From the Chronicle: An "expert in pedagogy" talks about blogs

From the CHE: an "expert in pedagogy"* talking about blogs:

I began to feel overloaded, too. Don't get me wrong. I love blogs. I have my RSS feeds set to a number of blogs that help me stay current on personal and professional interests. But the key difference is that I am not forced to read any of those blogs. None of them were created because of someone else's course requirement.

Frankly, the blog postings I required my students to write were just not very interesting. Those students are bright, insightful, frequently opinionated, and, as a whole, a pleasure to be around. Their blogs were not.

When I included a requirement that all students integrate at least three forms of multimedia in their blogs by the end of the semester, I envisioned creations like podcasts and Gliffy concept maps.

She goes on to add that (as everyone knows) blogs aren't inherently an interactive form for classes in the way that discussion boards might be and that the best blogs are written by people who are passionate about their subject matter.

This makes me wonder if the problem was that the focus was on the extras--the glitzy multimedia stuff--instead of on the subject matter. Of course, if this was an educational technology course, maybe writing about the media they were using was the point. Making Gliffy concept maps (whatever they are) is doubtless just as valid for education as writing essays would be in a humanities discipline.

Still, requiring that students use a technological tool when there's no compelling reason to do so except that the teacher wants you to (and we've all probably made this mistake at one point or another) could cause problems. The real trick is to make students so passionate about communicating something that can best be communicated through one of the technologies you've shown them to use (essay writing, blogs, multimedia, web pages, or whatever) that they're driven to learn it as a means rather than as an end.

*She really is; this is a quotation from the article. She has some good ideas.
************

FWIW, I do like to read my students' blogs. They have a definite subject matter, and the students often talk about it in interesting, smart, or funny ways. Yes, sometimes their inspiration flags--whose doesn't?--and they write a duty post or three, but not usually.

I also never expected class blogs to foster community in the same ways that discussion lists have done in my classes in the past. Although I've seen some self-important pronouncements posing as research about what is and is not a blog ("It must have a community/links/specific topics/other" or "That's not a blog; that's an online diary/journal/story forum"), the truth is that in my class, it's a blog if I say it's a blog, and it's a blog for me if it's serving the purposes of the class, regardless of what criteria it meets for others.

Part technology and part genre--is it a genre expressed through technology?--blogs resist such false dichotomies and attempts at containment. That's what makes them so messy and so interesting.

Some days, only chocolate-covered almonds will do

What kinds of days make you stop at the store for chocolate-covered almonds when you haven't had any candy in the house since Christmas?

1. Not the kind of day I had this weekend, where I finally responded to people who'd wanted copies of various conference papers and sent them.
2. Nor the happy parts of the day when a student from a class I taught a few years ago stops by, all dressed up in a suit, just to say hello and tell me how well he's doing now.
3. Nor even hearing some of the job candidates that the search committee worked so hard to choose, to interview at MLA, and to bring to campus; that's a nice part of the day, too.

No. You go out of your way to buy chocolate almonds

1. When you take a full slate of work into the office with you on a day you don't teach and instead spend it going over grad applications (and aren't done yet). I'm not complaining--it's important work--but if you're applying for a grad program, just know that your application has been thoroughly and carefully read.
2. When your work computer decides that it's done with this whole internet thing and refuses to connect at all, and you and the tech guy spend a couple of hours figuring out what could have gone wrong.

I know that all the cheery exercise and health magazines have a different cure for this ("Eat an apple!" "Take a brisk walk!"), but the almonds worked just fine. Now it's time to get to work.

Always Historicize

First, let me say this: I'm enjoying the students this semester, and several have proven themselves to be sharp readers of texts. They've also been enthusiastic about participating. What follows, then, is a comment on the kinds of things they've been taught to value rather than on them as students.

The other day in class, we were reading two works published by the same author in the same year--during a war, in fact. Since the author was writing about this war, I wrote the year on the board, noted and talked about a couple of the very famous battles that happened in this year, and concluded by briefly discussing a famous speech that had been given during this year. (It's hard to do this without telling you the speech, but trust me, you know this one by heart.)

