Not of General Interest

A Service Catechism

2012-01-27T16:38:00.000-08:00

Theory

Q: What is the purpose of service at the institutional and professional level?

A: To ensure the smooth functioning of all academic pursuits: tenure, promotion, hiring, curriculum, assessment, conferences, and the advancement of scholarship by professional organizations.

Q: What is the effect of service at the institutional and professional level?

A: To suck up time--entire days and associated brainpower--that should be devoted to writing.

Q: Can service be completed in chunks of time so that you can ignore importunate emails during your writing time?

A: Not necessarily.

Q: What are the rewards of service? (Choose all that apply.)

A: (1) Promotion, (2) tenure, (3) status in the field (4) the gratitude of your peers, and (5) the knowledge that you're helping and are not being a slacker.

Q: Why do you participate in service activities? (Choose all that apply.)

A: (1) Promotion, (2) tenure, (3) status in the field (4) the gratitude of your peers, (5) the knowledge that you're helping and are not being a slacker, and (6) I'm just a girl who can't say no.

Q: Whose fault is it if service obligations eat into your time? (Choose all that apply.)

A: (1) Those who ask you to do the service and (2) yours. You can't control (1) but you can control (2) a little bit by saying no to some things.

Application

Did I say no to something this week that would have hugely inconvenienced me and sucked up a lot of time and energy in order that someone else would have all the benefit of it?

Did I refuse to travel somewhere and destroy a writing day so that I could be an appreciative audience for something that was not necessary? (Hint: Killing a writing day so I can go sit in an audience somewhere is one of my least favorite parts of service responsibilities.)

Yes. Yes, I did.

Do you feel guilty about it?

Nope--not a bit.

Term Papers vs. Blogs and Cathy Davidson vs. the NYTimes

2012-01-21T09:36:00.000-08:00

Over at HASTAC, Cathy Davidson has written a great defense of her assertion that term papers should be abolished in favor of blogs. Like a lot of great lines, it was provocative, good copy, and not what she actually said, apparently (hey, academic superstar celebrities need publicity, too!).

Matt Richtel at the NYTimes is having none of it, suggesting that unnamed "defenders of traditional writing" propose a "reductio ad absurdum: why not just bypass the blog, too, and move right on to 140 characters about Shermn’s Mrch?" which Davidson rightly says is unfair.

I'm all for student-written blogs. I've been using them in classes for 10 years, and I think their use has helped students' writing, something that real researchers of this like Andrea Lunsford have confirmed (see Davidson's piece). I agree with all she says about students writing more and being more engaged when they're writing something they're (1) passionate about and (2) writing for a broader audience than just the teacher, which is what a blog gives you. Davidson's argument is attractive, and, in fact, is well established in the last 30+ years of writing pedagogy. Remember Ken McCrorie's Telling Writing and his (I think) railing against the comically stultified prose he called "Engfish"?

I guess I just have one question: what does Davidson mean by a "term paper"? I wrote something called a "term paper" in high school, but that was back when we incised the characters in cuneiform onto wet clay. "Term paper" seems to be the new whipping boy of writing alongside its maligned cousin, the five-paragraph essay, but are these really assigned in the same deadening way that she describes?

I'd never assign a "term paper" of the kind that she vilifies, but I would and routinely do assign papers that require an argument, with a thesis and evidence from the text and external sources. Students ought to be able to construct an argument and support it, shouldn't they?--and if they shouldn't, then why does Davidson couch her post about the issue in exactly that form?

The thing is, if you are in any kind of job that requires writing at all, you have to learn to write in a whole lot of different forms, including resumes and cover letters (her examples). You learn to see the conventions of these forms by writing in them and by seeing that conventions differ but that some good qualities of writing remain across them all. Isn't that what we're trying to get our students to see?

Despite the dramatic contrasts in which it's being framed by Davidson and the media, I guess I don't see this as a blogs vs. papers issue. What's wrong with "blog post -> short reading of a text -> longer argument -> presentation -> another blog post"? Or some other combination? Writing is a continuum, not an either/or.

Your thoughts?

Random bullets of Friday

2012-01-20T10:31:00.001-08:00

Until I can muster the brainpower for a post on Apple's education initiative, here are some random bullets.

Blogspeak is already serving as a placeholder in what I'm writing. I just reread a section in which I said that a character "was in dire need of an ethics makeover," which, while true, doesn't exactly pass for scholarly prose these days--or does it?
My resemblance to Jean-Luc Picard may end at our mutual fondness for Earl Grey tea, but I wish I had one power that he had: the one where you say "make it so" and some minion does it. I'm thinking especially of scheduling meetings, which even with online scheduling software where people put in their preferences is a process with far too many to-and-fro messages and far too much wasted mental energy. This includes the gentle reminders to those who refuse to put in their schedules but greet every announcement of a meeting with "I can't meet at that time!" If I were Jean-Luc, I would say "Schedule a meeting. Send the documents. Book the room. Make it so." and it would be done. Actually, I would just say "Schedule the meeting. Make it so" and the minion would intuit the rest, instead of my wasting two entire writing days on scheduling and meetings this week.
Speaking of Apple, I recently joined the Cult of Steve after yet another Sony computer's hard drive bit the dust ~~one year~~ two years after purchase, apparently taking some programs with it. It would warn me that I ought to back things up to the external hard drive, since the hard drive was failing, and, when I tried, gave an error message equivalent to "Nuh-uh, can't back this up. Fail!" With Dropbox, I still have almost all of my documents, but the lost email files would sure be nice to have. On the plus side, I'm still using the speakers and subwoofer from a computer I bought 12 years and 3 computers ago, which work with Steve's creation just fine.
In addition to my slow learner status re: the short life of planned-obsolescence Sony products and my vow never to buy another one, I had been introduced to the Cult of Steve by gateway drugs such as the iPad and iPhone. Now it seems normal to have to hunt for files and be frustrated (but less so every day) by the inscrutable workings of a machine run by Powerful Beings who purport to know better than I do where my pictures ought to be hidden. (I'm allowed to tag them; I just can't find them.) It's good training for dealing with bureaucracies, anyway.

On writing: Starting over after a hiatus

2012-01-13T17:00:00.000-08:00

It may not be exactly "starting over," but the poor book ms., abandoned in the flurry of MLA and associated paper-writing, not to mention the holidays and the start of classes, must feel, well, neglected.

How to begin again? Here's the plan:

(1) Print it out. Reading on the screen just doesn't give me the same perspective, and I will recycle the paper, so yes, that's necessary.
(2) Read it--all of it--while resisting the temptation to fix things at the sentence level.
(3) Go back through the research journal (printed version) and see what I've forgotten or missed. Highlight those parts and put an X through what's already done.
(4) Assess the roughest parts of more or less finished chapters and list the improvements needed--and then leave them alone for now.
(5) Generate some actual new text on the chapters not yet started and rough in some sections on the half-finished chapters.
(6) Go back to the "write every day" plan, even if that means using 750words.com again, since that really did help to establish the habit.
(7) Rev up the Excel chart again, since that acts as a conscience in tabular form.

As part of this new plan, I also have two resolutions:
(1) I'm going to try to reserve the computer where I write for writing and class work, not reading distraction sites.
(2) I want to have a complete draft of my next conference paper done at least 3 weeks before the next conference.

Random Bullets of MLA 2012

2012-01-09T08:12:00.001-08:00

Seattle, a no-snow and nearly a no-coat-needed city. Also, Pike Place Market, restaurants, and for the fans, two Starbucks stores on every corner. Great choice, MLA planners!
Free wireless in the conference room block, in the well-lighted convention center, in the Sheraton session rooms--a godsend. The password was still a mystery for a while: It seemed to be passed from person to person, or so someone told me, and when I arrived at one session all ready to tweet it, I couldn't get in because I hadn't thought to ask someone for the password.
Better spirits all around. Last year was all about the grim job market, or so it seemed. There was a lot of optimism in the air this year: better job market, enthusiasm about digital humanities, well-attended alt-ac sessions. People looked hopeful, or maybe it was just all that Starbucks caffeine causing those smiling faces.
Really good sessions and papers.
Lots of iPads and laptops, including use by presenters.
Good tech support for presenters: there was a try-out room, and the technicians came by to check whether the laptops would project before tech-using sessions.
Saw Rosemary Feal from afar at the big events and learned that her name is pronounced Fay-AL.
Learned that the Twitter feed is best read judiciously, since it induces "I should have been there" session envy regardless of how fantastic the session is that you attended.
Some sessions were tweeted by multiple people, but other great sessions weren't tweeted at all. Am not sure whether the tweeters are organized in some way so that the tweeting is distributed among sessions or whether they're all just voluntarily tweeting from sessions they'd be attending anyway.
When people sit at the twitter/laptop table set up in the back of a room, I keep expecting them to hold up signs at the end of each paper: 5.5, 5.9, 6.0.

The Peter Principle of Software Development

2012-01-02T15:50:00.001-08:00

A quiz for software developers.

1. If a feature has proven to be especially useful to users in the past, you should

a) Get rid of it.

b) Rename it so that users will not know where to find it (Preview developers, I'm looking at you. Why transform "Save as" into Export? Why?)

c) Surround it with three new pointless "features" that no one would ever want to use.

2. A feature is simple to get to in an earlier version, requiring only two clicks of a mouse. The next version of the software should require how many clicks to access the same feature?

a) Three

b) Five

c) Five plus a Google search for where to find the feature

3. If a feature is accessible through a fast keystroke combination, what should you do in the next version?

a) Make it accessible only by drop-down menu accessed from a mouse, so that it takes longer

b) Make it accessible only with a mouse AND rename it

c) Make it accessible only via the mouse AND tell the user to go remap the keyboard or write a macro if she's so keen to use keystrokes. Keystrokes are for peasants.

4. Should you, under any circumstances, explain how to do things in the users' manual?

a) Hahahahahahah--what a comedian you are!

b) What users' manual? You mean the giant .pdf with lawyers' warnings that tell me not to use the laptop as a tray to carry hot coffee and not to put the mouse in my mouth--in six languages?

c) No. Users' manuals build community by forcing people to Google the problem and find out the answer on various tech forums.

5. If a user minimizes or shuts down some feature by mistake, causing it to vanish, how long should it remain invisible to the user?

a) Forever. If you didn't write down what the feature was called--hey, your loss. Learn to work without it. It builds character.

b) It depends on the feature. If it's one that the user might want to use, forever, but if it's some pointless frill like sharing your private information with Facebook, it should pop up again and again.

6. For website developers: when designing a site where users have to enter important information that counts for something, should you have pointless pop-ups asking the user to donate money/consider visiting another site/choose between two equally incomprehensible options before continuing?

a) yes

Anything else you'd like to add to the quiz?

Taking stock at year's end

2011-12-31T13:55:00.000-08:00

All around the blogosphere, there are fabulous and funny roundups at this year's end. If I take stock the way I do after a class is over, what do I want to see more of or less of in 2012?
1. More acceptance and fewer regrets. By nature I can't make decisions, and when I do, I second-guess myself for literally decades. What if I'd done X or said no to Y? What if I hadn't resigned from Z task? Logic doesn't enter into it, and reflecting on the decisions just leads to pits of regret regardless of the reality that my decision may have been the right one. This year, I said no to more invitations and felt all right about it. That's progress.

2. More recognition of the fact that writing may be easy, but thinking is hard. I'm paraphrasing something profacero once said about writing being easy, because while certain kinds of writing are a real pleasure, others are tough. I'm thinking of some pieces I wrote that were based on archival materials, and the writing of them was just a joy--like writing a narrative--whereas what I've been wrestling with this year are ideas that reconceive some important things in my research area, and in that wrestling match, the ideas got the better of me more than once. I haven't written as much this year, but I've thought my way through some things that should prove fruitful (they'd better!) in 2012.

3. More attention to things I can do something about, and less attention to things I can't. Example of where attention matters: I lost about ten pounds just by paying attention to whether I was really hungry when I ate something. Example of where it doesn't: Watching the contest of political candidates vying for attention by appealing to the lowest common denominator of stupidity in the American public. Paying attention to what people call themselves or profess to be when their actions are what count.

What else? High hopes for more exercise, more writing, more energy, more good spirits-- and wishing the same to everyone else on New Year's Eve!

Post-Christmas

2011-12-27T13:48:00.000-08:00

The holiday was lovely. Family, here and on the phone from distant places. People playing the piano.

Looking out the window at that blue light in the atmosphere that comes just after dusk, when the only thing you can see clearly is the white snow and the shape of the trees.

And cookies. I can usually take them or leave them alone, but there's a kind of Christmas sugar cookies with confectioner's sugar glaze that are basically like crack to me. Fortunately, I ate up the rest and thought about Oscar Wilde's "the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it." Oh, Oscar. If you only knew.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everyone!

Soothing things

2011-12-22T18:53:00.000-08:00

What we want is . . . soothing things. Cookies. Maybe some more cookies. Maybe some tea, quiet music, and sitting by the fire.

Maybe to wander around the books on our shelves, take one down that has nothing to do with projects at hand, and read just for the fun of it.

From Mark Twain (culled from various essays and speeches):

"Always obey your parents, when they are present."
"Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. There is only one thing certain about it, you are certain there is going to be plenty of weather--a perfectly grand review; but you can never tell which end of the procession is going to move first. . . . The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing. When it strikes a thing, it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether--well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there."
"That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse."
"If a person offend you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick."
[On the last words of great men.] "Now there was Daniel Webster. Nobody could tell him anything. He was not afraid. He could do something neat when the time came. And how did it turn out? Why, his will had to be fixed over; and then all his relations came, and first one thing and then another interfered, till at last he only had a chance to say 'I still live,' and up he went. Of course, he didn't still live, because he died--and so he might as well have kept his last words to himself as to have gone and made such a failure of it as that."
"I have been a correct speller, always; but it is a low accomplishment and not a thing to be vain of. Why should one take pride in spelling a word rightly when he knows he is spelling it wrongly? . . . .Yes, there are things which we cannot learn, and there is no use fretting about it. I cannot learn adverbs; and what is more I won't."
"The fact is, as the poet has said, we are all fools. The difference is simply in the degree. The mercury in some of the fool-thermometers stands at ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, and so on; in some it gets up to seventy-five; in some it soars to ninety-nine. I never examine mine, --take no interest in it."

Do you have more suggestions for soothing things at this time of the year?

Random bullets of preparing for the holidays

2011-12-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

The nice thing about this time of year is that you can give in to your impulses to do the most soothing activity on earth: baking.
I know that administrators and support staff are still in the office, but grades are in (hooray!) and I am not. Do you really think I'm going to work on task force/committee/other service things this week? No? Then why do you keep sending me things? I'm guessing it's the "tennis ball school of time management": you lob it to my desk so it's off your desk.
After all these years, I actually associate listening to holiday music with working on papers for MLA. How sick is that?
The "buy local" thing is going pretty well, but I would like to give retailers once piece of advice: if you are any store that does not cater to children, playing Alvin and the Chipmunks as holiday music is a surefire way to send adults scurrying for the exits whether they've bought their virtuous local goods or not.
About buying local: yes, some things cost more than on Amazon. I just bought fewer things this year. It's not about things.
Technology brings us many gifts this time of year, including this one: If you are going to MLA and are not yet anxious about it, just check out anything on Twitter with an MLA hashtag. I guarantee you will start to fret and hyperventilate--or is that just me and is everyone else excited about it?

Automated learning: MITx and online certificates

2011-12-19T08:43:00.000-08:00

Update: Dean Dad has some of the same questions about who is going to pay for all this: Http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2011/12/lets-playspot-contradiction.html

According to an article at The Chronicle, "MIT Will Offer Certificates to Outside Students Who Take Its Online Courses." , MIT is going to start offering certificates to--well, the headline tells you about it.

In one way, this is a positive step toward making learning, especially in technical subjects, available to more people, people who couldn't attend/be accepted into/afford MIT. They'll earn the certificates in this way: "They'll watch videos, answer questions, practice exercises, visit online labs, and take quizzes and tests. They'll also connect with others working on the material." As open courses, these could be hugely popular: 94,000 people enrolled in just one course (yes, one course) offered by Stanford last fall. The course will be as rigorous as a regular course, we're told. These are MOOC courses.

As always, the sticking point is assessment: how will the learning in the course be evaluated, and by whom?

Short answer: "It's unclear exactly how the assessment will work."

Longer answer: Technology and teaching assistants will be our saviors.

But how much will outside individuals get to interact with MIT professors? That's unclear.
One way to promote such contact will be software that handles many questions, said Anant Agarwal, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

"Through voting and other mechanisms, you can create a funnel of requests so that the requests that come off the funnel at the very top can actually be answered by MIT professors and MIT TA's," he said. "A large number of questions at the lower parts of the funnel can actually be answered by other learners who may be slightly ahead."

MIT faculty members have also developed technology that can automatically grade essays. Other technologies that could come into play here include automatic transcription, online tutors, and crowdsourced grading.

This sounds as though it might work in technical fields, where I'm assuming you have some fixed, highly complex content that has to be mastered. I don't have enough content knowledge about those fields to say. It has an advantage in that we're all used to using online forums, responding, and rating good answers highly. It's satisfying to help someone online, and this model would take advantage of that knowledge.

But automated essay grading? Crowdsourced grading and the pointlessness of writing essays at all have already made their way into the conversation. Possibly MIT is thinking of anonymous grading along the lines of "the grading factory" or of outsourcing grading as business school professors are doing. Certainly some science instructors are enthusiastic about programs like SAGrader.

An essay grading program may not have the emotional kick of having a student come up at the end of the semester to thank you for helping her improve her writing, as happened to me and other bloggers recently, but MIT seems to say that the efficiency tradeoff is worth more than the emotional connection.

And if teaching assistants and adjunct tutors are the solution: does the profession really need to find MORE ways to exploit TA's and adjuncts? I'm guessing that only an Einstein in training is going to make it to the top of the question pyramid that MIT describes and that overworked and underpaid temporary faculty are going to do the bulk of it, without ever getting the satisfaction of having seeing individual students improve, unless they have a better memory for 94,000 names than I do.

I'm not saying this isn't the wave of the future; it might be. I'm not saying this can't work; for technical fields, it might. I don't know enough to say.

But if it's the wave of the future, why is MIT so careful to "distance" this "brand" from its own brand of education?

Thinking about next time at semester's end

2011-12-18T07:55:00.000-08:00

As I'm getting ready to post grades (now all in--yay!), I look at the Excel spreadsheet and it talks to me.

Why, oh, why, didn't student X show up more and, you know, make an effort? S/he should have been an A student.
Next time, don't be so tenderhearted in marking their first papers.
Really, you made that assignment worth THAT much?
Next time, arrange the semester so that you're not giving up writing for grading for the last three weeks of it.

And now it's time to get back to writing, which fell off hugely once I stopped doing the 750words thing.

Don't be evil, Amazon, and abandon your scorched-earth policy

2011-12-13T09:03:00.000-08:00

You've probably seen this already, but if you haven't, go read Richard Russo's "Amazon's Jungle Logic" at the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/opinion/amazons-jungle-logic.html?_r=1&hp.

In a new low in shopping promotions, Amazon is giving shoppers a discount if they go into a brick-and-mortar store, compare prices on an item using some price-compare app, and then buy the thing on Amazon.

On a world-affairs scale, that may not amount to much evil, but on an everyday-consumer-life scale, that's evil. It's even ratcheting up a notch the ethically dubious practice endorsed by staid old and usually not corrupt Consumer Reports of test-driving a car or checking out consumer electronics at your local dealer and then ordering it online to save money.

Here's a tip: those brick-and-mortar stores don't exist as free showrooms for online businesses, although Amazon.com would like to think they do. If we keep using them that way, pretty soon those free showrooms won't exist, especially in the book world. You won't stumble on books or find a gift by looking around a store filled with books, because there won't be one near you.

I still do buy from Amazon.com, especially when it's some book of lit crit that no indy bookseller would have or when sending a gift that would mean an hour in line at the post office. But I turned the tables on Amazon by printing out the "wish lists" of gift recipients. I plan to head down to the friendly independent bookseller with those lists later this week--and I won't be doing so with any Amazon Judas app in tow.

To comment or not to comment? That is the question.

2011-12-10T16:12:00.000-08:00

I'm grading the last set of papers and am doing this on the iPad for entertainment purposes (mine). I'm wondering what the rest of you do about the following: Do you write comments on their final papers?

Anti-comment reasons:

A lot of people say that they don't actually write comments on the final papers since the students won't look at anything except the grades. If the students want to know the reasons, they should come in next semester and ask.

Students don't have another possibility to improve in the class, so there's really no point.

Students won't see the papers. (While this is true of dead-tree papers, it doesn't apply for electronically uploaded ones, which the students will see via the CMS.)

