Sherman Dorn

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.

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.

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)

College graduation

The new Ed Sector report by Kevin Carey, Graduation Rate Watch, summarizes some of the material available from the IPEDS 6-year graduation measures for four-year colleges and universities. The main point is that there are vast differences within different higher-ed sectors not only in 6-year graduation stats but also Black-White differences in graduation. He correctly points out that some institutions such as Florida State have programs that appear at first glance to provide substantial support to first-generation college students, support that increases the likelihood of graduating.

Kudos: the interesting slice of IPEDS rates, with the appropriate hedges/caveats; the nod to Vincent Tinto's work; the acknowledgment of Cliff Adelman's suggestion for improving the IPEDS measures; the observation that U.S. News & World Report rankings largely diss graduation rates as ways to distinguish institutions; the recommendation that financial aid be shifted away from its merit-based emphasis today and back towards means-testing; the observation that funding enrollment does not provide a strong incentive for retention programs.

Kumquats: the continued push for a national unit records database. I think that's the only DOA suggestion in a compact, complex report. I may disagree with some other ideas, but the report on the whole is thoughtful and presents issues in a clear way. I might want a bit more use of the current college-retention literature, but I can't point to specifics because that's outside my area of expertise.

Some broader issues that complicate efforts to increase undergraduate graduation:

• A large proportion of college students are in community colleges, and programs that focus on first-time-in-college students at universities are great... and limited to that sector of higher education.
  
• Part-time students are a serious puzzle in terms of retention and even measurement. In many states, part-time students have a much harder time getting aid (in part because they are often older, and in part because of minimal-credit requirements). They also have competing obligations, are on campus less frequently, etc. I love older students in my classes for very selfish reasons (they are more mature, they help teach their classmates simply by being there and talking about their lives), but I'm not sure who has cracked the practical challenges that part-time students present for themselves and for their colleges.
  
• Health crises can turn a student with marginal success into a student who has dropped out, and young adults are among the least likely Americans to have adequate health insurance.
• Institutional pecking orders are hard to pinpoint, and they can shift rapidly: witness Florida, where reduced funding is pushing most of the state's public universities into being far more selective. My guess is that graduation rates will rise in 4-5 years, but while some institutions (including mine) are figuring out how some concrete steps to increase student success, some part of that will be a selection effect. So making comparisons with "peer institutions" may be a difficult enterprise.
  
• Measures focused on undergraduates make it somewhat more difficult for graduate-focused institutions in any incentive system. States need to be flexible and negotiate the systems with institutions, or they are likely to provide odd advantages to some institutions over others, advantages that will only be discovered after the fact.

And those are the issues that are apparent to me without knowing the higher-ed attrition/retention/graduation literature. There is one faculty colleague at USF who focuses on higher-ed attrition, and there are IR gurus for whom this is an occupational focus, so I do have local resources... now I really need that Time-Turner. But for now, it's 11:30 pm, and I still need to provide feedback on a student thesis...

Sketching a course 6

Habits and experience
Today I'm trying desperately to finish a paper that is far too late. Part of the delay is the craziness that is my professional and union life, but another part is that I am delving into two subjects that I have not been diligent in keeping up with. I am keenly interested in them, but they are on the margins of my main research interests, and when one's time is short...

The consequence is that I now have to play catch-up. If I weren't pressed for time in other ways, I would enjoy this process more, because over my life I have repeatedly been required to undergo a "drink from the firehose" experience in reading. It is an exhausting short-term experience, and it challenges me to engage all sorts of skills simultaneously, with the mental effect nothing quite so much like keeping a number of balls in the air at the same time. No, not juggling balls: more like a lit torch, a chef's knife, a soap bubble, and a ceramic bowl filled with yogurt. All of them. If you can keep them up there, it's quite a thrill.

Usually, graduate students have these experiences in high-stakes environments, as major papers at the end of a course. Or, rather, if they do have drink-from-the-firehose feelings, they're not likely to be successful. Is there a way to give them that experience in a strongly positive sense, with far lower stakes?