On a quiz the other day (because I believe that quizzes, like short writings, can sharpen reading skills), I asked them, as a bonus, to name the speech and the year in which it was given.

One person got the right answer. One.

Some were off by a few years, and some were off by centuries.

I'm not talking about the War of Jenkin's Ear here; this was a major war in which their own country was involved. (This isn't to say that the War of Jenkin's Ear wasn't a major war to those involved.) And I had written it on the board five days before this.

To do them credit, there were laughs and groans from the class when we talked about the answer. Since another reason I give quizzes and short writings is to spark the class's interest in the ensuing discussion, and also since it was just a bonus question, this date did its work even if they hadn't known it before.

I'm not a stickler for dates usually, but I do believe that having some knowledge of the context is important, even if, and especially if, that context is contested. I don't want to turn them into little Thomas Gradgrinds, but I think that the "big concepts/no details" push in some educational circles may be doing students a disservice.

In this class I try to do both: to teach students broader frames of reference (theoretical, historical, cultural, etc.) for understanding the literature that they read and to show them how the details of their readings contribute to those frames.

And I don't teach Fredric Jameson in this course, but somehow, his phrase from The Political Unconscious seemed apt for a title.

Random Bullets of . . .Snow?

It has snowed here in a major way (I will try to post pictures), and while this is child's play compared to the snow that happens in Snowstorm City and points west and north, having this much snow and having it last is both a novelty and a welcome change from those 0 degree (-18 for Canadian readers) days last week. The downside? All the trees look so pretty with snow-laden branches that I have a totally uninvited and unwanted smarmy 1950s version of "Winter Wonderland" running in my head.

I helped a friend to move out of an apartment yesterday.

This gets my vote for the most Not Helpful factoid of the weekend: in the course of writing on an author, I learn that she kept dual typewriters so that she could work on two novels at once, turning out something like 7,000 words at a time. That means A DAY. This makes me feel incredibly lame, or--wait, maybe I'm an "artiste" like Oscar Wilde, who said that a day's work for him was taking a comma out of a poem in the morning and putting it back in in the afternoon.

The cats hate the snow. Here are their thought processes, as best I can reconstruct them:

I open the back door. They stand there, sniffing the air.

Cat 1: "She is playing a practical joke on us, right? What has she done with the good weather?"

Cat 2: "Maybe the other door will have better weather. Let's wait till she closes this door and beg to be let out the front door."

Cat 1: "Didn't we try that five minutes ago?"

Cat 2: "Maybe she has relented and made the cold go away this time."

More on "Academic Blogging," etc.

Via Planned Obsolescence: an Inside Higher Ed column by Scott McLemee on the blogging session and Scott Eric Kaufmann's paper. It also includes links to Kaufman's and Holbo's talks. One issue that's discussed is one that has made the rounds of blog discussions before: the seeming tendency of pseudonymous blogs to be written by people who feel (or are) marginalized by academic culture--grad students, women, and people of color. (FWIW, there are also some comments about "whiny" women bloggers, but that's another story.)


Easily Distracted also discusses the "academic blogging" versus "academics who blog" issue:

In terms of my recent musings about the limits and lifespan of my own commitment to blogging, I find that it’s impossible for me to stay clearly on one side or the other of “academic blog” versus “academic who blogs”. . . . There’s just something in me, maybe a masculine something, that balks at excessive self-exploration in this online format, or that sets the “too much information” bar at a fairly restrictive point.

This, and Michael Berube's closing down of his blog, made me think. These are genuine questions, not an attempt to criticize those I've quoted here.

How much information is too much information? What kind of information wouldn't you post on a blog?

Does an academic blog have a natural starting and ending point?

And, to oversimplify one of the messages that seems to be coming through, are "academic bloggers" (often those who perform as, or are, male and write under their own names) all about the display--scholarship by another means, as another way to impress the masses and climb the academic ladder--and "academics who blog" (often those who perform as, or are, female) all about continuing community and supporting each other in all those trivial, TMI details?