Pro-comment reasons:

Since I always write the comments, I'm not sure if this is the case, but I'd think that writing comments would forestall email complaints and questions, especially from Very Concerned Students.*

There's no way, with the numbers of papers I grade, that I would remember the exact rationale for a particular grade months later, and although my grading standards are consistent enough that I could replicate them in an individual case, I don't want to sit there like a deer in the headlights while going over the paper with the student.

Your thoughts?

*Very Concerned Students = those who have told you repeatedly that they intend to, nay, WILL, get an A in the course, whether or not their touchingly high levels of self-esteem match their actual skills and make this a realistic possibility. Such students are hypothetical; I don't have any this semester.

The Magic 8-Ball approach to student questions

2011-12-07T21:23:00.000-08:00

"When will you give us back our papers?"

When they are graded.

"Will you give them back to us at the next class?"

Cannot predict now.

"What did you think of my paper in particular?"

Ask again later.

"Will we get them back before the final?"

All signs point to yes.

"Can I email you multiple times asking you 'what if?' scenarios about my grade and following up with demands for more calculations on your part?"

My reply is no.

"Will you be annoyed if I try to engage you in such an email exchange?"

Most likely.

"Can I ask you for an exact accounting of my grade after class when you are trying to get out of the room before the next class?"

Don't count on it.

"Am I going to pass this class if I don't make it to the final?"

Better not tell you now.

End of semester syndrome

2011-12-03T08:31:00.000-08:00

I think I have end of semester syndrome. Now, I am not a doctor, although I play one for 16 weeks each semester, but here are the symptoms:

A version of what Ms. Mentor calls October--"exploding head month"--in which although you've been working diligently since August, you realize that you have not accomplished nearly enough, and in your mind that becomes "nothing at all," and your head explodes with the knowledge of what you still have to do.
Also causing your head to explode: the realization that a whole bunch of deadlines, including MLA presentations, are zooming toward you at the speed of light.
A twinge of envy: assuming that all your colleagues have accomplished far more than you have in the past semester--have written more, have taught more exciting classes, and have generally outpaced you in every way.
Happiness that classes will soon be over. No more prep! No more grading! No more writing new assignments! No more figuring out how to teach yet one more brand-new story!
Sadness that classes will soon be over. You've worked really hard, and you've been with these students for all these weeks, and you're confident that at least some of them have learned something, and it's now all ending. In some way, you know you will miss the familiar routine of going in to teach them, and you will probably miss seeing some of them, too.
A sinking feeling upon realizing that you now have to get ready to do the whole thing all over again in the spring. You have to think about courses you've never taught before, and dream up assignments, and carry everyone along on your back with your enthusiasm until their enthusiasm for the class catches fire, assuming that it does.
And did I mention getting ready for the holidays?

Symptoms may also include soundtracks. Here is the soundtrack that accompanies my particular End of Semester Syndrome; yours may vary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ruFfxlMsbY
Am I the only patient with ESS? What are your symptoms?

No outrage, no deep thoughts--just writing

2011-11-30T22:08:00.000-08:00

I know it seems all tech tips and web-o-matic writing inspiration (but it does work) around here lately. The thing is, I've been spending time on the Big Project, and to do that, I have to talk to myself.

Talking to myself is taking the form of a research journal or writing journal in which I argue with myself--"Do you want to put in that part? Why not?"--that sort of thing. I write it out, and then I answer my objections, and then eventually I go away and write. A few bullets of this week:

After stuffing one already published piece into this new material I'm writing, I figured out that one chapter really needed to be two. No more stuffing, and a more coherent chapter--or at least I hope so.

My own NaNoWriMo this month was to try to get on 750words.com every day and write something. Sometimes I'd spend all day editing and rewriting, but when evening came, I started itching to get to that clean expanse of the site and type something. If you don't write, you can't edit and make what you wrote better, and even if what came out was repetitious, it worked: the repeated version was usually better and made the editing task easier the next day.

Writing this way made me realize again that writing is discovery. If I was writing in the research journal file or at 750words.com, I kept thinking of things as I wrote. I know--that's an old saw about writing, but it hadn't been working as well lately.

The problem with writing is that academics have to read before they can write: we can't spin webs like a spider unless we have the material already packed away somewhere from someone else's words. Unlike creative writers, we're spiders with a backpack of that kind of material, and once the backpack is empty, we have to fill it back up again no matter how much we might want to write.

I was so committed to this that I graded all the papers, tests, etc. at the very beginning of Thanksgiving break--I even felt like doing it then--so that I wouldn't have to think about grading or classes for the whole break.

This isn't the most exciting post, but I didn't want you think this was becoming Pogue's Posts over here.

Happy Thanksgiving! (and an iMessage tech tip)

2011-11-24T15:10:00.000-08:00

Giving thanks for better weather, family on the way, and a reasonably stress-free day so far. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

And the tech tip: if you have an iPhone, iPad, etc. and have been trying to use iMessage (free text messaging among Apple products) without success (like thousands of other frustrated users), try adding 8.8.8.8 as a DNS server number.

To do this:

1. Go to Settings -> Wi-Fi -> (name of your network) and click on the blue arrow. When the screen showing the details of your network opens up, look at the line that says DNS.

2. You will see one or more numbers that look like this: 89.87.61 (or whatever). You might have one or more than one sequence of numbers like this.

3. Add a comma to the last number and type in 8.8.8.8 and exit the screen. Example: 123.333.33, 89.87.61, 8.8.8.8

Some sites say to erase the old DNS numbers, but I just added this one (8.8.8.8) to the string that was there, and now iMessage works.

http://appletoolbox.com/2011/10/ios-5-imessage-not-working-%E2%80%93-how-to-fix/

Francis Ford Coppola on writing

2011-11-23T15:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=140870590

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: The question I wanted to ask is, actually, if you could talk about your writing process, your habit, sort of what's a daily writing day like for you.

COPPOLA: Well, the thing about writing is if you really try, if you do it every day, and you put in your time, you get better. I don't know if there's a - I think with acting that's possible, too, but writing is something that if you really plug away at it, you can get better.

The important thing is: A, choose the time that's good for you. For me, it's early morning because I wake up, and I'm fresh, and I sit in my place. I look out the window, and I have coffee, and no one's gotten up yet or called me or hurt my feelings.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

COPPOLA: It's very important that your feelings are very, sort of, just stable. You know, you don't want to have a heartache when you're trying to go fly on some adventure of writing. At any rate, it's very important for the young writer to, when you finish the six, seven, eight pages, to turn them over and don't look at them again, because I believe there is a hormone that is injected in the blood of the young writer that makes him hate everything he has just written.

And so just don't read it. And then when you finally have done it over the, you know, 30 days or how many days so that your stack of pages is in the 80s or something, then - and you feel you have it at some completion, then sit down and read it, and you'll find that your reaction will be very different because you will have a little distance.

And you realize that the first 10 pages that you would have just torn up and rewritten, which is to say never go back. If you don't read it, you're not going back and rewriting anything at first, because you don't know yet. And maybe you're just going to cut those 10 pages out, and they're not even going to be in it. So you would have been rewriting something that's not even in the piece.

So give yourself that chance to put together the, you know, 80, 90 pages of a draft and then read it very, at a - you know, in a nice little ceremony, where you're comfortable, and you read it and make good notes on it, what you liked, what touched you, what moved you, what's a possible way, and then you go about on a rewrite.

And I'll rewrite a script a trillion times. So rewriting is just the middle name of writing.

[Note: Coppola wrote the script for Patton, for which he won an Oscar, when he was 24 years old.]

A "keep your chin up" post, comfort food edition

2011-11-21T20:19:00.000-08:00

If you read the news, it's easy to get discouraged. On the national side of things, this means one party trying to "Kill the Poor" and heap benefits on the rich beyond all reason, with some candidates so venal that they make Richard Nixon look good. On the university side, it means the events at Penn State and the police attack on students at U C Davis. Last year was the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State. I hope we're not headed back in that direction.

So, to keep my chin up, and yours, I'm going to offer you some comfort food: a recipe for cranberry-apple cobbler (or apple brown betty, apple crisp, or apple crumble--name varies regionally).

1. First, get out your apple corer, if you have one (they are fabulous devices) and peel and core about 5-6 reasonably tart apples: McIntosh, Cortland, Honey Crisp, Wealthy, Northern Spy, or Granny Smith. Use all the same kind of apple, though; the cobbler will taste better. If you use sweeter varieties than these, ~~use some lemon juice~~ put the juice of 1/2 to 1 lemon in the recipe, depending on the sweetness of the apples.

Cut the cored and sliced apples in quarters so that the slices are small.

2. Preheat the oven to about 400 degrees and get out a pan, the size you'd use for brownies or a one-layer cake--about 8 x 11." Butter the pan.

3. Put the apples in the pan along with about a cup of fresh cranberries. Combine 1 c. sugar and 1 tsp. cinnamon in a bowl and pour it over the apples and cranberries. Toss this together with the fruit so everything is coated with the cinnamon-sugar mixture.

4. In another bowl, cut together with a pastry cutter or knives: 1 stick (i.e., 1/2 cup) of butter, 2/3 c. brown sugar, 2/3 c. rolled oats, 1/3 c. flour.

5. Spread this crumble mixture over the top of the apples and bake for about 35 minutes, until the fruit bubbles along the sides and the top is browned.

This is good served warm with ice cream and also just by itself.

There, don't you feel better now? It sure helped me.

Deep silliness at the Chronicle: banning all but ebooks

2011-11-16T20:35:00.000-08:00

Just in time for a little Thanksgiving levity, The Chronicle publishes an article so deeply silly that it'll do your heart good: "In the 21st-Century University, Let's Ban (Paper) Books". The credits line lists some books that the author has written, including one on our old friend the "digital native," but I'm having a hard time believing that he's ever read any.

First of all, the "digital natives" will have to be "weaned" off physical books, because . . . well, because otherwise ~~how will this guy make any money?~~ they won't be being all modern and 21st century and such. I always thought if technology made life easier, students would use it, because they're rational beings. But if they use physical books because books serve their purposes better? Now, that's just wicked stubborn, and those books have to be taken away, like pacifiers, for their own good.

Leaving aside the issue of paper versus e-form, what about content? Don't worry:

Much of what students need to study is already in the public domain and can easily, in instances where it hasn't already been done, be converted to electronic form. Most contemporary works exist electronically, as do a huge number of historical books and documents. This would be an incentive to scan more of them.

So copyright is no problem? These books are free? "Much" is in the public domain? Well, all right, then! Just point me to the planet where this is true, please.

What about our books? No worries there, either: "Professors would have a limited time in which to convert their personal libraries to all-digital formats, using student helpers who would also record the professors' marginal notes." I love this--"limited time." What happens then? Does Oskar Werner come in and incinerate the rest after the "limited time"? Has this person ever worked at a university where even getting the TPS reports in on time is a major challenge and subject to faculty complaints? Oh, and who's paying for all these student helpers and scanning? Universities in the grip of, in Roxie's phrase, "Excellence Without Money"?

Just in case you haven't got the point yet, there's a rousing scolding waiting for you in the conclusion:

The idea of having one's own personal library of physical books, so useful in earlier times, is no longer worth passing on to our students. ...Academics, researchers, and particularly teachers need to move to the tools of the future. Artifacts belong in museums, not in our institutions of higher learning.

I could tell you what I'd write on a student paper that used (1) sweeping generalizations, (2) illogical leaps of reasoning, (3) irrational and pointless abuse of a perfectly reasonable technology--paper--as "old" and useless, and (4) a complete lack of evidence for the conclusions, but I guess I'd better get busy scanning my notes while I still can.

Cast a cold eye

2011-11-12T14:19:00.000-08:00

While I admire what Historiann's doing with her roundup of "What's the matter with higher education?" posts in response to Anthony Grafton's piece, I just don't have anything useful to contribute and so will look forward to the posts. Roxie, Notorious Ph.D., Dr. Crazy, and others already have some great posts up in response, and there'll be more.

My short take would be that it's a resources divide: being starved of money is forcing public and private universities to face compromising either their educational mission or their existence as an institution. It's a mirroring of the gap between the 99% and the 1% all over again. I'm especially struck by this:

Americans, as Malcolm Harris recently pointed out, now owe almost a trillion dollars in student loans, more than they owe in credit card debt. Student debt, he explained, “is an exceptionally punishing kind to have. Not only is it inescapable through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social security payments, and even unemployment benefits.” The burden is distributed by the reverse of the Matthew principle: to him who hath not, no one gives anything.

. As one student with $200,000 in student debt put it in the New York Times not long ago, it's like graduating with a house on your back, but a house that you can't live in. If you marry, you saddle the person you love with this debt. You put your life on hold to pay it back, which may be never on the wages you can earn. There's something profoundly wrong with this system.

So. In other news, and to push down the previous post, today's the day I cast a cold eye on all I've written so far on the big project to see where everything is going, if it is indeed going at all. When I started this post, that's what I thought I was casting the cold eye on, but now I see it's not the only thing that needs scrutiny.

Short link post on Penn State news

2011-11-11T10:51:00.000-08:00

Update 11.22.11:Huffington Post today reports that the mother of Victim 1 (see story below) was dissuaded from reporting by

The principal of the school, Karen Probst, a woman.

The school counselor, also a woman.

Mother 1 wanted to call the police immediately, and that's when she was given the "Mr. Heart of Gold" speech. By the principal. And the counselor. Two women.

It's not about gender here. Protecting power is about protecting power.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/22/penn-state-scandal-jerry-sandusky-victim-mother_n_1108979.html?page=2

........

I am horrified, like everyone else, about the sexual abuse news from Penn State. And can we PLEASE stop calling it a "sex scandal"? "Scandal" implies some sort of delicious gossip about celebrities; this is just horrifying. And "sex" implies consent. This was not "sex" with consent but the rape of children. Go read these powerful posts right now:

Historiann on the culture of coverups and more.
Clio Bluestocking on how institutions do nothing and pass along the problem to protect their own.
Tenured Radical on the parallel between child sexual abuse and abuse of women on campus.
John Scalzi on what the students should be worried about, and The Onion 's scathing piece about what the members of the news media are worried about.
And a post from Lesboprof about another incident of rape two years ago in which a student took her own life.

One message is pretty clear, and it's an old message: Power consolidates and protects itself, even at the risk of missing a heinous crime; and those who want to challenge that culture are dissuaded from doing so, sometimes forcefully and sometimes by a more subtle degree of intimidation. Buried deep in one article about the courageous boy and his mother who came forward is this:

Increasingly worried about the boy's behavior, including his reaction to the phone calls from Sandusky, Gillum said the victim's mother asked school officials to help identify the problem. Gillum said the boy eventually told a school official that "there was an issue" with Sandusky, although the boy declined to elaborate.Gillum said a school official relayed the information to the boy's mother in a meeting.

The official, who Gillum declined to identify, then reminded the mother of Sandusky's solid reputation in the community. The psychologist said the official characterized Sandusky as having "a heart of gold."

The mother told the psychologist that the official advised her to think about the situation for a few days before taking any action.

"She was angry," Gillum said. "She was upset about that and felt that she was being dissuaded" from taking action. The mother did not respond to a request for an interview.

She felt she was being dissuaded because she was being dissuaded. The message there was clear: "He has power; you have none. He is important; you and your son are not. Are you sure that you want to bring down the @#$%^storm of misery that reporting is going to bring with it? Because, trust me, it's going to hurt you more than it's going to hurt Mr. Heart of Gold."
It's all part of the culture of silence that allows predators to continue their activities.

Grading Papers on the iPad Redux

2011-11-05T09:43:00.000-07:00

(Go here for the original post.)

Dropbox and iAnnotate made some improvements since the last time I tried grading on the iPad, so here's an update, part experiential and part technical. The technical part is here because I hate it when people rhapsodize about doing something on the iPad that you know from experience is tricky to do and then don't tell you how it's done.

The experience: grading on the iPad now doesn't take longer (or much longer), and it's fun. [Update: It now doesn't take any longer, although it would if I were including long explanations of errors as is possible with autotext.]

Experience update

Pro:
1. I invested in a wireless keyboard, which makes the whole typing on the iPad thing much easier and with many fewer typos.
2. I like reading the papers on the iPad. It seems to be easier to get a sense of the big picture of the paper, since the .pdf conversion usually changes double space to single space.
3. I didn't time the papers this time, as I did before, but the cumbersome features that made the process longer last March have largely been eliminated.

Con:
1. There's still no Autotext feature. That means that students have to rely on their handbooks or other aids to look up what may be wrong with a sentence, since I am certainly not going to type out 5 sentences on what a comma splice is every time they write one. On the other hand, we've already talked about these things in class and this isn't their first paper, so perhaps it won't be a problem.
2. There's still a few more transfer/downloading/renaming steps than if I were using Word.

Technical

Importing the papers

First of all, it's not necessary to change the papers (which are usually in Word or some variation) to .pdf using a third-party program. iAnnotate will do that if you open them correctly.

Do NOT try to open them directly in iAnnotate unless they're already in .pdf format; they won't show up.

1. Open Dropbox. Go to the folder where you've stored the student papers.
2. Touch (click on) the paper to open it. It'll show up in the Dropbox window, but tell it to "Open in" iAnnotate. Click on the box with the arrow in the upper right-hand corner to do this. You may have to scroll down to see iAnnotate as an option when the menu for this box opens up.
3. iAnnotate will convert the file to .pdf and then open it.

Marking Up the Papers

Second, write your comments using iAnnotate's commenting features. ~~I don't draw freehand lines and circles, since it's slower for me than just inserting comments, but it's possible to do that.~~

Update: In addition to using the commenting features, I now mark directly on the .pdf with a stylus. I don't do much with the stylus--circle a few words, add a "good point" in the margins--but the paper looks a little more as though it has been touched with human hands if there's handwriting on it. It's also a more immediate and "natural" way to respond it you're used to writing on paper.

1. To insert a comment, tap on the pencil icon at the side of the screen and tap on Note. You'll then have two choices: Note and Typewriter. Choose Note.

2. Type your comments in the Note space just as you would do with the Word comment feature. [Thanks to Stacey for bringing that up.] It works exactly the same.
3. Click on the minus sign to close the note when you're finished typing.
4. I used to use Typewriter for a final comment, but it shows up as a big black oblong with no text in some readers (like Adobe Acrobat). The Notes, on the other hand, seem to show up fine in Adobe, which is probably what most students have installed.

The Notes will show up in most desktop readers (including Adobe and Preview for Mac) and in iAnnotate but not in Goodreader, NoteTaker, CloudReaders, and other readers for the iPad. You can also "flatten" the annotations so that they'll be more readable. If you "flatten" the annotations, they will show up as a numbered list of comments at the bottom of the page instead of a pop-up message that shows up when students mouse over the comment.

Return the papers

Third, either re-upload the paper to Dropbox or email it to the student. You can email it by clicking on the box, which is on the left side.

But what if you want to re-upload it to Dropbox so that you can later upload the papers to a CMS? This is not an intuitive move in iAnnotate.

File cabinet icon? No.
Upload arrow? No. It will tell you that the file has been uploaded to Dropbox, but the file doesn't upload.

You would never guess this one (or at least I couldn't after many attempts), but here's what I found from drilling down on the iAnnotate support site:

1. Click on the file folder-like tab at the top of the document (the Document Context Menu).
2. Click on Share.
3. Click on Upload.
4. Now you'll see your Dropbox account. Click on it and your file will upload.
5. Note: It will probably upload to the iAnnotate folder rather than to the folder from which you downloaded it.

You'll still be stuck with the same filename, since the Gods of Apple Products have an insane prejudice against a Save As feature, but at least you'll have them all where you can rename them and upload them to your CMS or whatever.

Questions that don't need an answer

2011-11-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

"Hey, Professor Lastname, can I write my paper on this very specific topic using two books that are not only not in our course but not from the same century or country as the literature we're studying?"
Do you think that this student just might have an already-written paper from another course that ze wants to turn in for this assignment?
"I don't have your papers to turn back to you today; I haven't graded them." Student: "Yes, but have you had a chance to look at mine?"

The banking model of course prep: in person and online

2011-10-29T10:12:00.000-07:00

One of my courses is new this semester, so despite all the advice that people have been getting (see Profacero's post, for example, or the comments in the Another Damned Notorious Writing Group threads) about not spending any time on course prep but saving time for writing, unless you want to go into a classroom with egg on your face, you have to do something.

This is the reason for spending a writing day the other day dreaming up assignments and exercises for this and the other courses. The downside: losing a day of writing. The upside: now these things are done, and I don't plan to revisit them. If you've taught for years, you know what works and what doesn't, and if you make a mistake and write a bad part of an assignment, you adjust your expectations and fix it the next time.

