Sherman Dorn

Now I'm in trouble as a blogger...

The first time someone else treated me as if I were not only an expert but the expert on any topic, I wanted to look around the room to find some ballast. I think I do good work, but gravitas is a bit too solemn for me. Now Alexander Russo is calling me one of the "grownups" in education blogging. That's okay. As my parents taught me well, I can't really be hurt when someone calls me names.

The Ed in '08 Blogging Summit is Thursday, and I won't be going, because... well, I have a few prior commitments. If you're headed to DC for the event, say hello to Ken Bernstein, Russo, and everyone else there, and tell them that I am much wittier in person. After what Russo said about me today, I need an alibi.

Sterility or psychodrama vs. untimed engagement or intellectual drama

Margaret Soltan is not a Luddite—far from it, she has used her University Diaries blog to become one of American academic letters' premier public intellectuals. But as an observer of college life, she has a well-reasoned hatred of what she calls technolust. She regularly links to stories about students who abuse cell phones and laptops in class and professors who abuse students with PowerPoint. Her argument is that at its best, the classroom is the best environment for the drama of learning, and that technology is too tempting a draw for poor teaching:

...my focus is not on occasional courses in which clever and restrained use of this and other visual technologies makes a better class. My focus is on student (and other audience) response to PowerPoint in general, and on the clear trend toward the overuse of this technology and other technologies in settings in which direct human interaction should be primary. [emphasis added]

I assume that she is working off the same mental model of intensive interactions that's in my head: you walk into class, and you cannot wait to see what ideas suddenly come into conflict, which people realize what's happened to the ideas they've always held, and who change their minds as you watch and participate! ("Survivor" and other reality shows have nothing on a great seminar, because involvement of the audience on a "reality" show is vicarious at best.) To Soltan, presentation software, clickers, and online course management systems are the processed carbs of higher education: easy to digest, but not very nutritious. [The extension of this metaphor to identify academic equivalents of fiber, proteins, fats, and MSG is left as an exercise for the reader, who should instead read Howard Becker's warning about metaphors in Writing for the Social Scientist.]

The reality of instruction is far more diluted: even in a small seminar, the great, life-changing moments are rare. To her credit, Soltan recognizes that but holds up the ideal as the standard against which parallel-play* online classes, reading from PowerPoint slides, and constant-clicker lectures are found wanting. No shinola, Sherman. Take the worst from any format and it will be found wanting against the best of another format. The worst of online classes is the electronic equivalent of a correspondence class, where students proceed at their own pace in their personalized and isolated bubbles, at best watching their peers in an adult form of parallel play. The worst of either bad PowerPoint or bad clicker-based lecturing is a sterile reading of bullet point and faux interactivity. But the worst of in-class drama would also cause Soltan to cringe: the unprepared/psychodrama professor leading her or his students through a semester's equivalent of drowning in emotions, an academic waterboarding.

Maybe a better comparison is among the everyday exchanges in a highly-competent class taught in different formats. In the hands of a skilled lecturer, a PowerPoint or a clicker is a tool used to keep the class engaged, not a crutch for bad teaching. For decades, Bryn Mawr professor Brunhilde Ridgeway kept her beginning archaeology classes engaged with the old set of lantern slides, chugging through centuries of sculpture until, just as she was pointing out the development of articulated knees carved in Greek funerary sculpture, onscreen would appear Magic Johnson, larger than life, running downcourt with... superbly articulated knees. Everyone laughed, the point was carved in our brains, and she moved on. No one took her class expecting to fall asleep, and I suspect today's skilled equivalents of Bruni Ridgeway use PowerPoint stacks in similar ways.

The everyday exchange in a competently-run small discussion class is what Soltan claims it is, an intellectual drama. The adrenaline isn't pumping every minute, but even when the tension ebbs, there is always a flow, a set of themes that the faculty member reinforces through the term, the possibility of a quick turn of thought, a sudden connection with material remembered from several weeks before, and regularly a softly-spoken "aha!" that marks a minor epiphany.