That's disconcerting.

Blogrolling.com and the singing frog

Blogrolling.com hates us. At least it hates most of us; it seems to like jo(e) and Making Light, but otherwise it hasn't indicated any blog as being updated in well over a month--until today. A short while ago, it said that all the blogs on the blogroll were updated, and now . . . nothing. It's like the old Warner Brothers cartoon "One Froggy Evening," in which the frog refuses to sing if anyone looks at him.

This wouldn't be important except that one of my feeble New Year's resolutions was to stop using Bloglines and only look at the blogs from the blogroll as a sort of reward for getting some item (reading, writing) crossed off my list at the end of the day. Oh, well.

Please tell me this is not entirely germ-phobic: I got on the elliptical machine today at the gym and, after listening to the woman on the elliptical machine next to mine hacking, wheezing, and coughing, I got off and went over to the treadmill instead.

The Academic Job Market

Thomas Hart Benton at the Chronicle of Higher Education on the academic job market:

When will there be stern talks about closing down all the marginal and bloated graduate programs that have created a reserve army of the academic unemployed? In effect, the MLA report asks lower-ranked departments to realize their proper station and accept that they should not be making faculty members write two books for tenure while teaching eight courses a year.

But there's no reason departments should accept that reduced status. They don't have to. Plenty of English Ph.D.'s are only too happy to meet whatever standard the departments care to set.

. . . . . .

Better advice: Do not go to graduate school in the humanities in the first place — not unless you are independently wealthy or, for some reason, you don't mind the strong possibility that six or more years of hard work and lost opportunity will come to nothing but competing at a disadvantage against new college graduates for entry-level jobs.

These are sensible questions, but they might as well be rhetorical ones. A few comments:

"Stern talks" about closing marginal programs, which have been around for at least twenty years, are like talks about unilateral disarmament: "We need fewer Ph.D.'s and ought to shut down some programs." "All right. How about if you shut yours down?"

And as long as the arms race metaphor is on the table: the same holds true for the MLA recommendation about changing standards for tenure. Most university administrations seem to spend time setting standards to compete not just with their peers but with those ranked (in whatever fashion) above them. If it's good enough for Harvard or Next-Best U, goes the thinking, it's good enough for us; never mind that we've cut the library budget, raised teaching loads, and eliminated support for faculty research. Since the MLA issued this report--and indeed, since Stephen Greenblatt's call for this some years back--I've been waiting for news of universities taking this recommendation. I'm still waiting.

As long as it's a bragging point to send students on to Ph.D. programs--and as long as deans and universities make that a measure of success in annual reviews--this won't stop. We try to talk to students about this, but few people get any thanks for talking students out of going to graduate school.

'"Academic blogging" versus "academics who blog"

Scott Eric Kaufman at Acephalous writes about the distinction between "academic blogging" and "academics who blog":

The distinction between "academics who blog" and "academic blogs" ought to be insisted upon. . . . Careerists like myself may unwittingly pressure "academics who blog" into thinking their blogs must be more than mere blogs to justify their existence.

Although I think he means well, there's kind of masterstroke here: all at once he (1) elevates "academic blogging" above "academics who blog" (although with a "not that there's anything wrong with that" statement, he says that he has underestimated blogs that "deal with the minutiae of academic life"--"mere blogs") and (2) places himself in the second category, the one with the power to make bloggers quit because they can't be in category 2.


What fascinates me about this idea--and I don't think he's wrong about the ways in which academic blogs are characterized--is the unholy speed with which the academic blogosphere seems to be scrambling to create an alternative hierarchy that could end up being just as rigid as the old one. The mechanisms of establishing caste may be different from the nametag-gazing dance at MLA and other networks of privilege, but the result will be the same.

I hope not.