What keeps me going, though, is the back-of-the-mind metaphor that now that I've done this course once, I never have to do it again. It's in the bank, so to speak. Realistically, a course is never really done; you think of what could be done differently or better the next time you teach it. Still, you don't have to invent every single thing from scratch, the way you do with a new course, and it's unlikely that you'll need to (although I would) share materials with others who teach the course in later semesters. It becomes your course, and you are identified with it--for this moment, anyway--whether it succeeds or it doesn't.

In an online course, you're still working with a banking model, but the push from higher-ups is different. In effect, if the course has been taught by someone else before, there's a strong pressure for you not to change anything--assignments, readings, syllabus--and to use what has been done before. Instead of making deposits, you're supposed to withdraw from the account that someone else has established.

Now, in theory, this would be a huge timesaver, since you don't have to put all that time into creating new assignments and could spend it on writing. But if you are stubbornly perverse about teaching your own material, as I am, and if you see ways to improve the course, as I did, you ignore the pressure and design the course the way you want it. The difference is that this time, you're banking the course not on your own computer but on the university's server, and if you don't keep extra copies of the materials on your own computer, all your work could be lost if everyone else doesn't want to teach your course the way you designed it (and why should they?). You've banked it, but you don't own it. If it stays, it's not really associated with you as a teacher, and it can disappear.

We don't really "own" courses, of course, and all that banking imagery just makes the loss of time for other work easier to justify. It's just a different feeling. In one, I'm putting aside material that I can draw on later, and it has my name on it. In the other, I'm developing material anonymously for a collective pool of materials. Both have their advantages, but I'm struck by how different they seem.

The no-laptops-in-class experiment, a midterm report

2011-10-26T07:47:00.000-07:00

Like a lot of teachers, for years I've had some students whose faces I've never seen although I stand in front of them (or, during group work, beside them) several times a week for 16 weeks. Why? Because their faces are buried behind a laptop screen, and if I call on them unexpectedly--and it's always unexpectedly, because they rarely seem aware of what's going on in class and never raise their hands--the shocked look they give is so universal that it doesn't give me a sense of their personalities.

This semester, emboldened by all the "laptops are a distraction" editorials by faculty AND students that Margaret Soltan keeps posting, I banned them (along with cell phones, etc.). Just did it. Put it in the syllabus and everything, along with the requisite proviso about exceptions.

One big general exception is that if there's scheduled group work, everyone can bring a laptop (or cell phone, or whatever) and use it to look things up, and everyone seems to do this who wants to. If they don't have a laptop, they can use mine up at the front of the room to look things up.

So far, so good. Some impressions:

Class participation seems to be better in all the classes. At the very least there aren't 3-5 people permanently checked out of class, as there used to be when laptops were allowed.
It cuts down considerably on the Laptop Two-Step of calling on someone:

"Stu Dent, what did this quotation mean?"
(Startled Stu Dent) "What?"
"What did this quotation mean?"
"What quotation? What page are we on?" and so on.

I can catch their eyes before I call on them by name, so they can get ready and not embarrass themselves by seeming clueless.
Even if they zone out, they come back more quickly than they used to with laptops.
If they're doodling or taking notes, it's a lot easier for them to break away from doing that and look up to answer a question.
Of course, they could kill me on evaluations for not allowing their digital native selves to flourish in a wireless and connected environment, but I'm more interested in what they're learning, which seems to be (as gauged anecdatally by discussion and quizzes) more than in previous iterations of the class.

Yes, I could have done all that "incorporating Twitter" and being constantly fact-checked by students that a lot of edutech people advocate, but that might be better for large lecture classes. If it's a discussion, I want students to discuss. Is that unreasonable?

The thing is, I know it's hard to break away from a computer screen. It's hard for me, and, to judge by the people I see shopping at Zappos, checking email, and looking up the speaker's quotations on Wikipedia during conference presentations at MLA, it's hard for other people, too. I figure that for three hours a week in class, we can all look at each other and talk about literature without a digital intermediary. It's not too much to ask.

Facebook and scholarly communities: a minor rant

2011-10-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

I am on Facebook. On Twitter. On Google Plus. I know I'm in a minority on this, but I hate having to check them for work-related things. There are two reasons for this, one personal and one ideological.

The personal one is that when people post calls for papers and invitations for professional events, those places end up being just one more X#$%& place that I have to go to in case there's an announcement. It's not enough to check your email and the official site and the CFP at U Penn and Google Reader and any random blogs that the organization might be running. Oh, no. Now you have to click on the cheery "Follow us on Twitter! Like our page on Facebook!" links. If you find Facebook not only a distraction but kind of depressing (I know, this isn't a universal reaction), you just might be the kind of person who doesn't want to be forced to go there to get professional news.

The more important reason is ideological, and it's a two-parter.

First, who has time to keep track of all this? When do all those posters have time to write anything of substance?
Second, I'm uneasy about how much this gets into "closed web" territory. Right now, most things are announced in multiple venues, so even if you are a Facebook grump and don't log in much, you will still get the message. (I leave Twitter out of this because in looking at my Twitter stream, I realize that if you're not posting 4-6 times a day at a minimum and linking to "must-read" articles in each tweet, you're not really "on" Twitter.) But sooner or later, people are going to get tired of posting everything to 6-7 venues just to be sure that everyone gets it. They're going to post to the place where the people are, and that will be Facebook and Twitter. And if you're not on there, or, more important, following/liking/friends with the right individuals on there, you won't get the message. And that ought to be giving us pause, even if we're fans of social media.

Books as benevolent zombies

2011-10-19T17:19:00.000-07:00

If you follow the links from More or Less Bunk's question "How do you skim an e-book" (my answer: you can't, and I own a bunch of them), you'll find a whole lot of articles on libraries getting rid of books. This is not a new event, of course, but it was a little chilling to read (at The Chronicle) that "It is no longer appropriate to treat most print resources as protected objects, or the college library as a museum for books," in part because the sight of too many books just frightens our little chicken-hearted students to death by being too "daunting." Books are not just dead but scary. They're zombies.

Huh? Are we talking about the same students who thrive on vampire, zombie, and torture porn movies and bloody video games? They're daunted by a stack of books? Seriously? And if they're "daunted," isn't it our job to show them how to get over it?

In my classroom, we're doing more library work than ever before, and the students seem to be really engaged by it. Maybe I'm fortunate that Northern Clime's librarians enjoy showing the library to students. By "showing" I don't mean forcing students to sit passively in a room watching as a librarian conducts Boolean searches and drones on for an hour that seems like a year. No, I mean getting them into the stacks to look at and leaf through the books. Some librarians like to say that e-books are the future, but really, bound books are the great undead, springing back to life in the hands of readers.

Let's take some zombie-age books as an example. Librarians like the one at the Chronicle say that books after 1850 aren't rare (although some seem to be doing their level best to make them so), and some say that Google Books makes getting these books less of a problem.

Well, let's see. This week I needed to read a reasonably obscure novel from 1870. Yep, Google books had it, or part of it: only every other page had been scanned. Descending into the entombed depths of the library, I found a copy of the original novel, from 1870, along with a number of other first editions on the shelves by this author. If this library were following the "books scare students" model of dubious library best practices, these would've been gone a long time ago. Instead, they were right there, waiting for someone to bring them back to life.

Do digital natives crave digital books?

2011-10-13T20:49:00.000-07:00

We all know the drill: our students love their computers, what with being digital natives and all, so we need to invest heavily in ebooks. Over at IHE, Barbara Fister bravely looks at this particular flavor of heavily-promoted Kool-Aid and discovers something a little different:

This is fresh in my mind because I just attended an interesting day-long virtual conference on ebooks in libraries. In fact, I was a panelist for a session on marketing ebooks to students in academic libraries. Sadly, what I had to say probably wasn’t what the audience came for. Our students aren’t interested in ebooks . . . . I don’t know what students make of all this, but one thing that Project Information Literacy discovered in their latest study is that students are not as excited about gadgetry and electronic sources as we tend to assume. When project teams interviewed 560 undergraduates studying in libraries at ten institutions, they found students were keeping it simple. Most of them had only one or two electronic devices with them: a phone and a laptop. Most of them were focused on getting an assignment done or were studying for a class. Most of them had only a couple of webpages open in a browser, and they weren’t the same websites; they were browsing all over the place. (emphasis added)

This reminds me of the big push to use Facebook in classes a few years back. The thinking was that since students live in Facebookland, they would love love love to have their teachers in there friending them and pushing class-related posts at them in their out-of-class spare time. From articles I've read, students were not exactly thrilled about this togetherness concept dreamed up by dewy-eyed teachers. They understood that a social space was a social space and a learning space was a learning space, and they were okay with having boundaries between the two.

The connection I'm seeing is this: students may live in computerland, as we do, and they certainly communicate with us in that way, but that doesn't mean that they use computers as we do nor should they necessarily want or need to.

We can lead these horses to water, but we ought to stop trying to make them drink--that is, turn them into mini versions of us. Instead of force-feeding them our notions of what they should want based on starry-eyed notions of what "digital natives" do, why don't we pay attention to what they actually want? Sure, we need to expand their horizons beyond enotes and Wikipedia, but we can do that in ways that meet them halfway.

Actually--and this is another heretical thought--I'm starting to wonder if the students use the physical library more than we do. A little anecdata: I was at our library today, as I am most weeks, and it was full of students studying in groups. Once again I was the only faculty-age person there except for a librarian here and there. I know--this proves nothing. Still, I wonder if the atmosphere of the books has at least something to do with it.

Ever hear of MOOC?

2011-10-07T08:19:00.000-07:00

MOOC? It means "Massive Open Online Course," and I read about it in the comments over at the Chronicle--because I don't have time to sit through a long fanboy podcast when I'm supposed to be working, although apparently writing a blog post is just fine, time-wise.

To say, as the Chronicle diplomatically does, that MOOC courses "poses challenges to traditional education models" is putting it mildly. I clicked through to the courses linked in the article and comments and learned this:

MOOC courses are offered to up to 10,000 students at a time.
You can learn something, or not, and participate, or not, and do the readings, or not. (Okay, so this the way some students approach a traditional course.)
You don't get credit for the course, as far as I can tell. I've looked extensively at the materials for several sites and couldn't find a mention of it. I don't think it costs anything to take a MOOC course, but again, I couldn't find out from the sites.
The content for these courses seems to be people talking about social media or education through social media, so in a way, the course is more or less a performance of the subject matter.
People who are experts in the content area come in and curate parts or lead discussions of their content area, so you have social media people talking to people who are accessing the course using social media. Students end up practicing what they are talking about.
I can't judge the subject matter, since I never took an education course, but it is a very different content base from what we're dealing with in literature, history, psychology, or traditional disciplines in the sciences. The Mother of all MOOCs has modules on "collective learning," "connecting our learning," "learning in times of abundance," "triangulating our learning," and so on.

Here are my questions:

I learn a lot from the experts when I go on a site like fountainpennetwork.com every so often. I don't get credit for going there, but there are many people contributing to a knowledge base. Do discussion forums on specific topics count as a MOOC, or does the subject matter have to be education?
How would this work for a subject in which there is specific, rigorous content on which students need to be evaluated?
How would students respond if you tell them, "Hey, kids, here's a swell course for you to take. You'll learn as much as you want to learn and spend a lot of time doing it, but you won't get any college credit for it"?
According to trusty Wikipedia, the principles of MOOC are to (1) gather information; (2) remix content; (3) repurpose the content; and (4) feed it forward. This is presented as revolutionary, but how is this different from what we have students do in class every single day?
I'm reminded of the "reinventing the educratic wheel" post at Historiann's where some university thinks it has invented something new in promoting class discussion and group work instead of the dusty old lectures that it thinks rule college courses and that, like the "Paul is dead" legend, get dragged out every month or so as a dead horse to beat.
See also "The University of Wherever" at the NYTimes, linked from More or Less Bunk.

I think what we're really talking about is the issue of credentialing for learning, and MOOC opens up a lot of opportunities and excitement in subjects where credit is not necessary. Do we need to have a credit-based system for certifying that students learn a particular thing? In civil engineering, maybe yes, because otherwise bridges will fall down. I want to fly in an airplane with a pilot who has been tested and has the proper credentials, not someone who drops in to participate in (or maybe not) flight training online with 10,000 other people.

On the other hand, for learning about how social media works in education, maybe yes and maybe no. Maybe the learning and application is in itself the important part and the credentials aren't needed, although if that's so, why are experts named for each module?

Steve Jobs

2011-10-07T07:32:00.000-07:00

I heard about Steve Jobs's death on all academics' primary information source, NPR, as I was driving home, and, like everyone else was saddened by it. (See the tribute at Roxie's World.)

This won't be news to any of you, of course, but he did fundamentally change the way we communicate with each other. I'm thinking not just of the consumer electronics Apple pioneered under his watch but also of the difference he made in teaching. Back in the olden days, teaching with computers meant standing in a computer lab and teaching rows of students sitting at dumb terminals as they stared at a blinking amber cursor on a monochrome screen and tried to figure out what Function and Control keys were. Today, we teach students whom only draconian measures can separate from their iPhones and computers for the length of a literature class. I'm thinking of all the things we used to have to teach students about technology (FTP! Floppy disks! C:\ prompt! Save your file!) that are now either obsolete thanks to Steve Jobs or handled in an elegant, intuitive way.

As his Stanford commencement speech shows, he was an idealist as well as a perfectionist, and he was passionate about his work and encouraged others to be so as well. I never knew the man, of course, except through his products and the press coverage that erupted every time he walked out his front door, but he will be missed.

[See also the posts by Historiann and Tenured Radical, both of whom make good and less rose-colored points than I do. Oh, and let us not forget The Onion, via Dr. Koshary.]

A writing post at the Chronicle

2011-10-05T09:55:00.000-07:00

Rachel Toor looked into my brain, I swear, to write "What Looks Like Productivity" over at The Chronicle. A sample:

We keep busy. There are conferences at which to give papers, articles to be crafted from those papers, chapters to be contributed to someone else's book. When you're faced with a project that seems overwhelming, like writing a book, those discrete tasks can look appealing. How long, you ask yourself, could it take to write a paper? An article won't take long, right? And then your procrastination projects are subject to the same delays as the thing you're avoiding.

She did inspire me--that, and the lesson from doing the exciting writing the other night. I realized that what I'd been doing was editing and more editing on a section I've already worked on for too long, with a mounting dread about writing about--well, let's say I am an authority on birdwhistles and have written a lot about them over the past couple of years. The section I was working on demanded that I go back and say something fresh about them, and I was dreading it.

I decided to let that part go for now and have moved on to dinosaur vocalizations, and, with the aid of my Tomato Master and my Wordmaster, I'm excited about writing again. One's the personal trainer and the other the Stairmaster of my writing right now. They're telling me time's up, so I have to get back to work, and what a refreshing phrase that turns out to be when you're excited about what you're doing.

Renegade writing

2011-10-03T19:47:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Clio Bluestocking's posts on writing with mingled envy and excitement about the process--envy (in a good way) because she's writing so much and excitement because the other day, for the first time in a long time, I worked on a piece of writing that was interesting and exciting to me.

Mostly what I've been doing is editing and writing stuff for others: editing my own work, responding to others' work, and doing service work that I'm committed to doing. What it reminded me of was this: you can, and I did, spend 16 hours on something (a report, say), and no one will notice it or say anything about it, unless it doesn't get done. You can spend 5 hours responding to something (and I did), and what you'll hear by return email is, "Fine. Now how about this other task?"

If it's what you signed up to do, you put in the hours, and you mark them on Google Calendar so you can see the real number of hours that it takes. You vow to remember this when someone contacts you about another piece of work that's a distraction, the kind of thing you deludedly think won't take much time but always does, and you vow not to commit to this kind of work until you're willing to put in the hours it really takes. I've already turned down 2 such tasks this week.

No wonder working on that piece of writing felt like such a guilty pleasure. Reading things I hadn't read before as well as some I had, making connections, putting it together and writing the words on paper, staying up well into the night when it was just me and the ideas and the cool night air coming in through the window--I had forgotten how that felt, writing about something that I cared about and that I wasn't responsible to anyone else for writing.

I'm going to hold that feeling in mind as I turn to grading and, yes, more duty-writing.

Temptations

2011-09-30T15:43:00.001-07:00

For the first time in many years, there are actually jobs in my field. I don't want to move, and I probably won't apply, but a lot of them seem to read like this "Wanted: Undine Specialty 1 with possible subfield in Undine Specialties 2 and 3." It's tempting.
Some day, I am going to stand up in a faculty meeting and say, "This is not a karaoke bar. You cannot just stand up and hold forth to no particular purpose with all of us as your captive audience. If you're going to do that, at least buy us a round."
A few months ago, I was talking with someone (let's call hir Fatuous Fool) in Undine Specialty 2 who'd been in the field for, oh, 20 minutes or so, and FF said, "Of course X isn't really a Specialty 2 project at all." "Really? Why?" I asked. "How would you define Specialty 2?" "Um, er, um," replied FF, after which I dropped it. I wish now that I had pursued it a little further and been a little less gracious, because really, who made FF the deity of Specialty 2? Well, maybe taking the high road was all for the best.
I am tempted to rant further about reinventing the educratic wheel--"No more dreary lectures with our new ed-u-matic professor software!"--but fortunately Historiann has done it for me.

Touching books

2011-09-24T19:27:00.000-07:00

In one of my classes this semester, the students (some of them) seem happier to watch and listen than to speak up and participate. It's as though all those crazy antics I'm performing at the front of the class--you know, asking questions--are less real to them than the PowerPoints I use to show pictures and key terms when I lecture. We've done groups, presentations, reading aloud, and lots of other things. I think they're coming around.

The other day, I was introducing an author, and I had them come up to the front of the class. It's not small class, but they all gathered around.

"You know, when you read from our anthology, it's easy to lose sight of the context," I began. "I'll bet you think that Famous Author lives in this anthology."

She's clearly lost it this time, their eyes said. How could an author live in a book?

Then I pulled out some books and some copies of the magazines in which FA had published. They passed them around and I talked about the kinds of places where FA had published, how authors usually published with the same publishing house over a period of time, and all that. I asked them to look at the jokes and drawings and what they noticed about the magazines.

They seemed interested and stayed that way even when we moved on to the next part of the class. How could you be indifferent to an author when you've held the actual publication in which FA published all those decades ago? At the very least, they don't think that FA lives in an anthology any more, and they have a pretty good sense of the kind of literary house in which s/he does live.

Writers' little helpers

2011-09-17T10:58:00.000-07:00

Some technological, some not.

First the not-technological:

First of all, the Another Damned Notorious Writing Group. It really did help to feel as though I needed to accomplish something and check in on Friday.
Also, the ADNWG inspires bloggers to write about writing, as posts by its cofounders and also Sisyphus, Dr. Crazy, Dr. Virago, Dame Eleanor, and all the comments on the ADNWG posts attest.
Opposite day. I think I've posted before that my natural time to write is in the evening, by which I mean that I have better concentration and interest then, and I can write more in 2 hours in the evening than in 4 hours during the day. Given every piece of advice on writing ever published, I've been trying very hard to do the "get up in the morning and write" thing, but yesterday I just gave up, did fun class-prep work all day, cruised around on the internet a little, and in the evening finally made the suckitude meter budge in the right direction on this get-it-out-the-door article that I have to finish. I wrote a bunch and can now see the end in sight.

The technological ones:

Pomodoro. I finally broke down and bought Pomodoro instead of using my regular timer. Somehow, having its alien voice tell me to get started has helped, as has the game-type quality of having it enter the time spent automatically on my calendar.
Google Calendar. It truly did make a difference when I actually wrote in "Write" as an appointment on writing days. It's all a Jedi mind trick, like the timers, but really, what isn't?
750words. It doesn't work for the kinds of editing and rewriting I was doing yesterday, but for generating text that you can then cut into shape, it works well.
Freedom. Freedom cuts you off from the Internet for a period of time that you specify. The Windows version I tried didn't work, although whether that was due to Freedom or the general haplessness of Vista, I'm not sure. It works well with a Mac but--important--not if you are also running Pomodoro.
Excel. I know I've posted before about a spreadsheet I keep (on the advice of Boice & Silvia) listing word counts for the day & a brief description of what I did. I recently opened a new workbook page and started keeping track just of the time I started with the beginning and ending word counts. I used to do this on paper, but except for planning and editing, I haven't felt like writing much on paper lately, and this works.

I do realize these are all toys to keep me entertained while I get to work, little shiny technological carrots, so to speak, but if they work, they work. I'm saving learning about Scrivener, which I own but can't figure out yet, for the next big writing push.