The problem with online education is not that you can find bad online classes, because you can run a poor class in any environment. The problem with online education is that we don't have a strong sense of what broad engagement looks like online. I've been struggling with this issue for some time. When I can make the class synchronous (an awful term implying that we're somehow in our bathing caps and in an Olympic pool), there is some drama that helps, but synchronous online classes have to be pretty small to work well with equipment commonly available. Asynchronously? There's the great challenge, and the fact that I don't have an answer may mean that Margaret Soltan is right: Maybe there is no way to engage students consistently in an online class that doesn't have a live (synchronous) component.

But I suspect that there is a way to have an engaging intellectual exchange online. The terms social presence and transactional distance are awkward ways of talking about how to engage students outside a live setting. It would not be the same thing as a face-to-face seminar, but it may have some compensating advantages: the student who participates more when she or he has more time to think through a response, or the working parent who is able to take the class and thereby injects a mature perspective that changes the way 20-year-old classmates think about the world. Those changes are more likely when the message comes from a peer instead of a teacher. It would not be the live intellectual drama that Soltan and I value, but it would not necessarily be of lesser value.

I am certainly not There yet. I am not sure if anyone is in terms of deliberate course design, though I am certain it appears in spots and for some students. But it is incorrect to assume that distance education is technolust just because faculty are not practiced in a relatively new format in the same way that they can be in a centuries-old format.

On call for Mother's Day

Material gifts: a magazine and Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia (hat tip). Non-material gift: we do all the chores today. I didn't quite catch my spouse before she did a few minor things, but we've gotten to six tasks before she got there.

We don't do the breakfast-in-bed routine for Mother's Day, especially not with adolescent children who sleep in and my spouse who wakes up before dawn regardless of the rest of the schedule. But she was able to get a few hours of writing time in before the offspring woke up, so maybe that's another gift. ;)

We also have opened up the house, and I think I can go without asking that we close it up again and turn on the a/c until this evening. As long as it's 80 F. or lower when I go to sleep, I'm happy.

Give children the vote?

While I'm doing some journal editing tasks and catching up on more than 100 e-mails that have lain unattended in the last mumbledy days, I'll offer you the following provocative proposal: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry recommends that we Give Kids the Vote! (Hat tip).

Before you answer, I should warn you: I have adolescents at home, they want to vote, and they are shrewder and have sharper tongues than I do.

Summertime freedom ... sort of, and not quite yet

I've spent much of the last week tying up odds and ends, from my part in our department's annual reviews to finalizing a syllabus and looking at some data. Now it's into the summer... sort of. I am relieved that my class this summer is an all-day Saturday affair in June and July, not because I love teaching all-day sessions but because I'm not starting my classes in the crazy month of May, when I have the birthdays of both offspring, Mother's Day, and our anniversary, not to mention the end-of-school concerts and other stuff. Let me just mention the end of the upcoming week: on Thursday is my daughter's chorus concert. Thursday is also my son's harp recital at school. Friday is my son's harp recital for his private harp teacher (but he's also playing oboe there). Friday, I'm also supposed to be in Orlando for the FEA governance board meeting. Those of you with children know the routine: my spouse and I split the Thursday concerts, and I don't head to Orlando until after the recital. Saturday night, I return after the governance board meeting, because Sunday afternoon is the concert for the youth orchestra my daughter's in. I'd also like to go to the Florida Orchestra concert next weekend, but there's no chance of that. Add in other school-related events, private music stuff, the birthdays, anniversary, and Mother's Day, ... and I'm glad I'm committed to a formal exercise program, or I'll go crazy.

For the rest of the summer, it's a more relaxed schedule for my family. As usual, I'm not sure I really get a break. Yes, I'm not teaching until June, and it's one course only, but there's union stuff, journal editing, and my own research. Throughout my university, summer this year is going to involve more free time for USF faculty and students, because USF distributed less money for summer teaching than it did last year. Most tenure-track faculty will use the extra time to do research, and maybe relax a bit. Unlike Margaret Soltan, I don't think most new faculty can look forward to a relaxed life. But that's a complicated subject, it may reflect the different institutions where we teach, and if faculty are busy in the summer when not teaching a full load, it's because of self-imposed discipline.