[Updated to add]

Also, the power hierarchy Scott mentions (I hope he won't mind my using his first name; I did see him at the MLA panel, though I wasn't able to hear his paper) creates an automatic divide between anonymous and named bloggers. Since talking about theory, research, and so on would out most of us if anyone really cared to investigate, switching to an academic blog would mean coming out and being held accountable in the ways that Dr. Crazy discussed in her post of a few days ago.

It can be stimulating to read the discussions of theory at The Valve, Scott's blog, and other sites, but sometimes, especially if you've been toiling in the fields of reading academic criticism all day long, what you long for is a diversion. The best diversion might just be the lovely prose--fresh, funny, and with a dash of occasional snark--to be found on a lot of those "mere blogs."

First week

Not much to report; it's the first week of classes, and the syllabi for the classes *did* get done, my usual fears to the contrary.

For one of the classes, I'm in a retro-classroom. I don't really mind. The university prides itself on its technology (as which university nowadays does not?), but this one has a tiny television monitor (instead of a projector) at the end of a long, narrow room, which means that the students can see nothing that I project, as they were quick to tell me. It also has some kind of super-ventilation unit close by, so I have to speak up since it's a little like teaching inside a vacuum cleaner.

The students seem good-natured about these limitations; in fact, it was a student who told me that I'd probably need to speak up since the acoustics were not great, since she'd had a class in there before. And if they really need to see a web page, well, I'll do as I did today and invite them all up to the front of the class and gather around the campfire, so to speak.

Back to transparencies, then, and let's party like it's 1995!

On Writing

The only way to write is to live in it (the writing).

Or maybe more correctly: The only way I can write is to live in it.

This wouldn't have been my favorite way of phrasing it, but when I woke up this morning after 3 hours' sleep with this phrase going through my head, it seemed only fair to write it down.

I finally finished a big project that's been hanging over my head for too long, and although I talked to my family this past week, I didn't want to do anything else until I'd finished. Once you're past the stage of agonizing procrastination, writer's block, and the boredom of sitting in front of a screen with nothing to say, you don't want to risk all that by doing something crazy like, say, eating or letting the cat in when he's scratching the screen on the window to shreds. You just want to write.

Now, I realize that this is not the way that professional writers do it, and it isn't the Boice Way. This is the way of the Great Satan that Boice warns against, in fact. I *want* to do the "write a little every day" thing, but that's a kind of multitasking. I haven't yet been able to turn my brain on and off that way ("10:14--continue to work on manuscript; 10:15: stop writing and prepare class"). I'll keep trying, but for now?

It's all there in the first line.

Post MLA

While everyone else has been writing terrific post-MLA posts, after getting back late on New Year's Eve I've been trying to get the writing done that (surprise, surprise) did not write itself while I was away* and also to get ready for the semester, which starts on Monday.

The reflections on blogging, the scholarly worth of blogging, even name tags--all that's been covered well on other blogs, so here is something resolutely trivial: cards.

One of the few perqs academics in full-time jobs get (besides free books and the ability to spend vacation time and money going to conferences) is a set of professional cards with name, department, etc. , and yet in years of going to conferences, I've noticed an odd reluctance to use them, except by publishers in the book exhibit. (An exception: Dr. Crazy mentioned taking a card so that she could pass along someone's name to a colleague.) I have even heard people apologizing for having cards ("My department got these for me--don't know why I carry them"). Writing something down on a scrap of paper that you've scrounged from your conference notes seems much more the norm.

Is it that people don't carry cards? Is it that they believe it's presumptuous or pompous to give someone a card? Does it make academics feel too much like salespeople? Or are the odd apologies I've seen atypical?

Do we even have an established etiquette for giving out our cards?

See, I told you it was trivial.




* I lied. I also took a day off and did nothing except watch old movies.

Blogging the "Meet the Bloggers" session

My meeting got out a little early, so I was able to catch the last two papers of the "Meet the Bloggers" session. Since others who were there for the whole thing will surely write about it (as will the bloggers themselves), I'll keep this to a few impressions.