Small post on writing

2011-09-14T16:39:00.000-07:00

With all due respect to Profacero, Dame Eleanor, Dr. Virago, and Jonathan at Prose Doctor, writing is ~~not either~~* neither easy or fun right now. I'm still finishing up a promised piece that I thought I could get done before Notorious/ADM's writing challenge--the one I listed so confidently last Friday--but it isn't happening despite many long hours of working on it this week (and the week before that, and the week before that, and so on).

It's sucking up vast quantities of time that I'm supposed to be putting to other things. It's slow work, and it's harder work than it ought to be. Some parts are pretty good, some are okay, and some are bad but getting better. Instead of a word count meter, maybe I should put in a suckitude meter and measure the gradual progress in the right direction that way.

But it will get better, and it will get done.

*"Neither." Sheesh. See what I mean about the words not working?

Hacking the Academy: Transformative? Feasible?

2011-09-09T20:36:00.000-07:00

The shorter version of the free, crowdsourced book Hacking the Academy is now online (via Profhacker) at this site: http://www.digitalculture.org/hacking-the-academy/. I've been reading through the "Hacking Scholarship" part.

The whole essay or series of essays, if it's not too old-school a term to refer to them that way, is exciting; you can feel the energy that went into this project. It's also exciting to see put together in one place ideas that have been out on the blogosphere for some time. Here are some excerpts, with comments and questions:

"Say no, when asked to undertake peer-review work on a book or article manuscript that has been submitted for publication by a for-profit publisher or a journal under the control of a commercial publisher." (Jason Baird Jackson)

Cathy Davidson and other eminences may be able to get away with this, but if your university, like most, counts productivity in ways that engage with traditional publishing, this Bartleby "I would prefer not to" idea may not work.

"The idea that knowledge is a product, which can be delivered in an analog vehicle needs to be questioned. What the network shows us, is that many of our views of information were/are based on librocentric biases." (David Parry)

True, and again, something that's exciting and potentially liberating, although I confess to being librocentric (a librophiliac?). I don't know about this "knowledge as product in an analog vehicle," though. Haven't we been talking about alternative ways to exchange/preserve/present knowledge for at least the last 20 years or roughly the Internet age? That's how long I've heard about it, at any rate.

"In a world where the primary tools for finding new scholarship are tagged, social databases like Delicious and LibraryThing, the most efficient form of journal interface with the world might be a for journals to scrap their websites and become collective, tagging entities." (Jo Guldi) Guldi goes on to suggest a "wikification" that would allow a journal article to be crowdsource-reviewed for a year and to disappear if the author didn't make it a stronger article as a result.

Again, another interesting idea. Here the "survival of the fittest" ethos usually considered to be the province of official peer reviewers is crowdsourced--still Darwinian, in that a few will survive but many perish, but more democratic, maybe. Someone else suggested that reviews will still be "invited," so there will still be a hierarchy.

Meanwhile, the article dangles in the wind for a year, and if it is deemed insufficiently improved (by whom?) it disappears and the now publicly humiliated author . . . does what? Takes it off his or her cv, if it was on there to begin with? At what point does it count as "published," if we will still even have that category of evaluation?

"But the key point is that we need to take back our publications from the market-based economy, and to reorient scholarly communication within the gift economy that best enables our work to thrive. We are, after all, already doing the labor for free—the labor of research, the labor of writing, the labor of editing—as a means of contributing to the advancement of the collective knowledge in our fields." (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)

Can I get a big "amen"?

"But, as Cathy Davidson has noted, 'the database is not the scholarship. The book or the article that results from it is the scholarship.'” (Mills Kelly)

True--and yet what about the work that goes into establishing, curating, and mounting a database for use, not to mention the technical details? Kelly says, rightly, that it's not considered scholarship if it doesn't make an argument. Isn't the selection of texts and choice of access media a form of argument or at least an intellectual labor?

More to the point: Kelly never says this and never puts it in this way, but I'm uncomfortable with what could be seen as a distinction between worker bees who create the database and the "real scholars" who use it. Don't we value editions? Why should a database be less valued? Tom Scheinfeldt provides an answer for this:

At the very least, we need to make room for both kinds of digital humanities, the kind that seeks to make arguments and answer questions now and the kind that builds tools and resources with questions in mind, but only in the back of its mind and only for later.

Anyway, even if you don't agree with all of it, it's an exciting way to think about the possibilities of scholarship, so go read it.

Your thoughts?

Monty Python wisdom

2011-09-06T20:47:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it happens: didn't sleep well, woke up early, went back to sleep and had a bad teaching dream (they showed up in a room I hadn't been told about), and so on.

So in the rich tradition of interior monologues, as I was preparing to leave for the day, one part of my brain said, "I don't feel like teaching today."

Up pipes a John Cleese voice from the "Dead Parrot" sketch. You know the part where Palin tells Cleese, "Beautiful plumage, the Norwegian blue" and Cleese answers "The plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead"?

Yes, a John Cleese voice popped up inside my head and said, "Your wanting to teach don't enter into it."

I laughed, got in the car, taught all day, and had good classes. It's true: when they're expecting you to show up, your momentary thought that you might not feel like it don't enter into it.

(Link to the sketch: Dead Parrot Sketch)

Where have all the bloggers gone?

2011-09-01T22:11:00.001-07:00

Gone to the Chronicle, every one--well, two of them anyway: Tenured Radical and now Lesboprof. The Chronicle is not what you'd call enthusiastic about casual pseudonymous passers-by leaving comments (you need a Chronicle identity), so I won't be able to wish Lesboprof well in her new digs as I'd wanted to.

Inktopia? Gone to Scientopia (at least for a guest post).

Dr. Isis? Gone to her own domain: http://isisthescientist.com/.

Comradde PhysioProffe? Gone to a group blog: http://freethoughtblogs.com/physioprof/.

I know there've always been group blogs, and this is only a few instances, but I'm wondering if we're seeing some kind of consolidation wave taking place. This is good in one way because the Chronicle and other sites are recognizing the power of blogs, but on the other hand, the integration of blogs/Twitter/Facebook that sites are aiming for makes that cloak of pseudonymity even thinner than before.

Maybe the "thin pseudonym" people like Historiann and the moms at Roxie's Place have the right idea. Yet when I tried blogging a little bit under my own name, I hedged so much about everything that the posts were worthless (and I took the blog down almost immediately).

For better or worse, this feels like a real voice in ways that my real voice did not. How's that for a conundrum?

Dear Mr. Gates: Brick and mortar colleges need love, too

2011-08-31T20:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Gates,

The Chronicle reported today that in a time of huge cutbacks and givebacks for brick and mortar state universities, where students learn by talking to one another and their teachers face to face, you have given $4.5 million to Western Governors University:

Western Governors University, the online institution emphasizing competency-based learning, has received $4.5-million to support its recent expansions into Texas, Indiana, and Washington State.

What's that you say? You support online-only educational ventures even if brick-and-mortar state universities, which are really, really hurting in this economy as states claw back money already allocated, have existing and well-established online learning programs?

Then why did you give the money for this, which is definitely not online-only?

The money, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will be used to open brick-and-mortar offices, to market the university to prospective students, and to finance any future expansion in other states.

So let me get this straight: at a time when universities, including one to which you have been generous in the past, have taken percentage cuts in the double digits to their budgets once or twice a year for the past several years, you have decided to fund a new bricks-and-mortar building and to pay for marketing this (now not so much online-only) university? And you're going to give it money to compete with the definitely hurting state universities?

Does this mean that your company is going to hire more graduates from online-only universities and stop maximizing its use of H1B visas for those who went to brick-and-mortar universities elsewhere?

Anyway, at least you are interested in investing in education, even if we don't see eye to eye on how your money should be spent.

Love and kisses,

Undine

Soundings: Uncoverage and mosaic coverage

2011-08-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

Like Dame Eleanor and Dr. Crazy, I'm tired but pleased after the first week of classes. I've also been thinking about the recent post at Profhacker on "uncoverage" as opposed to "coverage."

I've heard arguments against the coverage model many times, and the "uncoverage" model does sound attractive. Take, for example, the "mom and apple pie" idea implied by this sentence: "Taken together, depth and breadth mean moving away from the prepackaged observations and readily digestible interpretations that go hand-in-hand with coverage." Who could argue with getting away from "prepackaged observations" and the rest? It's like shooting arrows into the much-maligned five-paragraph essay.

Logically, however, this presupposes that either (1) you as a teacher are teaching these preconceived ideas by rote to a bunch of parrots or (2) the students need to be disabused of these rigid ideas since they already know them. I think the situation is more complicated than that.

The thing is, students don't necessarily know this stuff. They don't always have preconceptions that need to be shaken up about, say, what a metaphor is or what Romantic poetry might be, because some of them will never have heard of it to begin with. They can't tell obvious points from nonobvious ones, or logically sound points from crazy ones, because they don't have the frame of reference necessary to make those judgments. In short, they can't question a conventional idea and rebel against it if they don't know it exists in the first place.

That's where the idea of "soundings" comes into play. What we're doing, especially for the first few weeks, is taking soundings into the depths of their knowledge. What have they heard about the Romantics? What do they know about Dickens? It's only by uncovering what they do know that we can address what they don't know.

Maybe they have some good ideas, or maybe they have some misconceptions, or maybe they have limited conceptions, or maybe they have some combination of all these. What we need to do is provide a mosaic of "uncoverage" with enough "coverage" so that they can put the pieces together themselves.

Random bullets of back to school

2011-08-24T20:57:00.000-07:00

It just wouldn't be a syllabus, would it, without a mistake on it? I don't mean a typo (which there mercifully weren't any of), but a mistake as in put the wrong date and so on. Perfection is an insult to the academic gods. That's my defense, and I'm sticking to it.
If they are half as excited as I am to start the new semester, we're all good.
I have to keep reminding myself that in the total scheme of things, the administration does not give the tiniest damn* about the many, many hours I put into creating a course, nor to teaching it, prepping for it, or grading the papers for it, although of course they would say otherwise, and that this in turn makes absolutely no difference to the way I approach teaching. It does not prevent me from spending too much time (and, to an extent, having fun) prepping for the courses. Part of why we all get incensed about the "lazy professor" nutcase rhetoric out there now is that it is hard, demanding, and absorbing work that we do because we're committed to it and want to do it well. Go ask Matt Damon if you don't believe me.
Anybody who says teaching isn't (or can't be) absorbing intellectual work is a fool. There, I've said it.
Reader, I banned them--electronic devices, I mean, a la the airplane speech, although I didn't actually give that speech. We'll be using them at some times during the classes, but let's see if that creates a mass exodus from any of the classes.
Now back to course prep.

(*as in all administrations would like teaching to be done well, but what they reward in terms of tenure and promotions isn't primarily teaching.)

A nice moment and a tech tip

2011-08-19T21:35:00.000-07:00

Today I did something I don't do often enough: I went to each of the rooms where I'm scheduled to teach and checked to see if I could get the technology to work with my computer.

Since it was a Friday afternoon and school hasn't started yet, no one was in the classrooms. They were cool and dark until I switched on the lights, and the rooms had those freshly waxed floors that are never as clean as they are at the beginning of the semester. There's also that feeling of mild outlawry in walking into an empty classroom and taking charge of it, knowing that if anyone challenged me I'd just tell them I was a professor and they'd go away.

This was a geektastic little tour, too, because I figured out how to get everything to work--the computer, the iPad, doc camera, projector, and even sound, which is sometimes a dicey proposition. I tried PowerPoint, web pages, Keynote, and Youtube, playing "Trouble in River City" from The Music Man in all three of the rooms and wandering to the back to see what students would see from various angles.

Here is the nice moment: as I was in the largest of the rooms (before playing the YouTube clips), students kept wandering in singly or in pairs. They'd walk around a bit, look at the desks, and then leave. Some of them talked to me a little: "Hi, are you a professor? I'm just checking out the room before classes start." It was good to see students doing that, and it reminded me that we were both doing the same thing, in a way--trying to get acclimated to the space a little before classes start.

Here is the tech tip, as passed along to me by the Apple geniuses: some time in the spring of 2010, a MacOS upgrade made all the power settings on the laptop default to California power-saving standards, which sounds all eco-worthy and green except that if you were projecting video of any sort, the video on the screen at the front of the room was so dark that students couldn't see it, even if the laptop was plugged in. The same automatic darkening occurred when students would present their work and embed a video clip. I knew something had happened and figured out that it was probably somebody's idea of a feature rather than a bug, but it was maddening because there was no cure for it.

The Apple genius told me that it was a common problem and that this is the way to fix it: go to the battery icon (Energy Saver Preferences), and change the settings from "Better Battery Life" to "Higher Performance" under "Power Adapter." You will have to restart and log in again (not just log in again), but that should fix the settings temporarily. The settings will revert to "Better Battery Life" even if the computer isn't running on battery, so you will have to repeat the process if you shut down the computer.

This fix seemed to work today, so let's hope that it works if I show video in class this year. The last time, students tried to watch a movie that looked like Godfather II seen through goggles filled with dark coffee, and even their young eyes couldn't make out the murky doings on the screen.

Wishes (resolutions?) for the new academic year

2011-08-18T21:37:00.000-07:00

I'm taking break from planning classes that start almost immediately to think about this year. What do I want to happen?

Less time spent in faculty meetings where we might as well pass around the Festivus pole. You know what I'm talking about: the ritual airing of grievances, feats of strength (power struggles between individuals), and so on. Not all meetings are like this, but let's make none of them like this. (I'm not talking about raising legitimate problems but re-discussing past issues.)
This goes double for meetings in which people submit things for discussion and don't show up to discuss them.
Triple for those who make a lengthy point in an already overly long meeting, stand up, say "I have to leave now," and then walk out the door, leaving the rest of us holding the Festivus pole.
Spend more time on writing early in the morning during writing days.
Spend less time being irritated and tempted to fire off annoyed emails. I don't often send them, but the irritation is distracting. Twain said "When angry, count four; when very angry, swear." Both are better than writing angry emails in your head when you're supposed to be writing.
Say no to pointless service obligations, the kind where I'm basically there to warm a bench rather than to play the game. I've done plenty of service, and it's time to get my other work done instead.

What are your resolutions?

A clip post on writing: Jennifer Egan and Michael Agger

2011-08-10T20:32:00.000-07:00

Two quick clips on writing.

Jennifer Egan, via ia Perfect from Now On:

The second thing is, I feel like getting in the habit of it is huge. I guess that was my one accomplishment of those two years [with the first failed novel]— making it a routine is a gigantic part of it.
One corollary of that— and this is probably the most important thing for me— is being willing to write really badly. It won’t hurt you to do that. I think there is this fear of writing badly, something primal about it, like: “This bad stuff is coming out of me…” Forget it! Let it float away and the good stuff follows.

And this, from Michael Agger's "How to Write Faster" at Slate:

The infamously productive Trollope, who used customized paper! "He had a note pad that had been indexed to indicate intervals of 250 words," William F. Buckley told the Paris Review. "He would force himself to write 250 words per 15 minutes. Now, if at the end of 15 minutes he hadn't reached one of those little marks on his page, he would write faster." Buckley himself was a legend of speed—writing a complete book review in crosstown cabs and the like.
. . .
Ann Chenoweth and John Hayes (2001) found that sentences are generated in a burst-pause-evaluate, burst-pause-evaluate pattern, with more experienced writers producing longer word bursts. . . . One also finds dreadful confirmation of one's worst habits: "Binge writing—hypomanic, euphoric marathon sessions to meet unrealistic deadlines—is generally counterproductive and potentially a source of depression and blocking," sums up the work of Robert Boice. One strategy: Try to limit your working hours, write at a set time each day, and try your best not to emotionally flip out or check email every 20 seconds. This is called "engineering" your environment.
. . .
Like many writers, I take a lot of notes before I compose a first draft. The research verifies that taking notes makes writing easier—as long as you don't look at them while you are writing the draft! Doing so causes a writer to jump into reviewing/evaluating mode instead of getting on with the business of getting words on the screen.
Alas, the cognitive literature offers no easy solutions. The same formula appears: "Self-regulation through daily writing, brief work sessions, realistic deadlines, and maintaining low emotional arousal."

Assigning and grading essays this year? How old school of you.

2011-08-07T16:55:00.000-07:00

As I begin to think about assignments for the semester, I find myself torn between the tried and true--assignments I've given before--and fancy new possibilities. Just in time to help, "Professors Cede Grading Power to Outsiders—Even Computers" at the Chronicle describes a couple of models of teaching wherein you assign essays but never grade them yourself, and Cathy Davidson at the New York Times questions whether we need essays at all.

The first is the model of online-only Western Governors University (there's no possessive apostrophe in that name, which may be a sign all in itself). WGU assigns students to a faculty mentor and "[n]o letter grades are given—students either pass or fail each task. Officials say a pass in a Western Governors course amounts to a B at a traditional university." All the grading is done by a cohort of adjunct professors, who never see the students and thus aren't swayed by issues of how hard the student worked or other external factors. It sounds like a no-classes version of the AP exam or maybe a CLEP exam.

This model of splitting instruction and assessment into two different areas is actually one that most of us are familiar with: exit exams, portfolio assessment, and programs like the first-year writing program at Texas Tech all use a form of this model, and as in those examples, the instructors participate in norming sessions to ensure consistency. Since the exam is everything in this model, what happens to all the pressure for instructors to evaluate students in multiple ways?

The second model gave me pause: using a program called SAGrader to grade the students' essays and give feedback on them. I remember seeing programs like this touted a few years ago, and they were easily fooled by both the bombastic say-nothing five-paragraph essay ("Weather is very important in this our world today") and the "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" variety of nonsense sentences. Here is what gave me the most pause:

When she announced to her class that software would automatically grade the essay tests, many students were wary. "The students said, I'm being graded by a robot?" she remembers. "I said, Anybody who doesn't get a 100, I will look at a machine, and I will see if the machine made a mistake."

So a perfect score--not just an A, but a perfect score--is the default grade for these essays? I went to the site, and apparently the model there is that students submit essays until they are perfect in some terms or other, though I'm not sure that creativity and critical thinking are part of those terms.

The third model is Cathy Davidson's in Now You See It. In "Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade" at the New York Times, Virginia Heffernan quotes Davidson as suggesting that the fault, dear Brutus, lies not within ourselves or in our underlings but in our assignments:

What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in school — the term paper — and not necessarily intrinsic to a student’s natural writing style or thought process?”

If we assigned tweets, blog posts, and wikis instead of essays--and quit teaching old-fashioned writers like Thomas Pynchon--we'd be doing everyone a favor, including our students, she concludes, because we're trying to prepare them for jobs that won't exist in the future instead of the 65% of all jobs that haven't been invented yet. Incidentally, in the comments to the article, I learned that some students are using an easier way to read online: Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting, which sets up a sentence to look like a poem.

There's something attractive about having students experiment with different forms of writing, but speaking as someone who has taught or used with students a lot of technologies only to see them fall by the wayside, I'm not sure but what she's missing the point. (Example: do you still teach them or have to teach them how to write HTML in Notepad? How to observe listserv etiquette? How to write an email address? I didn't think so.)

But technology aside, can't each of these forms teach something different? Is there something inherently better about a 144-word message or a 600-word blogpost than a short research paper where you have to synthesize, group, and critique ideas, adding some of your own?

Research World: On archives and concentration

2011-08-02T17:56:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I was a little ambivalent about this trip to the archives; I had too much to do, and so on--all work that I was supposed to be doing and never actually completing. What I hadn't counted on is the magical powers of concentration that research libraries somehow beam in to the heads of those in their research rooms.

Think about it. You leave a very hot, humid space outdoors, where you're trying to figure out all the basic daily life in a new space (How do I get back to where I live? When does the bus come? How do I get my key/print documents/get some tea/do laundry?) and are consequently feeling frazzled.

Then you go into a cool, quiet research room where you know what you're supposed to be doing. Even though there's wireless internet in the room, you barely notice it except to look up something related to the archival materials you're reading. You don't fidget, and you don't think about the other writing you're supposed to be doing. You work your way through the folders, reading, taking pictures with your newly silent camera, transcribing, and otherwise doing the work you know you're there to do.

You're in Author space. Everything you do for 7-8 hours in that room relates to Author. You start making connections just because of the sheer volume of Author time you're putting in. Even when you walk somewhere for lunch and the heat hits you as you leave the building, your brain is still working on Author questions.

Best of all, you feel capable of making judgments now that you couldn't when you first started to look at the papers. You recognize not only Author's handwriting but that of various associates, so you can tell who is writing what. You get to know the issues that the letter writers are talking about, even if they're using some shorthand way of alluding to them.

Even outside the reading room, you don't want to let the world intrude except for some escapist reading or a little Netflix. You ignore the news and various crises in education; you stop looking at Facebook and Twitter. All of it seems too noisy and stressful if you're in Research World.