In more mundane news, I've been suckered into a new exercise regime. No, not suckered: quite enjoyable. But it's another thing I need to schedule. Anyone have a working Time-Turner I can borrow?

Sketching a course 5

Framing questions as stuff, habits, and experience
Probably the most powerful intellectual experience I had as an undergraduate... or rather the most powerful explicit design of a course I took in my major (history) ... was a course on late medieval/early modern Europe taught by Susan Stuard. She structured the entire course around a single question: what accounts for the rising economic and political power of western Europe by the end of the Renaissance? Each week's reading was a famous piece of European historiography that had a different answer: technology, a reaction to Muslim control of the Mediterranean, an early industrial attempt that failed, the Hanseatic cities as a crucial cluster of merchants, etc. As we accumulated a critical mass of readings, the members of the class began to have much more extensive, in-depth debates about European history, historical explanations of change, what constitutes sufficient evidence, how to shape strong arguments, and so forth.

As I think back on this course and a few others with similar designs, the intellectual experience was a shared one. In other courses, I had my epiphanies and wonderful moments, but this particular class became a cohesive group. Sometimes that's just the dynamic of the particular collection of people involved, idiosyncratic and unrepeatable. But Susan Stuard's framework of the course (as well as the way she ran discussion) was absolutely integral to the development of the class dynamic.

Sketching a course 4

Stuff to expose students to

• Street-level bureaucracy/loosely-coupled systems
• Arguments over what the links between education and democracy are

Habits etc.

• Grasping POV within nonfiction
  

Experiences

• Staying with a the development of a complex idea through its nuances
• Multiple-resolution understanding: Seeing the flowers (details) and the landscape (10,000-foot view) at the same time
  

Open-source textbooks

This morning, Inside Higher Ed has a good article on faculty who write open-source texts. In the end, it'll be faculty decisions that determine whether this is a viable alternative to expensive texts.

Sketching a course 3

Habits etc.

• Reading at multiple levels: for information, for a story, for perspective
• Evaluation at multiple levels: consistency/logic, newness, accuracy, relevance of questions
  
• Writing through multiple drafts
  
• Revision with an audience in mind
  

Experiences

• Reading for wonder
  
• Writing as joyful
• Writing as intense
• Writing to sort through ideas and then present them
  

Sketching a course 2

Stuff to expose students to

• The difference between the rhetoric of federalism/local control and the (maybe chaotic) reality of education reform (multiple sources)
  
• Politicization and education as part of citizenship (multiple sources)
  
• Curriculum as projection of values (Kliebard)
  
• Finances and reform rhetoric (multiple sources: need an argument more than pat descriptions)
  

Sketching a course 1

In the next few days I need to carve out time for journal editing responsibilities as well as writing a symposium paper I'd promised to be finished by Friday but probably won't be done until next Tuesday or so. (There, Laura! I've made that commitment publicly.) But since I'm waiting for a student to show up in my office, I'll blather a bit about a course I'm creating for the summer on school reform.

Stuff to expose students to
I want to focus on the historical and policy literature on school reform, which overlaps but not entirely. There are a few obvious books to assign (Tyack and Cuban to start off the course, and a choice of DeBray, Manna, or Mcguinn somewhere towards the end: see the Amazon recommendations box on my home page for those), and then I have to figure out how much I want to delve into the contemporary policy literature vs. history. I need to think more about the concepts and less about books... but it's also inherently a reading class.

Habits etc.
One shift I want to encourage in graduate students is to rely less on the mental shortcuts they've accumulated from their experiences and try to use different questions to probe the issues in the class ... and their experiences. This is probably unfair of me, since I teach in an area where I'm using all my own mental shortcuts, but it is my course. Maybe I can challenge them to provide me an experience where I have to give up my mental shortcuts. Hmmn...

Experiences
The course has a bit of an odd schedule--four day-long classes on Saturdays in June, followed by a day-long Saturday late in July. I need to think about the experience of a complete day in a heavy reading class. And the several weeks' gap in the end. What opportunity does that gap provide?

Speedy animation

Done in about two minutes of downtime with K-sketch:

Yes, I'll keep my day job.