Very Famous Female Blogger (I don't want to out her even by giving her blog pseudonym, but you can figure it out).

Connected blogging with her work in 18th-century publishing and the essay, especially The Female Tatler, possibly by a pseudonymous "Mrs. Crackenthorpe," which successfully competed for audience with the mainstream Tatler for a while and was published on alternating days with it.

Mentioned Habermas's "enabling fiction of the public sphere" and that we don't realize just how imperfect the public sphere is.

Her impressions (based on her blog survey) were that "most pseudonymous bloggers are who they say they are; if they say they are women, they are," etc.

Pseudonymity invites risk, but those who choose to publish pseudonymously are willing to take those risks in order to gain something greater (for early women writers, money).

Blogging is "a way for people who are marginal to be in the public sphere."

Mentioned in the Q & A about threats of "outing" a blogger: it's important to maintain the distinction between persona and writer.

Michael Berube

Praised The Valve's book events: "they rock."

"The state of book reviewing in our discipline is terrible" because of the delays in print publication, etc.

Discussed two "blogspats," one that occurred when he was accused of leaving a damaging remark on a grad student's blog. Noted that he didn't know it was a grad student & thought the person was "just a guy."

Second "blogspat" was "Burqagate," the flap over Ann Althouse's criticism of a blogger "because she had breasts" and Amanda Marcotte's photoshopping of a burqa-clad woman. (Look it up if you want more information.)

Discussed the ways in which leftists sometimes denounce even those on their side for not being severe enough in their denunciations (example: denouncing the people who denounced the Democrats who were too lukewarm in their denunciations of torture).

Blogspats: "junior high with hyperlinks." Gives us "important lessons about how to go about choosing sides."

My notes on the rest are too scattered to be of use (which isn't to say that these are of use at all, mind you; the good stuff is in their talks, not here.)

The room was packed--standing room only, and this at 8:30 a.m. on the last day of the conference, which is not, shall we say, a coveted time slot. (On my way to the session, I saw several rooms with 4-5 brave souls listening to speakers.) And why wouldn't it be packed? The panelists were smart, funny, and interesting, as you'd expect. There were non-pseudonymous bloggers in the audience who talked during the Q & A and, I'm sure, other chickenhearted pseudonymous bloggers like myself, who were there to hear thoughtful talk about blogging--and, probably not incidentally, to see the stars of the blogworld.

Random Bullets of MLA 2006

Yes, there was a nice holiday sandwiched in there somewhere (which I might write about some time), but for about 10,000 people right now it's all MLA, all the time here in Philadelphia.

The weather is nice, saints be praised. At an MLA in Toronto some years back, the temperatures fell into the minus digits, which made walking between the hotels considerably less than pleasant.

I wish I had a camera to take pictures of the Reading Terminal Market, which is right next to the main conference hotel. It's like Pike Place Market in Seattle, an old building converted to small open shops--fish vendors (though no one throws the fish here, at least that I've seen), bakeries, and lunch counters of all sorts. If you go, here's a tip: it supposedly closes at 6, but I observed many very unhappy countermen serving us clueless MLA types at 5:30 p.m.

The cliche really is true: the dress code is black, black, and more black.

It's nice to see people greeting their friends here. On the other hand, I've never seen so many people ready to give a cool, appraising stare without either smiling or looking away once someone meets their gaze.

Due to other commitments, I won't get to see the "Meet the Bloggers" session on Saturday morning with Michael Berube, John Holbo, Scott Eric Kaufman, et al. but hope that others will blog about it. (I feel fairly certain that the panelists will.)

Secret message to panelists: When you look up from your paper and start speaking extemporaneously, time does not stand still! The clock keeps right on ticking and cutting into someone else's presentation time. Really. I wouldn't kid you about this.

To try to curb Meandering Speaker Syndrome, the MLA has placed timers on all the tables and blinking lights on the podium. Green means that you have 3 minutes left, Red means that your time is up, and the next step is a trap door that opens beneath the speaker's feet and drops him or her into a dungeon. All right, the MLA hasn't perfected that last step yet.