I'd like to bottle Essence of Research World and take it back home with me.

Thoughts from the archive

2011-07-28T17:57:00.000-07:00

Walking into an archive (and a town) I've never been to before doesn't feel strange, somehow, for as soon as I caught sight of Author's familiar handwriting, I felt right at home.
It's completely irrational, but let's say Author has a side subject that ze is interested in writing about, like geometry or cutting out paper dolls. Every time Author starts talking about geometry or paper dolls (which other researchers have already discussed), I want hir to talk instead about what I'm interested in having hir talk about. See? Irrational.
Those who (ahem!) have recently purchased a camera to take photos of materials like the cool kids do should be warned that they should test the camera before going to the archive. Camera manufacturers like to put in enough loud shutter clicks, beeps, and little musical flourishes when the camera turns on and off to embarrass the most intrepid researcher, especially when said researcher can't figure out how to turn them off without diligent Google searches for guidance. If you were in an archive recently and some fool had a noisy camera, that was me.

Writing houses again

2011-07-23T07:20:00.000-07:00

Our family used to have a dog that did this: If she didn't want to acknowledge the presence of something she was afraid of, like a cat or something she'd chewed up and knew she'd get in trouble for, she wouldn't look directly at whatever it was but would turn away and look at it out of the corner of her eye.

I am that dog, looking slantendicular when I think about (1) the upcoming semester, which is coming up at the speed of light; (2) an upcoming research trip that I would normally look forward to but am not prepared for; (3) serious academic controversies as reported by diligent bloggers; and (4) a ton of writing that is not going well at all. You would think it impossible to avoid looking at everything on your desk directly, including the computer monitor, but you would be wrong, although I can safely report that a day spent trying and failing to write is much more exhausting than actually getting the thing written.

Fortunately, The New Yorker's article "The Rise of the Tiny House" let me escape into my writing house fantasy again for a little while. I'm pretty sure that will help. That and getting the writing done.

(I will write a real post soon.)

Home is where the dishwasher is

2011-07-18T20:29:00.000-07:00

Historiann has an interesting post up about Michelle Nijhuis's "Not one more winter in the tipi, honey." It's about the gendered division of labor that creeps in when idealistic back-to-the-land-for-a-simpler-life types experience parenthood. The glamor jobs like siding the yurt win a lot of praise whereas the realities of invisible (and repetitive) domestic work like washing diapers don't, and the division of labor that usually attends these tasks often means that women bail out first on the Arcadian dream.

I think it's partly the invisibility of these tasks, as Historiann says, and partly their lack of glamor, but also the sheer amount of mental as well as physical energy that they take. I've never done anything remotely yurt-like in terms of pure back-to-the-landness, but being in the Land of No Internets in the summertime has given me a little appreciation for that life.

I used to get impatient when whoever was in charge of cooking would ask what we'd like for dinner hours before dinner time, but I have more sympathy for that now, though I try not to ask. Once you're the person in charge of cooking, baking, and the rest, you realize that if you don't think about it in advance--first at the grocery store, since it's a long trek back there if you forget something, and then counting back from dinner time to the preparation time you're going to need--dinner and breakfast and lunch aren't going to happen.

Now, to be fair, other family members always offer to take over some of this work, especially washing the mountains of dishes, and certainly at home we have an equitable division of labor: one person cooks and the other cleans up, and so on. I've chosen to take on the more traditional role at the LoNI mostly to give everyone else more free time and because I don't have to do this permanently. I've also done this as a kind of experiment in 19th-century living and as an exercise in shifting focus from one form of work to another.

A lot of commenters over at Historiann's mentioned Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, and I'm reminded of something the character Laura thinks about in The First Four Years. In this book, she's pregnant and feeling miserable, but she realizes that "the work must go on, and she was the one who must do it."

To get back to the "not one more winter in the tipi" idea: You can put a solar panel on a yurt or not, depending on how you feel that day, but for all the domestic tasks, the work has to go on whether you feel like it or not. That makes a difference.

Handwriting: a tipping point

2011-07-11T20:16:00.000-07:00

Apparently Indiana has abolished the teaching of handwriting (cursive, I think, though the articles don't say) in favor of more typing.

If you're at The Wall Street Journal, you see this as "the end of civilization as we know it," although I think Anthony Daniels is kidding.
If you're at The Atlantic, you worry a little more about "how handwriting builds character."
If you're Karin Harmon James, a psych professor at Indiana University, you talk about how "handwriting increases brain activity, hones fine motor skills, and can predict a child's academic success in ways that keyboarding can't." (The quotation is from the article and not from James.) What's disturbing is that James is talking about printing and not cursive in reporting this result: "The printing practice also improved letter recognition, which is the No. 1 predictor of reading ability at age 5." Eliminating practice of writing would thus have a negative effect.

There are class considerations here, too: little Sophie and Ethan* in the suburbs will just add another class to their over-scheduled lives between private music lessons and computer camp while those in regular public school will not. As long as students can still handwrite essays on exams, I don't care if they write in cursive or not, but maybe we're at a tipping point in terms of teaching the physical act of writing with a pen.

But I've discovered something disturbing: I don't much like to write by hand any more, and my handwriting is getting worse from disuse. This is almost as disturbing as discovering that I pay better attention to the books I read on the iPad, even though it's not as easy to mark them up as it is with a pencil. This feels like another kind of tipping point, and I'm not sure I like it.

Has that happened to you?

*Names chosen from the most popular names for 2011--no offense meant to any actual Sophies or Ethans.

Grading: top down or bottom up?

2011-07-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

At various points in my teaching career, I've heard of classes in which students were told something like this the first day: "Everyone has an A in this class unless you don't do the work" or "An A in this class is yours to lose" or "If you complete these 5 assignments under our contract, you will get an A." The idea is that this would dispel the students' anxiety about the class and make them work harder for the sheer joy of learning.

I could see the traces of this kind of grading when students would get to my class, look at an essay exam or a paper that I'd handed back, and say, "Why didn't this get an A? Where did I lose the points?"

My practice, as I would always explain to the students when the first exam was handed back, has always been the opposite: a paper starts from zero points/grades and rises up the grading scale based on its quality. A B paper isn't an A paper gone bad in some point-driven way but a paper that began as a 0 and worked its way up to a B ( or"good," as students often forget) level. Better papers worked their way up to an A. Some papers worked their way up to a C.

It seemed to me that the "A is yours to lose" theory of grading would create more anxiety than it would solve, since the only way you could go in such a system was down. Every evaluation opportunity becomes a chance only to fail or to maintain the status quo rather than improve. The best you can do is break even and not lose, but you never really win.

I was thinking of this recently because of something a student wrote about this summer. Her assumption was that all teachers graded on the "points down from an A" model, and her suggestion was that teachers instead start from the bottom and grade upwards since that is more motivating and since that is what students are used to in every game they ever play on their iPhones. I hadn't thought of grading and motivation in terms of games, but it's a great metaphor.

What's your practice?

No phones, no lights, no motor cars

2011-07-04T15:55:00.019-07:00

I'm back, in a manner of speaking, although my body clock is still set to several time zones away. It couldn't be called a restful trip, what with flying in and then driving 4 separate trips of 500 miles each due to family emergencies, and when I woke up this morning, I'd been in so many different places that I didn't know where I was for a minute.

But there were a few days in the land of no internets, and that helped a lot. I've written before about the land of no internets, which feels sort of like a private family theme park where the 19th century comes alive (no phones! no internet! no washers! no dishwashers!). Life slows down and spreads out before you when you can't check messages and the phone is off. Instead of looking downward at the phone, a gesture that's become more and more ubiquitous, you lift your head. You look out across the water or across the room at your family members.

Some days I watched the rain pour down and decided that it was a good time to make some cookies or maybe a blueberry cobbler. Other days, I was out on the water and just breathing in the early morning smell of the air. At night, it's so dark I can see constellations that I don't see at other times, and if I ventured a few feet from the house, I wouldn't see it unless the moon is out.

When I left the land of no internets, I discovered that I'd been pelted with phone and email messages from colleagues who didn't take a hint from my previous "I am away from my desk" responses and seemed to want replies! right! now! to deal with issues that were important to them.

But I don't have to care about those messages when I'm in the land of no internets.

Update: light posting

2011-06-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

More travel, including a visit to the land of no internets = no posts for a while.

Writing Vampire

2011-06-15T19:08:00.000-07:00

Pack, get up at the crack of dawn, travel, work on something else entirely, return, wash clothes. Repeat that a couple of times and it does wonders for your writing schedule, as in "makes any concentration impossible." Not for everyone--there are stalwarts among you all--but I am so far from being in the writing zone that I'll have to schedule another trip just to get there.

I had lunch with a friend today, a writer. When the talk turned to writing, I couldn't stop asking her about it. So you write every morning? How many hours do you put in? You have a writing group? How is it going?

As she talked, I realized that I was drinking in this story of the writing process. It was gratifying to hear from someone who was doing successfully what I was failing to do this week, and it was also just guilt-inducing enough to make me want to try again, with renewed effort.

Gratifying and guilt-inducing. Filling up some need I had to hear about writing going well.

Yes, blog friends, I have become a writing vampire.

"Twitter can do it all"

2011-06-09T07:21:00.000-07:00

A conversation I've been having with increasing frequency lately goes like this (redacted for content essence):

Enthusiast: "Twitter can do it all. Links to scholarship, trends in the field--it's all there. You should try Twitter."

Me: "I'm on Twitter, and I follow a fair number of people. It has some useful resources."

Enthusiast: "You really should try Twitter. It's great for keeping up with scholarship."

Me, with a little more heat: "I'M ON TWITTER. It has some useful resources, but it doesn't have everything."

Enthusiast: "Twitter has everything. It's wonderful because people tweet great insights into literature. You really should try it."

Me, giving up: "Thank you for the tech tip on this marvelous resource. Gee, I had never heard of it before."

Enthusiast: "Twitter can do it all! You should try Twitter!"

I'll spare you the rest. Let's just say the communication loop is not reaching from my mouth to Enthusiast's ear. I've talked before about how annoying it is when people assume that because you have a nuanced view of what a particular technology can and can't do, you just don't get it, so let me stop there.

Here is what I've heard in these conversations and more formal settings. Twitter is the following:

a great branding and self-promotion mechanism for scholars and grad students
a means of keeping up with the scholarship so you don't have to read those pesky journal articles
a source of great insights by great thinkers in the field before the insights are published
a way to get the gist of various speeches and sessions at conferences
a way to find links to resources that you'd otherwise never see.

I find #5 the most useful and sometimes #4, but "great insights"? My reaction to a lot of tweets is "well, sure," or "of course" or "that's interesting. I'll check out the link." Maybe I'm not following enough people, but I've never seen a tweet that made me feel as though Moses had come down from the mountain top with tiny, 144-character tablets.

Edited to add: in the comments, Dr. Koshary hilariously captured this "join my church" attitude:

"My Twitter is a mighty Twitter. Twitter is so great, you really should come to know Twitter. If loving Twitter is wrong, then I don't want to be right! Twitter can do anything, but Twitter lets us accidentally send sexually explicit messages meant for significant others to our parents because Twitter loves us enough to let us make our own mistakes."

Leaving on a jet plane

2011-06-04T18:18:00.000-07:00

Some are jetting off to exotic climes like Blargistan or the Berks conference. Dame Eleanor, What Now, ADM, Dr. Koshary, and others are doing the summer writing challenge that Notorious and ADM are hosting. Still others are contemplating workspaces, like Profgrrrl, or devising monthly challenges, like nicoleandmaggie, or thinking about summer writing, like Dr. Crazy, or being (rightly) concerned about the editing they're receiving, like Horace.

As for me, I'm doing some of the above, including enough travel to disrupt the writing process, not that it takes much to disrupt the writing process. I was away, and now I'm back, and shortly I'll be leaving again. It's all stuff I signed up to do, so I shouldn't complain, but when has that ever stopped me from complaining?

Those long quiet days of trying out arguments on the cats as I sat at the desk may be over for a while, but I'll bet--or hope--that there's a burst of writing when I get back.

How to Put a PowerPoint onto an iPad

2011-06-02T09:23:00.000-07:00

Say you already have some PowerPoint presentations that you use for classes (I mostly have pictures for the class to analyze), and you want to try using them on the iPad. Here's the problem: even if you have Keynote on your iPad, if you don't have Keynote on your main computer because it's not a Mac, Apple won't let you transfer the files via iTunes.

Here is a workaround that's probably known to thousands of people, but since I just figured it out, you get to read about it here.

1. Using Dropbox, go to the presentation. (You can also email it to yourself and open it on the iPad.) Once it's downloaded, click on the little box with an arrow in the upper right-hand corner ("Open in"). Choose Keynote.

2. It will download into Keynote, with a few warnings that the font might look different.

3. Tap on the presentation to open it. That's all there is to it.

4. You can edit the presentation in Keynote (add presenter notes, change the text, etc.), but apparently you can't save it back to Dropbox. To get the new edition on your main computer, click on the little wrench and go to Share and Print. You can save it as a keynote file, as a .pdf, or as a PowerPoint file and email it to yourself.

5. Now here is the awesome part: say you want to leave your iPad up at the podium and walk around while you show the PowerPoint. If you have an iPhone,you can use your iPhone as a remote control for the slides if you download and install Keynote Remote. Both devices have to be on the same wireless network, which shouldn't be a problem in a classroom.

I learned about this in the comments on one of Pogue's posts at the NYTimes. Pogue also talks about something called "presenter view," which I had never heard of before: although the audience sees just the slide, you can see your notes and a preview of the next slide. You get to "presenter view" by going to Slide Show, Set Up Show in PowerPoint.

Random bullets of still here

2011-05-31T07:10:00.000-07:00

I come back to the blogosphere after a week or so and discover that many of the posts are about food--lovely food, like Comrade PhysioProf's fabulous pizza or Dr. Crazy's excellent restaurant meal. Do we rediscover food again once the semester is over and we realize that we have, you know, bodies that like to eat?
In another vast epiphany, I realized that have fixed opinions about what makes a panel work: my panel, my rules. The rules are pretty simple:

Shut up and let the panelists shine, but don't let them talk past their allotted time (that one is a no-brainer).
Shorter is better for presentations, since everyone's attention spans are getting shorter.
Be prepared for massive technology fail but do all you can to make it succeed, like getting the presentations set up on a single computer ahead of time if possible instead of switching between them
Let the audience talk rather than posing a bunch of questions yourself or letting the panelists just ask each other questions.

Addendum: I also realized that I am impervious to the criticism that arises from enforcing my rules because they work.

The hazards of reading literary criticism at home

2011-05-20T14:53:00.000-07:00

As I was working at home yesterday, there was a knock at the door. I was concentrating on what I was reading, so I had the book in my hand as I opened the door and saw a clean-cut young man with a stack of handouts.

It was a religious-oriented local lawn service business, and since I didn't need the service, I politely said so. We were polite and cordial in our conversation, and then he turned to go.

As I was closing the door, he turned back to me.

"Is that a good book?"

"What?" I'd forgotten that I had the book in my hand.

"Is that a good book to read?"

"Yes. It's a book of literary criticism," I said, and shut the door.

Why on earth would he ask about the book? I thought at first maybe it was one of those salesmen's ploys--you know, where they ask for a glass of water to keep you talking to them. That hadn't seemed to be the case here, though.

Then I looked at the book in my hand. Like so many cultural studies books by a prominent publisher that rhymes with Luke Luniversity Fress, it had a provocative image on the cover--an image of a naked woman swathed in gloomy draperies, in fact. I'm sure the naked woman was performing gender or destabilizing gender identity or representing the hegemonic forces of history, but whatever she was doing, she sure was naked enough that the lawn guy noticed--and, to judge by his peculiar parting expression, didn't approve.

Random links about technology and teaching

2011-05-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

Take these with a grain of salt and my standard disclaimers: I like technology and think it has valid uses in the classroom, hands-on learning can be useful, and all the rest.

Here's an experiment: say you have a class that for some reason is mostly lecture, and in the eleventh week (which we could call the "week 11 slump," because anyone who's ever stood in front of a class knows that's what it is) you tell the students they'll be part of an exciting experiment about learning, and you let the postdocs take over and give them all kinds of cool interactive tools. For one week. The students who have practiced on these tools perk up and do better with their week's learning than a control group. Would you then conclude that "Postdocs Can Be Trained to Be More Effective than Senior Instructors"? You wouldn't? What kind of scientist are you, anyway?
Kim Brooks, at Salon, wants something different to happen with high school English so that her first-year comp students can write better. I think she wants fewer hands-on assignments that ask students to make videos about how Hester Prynne would act today and a few more assignments that focus on making sure that students can write a sentence that has (1) a subject, (2) a verb, and (3) a clear point.
But if you go to USC, you might get to keep making videos instead of writing papers. For the record: making videos can be a valid pedagogical choice, of course, and students can come up with some very sophisticated visual arguments. But sooner or later students are going to have to write something, aren't they? A cover letter? An email? A report? Do geologists (one of the examples) get to turn in a video assessing the prospects for drilling for oil in a particular region, or do they have to write a report? I'm guessing the latter.
According to the Chronicle, Stanford med students, who were issued iPads last fall, demanded paper notes or books instead of reading their required books on the device, although they found the iPad useful for sketching and taking notes in lectures: "But when Stanford's School of Medicine lent iPads to all new students last August, a curious thing happened: Many didn't like using them in class. Officials had hoped to stop printing an annual average of 3,700 pages of course materials per medical student, encouraging them to use digital materials instead. Some students rebelled, and Stanford was forced to resume offering printed notes to those who wanted them. In most classes, half the students had stopped using their iPads only a few weeks into the term."
At least no one's requiring that Atlas Shrugged be taught lest money should be withheld from the school. Oh, wait: "A separate grant from BB&T funds a course on ethics and economics in which Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is required reading. The novel, which depicts society's collapse in the wake of government encroachment on free enterprise, was recently made into a movie marketed to tea party members."

I want a meeting . . .

2011-05-05T12:28:00.001-07:00

Disclaimer: This isn't inspired by anything in particular.

I want a meeting that doesn't simply repeat and elaborate on information that's already been disseminated by email, especially if the information is, as always, more bad news about the budget.
I want a meeting that recognizes the truth of this statement: "Email is for announcements. Meetings are for action."
I want a meeting in which faculty venting about issues that can't be changed and won't be the subject of a concerted protest is either banned or kept to a minimum.
I want a meeting in which the phrase "We will talk about this at the next meeting" after the subject under discussion has already been talked about endlessly will be banned.
If there's supposed to be a vote, I want a meeting in which the vote will happen.
I want a meeting in which entirely new information that I've never heard about, even after attending every single meeting, is not presented in the context of "everybody knows about this" as a done deal.
I want a meeting that doesn't happen and is canceled if there's no reason for it beyond the fact that it is scheduled.
I want a meeting that I can come out of feeling as though I’d accomplished something instead of feeling angry and helpless at what the powers that be are imposing on us.

This will probably be *poofed* for rantiness, but I had to say it.

Library tales

2011-04-29T16:35:00.000-07:00

The Little Professor has a post up about the University of Denver, which decided that a modern library could do without those messy paper things with pages. You know the things I mean: they have no digital content at all and are thus entirely useless. Best to put them in an off-site storage facility where they won't be in the way of students who want to hang out with their laptops. Here's someone who speaks for a lot of us:

Faculty members who have objected say that, while database research is important to modern-day academics, Denver researchers will invariably lose out on serendipitous discovery that comes with perusing a library’s stacks. “I know it’s kind of a touchy-feely argument, and I wish I had documented my own experience to prove it,” Headrick said. “But it’s very, very common in a lot of the social sciences. I’ll leave with five other books that I find while looking.

It's funny. We believe in digital serendipity: we find things when we're searching online that we never thought we'd find, and we boast about it. That's what Twitter is for, apparently. So why are we so apologetic about the "touchy-feely" nature of paper serendipity, which is at least as important to those in humanities fields?

And is anyone else getting tired of the argument that those of us who find it useful to look at books on shelves just don't get the digital age? I get it. I really do. Being able to search for and access texts online is a wonderful thing. But to sing the old song again, paper is a technology, too, and sometimes it's the most efficient one. I can scan through a book, read a few pages, check the index, and know whether to take it out or not in a minute or so.

I was thinking of this the other day when I went to our campus library, which was filled with students studying. (The presence of books doesn't seem to have hurt their ability to do this, by the way.) As I was checking out, the librarian helpfully pointed out that books could be delivered to departments if faculty ordered them. I appreciate that service and will probably take advantage of it at some point, especially if I'm pressed for time. There's a tradeoff, though, and its name is serendipity.

Spring madness

2011-04-25T13:40:00.000-07:00

I have a question: how many of you have noticed that at the end of the spring semester, universities (or departments) get a little squirrelly?