Complex object creation tools: review needed

With the recent release of new versions for both Omeka and Sophie, I'd love to see some comparative review from both institutional users (e.g., the perspective of someone in charge of a project team) and also individual users (e.g., teachers trying to create content for specific courses or modules).

I'm not saying I'm going to (no time!), but I'd love to see the reviews from both perspectives.  Oh, yes, and while we're at it, how about a review of Inform 7?

Ethnography of seminar discussions?

This is a stab in the dark, because my normal routes for searching aren't leading me anywhere, and I want to get this query out there before I forget (and I don't have a "fleeting thoughts" category for the blog): If you know of a good ethnography of seminar discussions in higher ed (either undergrad or graduate), please let me know. Equivalent studies in other disciplines are also relevant (so something in communications that looks like micro-ethnography would certainly qualify).

Wherein we become cranky about Bloom's taxonomy and accidentally teach our sharp-tongued son some math

I will admit that I am one of people who grind their teeth when hearing the umpteenth time about Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in the context of planning instruction. In my experience, most people point to it as a source of heuristic advice: how do you design assignments that push students to do more than they thought they could?

But I've also seen people view the taxonomy as Truth Incarnate about Instruction, as a hierarchy of thinking, and that drives me up the wall, as I have written before. Last week, I read something that relied on a Bloom-as-truth assumption, and I began to think, why do humans think in hierarchical terms, even where it is inappropriate? I'll speculate on that in another post, but when I tried to set this up with my adolescent son, he had an interesting counter-argument (apart from trying to argue with me about Bloom, just because he wanted to argue):

Any scheme that is not hierarchical can be converted into a hierarchical scheme.

I tossed out a few examples, such as a circle, a random array, etc., and he handled them all with aplomb, explaining how he would pick a path through each scheme and declared (roughly paraphrased), "If I can pick a path from first to last, then I've created a hierarchy." I didn't argue with him on the difference between an order and a hierarchy, because what he'd just discovered for himself is the notion of a change of variables.

How to ask questions of faculty

Once again Cal Newport has solid advice for college students:

Don't be afraid to ask questions when confused in class. Use the following format: <this is my interpretation> + <this is what confused me> + <this is what I want to be clarified>

Yes, yes, yes: don't ask a vague question such as Can you tell me again <topic>? Instead, explain your best understanding, which will help me or my colleagues figure out if you've nailed it, if you're in the ballpark but need some guidance, or if you're out of the ballpark.

Turn anything into a lesson, but will it stick?

A friend of mine has done something unusual with the celebrations of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday this year. She teaches young adolescents with moderate cognitive disabilities and behavior problems, and this year, she chose King's 1964 Nobel Prize acceptance speech as the basis for a series of lessons in reading, language arts, civics, etc. in the last week or two. She says she wasn't sure how basing a spelling test on a Nobel Prize speech would go over, but she did it anyway.

There's a test of what the students learned beyond the question of whether the speech taught the students some new words. She reported that when she asked the students if they agreed with King's arguments (in favor of "unarmed truth and unconditional love" over militarism), they all said yes... in a week where she had at least a handful of minor conflicts to break up. So perhaps we should say that their understanding of King's message, or maybe their own behavior, is a work in progress.

On the other hand, I'm not sure we're doing much better as a society than my friend's students. We're happy to give King his day, as long as we can ignore his ideas about justice and peace.

Maybe it's time we adults change.

Teaching about what humans do

I've been tagged by Craig Smith, who asks, Why Do You Teach and Why Does It Matter? after reading Dr. Crazy's explanation of why she teaches literature. This comes on the heels of Stanley Fish's boldly hedonistic Epistle to Philistines and the expansion on this, last night's Epistle to Dumb-Ass Colleagues. (Okay, the posts were properly called The Uses of the Humanities, parts 1 and 2, but I agree with Margaret Soltan's reading of Fish Epistles I.) Fish's essays are in his typical eliding style, with just enough of substance to frustrate me when he misses the obvious.

And here is one part of the obvious: an academic education requires the study of a variety of disciplines, including science, math, and also what humans do. Understanding "what humans do" requires behavioral sciences, social sciences, and humanities. While the configuration of disciplines is not carved in stone, a student will get a pretty good education in the culture that humans produce within the humanities. One way to think about the value of any discipline or area is to think about the institutions that leave out the area.