An imaginary history of the MLA convention

Time: December 26th, some time in the twentieth century. Place: A wood-paneled faculty club, somewhere on the eastern seaboard. Three male faculty members are sipping sherry and smoking pipes. We catch them in mid-conversation.

Professor A: "I had a devil of a time getting out of the house too, Fred. Why, the children wanted me to play with them again today! What is it with this time of the year?"

Professor B: "My wife wanted me to stay at home, too--something about a holiday being family time. Don't they know I need to Think Deep Thoughts?"

Professor C: "And I'm even worse off. My wife hasn't had time to fact-check the citations for my latest article, and she hasn't typed a scrap of manuscript for me since this whole thing began!"*

Silence. Puffing of pipes and sipping of sherry.

Professor A: "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get away and talk to each other about something that mattered, like scholarship, instead of being at home with the family?"

Professor B: "That's a great idea! We could stay away until all the mess was cleaned up and return just in time for New Year's Eve."

Professor C: "We could meet in New York, or maybe sometimes in Chicago, for those on the West Coast. We're already in the Modern Language Association; how about holding that meeting right after Christmas? We're all free then."

Professor A: "It would get us out of the house."

Professor B: "No more messy family time!"

Professor C: "It's a good thing that no women would be going to this convention. Why, their heads would explode, if they had to get ready for Christmas AND get ready for MLA."**

All: "A woman at the convention? Hahahahahahaha!"

And that, dear friends, explains why many of us will be getting up at the crack of dawn to fly to distant cities in about a week.

Updated from the comments:
(from Anonymous)

Sally: Now WTF am I going to do with my kids on Jan 4 when they should be in school and I have to go to the New Improved Women Friendly MLA??


**********

*Seriously. I heard a grad director say once that it was good for grad students and faculty members to be married, so their wives could type their papers for them.
**Seriously. Why do you think I'm writing this at 4:30 a.m.?

Technology in teaching

The Chronicle has an interesting discussion with Henry Jenkins of MIT about using technology in teaching.

Extracts (with comments):

1. [Jenkins talks about] blogs as a way of sharing insights and experiences teaching -- as part of the process of mentorship within a department. Most of us spend far too little time talking with our colleagues about our roles as teachers and younger faculty are often starved for advice from senior members of their department but don't know how to ask. If a department created some blog or wiki that allowed for people to trade positive or negative teaching experiences -- everything from dumb things student wrote on tests to innovative ideas about classroom activities -- I think this would create a context for support for pedagogy within departments. Of course, the same can be done through fields.

Earlier, Jenkins had repeated the usual thing about those scairdy-cat faculty (I'm paraphrasing his idea) who won't use technology because they see themselves as lone operators who don't like to ask for help.

That aside, a wiki isn't entirely a bad idea, but does anyone think that people will truly open up, under their own names and in writing addressed to their colleagues about bad teaching experiences? How long would it be before students would be checking such a wiki to see Professor Blooper's Greatest Hits? How long would it take for the university to shut down such a forum on the grounds of FERPA and student privacy where quoting from papers is concerned? Also, every forum or discussion list I've ever seen (including the ones at CHE) where teachers relieved stress by posting student bloopers has had a few posters saying something along the lines of "this is not worthy of us as Educators."

Also, isn't he missing the point? Isn't talking honestly about teaching what a lot of us (anonymous bloggers) do? It seems to me that a version of this community already exists, although he doesn't seem to know it.

2. [Jenkins on low bandwidth issues]The MIT environment is very rich in bandwidth but every summer I spend time in the woods in the North Georgia mountain on dial up. I am always frustrated by the shift in how long it takes to do even simple operations and how many of the things I do easily in Cambridge are impossible to do in Clayton, Georgia. This is something that researchers in this area have not spent nearly enough time reflecting upon. It is frankly a blind spot in a lot of the research initiatives that involve new media for schools. I think any assignment needs to start from a realistic understanding of what it is going to be hard for students to do and what it is easy for them to do. One has to factor in the realistic constraints students face in designing activities. And one has to also know -- and inform them -- about resources on campus where they might be able to get faster connections or more expanded bandwidth. I am not sure there's any magic formula there.