Maybe some issue comes along that wouldn't rattle anyone in the fall, but in the spring everyone starts sending furious emails about it.

Or maybe a department meeting gets very tense all of a sudden over a seemingly minor issue.

Or everyone gets in an uproar about some announced policy that's been around for ages but now is seen as the decline of civilization and the end of Truly Serving the Purposes of a Liberal Education.

I can't describe it any better than this, but in my house, we call it the annual spring madness and all but place bets on when it will strike. I've seen it wherever I've taught, so it's not limited to one place. Have you seen it, too?

Notes from a former adjunct

2011-04-19T18:59:00.000-07:00

There have been two blog threads I've watched going the rounds recently, threads I've watched from afar. One is the "burnout after tenure" thread (seen at Historiann's and elsewhere), and the other is the controversy over Tenured Radical's advice to adjuncts. I spent a lot of years as an adjunct, so I have a few thoughts:

When TR tells you "Don't listen to senior colleagues who tell you that there will soon be a line in your field and that you are ideally positioned for it," believe it. Repeat it. Cross-stitch it on a sampler. Tattoo it on your forehead. Anyone who would tell you that is probably trying to be (1) kind or (2) hopeful about your prospects, but it's just cruel.
Let me put it this way: If they're not willing to put a ring on it, so to speak, when they're telling you that they can't live without you because of all your fancy extra service work and great teaching, they're not going to be more likely to do so when a shiny new parade of faculty candidates comes to campus. If you decide to stay when your department is courting the shiny ones, that's your decision, but do so with your eyes open.
Let me put it another way: do you remember the movie An Officer and a Gentleman? For those who didn't see it, Richard Gere is a Navy officer-in-training and Louis Gossett, Junior, is the grizzled old sergeant. Gossett knocks the snotty attitude out of Gere and teaches him life lessons. At the end, Gere is a shiny new officer, ready to have an exciting career, and Gossett is . . . the grizzled old sergeant, waiting to knock some sense into the next batch of snotty recruits and show them the ropes. I did not want to become that grizzled old sergeant (adjunct) showing the new officers (t-t faculty) the ropes of the place, even if it meant getting out of teaching altogether.
On the other hand, New Kid says that "there is a whole cohort of people out there for whom contingent employment is their career." Absolutely true. A lot of people who were adjuncting in my old department are still adjuncting there many years later, either because they had family ties or because they didn't want to leave grad school city.
I have known people who have retired from their positions as adjuncts, and they were happy about their careers.
I've also known people who became administrators of programs, or advisers, or otherwise were employed in academia without tenure-track positions, and they were happy, too.

This isn't to say that there shouldn't be more tenure-track jobs, or that the job market is bad, or that those who want t-t jobs shouldn't be angry, or any of that. I don't have any advice.

Scenes from the front office: "Excellence without Money" in action

2011-04-16T15:04:00.000-07:00

It's registration time, and two days after it started, Required Course X is completely filled up for this summer and next fall. I've fielded my share of desperate emails this week and went to our departmental front office to see if there were any options. Nope--no options.

Students were coming through the doors as I waited, and the phone kept ringing. The message our administrative assistant gave was always the same:

"No, sorry, there aren't any more sections available."

"Sorry, but because of budget cuts, we only have so many instructors to teach that, and the sections are all full."

"I can put you on a waiting list for fall."

"Sorry, the sections are all full.

"Sorry."

"Sorry."

It's not the students' fault. I know that some of them have been trying to get this course for a while, and that others were ready to sign up but it was already closed when their registration time opened.

It's not my fault. I volunteered to teach the class this summer in part for the money, of course, but in part because it's something that students need to take. (Yes, this goes against the "put research first! Only teach your specialty!" ethos that we all get told, but I believe in this course and its benefits for students, so I'm teaching it anyway.)

In a way, it's not even the fault of the upper administrators, since after the state budget cuts, they may not have the money to pay for this, either.

It's a living example of Roxie's "Excellence Without Money" in action.

Why the study of history matters: April 12, 1861

2011-04-11T17:43:00.000-07:00

In honor of the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, I'd like to say a little something about why the study of history matters.

Now, unlike my esteemed blogfellow Historiann , I'm not a historian, nor do I play one on tv, although I get a little dramatic in class sometimes about historical events. I'm what movie stars or the Mafia would call a "civilian" as far as history is concerned--an interested civilian, one whose idea of a good book is something by Drew Gilpin Faust or Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, but a civilian nonetheless.

When I was in elementary school and we learned about the Civil War, we learned that it was fought over slavery. Slavery was wrong, and the North wanted to put an end to it, and the South wanted to keep their slaves, and they fired on the North at Fort Sumter, and the war was on. We had learned about Harriet Tubman (but not Frederick Douglass), and we admired her work on the Underground Railroad. There were, in fact, some Underground Railroad houses in the area, although I didn't know that at the time.

When I got to high school, though, I was told that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. No, that was a simplistic, babyish way of looking at the causes. "States' rights" was the issue, plain and simple: a conflict between the federal government and the states over governance. This may have been the same year we learned about "triangular trade" rather than "the slave trade." At any rate, I remember this vividly because it made no sense to me to be told that slavery was just a side issue, basically an economic spat in which the North wanted to deprive the South of its labor force. People were being bought and sold, yet "states' rights" was the issue? That seemed just plain wrong, even to a daydreaming teenager like myself, but history was presented as Holy Writ back then.

Here's why the study of history matters: because otherwise history gets taught as Holy Writ in one immutable narrative strain with no acknowledgment that it is just one of a number of strains and not necessarily the best one. What I realized some years ago is that my history teacher, high school edition, must have been caught up by the revisionist Southern historians and that that was the narrative he was teaching us. We did not know that there were other strands that told a more truthful story, or that historians were always working on finding more information and telling a more truthful story. But that's what studying history teaches you--that the story is always evolving--and that's why I'm glad there are historians.

Online high school education: what happens when they get to college?

2011-04-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

I've been wondering recently what happens in online high school classes, since that seems to be the ~~least expensive and least common denominator solution~~ wave of the future for a lot of cash-strapped states. Here's one example from the NY Times Education section:

Jack London was the subject . . . In a high school classroom packed with computers, [the student] read a brief biography of London with single-paragraph excerpts from the author’s works. But the curriculum did not require him, as it had generations of English students, to wade through a tattered copy of “Call of the Wild” or “To Build a Fire.”

[The student], who had failed English 3 in a conventional classroom and was hoping to earn credit online to graduate, was asked a question about the meaning of social Darwinism. He pasted the question into Google and read a summary of a Wikipedia entry. He copied the language, spell-checked it and e-mailed it to his teacher.

Okey-dokey, then! If your teacher is some kind of automated software, I guess you're good to go with that answer. If this is flagged for plagiarism by a real teacher (as the article suggests), how do you have a conversation with the student that is a learning experience rather than a punitive conversation if you can't meet face to face?

I'm concerned that these students who "learn" in this manner are in for a world of hurt when they get to college. What happens if they haven't been taught already that "copy and paste from Wikipedia" isn't acceptable as a methodology?

What happens when they're asked to analyze a text, construct an argument, compare points of view, write a coherent response to a question, or any of those other pesky critical thinking skills that college instructors insist are important and that are, some say, the reason students go to college in the first place?

I can think of a couple of things that could happen:

1) There'll be an even greater culture shock for first-year college students when their skills meet a college-level set of expectations ("But I got all A's in high school!").

2) There'll be an increase in the number of "readiness" or remedial or whatever the college chooses to call them courses, which research suggests (via Dean Dad) don't help as much as they should--unless the state is strapped for cash and decides that remedial courses or extra programs cannot be offered at all, leaving students without support.

3) There'll be pressure on college teachers to "recalibrate" their expectations to the new normal for what high school graduates can do in terms of writing and reading.

4) The students could step up in as-yet unseen ways that might surprise us now. Since they've already taken responsibility for their education by the self-paced learning online, they might be more amenable to the kinds of instruction that we offer.

Thoughts?

The Writing Process: Little White Lies

2011-04-05T15:14:00.000-07:00

Profacero has a post up about writing and time. While I agree with most of what she says, I can't completely go the distance on this one: "One, as I have said before, you must allow yourself to estimate time realistically. Perhaps it really will take 120 hours total to write that piece. If so, it is of no use to try to force yourself to take less time; you have to plan to free up all of the 120 hours."

Yes, if it really will take 120 hours, you have to plan for that at one level of your mind, the Rational Writing Brain. RWB allows you to estimate how long certain kinds of writing will take.

But to the Primitive Writing Brain, that 120 hours is an invitation not to start. PWB would say "120 hours? Okay, I'm out of here. No way am I sitting in that chair for 120 hours."

So RWB has to set to work and coax PWB with the Five Stages of Writing every day:

Denial: "Naw, it won't take 120 hours. Why, I'll bet that if you sit down today, you can get 5 pages done! Remember when you wrote X piece so fast? I'll bet it'll be just like that."

Anger: "Yes, it's lousy right now, and it's going to stay lousy unless you get to work and fix it. Get moving!"

Bargaining: "If you just write for the next 20 minutes/200 words, you can get out of the house for a while."

Cheerleading: "See, you're almost finished with this part! You really can do this."

Acceptance: "It's not so bad, after all, and this part is pretty good. You won't have to revise this again tomorrow."

See all the little white lies? Of course it will take 120 hours. Of course it has to be revised tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, but if RWB said that to PWB, PWB would never let the writing alone for the day, let alone pick it up again the next day.

Writing's like making bread. No matter how diligent you are about kneading it, if you don't let it rise or rest at all, you'll never be able to do anything with it.

Want to hear the song? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTRFPbEpun0

Cursive handwriting (again)

2011-03-31T21:12:00.000-07:00

The Huffington Post reports that some schools are doing away with cursive handwriting. Now, as Sisyphus reminded me a couple of years ago, "no cursive" doesn't mean "no writing"; it just means that students are being taught to print and schools are leaving it at that (I think that's the case; the vagueness of the teachers on this point is annoying).

On one level they have a point. If the students are going to be tested to death--unless Michelle Rhee is in the picture, in which case the teachers cheat or get fired if their students don't get the right test scores*--maybe that half hour a day isn't best spent on practicing writing. I have a couple of observations and questions, as always:

Students are still going to have to write (as in "not type") essays in classroom situations for a while, so as long as I can read what they write and they can read what I write in response, I don't care whether they print or not.
Will they be able to read handwriting? The article treats this as some kind of ridiculously trivial skill, like knowing the best way to powder a wig.
It's faster for me to write in cursive, but maybe that's because I was taught cursive (and retrained myself through calligraphy later on). That makes me a dinosaur, and I accept my scaliness with pride. Maybe instead of "digital natives" we should be talking about "print-writing natives" as the real generational divide.
Some have said that cursive is needed so that people can sign documents and isn't used otherwise, sort of like that kind of literacy in the 19th century when people knew enough to sign their names but were otherwise illiterate. I don't whether cursive is necessary there, though. In reading job letters over the past few years, I've noticed that a lot of the candidates sign their names with just a squiggle like a sine curve or a couple of loops rather than with a name that you can read. I'm not sure why this is so, or whether it's a trend, but I thought it was interesting.
I'm puzzled by why we keep wanting students to know less and less. Don't bother memorizing multiplication tables or learning how to make change--who needs it? Don't bother learning another language or having language departments, because Real Americans are proudly ignorant of any language but their own. (Remember the flack John Kerry took because he could speak French?) Don't bother learning to write in cursive, because unless you're going into a profession where people must read handwriting (such as being an academic), it's a useless skill.
Or it might end up being a kind of class-based skill, the way knowing Latin and Greek were once the marks of a gentleman. The rich need to know how to write in cursive; we worker drones don't have to know it. It sounds silly, but it may be part of that larger trend now toward cutting out "useless" knowledge that doesn't prepare students to get a job, when employers actually want good writing and thinking skills.
The thing that handwriting of any kind (not just cursive) does best is to allow the brain to make marks on paper through the fingers and thus help the retention of knowledge, as some of us have written about. It's not the same as typing, even on a manual typewriter, which seems to be making a comeback.
Here's what I don't understand: aren't all the Edumacrats screaming about "hands on! hands on! Learning must be hands on!"? Here is a hands-on type of learning that, let's face it, forces a kind of attention and focus as well as training the brain. Even if they're not in favor of cursive, wouldn't you think they'd like its hands-on qualities?

*Edited because I forgot to credit Historiann for pointing out the scamming outrage of falsified tests that Michelle Rhee instigated.

Grading papers with the iPad

2011-03-29T16:40:00.001-07:00

Read the updated post with some technical advice here:
http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2011/11/grading-papers-on-ipad-redux.html

[Update 10-13-11: Recent improvements to iAnnotate and GoodReader have made it a lot easier to use Dropbox or other services to upload papers.]

Around the web, there've been some posts lately about grading with the iPad, including a couple of good ones by Caleb McDaniel and Michael J. Faris. I was curious about this, so I thought I'd try grading on the iPad and see how it went.

[Update: There's a new post up about this by Janet Johnson at MediaRhetoric.com; she talks about iAnnotate, which she finds easier to use than Word. She also uses some other grading apps, including GradebookPro and EssayGrader, which is sort of like Markin for the iPad.]

My initial thought was to do a whole set the usual way (comments in Word) and a whole set using iAnnotate on the iPad, but I ended up doing just a few on the iPad. It was pretty clear what the strengths and weaknesses were after that. Here's the process:

1. To use iAnnotate for grading, you first need to download the papers (if your students use Word), convert them to .pdf files, and save them to Dropbox. That took about a minute apiece. You don't have to save them to Dropbox if you don't have it; you can transfer them through iTunes, which is the official way to transfer files on the iPad, or through a transfer feature of iAnnotate.

2. Open iAnnotate on the iPad and read the paper. iAnnotate lets you insert comments in little pop-up boxes, use a pencil tool to circle items, underline phrases, and so on.

You can use your fingers to indicate the text you want highlighted by swiping the text or pressing and holding until the program asks you whether you want to make a note or not.

If you have a stylus, you can also write on the paper, although even my best efforts at writing letters looked like those of a 4-year-old.
For each comment, you need to click on the appropriate icon on the sidebar (underline, make a note), click in the right spot in the text, type the note, close the note, and close the annotation menu.

3. Typing on the iPad isn't as straightforward or as fast as typing on a physical keyboard, although it does work. For one thing, if you want to use an apostrophe, you have to go to a different keyboard, although some of the usual contractions (it's, I'll, etc.) will insert themselves automatically.

4. At the end, you can upload the file back to Dropbox or mail it directly to the student. There's no "save" or "save as" feature (or at least I haven't been able to find one), but iAnnotate saves the annotated file automatically. If you like to save the graded papers with a different filename, as I do, you'll have to change the filename on your regular computer.

Note: If your students email you their papers in .pdf format and you mark them up in iAnnotate, you won't be able to save that version to Dropbox. Dropbox only accepts the annotated version if it originated in Dropbox, apparently a known issue with the two programs.

5. I used the Typewriter comment feature to write the final comment. [Note: See the updated post (above) about using Note instead.]

6. If you email the file, there are two options: one "flattens" the annotations, which means that the student sees a little yellow comment box with a number and the comments are down below, and one that the student should be able to see using the pop-ups.

Advantages and Disadvantages:

1. Draw. Most of the information I've seen lists "not carrying around a stack of papers," "no messy writing in the margins," etc. as an advantage, but since I'm collecting and returning papers electronically, that's not an issue.

2. Advantage: It's kind of cool to grade on the iPad. If I have the iPad with me anyway, I might as well carry some grading to do.

3. Disadvantage: No Word autotext on the iPad. No magic keystrokes that insert text (Alt-I-A-X). That makes a huge difference, since I use it to explain common problems and can then spend a lot more time on substantive issues.

4. Advantage: No computer to lug around. On the other hand, I have an old-ish netbook that, like the iPad, fits in my pocketbook, so it's really kind of a draw if portability is the issue.

5. Disadvantage: Grading takes longer. Total average time: if N = the amount of time that it takes to grade a paper in Word or on paper, the iPad version took me N + 9 minutes, on average. I did the math: 9 extra minutes apiece x 30 papers = time I could spend doing something else.

6. Disadvantage: Typing is less intuitive, and I noticed that my shoulders were getting all hunched up with the effort to type and not make mistakes.

7. Draw: The CMS my university uses does not play well at all with the iPad; there's no way to scroll down or upload the papers to the dropbox space in the CMS. On the other hand, if you're emailing papers back anyway, this may not be a problem.

Professor Angriette from Angryville

2011-03-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

The important things I want to say aren't things that I can be articulate about, such as Bob Herbert's great final column about what's wrong with this country (does GE making $5.1 billion in profits and paying no taxes ring a bell?) and the attack on William Cronon, about which you can read good posts at Tenured Radical, Historiann, Bardiac, Roxie's World, Dean Dad, Anthony Grafton at The New Yorker, and Paul Krugman at The New York Times (h/t Historiann for the links). I would have to change the name of this blog to Professor Angriette from Angryville and buy a megaphone to yell at all the ~~idiocy~~ mendacity, since even quivering like Lionel Barrymore can't cut it as a statement of rage anymore.

Anyway. Later on I'll write a nice, quiet post about writing or pouring rain, both of which are constants here right now.

Big Love finale: my heck, yes!

2011-03-22T13:15:00.000-07:00

I know this is off-topic, but I can't help writing about it as a way of getting it out of my head. If you either don't care about Big Love or haven't seen the finale yet and don't want spoilers, you don't want to read this.

Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer have already discussed why they ended the series as they did, so this is just a few random bullets of reaction.

How early in this episode did you realize that something dire was going to happen to Bill? The Godfather-style smile with oranges was a big tip-off, of course, but really, every time Bill starts to get out from under his problems, he goes and invites another peck of trouble by angering the civil authorities, the church, his wives, the D.A., Juniper Creek, or someone else who's unimpressed with his pronouncements. See under "hubris": Bill Henrickson.
Bill is an Everyman with a vision, and although a lot of people disliked his character, it seemed to me that Bill Paxton did well at portraying an everyman who's misguided but has a strong set of beliefs, however wrongheaded we think those are. Also, he's handy with tools, and it was one of the many nice touches in the show that he'd head for something he could handle and fix in the material world when his spiritual world was going awry. Barb wants the priesthood? Salt the patio. Barb is pulling away? Put a towbar on Lois's car. (By the way, this season had far too little of Nicki's Handy Home Repairs and Appliance Hauling compared with previous years.)
Speaking of hubris, Spouse commented that he thought the whole series had been about hubris, which if you think about it, would make Bill a tragic hero of sorts. Does he achieve tragic status? With his vision of Emma Smith and family, Bill does achieve a kind of anagnorisis and is able to act on it just before he dies, explaining his revelation to Ben and Don and asking Barb for her blessing. Spouse pointed out that, like Joseph Smith, Bill never does get to the promised land but is murdered before he can get there.
The Emma Smith figure puzzled me last season and in the finale at first, since she was vehemently opposed to polygamy and was vocal about it, too. Olsen and Scheffer said somewhere that that was her function--to draw attention to the flaws and give voice to the dissent about it.
I didn't miss the characters who weren't brought back--not Joey, Wanda, and their baby (who creepily never grew to toddlerhood in 2-3 years) but were sent to the Big Mexican Compound in the Sky nor Teeny nor any of the multitude of Juniper Creekers. It was a finale, not a family reunion.
Speaking of children, all of the Henrickson brood was seen from time to time, but with the exception of Our Spokesman Wayne, they were pretty much seen and not heard (except for singing) and never seemed to need a babysitter. Think about it, though: if the show still focused on minor domestic dramas like who's going to drive the kids to school or who's going to pick up a costume for Teeny, which was the material of the early seasons, we wouldn't be watching it because the show is done with those logistical points--and so are we.
Nor did I think that some kind of dramatic justice demanded that Alby be the one to kill Bill. Having Carl do it--and after Bill had performed one of his rare unselfless acts and fulfilled one of his promises, for a change--made sense in that Bill was a repudiation of all that Carl stood for. Also, Bill doesn't lose to Juniper Creek, but he does lose to randomness, and for someone who mistakenly thinks he has life under control as much as Bill does, it's a perfect undercutting of his control one last time.
Lois and Frank. Frank's recollections about their early life together--living in the trailer--didn't mention one thing: he was already married to someone else at the time, and Lois was his second wife. Is there a setting-up-housekeeping period in polygamy when the husband and new wife go off together, or was Frank being tactful (Frank! tactful!), or did the writers forget that Lois wasn't the first wife?

Your thoughts?

Teaching writing: FSP's "Can't, Don't, or Won't?"