Summer syllabus finalized

In between bits and pieces of other things, I've finalized the syllabus for the class I start teaching in June. This is a topics course on education reform (history and social-science perspectives on), and I probably didn't take many risks in setting up the summer course. We'll just see how it goes. Four books in common, one independently chosen and read... I'm fairly happy with how I'm using the gap between the fourth and fifth class sessions, but that's before we get into the course. There are a few other ways I'm trying to manage the time (all-day class sessions), and I hope it keeps student interest and motivation high.

And I'm trying an avatar before the course. (If you can't see the Flash avatar box below, you'll have to click through to the entry on my webpage to see it.) We'll see how it goes...



(Voki)

Reading First analysis, the Boring Version

I've got to stop being even slightly witty, or I'll continue to be quoted slightly out of context, but in this case, it's entirely my fault for being all "meta" on Mike Petrilli's defense of the Fordham Foundation's defense of Reading First.

So let me try to address the substantive policy issues. No Child Left Behind created a large program (Reading First) to give money to states that promised to adopt early-reading programs with significant research support. This came on the heels of a National Reading Panel report that emphasized the importance of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction to early reading, among the focused questions it addressed.

For now, let me skip the question of the NRP report, since I'm not a reading research specialist (see completely ambiguous disclosure at the end of this entry). Instead of looking at the reading research base, I'm going to make the point that at least the implementation was bollixed up. The Department of Education's appointees to various pieces tied to Reading First were often tied to people at or from one institution (the University of Oregon), and the Inspector General's report was concerned about both conflicts of interest and also the way that many states felt pressured to adopt a specific curriculum/reading program.

I don't have much experience reading program audit reports, but from the few I have, there's an understated quality to most of the language, and it's not clear from the outside whether the muted tones necessarily mean, "Well, someone complained, and there are minor problems," or whether they mean, "I'm going to be very polite, but at least one person screwed up massively, and the only reason why no one's being prosecuted here is because there's no covering statute or the threshold for conviction is pretty high--but since I'm an auditor and not a prosecutor, I'm staying well out of that territory." I'm on the outside, so I have no clue which is which with the Reading First report, though I looks like it shaded into at least minimal corruption.

So it's possible that the Congressional bristling at appropriating funds for Reading First may reflect some informal briefings about the extent of problems. But it's not that simple, either, since Reading First appropriations may also be the way that Congressional Democrats can exercise limited authority over the Bush administration scandals: it may be possible that since Democrats can't punish the DoD or key administration figures over Halliburton the way they'd like, they're going to Make Damn Sure that other shenanigans are shut down (or programs they perceive to be shenanigans). Whether that shades into partisan battles probably depends on your partisan leanings.

... or it may be the standard legislative Scandal Fatigue: "We're not sure exactly what the problem is, but something's wrong, the program evaluation doesn't appear to look good, and maybe just wiping the slate clean is best."

... and wiping the slate clean may be best, both for state officials who want funding for reading programs and also for children. There will probably be a new reading program, with several new statutory requirements to prevent a repeat of what the IG found (or what Congressional leaders think the IG found or are concerned about because of the report or what their staffers think is a good idea in response to the audit report or...).

Whatever federal program comes out of the ashes of Reading First may be as closely related to phonemic awareness and phonics as Reading First, but it may not. The evaluation cracks open the debate over teaching reading that the NRP never really closed. I'm not sure it's that controversial that fluency is important but not sufficient to guarantee comprehension. But Big Bucks are involved, so everything gets magnified. The corruption in Reading First hasn't helped that, either.

(And now the disclosure: My experiences are firmly on the side of phonemic awareness's importance: I was a postdoc with a fellow postdoc who was a firm advocate of Direct Instruction (with capital letters), and I've seen similar stuff work with struggling young readers. And one of my children clearly learned to read relying first on phonics and classic blending instruction (together with individualized picture mnemonics to learn the ball-and-stem letters' sounds). But my DI friend's roommate was a comprehension researcher who teased her friend, "So after your kids learn to sound out words fluently, they need to come to me to learn what the stuff means!" The struggling readers I mentioned earlier also had the benefit of engaging text. And my other child clearly was a print-convention person whose learning of reading didn't appear to need phonics instruction, as far as I can recall. Go figure, but if you can find an ax I'm grinding here, you're pretty creative.)