I'm glad he mentioned this problem, which has been talked about since, what, 1988 or so when people really started using technology in teaching. Those designing (and those funding) the next new shiny thing that's going to transform teaching technology put it into the report somewhere and it's promptly forgotten when funding time comes around. Even common technologies aren't responsive to this; has anyone tried Blackboard or WebCT on a dialup lately? Apparently we aren't any closer to solving this problem than we were in 1988, but at least it's still mentioned as a problem.

3. [About teachers who are annoyed with students who use laptops in the classroom]: In some of our Intro to Media Studies classes, professors have asked TAs to do real time blogging during the lecture, throwing out links to web sites which are relevant to the content being covered. This way if students are multitasking, they may be reinforcing what is being taught rather than being pulled in a separate direction. After all, this is a generation that is used to absorbing information from multiple sources at the same time and often learns multimodally -- that is, by taking in the same information through multiple sensory inputs. So build on that.

First of all, this may be excellent advice--for a lecture. For a discussion class? Not so much. In my experience, when the laptop screen goes up, the urge to participate goes down. I had two students this semester who were good at participation--until they began to bring their laptops to class. Don't get me wrong; they're welcome to bring laptops if they want to. But in a discussion-based class, attention to the screen leads to "discussions" like this:

"Why might the heroine have said this to the hero, Student?"

(Looks up from screen): "What?"

"Why might the heroine have said this to the hero, Student?"

"Umm. I'm not sure."

I did take both of them aside and said something like this: "Look, bring the laptop if you want, but you haven't been discussing the works along with the class; this could affect your participation grade."

Second, haven't recent studies shown that this much-vaunted "multitasking" learning is a crock? Students think they're paying attention to everything, but they're not. Certain law schools, as reported in the CHE, have banned laptops or shut off wireless access in the classroom for this reason.

Do laptops really "enhance the classroom experience" as Jenkins says they can?

Lost weekdays

After a hard drive crash, even if you're lucky and have backed stuff up, it'll still take a few hours to load back all the software and documents.

I've spent the last few days doing this, and most of the documents are there. Since Endnote 9 decided to go from having a single file for everything to having the file that you work in plus a data file, however, there's twice as much that can go wrong. Apparently the backup I did saved the file I work in but NOT the data file, without which the other file is useless. I found a backup copy . . . from June.

So the joys of semester's end: trying to reconstruct a database of 250+ entries for a deadline-driven project, one that includes some notes. Some notes are in Word and thus have been saved; others have not.

There's a moral in this ("save everything, all the time"), which I thought I'd done with an automatic backup system.

Just because there's a moral in this, though, doesn't mean that I want to hear it right now.

Can't win them all

Yesterday, as I was collecting the final exams for one of the classes, ArticulateGuy* came up to the desk. "You wanted us to answer three questions on this part but just write one of the essays, right?" he asked.

ArticulateGuy has completed all the requirements for the course except one, and it's a big one. He hasn't turned in a single paper. Not one.

Now, as a concerned teacher, I do send a reminder e-mail (a mass e-mail saying "I haven't received X") if I don't get a paper from someone. Just one e-mail: my secret motto is "I'm a mom, but I'm not YOUR mom." However, last week I'd had this exchange with ArticulateGuy.

"ArticulateGuy, I didn't receive a paper from you this week."

"I know. I'm a bad student."

It'd be nice to get to the bottom of THAT statement, but I had another class in 5 minutes, so here's what I said:

"You're smart, and you have good things to say in class. Get the paper in to me."

Yesterday, I mentioned it to him again as he was making sure that he'd followed all the directions on the exam. "Look, ArticulateGuy, you can't pass the class if you don't turn in the papers. I'll be turning in grades before Friday, so you have a chance if you can get something in to me. I don't want to nag (ha!), but I just wanted to let you know."