2011-03-21T16:46:00.000-07:00

Female Science Professor has a post up called "Can't, Don't, or Won't?" in which she relates something that she heard from a "Writing Expert":

She said that she understands that many professors get frustrated when their students keep making the same mistakes in their writing, but that most people can't learn from their own writing mistakes, even after having the mistakes corrected and explained. It is essentially a learning disability. . . .

Are they lazy or careless? Do they just expect others to fix their writing problems? It is not difficult to find laments such as this in professor-blogs.

But the Writing Expert said that most people can't fix these problems. She said that some can, but most can't. She said "can't", not "won't" or "don't", indicating a lack of ability, not a lack of willingness or attention.

Have any of you heard this? I know that patterns of errors can be difficult for students to detect (thank you, Mina Shaughnessy, for your work all those years ago about this!), but "can't" seems like a tricky term to use unless the student is diagnosed as learning disabled.

It's hard to spot errors in your own work, and it's even harder for students to do so, although they can often see the problems in someone else's paper, as one of the commenters at FSP's place says.

I know that despite the claims of minimal marking enthusiasts, sometimes students just don't get the point of those mysterious little check marks in the margins. They get just as frustrated and hopeless with that kind of "I know the answer and I'm not going to tell you" marking as they do with papers that are "overmarked" with every little item pounced on and killed in a pool of red ink.

Grading is a balancing act between encouraging the students to take responsibility for their writing by letting them figure out the problem, as in minimal marking, and helping them out by explaining what's amiss so that they can do better next time, as in traditional marking with marginal comments. We ought to know that they don't make those mistakes to spite us, but because they don't (can't?) see them.

But doesn't "can't" sounds a little defeatist, as though the students can't learn and we can't help them to learn? If a student "can't" learn to correct an error, does that mean it's incumbent on us to ignore it? Or does it mean that the student shouldn't be in that particular class in the first place?

I have more faith in students than that. I'm crossing "can't" off my list of reasons not to learn to write better.

Writing procrastination makes the news

2011-03-17T16:59:00.000-07:00

In The New York Times:

Is there a cure for writer’s block? (And no, “get a real job” doesn’t count.) A recent article in The New Yorker profiles a therapist who treats struggling screenwriters for hundreds of dollars an hour. For centuries, poorer scribes (which is to say most of us) have preferred to rely on rituals and folk remedies. Sharpen 10 pencils. Eat a sandwich. Pretend that the first chapter of your long-overdue opus is a casual letter to your grandmother. Weep quietly. Have another drink.

And from the article on Barry Michels at the New Yorker link:

By far the most common problem afflicting the writers in Michels’s practice is procrastination, which he understands in terms of Jung’s Father archetype. “They procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write,” he says. “Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he’s answerable to, but it’s not human. It’s Time itself that’s passing inexorably. That’s why they call it Father Time. Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you’re defying this authority figure.” Procrastination, he says, is a “spurious form of immortality,” the ego’s way of claiming that it has all the time in the world; writing, by extension, is a kind of death. He gives procrastinators a tool he calls the Arbitrary Use of Time Moment, which asks them to sit in front of their computers for a fixed amount of time each day. “You say, ‘I’m surrendering myself to the archetypal Father, Chronos,’ ” he says. ‘I’m surrendering to him because he has hegemony over me.’ That submission activates something inside someone. In the simplest terms, it gets people to get their ass in the chair.” For the truly unproductive, he sets the initial period at ten minutes—“an amount of time it would sort of embarrass them not to be able to do.”

It's really what Boice and Silvia and Raymond Chandler and everyone else has told writers to do, but with a Jungian spin.

The Writing Process: Snoozefest and Drive-by Prose

2011-03-16T15:40:00.000-07:00

Historiann has a good post up about finding "teh funny" in what she's writing about and how that's a problem right now:

But, the problem for me right now is that there just isn’t a lot of humor in the story of a little girl whose life was filled with warfare and trauma for her English family, and the starvation, disease, and eventual destrution of her Indian family.

I hear you, Historiann. What's got me stuck right now isn't so much the subject matter of what I'm working on, although it's kind of grim, as the question of voice.

Right now I'm mired in the depths of what can charitably be called "snoozefest prose." If it were somebody else's snoozefest prose, I'd make fun of it and ignore it, but since it's mine--well, I still make fun of it, but I can't ignore it.

The thing is, the only way to get through to what I really want to say is to slog through the snoozefest prose, writing down sentences that I know I'll have to change, before getting back to it with an ax later on and turning it into something someone will want to read.

As an antidote to this prose, today I reread a conference paper that I gave last fall, one that received some good questions from the audience and compliments later. Like Historiann, I write in part to amuse myself and thought that this one might give me some ammunition for revising the snoozefest prose. It did. The conference paper's style was more much more flexible and funny because it was written to be read aloud. A conference presentation is the "drive-by" prose of scholarship: you say it and you're done.

Now it's time to get back to wrestling with the snoozefest prose. It helps, though, to know that someplace within it is drive-by prose waiting to get out or at least to enliven it.

Short takes on the week

2011-03-12T07:57:00.000-08:00

Marc C. Carnes's article on Reacting to the Past (history as RPG) is inspiring--really. I almost wrote "inspiriting," and it's that, too. It made me want to adapt some of these techniques for my own discipline. I already do some of this research-based and team-based role-playing as a learning technique, but this makes me want to do it more systematically.
Dr. Crazy has a good post about "The Path to Full" and takes on the secret fear of "am I stalled at associate"?
Tenured Radical has a good post about the practical dimensions of using research libraries.
Historiann has taken this fabulous picture of the sign to my secret bunker on her travels. I hope she is going to stop in and say hello to the Henricksons and have a glass of rebellious wine with Barb.
The Atlantic showers Nick Denton of Gawker with fanboy love for new media, albeit with a light dusting of skepticism, just as The New Yorker did a few weeks ago. It's a perfect subject because the old media gets to pull out the "journalism-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket" card while indulging in all the frivolous delights of new media journalism. Case in point: the media storm over Amy Chua, which The Atlantic got so excited about that it put BOTH of its women columnists (Caitlin Flanagan and Sandra Tsing-Loh) in the same issue instead of making them take turns the way it usually does.

At the Chronicle: "Actually Going to Class?"

2011-03-06T13:45:00.000-08:00

Over at The Chronicle, "Actually Going to Class, for a Specific Course? How 20th-Century" asks a question and raises a few more:

Learning outside of this structure engages students more deeply, recent data indicate. Professors talking for 16 weeks or so, assigning readings, and then testing students often appears to yield a bunch of quickly memorized facts that are soon forgotten. . . .

Courses won't go away completely, Mr. Bass argues—they do provide a handy framework. But he said he hopes that professors will stop thinking of them as a goal unto themselves and focus more on linking skills conveyed in the classroom to hands-on student activities.

Really? "Quickly memorized facts"? Where do these people go to school, the Mr. Gradgrind Academy? Yes, if you set up a straw man of a Facts-O-Rama education and then test for the kind of learning that takes place, you might see that it doesn't work very well.

The second quotation has more going for it and a couple of things wrong with it. The first point is that hands-on student activities are important. Here's my question: where do you do the "hands-on student activities" if you don't have a class? If you have a course in which content (as in "a body of knowledge," not "how I feel about looking at this video") is important, hands-on learning can't do everything, although it can help.

The second point is that the author is almost apologetic about the concept of a classroom. What is a classroom but a place where presumably interested parties get together to work on learning and contributing to a body of knowledge? Unless you're Stephen Hawking, rattling around in your own head with a text doesn't get you nearly as far as discussing it with others.

Another person quoted in the article has made the astonishing discovery--hold on to your seats--that "The class discussion only really works when everyone is prepared." Instead of seeing that as a reason to give up on class, however, I see it as a reason to keep trying harder with the admittedly useful "framework" of a class rather than to give up and send them to YouTube.

I can't speak to the efficacy of podcasted lectures in, say, science classes, but in the humanities, which apparently nobody cares about anyway, there's a give-and-take in the classroom that can't be replicated. In short, let me state a fact:

I have never given the same exact lecture twice, and my classes have never discussed the texts in the same way twice. We see each others' faces, hear each others' voices, and learn from each other, and it's that process that's valuable.

Giant messes o' stupid

2011-03-03T20:39:00.000-08:00

In one of my favorite pieces by James Thurber, "University Days," Thurber describes his experiences in botany class. According to the piece, Thurber could never see anything through a microscope, which enrages his botany teacher:

"We'll try it," the professor said to me, grimly, "with every adjustment of the microscope known to man. As God is my witness, I'll arrange this glass so that you see cells through it or I'll give up teaching. In twenty-two years of botany, I--" He cut off abruptly for he was beginning to quiver all over, like Lionel Barrymore, and he genuinely wished to hold onto his temper; his scenes with me had taken a great deal out of him.

Thurber finally sees something and starts drawing. "You didn't, you didn't you didn't!" the professor screams. "That's your eye! . . . You've fixed the lens so that it reflects! You've drawn your eye!"

I too am starting to quiver all over like Lionel Barrymore,* not at my classes, which are fine, but at the giant messes o' stupid from the things I read in the news about people who can't seem to see beyond their own eyes.

(Let's leave aside the big one, which is that if the anti-union forces manage to fire everybody and drive them into the poorhouse, who's going to buy all the products from small businesses, and with what money? Who's going to buy the big-ticket items that we keep being told are going to "grow us out of the recession" when the U.S. has outsourced those jobs so that nobody can afford the big-ticket items that we're being exhorted to buy? When are all those wealthy people that we can't tax because then they won't "invest in jobs in America" going to, you know, kick in and invest in jobs in America? In 1980, Reagan said this would happen, but I'm still waiting. Update: Go read Paul Krugman, who says it better than I can. )

Sorry. Let's choose a smaller one so that I can stop channelling Lionel Barrymore.

Back to computers and online classes instead of teachers in Idaho. In responding to Jon Stewart, Sisyphus has it right: "Because nothing is easier to control with a computer program than a distracted, unmotivated child who doesn't want to learn about fractions or verb tenses or godhelpusall critical thinking."

Let's add some critical thinking to the Idaho "computers iz r teachers" idea.

1. This plan is being hailed by those in favor of online for-profit education in K-12 because "with a laptop, every student can take an online class." Q.E.D.

2. Online classes are on the interwebs.

3. You need an internet connection to get on the interwebs.

4. Internet connections do not come free with laptops. They cost money.

5. If a student is so disadvantaged that he or she doesn't have access to a computer at home, what are the odds that the home has internet access?

6. If a student already has access to wireless at home, what are the odds that he or she does NOT have access to a computer as well?

7. Tell me again how the mere possession of a laptop is going to make possible the hours online that an online class requires? Is Idaho going to pay the wireless costs?

8. If the students are supposed to use the laptops at school, sitting in a room and working individually on different classes--that is, putting 40-50 lively teenagers unsupervised (teachers were fired, remember?) in a room with computers and internet access--no, nothing could go wrong there, nothing at all.

Okay, I'm starting to quiver again. These people are only seeing their own eye. That's all I've got to say.

[*For those of you who are not old movie fanatics: you've probably seen him as Mean Banker Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life at Christmastime, which is when this movie gets shown a lot.]

Classroom as airplane

2011-02-26T11:01:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Air Literature, Flight 457, departing for nineteenth-century Boston. Our flying time today is estimated at 75 minutes. Flight attendants: please arm doors for departure.

Beneath your seat you will find in your backpack a book marked The Bostonians by Henry James. Please take it out and follow along as the crew members review the important safety instructions for this flight.

All seatbacks should be upright and tray tables should be down and in the locked position. You will also want paper and some kind of writing implement to be on your tray table at all times so that you can take notes on our flight.

Crew members will shortly be passing through the aisles to hand out an exciting QuizOpportunity so that you can gain more GradeMiles.

All portable electronic devices must be turned to the off position and must be stowed for the remainder of the flight unless you are directed to power them on by a member of the crew. Devices that transmit or receive a wireless signal may not be used on board at any time.

Passengers enrolled in our GradeMiles program will earn 25 participation points toward their GradeRewards card for today's flight.

[To student who stands up to wander out in the hallway for a drink of water]: Sir, you could wander away in a normal classroom, but didn't you hear that the flight attendants had armed the doors for departure?

We now invite you not to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight but to sit forward, listen, and discuss the book in front of you, since this powers the flight for us all.

Thank you for flying AirLiterature.

Random Bullets of Friday

2011-02-25T12:04:00.000-08:00

Over at The Chronicle, Thomas Hart Benton is right about "A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education." He cites lack of preparation, grade inflation, a culture that doesn't value education, etc., as things that people like Arum and Roska just might want to consider when they're thinking about why undergraduates aren't showing more improvement.
In an online-learning related topic, Idaho has a plan for educational success:

give high school students laptops;
fire 750 teachers;
increase class sizes;
require that students take at least two online courses.

nothing, absolutely nothing

Online teaching: thinking like a student

2011-02-23T13:02:00.000-08:00

One thing that online teaching does better than just about anything else is force you to think like a student.

Say you're in a face-to-face classroom and you discover that you've dropped a week in making up your syllabus. I do this often enough that I should trademark it as "Undine-style teaching,™ now with the magical disappearing week," so this isn't exactly a hypothetical instance. What I do is announce it, thank the person who brought it to my attention, issue an updated syllabus, and move on.

Or you hand out an assignment, and, as you're talking the students through it, some hands shoot up and ask questions about something you hadn't even thought to put on the assignment, because it never occurred to you as an issue. I like to think that my assignments are pretty carefully laid out, but then I hear this: "Do you want paper clips or staples?" or "If I don't use the extra time to do X, can I have it as extra credit points?" I answer the questions, make a mental note to add that information next time, and, yes, move on.

And anyway, it's not always what you did or didn't say. You hand out a quiz, say "this is an open-book quiz," and, two minutes later, five students ask, "Is this an open-book quiz?"

But when you're teaching online, you have to think like a student and try even harder to anticipate these questions from the beginning not just of the class but of the semester. First of all, you're not supposed to change anything once an online class has started.

Second, I've been teaching long enough not to break the cardinal rule: never change a deadline date, because even if it's to their advantage and you make the date later, someone who wrote the paper early will always, always complain about it on the evaluations. I don't like to think what would happen if a date got changed in an online class, where some students like to print out all the course materials on the first day and ignore everything but the Discussion Board thereafter even though they're cautioned not to do this.

Although there's a space for students to ask me questions about the class, and they can email me with questions, it's better if I'm as clear as I can possibly be about what I expect from them. This is always a good policy, of course, but when you can't see them, and they can't see you, it's doubly important. You have to think like a student the whole time. No wonder online teaching takes so much time.

The Devil over the Right Shoulder

2011-02-19T09:55:00.000-08:00

The Wisconsin news (see Dr. Crazy, who can write rationally about it) about the continuing war on education and the middle class would only lead me into another rant, so I am not going to write about it.

Instead, here's an update on what Mark Scroggins is calling "my writing life" over at his blog. Like him, I've finished a number of pieces that are now coming out, and I'm now looking at the big project.

The big project now sits before me, in all of its terrifying there-ness. It isn't complete, although I've published some pieces from it and have presented on others. I've gotten feedback from scholars and an editor I respect that it's good, even exciting. At those times I've felt buoyant and good about it.

But now I'm sitting at my desk with the devil over the right shoulder. The devil is asking whether it's worth doing at all, or at least whether it isn't two different projects. He's asking for more rationales and more research. He's asking whether every single claim is really true or whether I'm flourishing rhetorical capes to distract the attention of the bull/audience. More immediately, he's asking me how I plan to structure the opening arguments.

This devil over the right shoulder can be a great help, of course, in anticipating problems and making the project stronger. What's been the most help in answering the devil is approaching this through structure, or models, as Jonathan Mayhew recently suggested as "reading for structure" over at Stupid Motivational Tricks. Reading for structure is something I've done for years myself, and I've recommended it to students many times.

In this case, it means reading introductions and prefaces, lots of them, to recent scholarly books in the field and noting not only how the argument is structured and in what level of depth, but also the nuts and bolts: how long is the writer spending on the various parts? How is she/he making the claims? How much background and review of scholarship is there? What's the voice like in these pieces? How does the first sentence work? The first paragraph?

This could be seen as a distraction, but what has happened is that I end up making notes and putting pieces of my own project together as well as temporarily quashing the devil's objections.

What about the other shoulder? There's a devil on the left shoulder, too, saying, "C'mon, why don't you ditch this and write a blog post or something?"

Clutter-busting, academic style

2011-02-13T10:40:00.000-08:00

Tenured Radical has a post up about a book, Clutter-Busting, that encourages getting rid of things, examining your emotional attachments to things, or something like that.

My clutter-busting moment came the other day when I was in the office, finished for the day but too lazy to head out for the library for an hour or so. Then my eyes fell on the filing cabinet in my office, which for some time has stood there as a Memorial Cabinet of Classes Past rather than as an actual, functioning space in which to, you know, file things.

Some background: I've recently reorganized the bookcases in my study at home so that I could actually find the books I needed and have arranged them according to a system more precise than the big books on the big shelves and the little books on the little shelves. This had an immediate effect: apparently I was catching sight of the disorder on that side of the room out of the corner of my eye, because once it was decluttered and organized, that side of the room felt peaceful and, strangely enough, the whole side of my body that normally faces that side of the room felt oddly relaxed.

Back to the Memorial Cabinet. In the past, when I've tried to clean this out, I've gone through every folder carefully, trying to see what might still be useful. But the advantage of having everything in a computer file is that you don't have to look at the paper. In the past, I've kept the paper versions because of the notes written on them, but really, if I haven't looked at them in the past two iterations of the class, what are the chances that they're really useful?

Instead of heaps of documents that might be useful, divided by class, author or subject matter, I had three heaps: Keep, Shred, and Toss.

So--class notes from 2005? Folder contents gone (into the recycler). The whole folder. All at once.

Never-picked-up student papers and exams? Gone (into the shredder).

Materials from a curriculum reform now implemented? Gone.

Stuff I apparently thought would be useful at some point but haven't looked at since 2007? Gone.

Old book catalogs (which were in the Memorial Cabinet for some reason now lost in the mists of time)? Gone.

The difference between this decluttering and others is that it wasn't a ritual memory tour through classes past, with meaningful pauses to consider the students and the work done, or a piece-by-piece consideration of whether something would work for classes in the future. Maybe there's still a place for that kind of reflection--I don't know--but the place, for now, is not in my no-longer Memorial Cabinet.

Oh, and 20 minutes later, having hauled these stacks of paper to their various bins, I was at the library, energized with all the decluttering.

Student Evaluations and Academic Rigor

2011-02-11T21:02:00.000-08:00

Richard Arum, speaking in "A Lack of Rigor Leaves Students 'Adrift'" at npr.org:

According to the study, one possible reason for a decline in academic rigor and, consequentially, in writing and reasoning skills, is that the principal evaluation of faculty performance comes from student evaluations at the end of the semester. Those evaluations, Arum says, tend to coincide with the expected grade that the student thinks he or she will receive from the instructor.

"There's a huge incentive set up in the system [for] asking students very little, grading them easily, entertaining them, and your course evaluations will be high," Arum says.

I'm glad it's a real study, or we'd all be saying, "thank you, Captain Obvious."

Seriously, though, student evaluation numbers are the primary way in which a lot of us have our teaching evaluated. We (or our administrators) have canonized those numbers and granted them a lot more power than they had when student evaluations began back in the 1970s. Isn't it logical to assume that in situations where those numbers have the most power, the temptation will be the greatest to massage the assignments into something that's student-friendly or at least complaint-proof?

I'd like to see some study like the following: take instructors of comparable rank and teaching ability (as measured by observation, etc.) who are teaching similar kinds of content, maybe a large required course where the instructors don't have to use the same materials. Half of them don't have to have student evaluations at all, or maybe they have evaluations that are locked away for the period of the experiment so that administrators can't see them. Follow both groups for 5 years or so, judging teaching in one group solely by observations, self-report, and review of course materials. At the end of that time, see if there's a demonstrable difference in student learning and academic rigor.

I know this probably couldn't be done (and isn't a scientific design, of course), but if we're going to "assess outcomes," shouldn't we also be assessing one of the primary if not the only means by which we evaluate teachers?

That's one small step for MLA, one giant leap for MLA-citers

2011-02-08T21:43:00.000-08:00

Update on the quandary about using MLA format to cite from the Kindle (from The Chronicle):

Ms. Feal says the MLA is considering whether to "accommodate" location numbers on the Kindle.

Finally! And may I also say "thanks"?

But wait--there's more!

According to the commenters, the newest software for Kindle can display the real page numbers, too: http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/kindle-books-get-page-numbers-and-social-features/?src=busln

This feature isn't available yet for those using the Kindle app on computers or iPads, apparently. Also, you Nook users must be laughing up your sleeves at the rest of us, because apparently the Nook already has page numbers.

Still, all those Kindle books need to be retrofitted in some way so that the page numbers show, and it's likely that they'll convert Eat Pray Love or Tom Clancy before the critical study that I was thinking about buying today before the "citing locations" problem made me put it back on the virtual shelf.

This still doesn't get past the "it's harder to annotate an e-book" issue, because, well, it just is harder (says the person who has downloaded every imaginable type of book and .pdf reader). But it does start to tip the scales when the choice is "instantaneous download" versus "this book will ship in 6-8 weeks."

NYT: "Online Courses, Still Lacking That Third Dimension"

2011-02-07T21:37:00.000-08:00

"Online Courses, Still Lacking That Third Dimension" (at the New York Times) considers the question of online courses with a fair amount of balance. Again, for the record: I am not categorically opposed to online courses and in fact teach some. I am opposed to approaches that don't consider their strengths and weaknesses.

Some thoughts:

1. Bill Gates wants "at least one great course online for each subject rather than lots of mediocre courses."

Who decides, Bill, and what are the standards? Video lectures by dynamic Ivy League lecturers? Interactive razzamatazz? How does the value of "great" comport with student (and administrator) pressure to make courses easier? Or wouldn't this be a concern since without teachers who have to fear being fired because of the immortal "course was to hard" and "to much writting" comments on evaluations, the course content would be immune from being watered down?

2. Food for thought: Like M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon has worked hard to make its courses available for free on the web, a laudable goal, if an expensive one. These are "automated courses" without instructors. CM doesn't give credit itself for these courses but will send completed student materials to another institution so that that institution can give credit.

Maybe this works well for science courses; I can't judge. But the message is that automated courses are good enough for other schools, but not good enough for Carnegie Mellon, which prefers, as the article puts it "humanoid instructors."

3. I think this person is onto something:

Wendy Brown, the Heller professor of political science at the Berkeley campus, spoke witheringly of the idea at a campus forum in October: “What is sacrificed when classrooms disappear, the place where good teachers do not merely ‘deliver content’ to students but wake them up, throw them on their feet and pull the chair away? Where ideas can become intoxicating, where an instructor’s ardor for a subject or a dimension of the world can be contagious? Where scientific, literary, ethical or political passions are ignited?”

4. Why is it that people seem keen to get 3-D on their television sets despite the funny glasses but would rather go 2-D when it comes to education?

Do Android Students Dream of Electric Blackboard Sheep?

2011-02-05T09:24:00.000-08:00

Sharon Marshall's "More Face-to-Face, Less Screen-to-Screen" at the Chronicle really resonated with me and with things I've written on this blog. I found myself wanting to yell, "Preach it!" at statements like this one:

I posted assignments online, and students uploaded their papers from their computers. I experimented with the paperless option, which meant downloading student essays, saving them in a file, using the track-changes tool to give feedback, and then e-mailing the papers back to students. It took many hours, and now that I have learned that reading on a computer screen can be about 25-percent slower than reading on paper, I understand why.

In our discussions, instead of writing their first thoughts about a topic in their notebooks, they recorded those thoughts in a dialogue box online. In the old days, we would read those thoughts aloud from the notebooks. But being citizens of Blackboard meant that—in class or not—we were able to view all of the other responses and papers and give peer feedback online.

"Citizens of Blackboard"--exactly right. Although we're all "citizens," we governors of the electronic CMS states know that the work of government eats great, uncompensated buckets of our time and is even messier than making laws or sausage. (Check out, for example, this hilarious account in the Chronicle forums of creating quizzes in Blackboard.)

Right on schedule, someone in the comments writes that no, no, no, technology is not the problem; it's just that Marshall is not a digital native, don't you see? Android Students love technology. They love Blackboard and Big Brother. Two plus two equals five. (Okay, I made that last part up.)

Can't we say that both things are true?

Here is what you get less of, good and bad, in a techno-enhanced classroom:

Paper. Eco-friendly? You bet, as long as you're not counting the electricity and gadgets.
Voice conversation.
Eye contact.
Immediate, spontaneous responses to what others have written, which helps to foster ideas and get class discussion going.

Here is what you get more of, good and bad, in a techno-enhanced classroom:

Writing.
Written conversational responses, especially by those known in classes everywhere as "the quiet ones."
Time spent (by the teacher) on managing the gadgetry and listening to complaints when the gadgetry doesn't work.

Here is what I would like to see: more acknowledgment from techno-enthusiasts in positions of administrative power that those who see two sides to this issue are not Deadwood Bumps in the Shining Path of Educational Progress.

Historiann and Benjamin Franklin

2011-01-28T16:40:00.000-08:00

Historiann has a terrific article about blogging and especially pseudonymous blogging up at Common-place. If you go to read it, as you should, you'll find out find out why we are like Benjamin Franklin's Silence Dogood and other good ideas.

I was especially struck by this:

Pseudonymity can work in the service of community-building in the blogosphere. . . . Although I'm not fully pseudonymous, my commenters are overwhelmingly pseudonymous. Nevertheless, regular readers and commenters probably recognize the commenters who appear most frequently because most of them have individual personality traits or interests that remain fairly stable. That is, they fully inhabit the names or roles they've chosen to play on my blog, and their pseudonymity, as well as the role I play as Historiann, is key to the kind of supportive community I wanted to build.

Supportive. Community-building. Can you see why I like this idea? Even though Historiann, like Roxie's World, is a "lightly pseudonymous blog," Historiann herself gets why some of us are, or are trying to be, pseudonymous.

That's important, because every so often, "real" bloggers who publish under their own names will write something like "why don't you man up and write under your real name?" (And yes, I used "man up" deliberately.)

I've thought about this a lot lately, because after listening to Moose at MLA, I was ready to stand up and say, "I'm a blogger, too"--sort of like an "I am Spartacus" moment. That feeling dissipated as I listened to the other speakers talk about the disadvantages, and I went back into my pseudonymous cave.

There was a lot more to this post about why I'm staying pseudonymous as long as I can, but really, Historiann explained it all. How about you?

Update: See also posts by ADM, Dr. Crazy, Comrade PhysioProf, and Prone to Laughter and their links.

Personal productivity insights

2011-01-25T11:52:00.000-08:00

"And now for something completely different" really works. If you're going to take a break for lunch, take a break. Don't keep trying to read journal articles; read a different book or a magazine, something that's not related. Or take a couple of minutes and write a blog post :). When you get back to work, you'll then be refreshed by more than the food.
Love your tools. If you are a faux-organized type like me--that is, you are not naturally organized but have learned a lot of strategies for simulating organization--you probably have learned to love lists, Excel, timers, and everything like that. As long as the strategies don't overwhelm the task, these kinds of devices can energize you about working on your project because you want to fill in the slots or check off the boxes.
Only look at everything once. Back in the olden days when I was learning to bake, my mother told me that a friend of hers had a rule: "Only touch everything once." That means that if you get something out and use it, put it in the sink or dishwasher. Put away the ingredients after you've used them. I think that was what she meant, anyway. But this rule applies to other things, too, including email. For example, in my online classes, I was logging in a few times a day just to see how the discussion was going, but I wasn't commenting or grading. I've done this with blogs in face-to-face classes, too--spent time reading them and then had to read them again to comment or grade. That's a waste of time. My new rule for myself is that if I log in, I have to be doing something active: commenting or grading or responding to student emails.
Take a lesson from Amy Chua. No, not a parenting lesson; I have no comment about that, nor do I know anything about Ms. Chua except what I read in the WSJ article. But it's clear that she didn't get where she is by reading fluffy lifestyle pieces in magazines about people like herself or made-for-the-talk-show-circuit books by people like herself. In fact, I'm betting the only such book she's ever read is her own. It's not her fault if she makes a ton of money trading on people's gullibility; it's my own fault for being stupid enough to pay attention to stuff of this kind in the first place. Amy Chua's lesson-by-example for me is simple: "If you want to be productive, don't read my book, and ignore the massive publicity machine surrounding me and other celebrities/controversies enjoying 15 minutes of fame." In other words, unless something is either entertaining (hello, bloggers!), useful (again--hello, bloggers!), or both, I'm going to chuck it. That's how this week's Time magazine, which I subscribed to reluctantly after Newsweek stopped having any actual content, got thrown in the trash. [Edited to add: Well, the recycling bin, but that doesn't have the same drama quotient as "trash."]

Writing essay tests helps students learn? Do tell.

2011-01-21T07:37:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times comes this late-breaking news: "To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test.":

Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.

The research, published online Thursday in the journal Science, found that students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods.

One of those methods — repeatedly studying the material — is familiar to legions of students who cram before exams. The other — having students draw detailed diagrams documenting what they are learning — is prized by many teachers because it forces students to make connections among facts.

These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students the illusion that they know material better than they do.

What helped most with retention of material was writing essay tests--"retrieval" exams that tested the amount of information students were able to recall when they wrote about the subject.

The researchers speculate that this effect occurs because the mind creates information storage systems as writing occurs, or something like that. The analogy that immediately sprang to mind for me was a medieval system of memory retrieval, although oddly enough the memory mapping techniques now taught in schools didn't result in better retention.

So now let me say that again, slowly:

Writing an essay about a subject helped students remember specific information.

Writing. Not shiny edu-gadgets beloved of administrators, although you all know I love gadgets.

Specific information. Not the touchy-feely "fluff" that budget-cutters apparently think the humanities teach.

Let's pair this information with the widely-reported study that Historiann posted about the other day, the one that's being reported in the news as "college students don't know nuthin' about nuthin'" but that, as she correctly notes, shows this:

Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.

Could someone beyond an obscure pseudonymous blogger put this 2 + 2 together, please, and let the legislators know about it?

MLA 2011 and the Great Twitter Debate

2011-01-18T16:48:00.000-08:00

First, go read the great post and comments over at Roxie's World about the role of Twittering at the recent MLA. Go ahead; take your time. You'll be glad you did.

It seems to me that Twitter does three things really well.

In normal times (i.e., not during a convention) it points you to other media and allows the Twitterer to promote him or herself in a gentle way: "Go read my blog post! My article! This link!"
In normal times, it conveys external news along with approval/disapproval/excitement about something that's currently happening: "Go read this article! Can you believe that a politician said this?"
In conference times, it's a way of collectively live-blogging a session that conveys some of the excitement and ideas of the session.

The debate over Twitter is about the last one of these. There's too much to condense, but here are some of the questions raised, with apologies in advance for overstating some complex issues:

Did the preponderance of tweets from digital humanities sessions create a sense that those were more exciting sessions that the ones that didn't get covered?
Did the fact that the tweeted sessions seemed to dominate the news coverage skew the sense of what was happening elsewhere at the convention?
Are some sessions just more tweetable than others, or do people at the untweeted sessions need to get with the program and (there are hints of this among the comments) be less stodgy?
Alternately, you know those bumper stickers that say "Hang up and drive"? There are some comments that suggest that tweeters put the computer away and just listen.
Finally (and this is a contentious one), does the tweeted/nontweeted session divide create another category of insiders and outsiders?

As someone who was there, went to sessions, and read the Twitter stream, I'm of several minds about this. On one hand, it was exciting to see commentary going on in real time, although I wondered in some of those sessions whether the presenters were disturbed by seeing people staring at laptop screens instead of at the front of the room--and whether others in the row were disturbed by the clack of keys. (Probably not.) It was also exciting to see accounts of presentations I didn't get to see because of commitments elsewhere.

On the other hand, in some sessions, the papers were so amazing and complex (yet eminently listenable) that I could barely take adequate notes on them; a tweet couldn't possibly have done them justice. This is not to say that papers that can be tweeted are too simple; I'm just agreeing with Roxie's typist's point:"Still, I admit to thinking that some of what is untweeted is really untweetable -- Certain kinds of presentations, certain modes of argument simply don't lend themselves to that kind of quick and dirty distillation, and I don't think that's bad." Sometimes, you're just sitting there in an intellectually stimulating stream of good ideas, and you just have to let your mind go with them.

So: Twitter at MLA-- yea or nay? It depends. It was great for what it did, but I don't think we can ignore the reservations that Roxie's World has specified, and I don't think the answer is necessarily "more Twitter for all!" To pull out one of my hoary old blog mantras, one technology or medium isn't going to work for everything, and expecting it to be useful in all situations (like those of the complex listen-only papers) is to strain it beyond what it can usefully do.

And anyway, you know that someone will sooner or later tweet a message to announce where the full version of those listen-only papers has been published. That's the power of Twitter.

Random bullets of back in the saddle again

2011-01-15T09:11:00.000-08:00

I'm back at work (classes) but still in high spirits because of MLA, so here are some random bullets.

The first thing I have to remember is that the reduced teaching load for this semester is a gift. It is not an invitation to spend exactly the same amount of time on fewer classes, even if the classes that you have are higher in enrollment. This week I spent all my time on teaching. I need to remember the "fewer classes = less time" rule and change how I spend my time before the papers start rolling in.
In this teaching delirium, I had devised a plan that would have me on campus even more days than before for an extra-duty assignment. When I mentioned this plan to a Sane Person, the Sane Person said nothing and just lifted one eyebrow. Sane Person was right! I rearranged the schedule so that I will now be on campus less and complete the extra duty assignment much more effectively.
Paying attention to news controversies (like the WSJ one about how to be the mother of perfect children; you know the one I'm talking about) and reading comment threads is a complete waste of time regardless of the train-wreck fascination that they can hold. I'm going to reinstitute my personal ban on those.
About those controversies: I've found myself even paying attention to the stupid ones, like the astrology one and the "Two spaces after a period" one over at Slate. (The parenting one is stupid, too, but disturbing.) If you learned to touch type with two spaces, you'll type two spaces, and if you didn't, you won't, and in either case, Replace All will make everything right in the manuscript. Let's move on.

Brief MLA Report: the Fabulous, the Good, and the Okay

2011-01-09T11:17:00.000-08:00

First, the fabulous:

MLA Gods: Putting MLA in Los Angeles, home of palm trees and sunshine, when lots of us are struggling through an epic winter? Genius.
Getting a hotel for us that was way beyond our humble expectations (remember, we're the people who will stay in dorms to save money)? Genius.
Also genius: wifi, wifi, everywhere, although I had to get the SuperSecret MLA code for the JW Marriott lobby, which probably wasn't supposed to be secret but that I didn't get, from a kindly fellow MLA person tapping away on his computer.
Yes, Virginia, there are kindly fellow MLA people, lots of them. They live in the hearts of academics even when you think that all anyone does is nametag-surf. I even saw people smiling on occasion and being helpful to people that they didn't seem to know, although MLAers usually roam only in packs or herds of the like-minded, for protection. Could the sunshine have been beaming down benevolence rays?
Seeing spotlights in the sky and hearing the roar of the crowd at the Staples Center one night. No, it wasn't for a group of MLA bigwigs on the red carpet, but it was still exciting.
Excellent panels, of which I want to single out Moose's talk on Thursday night, which was, well, fabulous--funny, organized, and right on point. You can read it at her place, so I won't talk more about it, but everyone loved it. I went to a lot of the "archives" panels, too, which were also excellent. There's a genuine excitement about the new ways we can "do" literary and other kinds of studies, and we heard about a lot of smart and interesting approaches. Don't forget, there's more of this going on today.
Lots of good meetings with people and talks with old friends over meals.
Seeing more people than I thought I even knew.

The Good:

Lots and lots of places to eat close by, if you didn't want to seek out esoteric food.
Did I mention the weather?

The Okay:

Not a lot of places to get a quick sandwich or bagel, unless you wanted to join the long black-clad lines at Starbucks. Sometimes you just want to eat and get to the next session, but unless you could live on coffee or pastries (both of which I hate), you were out of luck.
I have to confess that after a couple of the "hard times" panels, I heard some audience members say, "I can't take another one of these"--"these" being the panels on the grim news of the profession.

MLA, MLA everywhere

2011-01-03T16:52:00.000-08:00

Is it just because I'm going to MLA this year that I'm noticing so many posts about it? Anyway, here are some posts:

Moose at Roxie's World is going to be speaking in a blogging session, Session 150. I want to go to that session.
Dr. Crazy makes some good points about the new family-friendly timing, namely that it's not so family friendly if you have kids in school. So far, I've been really happy that MLA isn't ruining Christmas as it usually does (Stress over MLA & presentations + an introvert's tendency to dread going to conferences = not fun times), but I can see her point.
Sisyphus, on the other hand, figures that the timing is perfect.
Meanwhile, back at the IHE ranch, Melissa Nicholas has found a way to make MLA job interview candidates stress out about whether they have the right clothing (a suit) to wear or not. She means well, but as one of the commenters said, the time to tell everyone this was about a month ago, not two days before the convention when all you can do is worry that you have the wrong clothes.
For the record, I have been on and chaired several hiring committees, and I could not begin to tell you what anyone wore. What they said--yes. Whether they were prepared for the interview--yes. Whether they had exciting ideas for classes to teach--yes. Whether they wore a suit? Not at all, although I don't think anyone had a suit with a skirt. However, the IHE post did make me feel as though I ought to do an emergency shoe shopping trip tomorrow, since I understand that snow boots are not much worn in Los Angeles.
The Little Professor will back me up on the "don't worry about the suit" idea. Actually, I am backing her up, since she posted about it first.
Although she's writing about the OAH, Tenured Radical has a great post up about how to knock the softball interview question "tell us about your dissertation" out of the park.

And I know it's a big step, but since my paper is already in the hands of the respondent, I'm going to go computer-free at MLA (well, except for the iPad).

Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T15:37:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to everyone! How about some bullets of twenty-eleven?

Yes, we have to make the changeover from "two thousand and x" some time, so why not this year?
It was heavenly not to wake up and head out to the airport the day after Christmas for MLA.
On the other hand, that means that the new semester is coming up at the speed of light.
And so is MLA. Where'd I put that nametag, again?

As I was out walking just now in the very cold winter twilight, I started thinking about resolutions for this year and was wondering this: is a resolution the same as a goal? I think of resolutions as not having an end point--something like "write more"--as opposed to goals, which are more like "write x amount each day," or "exercise more" as opposed to "lose ten pounds."

Anyway, here's what I want to remember for 2011:

Curiosity and excitement about a project are your friends. Don't try to push them away by limiting the amount you want to do in favor of what you "ought" to do.
That goes double for listening to budget doom-and-gloom from colleagues or the internets. Can you do one single thing to help the situation? If not, stop listening and just check in once in a while rather than following each twist and turn of the drama.
Learn more. Write down what you learn, especially if you're piecing together something you found in an archive. You think you'll remember it. You won't.

Holiday hiatus

2010-12-24T09:25:00.000-08:00

Time to take a break from the internets, ignore some emails, get some things done (though that'll be tough with no library, as Dame Eleanor points out), and make some cookies. Lots of cookies.

I can't do better for holiday wishes than the poem over at Roxie's World, but Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays, everyone!

Random bullets of December

2010-12-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

I'm in the midst of a much-put-off task (work-related but not writing-related) that apparently I will do anything to avoid, including eating cookies, shoveling the driveway, and scouring the internet for amusement.
Said scouring includes visiting blogs in search of amusement (thank you all!), but it doesn't seem fair to expect amusement and not give any back. However, this post can't really count as amusement until you get to the video below.
Today's excitement includes finding a rebate card with some money left on it and buying two more Kindle books for the iPad. Free books! Score! Well, they seem to be free because I never remember to take the rebate card when I actually want to buy something.
I've been reading a lot more for pleasure and semi-work since I got the iPad--that is, I get things that are maybe background or history for what I'm doing. So far, on any given day, I have a book going in the Kindle app and one in the Google Books app, and it's great to switch back and forth. If the sky ever clears up, I'm going to try out the Star Walk app I bought. You hold the iPad up to the sky, and it shows you the constellations and so on that you're looking at in whatever direction you point the iPad.
One of the desk copies I ordered is apparently now only print-on-demand from a major publisher. "We'll get it out to you right away," Publisher said a month ago. Didn't happen, so I bought a used copy. It was under $10, and it's easier to get that way than to try to contact the publisher and hope someone's going to respond in the next few weeks. At what point do you figure it's easier to pay money than to fight with the publisher about a desk copy? I don't know the tipping point, but I'm not going to stand on principle in that situation. They may owe me a book, but my time is worth something, isn't it? Especially when I could be eating or shoveling or reading blog posts?
Dean Dad writes about community colleges in California that are considering refusing to allow students to take the same class an infinite number of times (say, more than 5), since those who take a class for the third or fourth or fifth time are less likely to pass than those who retake it only once.
Just in case you're not one of the millions of people who saw this already, here's a video of dancing in an Antwerp train station that made me smile.