This breaks my "I'm not your mom" rule, but I couldn't help it. I hate to see them crash and burn like this.

I'm holding out hope, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for his paper.

*with apologies to ArticulateDad for stealing part of his pseudonym.

How far we've come

From a New York Times article on Helen Vendler (free registration required):

Back in the States, Vendler enrolled in 12 English courses in a single year at Boston University so as to qualify for graduate school at Harvard. In her first week there in 1956, the chairman of the English department told her, “We don’t want any women here.” (Years later, he apologized.) Another professor, the renowned Americanist Perry Miller, considered Vendler his finest student and published one of her course papers, but denied her admission to his Melville seminar. “The men come over in my house and they sit around and drink and we talk. I wouldn’t talk like I wanted to if there was a woman there,” she recalled him explaining.

Food for thought.

Last day

Ferule and Fescue asks "Do you perorate?" on the last day of class. Well, sort of--but at the wrong time, the beginning of the class.

In the fiction class, I use the excuse of going over the exam guide for the final as a way to sum up themes, make connections, and say a few things about the works. The conversation that followed was what was most valuable, though. I'd asked them questions along these lines:

1. What work or works did you enjoy the most? Why?
2. What work did you think was the most significant? Why?
3. What work in this period would you like to see replace one of the current offerings (if you'd like to see this)? Why?

It was an interesting discussion, and the answers to the first question varied widely; most answered Big Famous Novel for the second one, but there were some surprises there, too. We got to talk about the ways in which the works fit together, why I'd included some works instead of some others, the limitations imposed by a 15-week semester (if long novel A is included, it's hard to include long novel B without drastic cuts elsewhere), and so on. Almost as an afterthought, a few months ago I'd included one assignment to find current cultural references on Big Famous Novel and we'd discussed them in class; a student yesterday commented that she'd enjoyed it when we talked more about current cultural parallels with the novels, as we'd done with BFN and another book.

In the other class, I also did a "this is what the course has taught you" at the beginning before continuing the regular class discussion.

So, in short: their voices, not mine, were the last things that they heard. There are no Professor Kingsfield applause lines in that way of wrapping up a class, but I'm satisfied.

teaching-carnival

Waiting for the third shoe to drop

I've lost my checkbook. (Why do I carry one, anyway, instead of just relying on cards?) I put a "stop payment" on all the remaining checks and have searched my car and all the places it could be as well as called a few places where I've been--no luck.

I turned on my one-year-and-one-week-old computer today to see a message that a hard drive was failing. (I thought I just had one, but the Intel RAID controller lists two.) I clicked on the button that said "Advanced information" and saw this: "Status: error occurred." Thanks, I knew that already. How about some information about the error?

Let's hope that these things don't go in threes.

Updated to add this:

The hard drive is officially toast. At least it let me back up most of my important documents. Most are on my laptop in various forms as well. I picture maniacal laughter at Sony headquarters: "Ha! She thought it would last beyond the warranty period, and it did--a whole week beyond the warranty."

I took it to the national chain with the tech guys in red shirts, since they'd been had been pretty good in previous computer meltdowns. The tech guys had been turned into real Salesmen since I'd last taken equipment in to be fixed.

"Here's our basic and intermediate service," the guy in a Santa hat explained, "but for only $259 you can get our special 'Peace of Mind' service."

"What might that be?"

"Well, we will back up your data [I'd already explained that I had backed it up to a flash drive and an external hard drive] and will load any two pieces of software that you already own onto your computer, if you drive home and get the disks. So much more convenient, and then you can enjoy your time with friends and family, ma'am."

"So that's $80 more than the intermediate service just to load two pieces of software onto the computer?"

"Oh, but we back up your data, too, so you have peace of mind. Just think of all the time you can spend with your family! Most of our customers just love the extra service!"

Can you guess that I declined?