Here is the other part of the obvious: you don't learn how to think in the abstract but in bumping up against ideas in specific contexts. That "bumping up against" phrase is important to me, because you don't learn anything if you are not challenged. Some subjects appear easier to you or me than others, but that perception is about subjects that are under a threshold of difficulty, not the absence of new ideas and challenges. Teachers can make learning easier, but that fact doesn't eliminate the need for challenge. And the specific context matters. As my favorite high school English teacher told us at the beginning of AP English, she taught writing, and she did it in the context of teaching about literature. She also taught us an enormous amount about literature in the course of that year. Even philosophers talk about topics. Care for a casual game of penny-ante Ontology?

In my case, I teach social-science and humanities perspectives on education, with a focus on history and sociology. The majority of my students come to me to fulfill exit requirements or in the midst of pre-professional training that reinforces psychological assumptions, and I have most of them for only one semester. I provide students with an additional set of views, humanities and social-science perspectives to examine schooling. When students leave my classroom, they should be able to explain how people fight over the purposes of schooling and the different models of how schools function as organizations (or don't).

In many ways, I am lucky to be in a field where I get paid for navel-gazing. My neighbors and fellow citizens should want me to teach students who want to teach that the world may not agree with their reasons for teaching or their view of the purpose of schooling; that the world's range of schools includes places that provide a very different education from their own experiences as they grew up; and that the job of teaching involves more than going into a room, shutting the door, and letting the gorgeous lesson plans unfold without interruption or difficulty. That's a fairly practical purpose. There is also the specific example of the argument above: Formal schooling is what humans do today, and studying the social context of formal schooling is a reasonable way to study what humans do.

In addition, when students are in my course, they have to write extensively and coherently about schooling. Over my career, I have taught over 2,000 students. I have taught most of those students at USF, where I have never written a multiple-choice final exam and where I have always required that students write papers. Before my colleagues and I agreed to craft a single paper assignment across all of the undergraduate social-foundations sections, I assigned a "perspectives" paper where I collected sources on two or three recent "hot topics" in education and told my students, "This is not a research paper. I've collected all of the background you should need. Your job is to apply the concepts you have learned in the course to these hot topics." (I gave students the ability to propose a topic of their own choosing, as long as I approved it in the first month of the course. Almost no students took me up on the offer, and as a result, I stopped having students propose topics that focused more on psychology than the topics in my course.) In most cases, the common readings for the course never directly addressed the hot topics, so they couldn't just regurgitate ideas. I was mean! (See the bit about challenges above.)

Some of these assignments were more successful than others. I am still aghast that a few years ago, the majority of students who wrote about the "intelligent-design" controversy in Dover supported teaching it alongside evolution in a science class. I graded them on the merits of the assignment (which is not synonymous with the question of what should be in the curriculum), and then explained my point of view in comments separate from the grading. But I challenge students' beliefs about education, no matter what they carried into the classroom, and I push students to  justify their conclusions with plausible arguments.

And to continue this meme, I tag...

• Margaret Soltan
• Timothy Burke
• Miriam Burstein
• Profgrrrrl
• Kelly in Kansas
• Mark Grimsley
• Jose Vilson

Timothy Burke beats me to the punch on interesting learning objects

In his blogging on a conference this week sponsored by the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (or NITLE), Timothy Burke has raised the right questions to ask about electronic learning objects that are interactive, information-intense, and based on scholarship and the interests of great teachers:

• How could they be crafted to change teaching? [W]e're also not pedagogically literate about how to use this kind of material and we don't often create them to be used as the center piece of a small liberal arts class. Suppose I had students look at the Palenque learning object. It's great for giving the students a vivid visual and experiential feel for the place. But ok: it's thus just a supplement to something else that's being used to create discussion-based learning for that session. That's part of the problem with some of these objects: they're supplemental, optional, not just because faculty don't work to enhance their teaching but because that's how they cast themselves. At least some of these objects have to have the character of scholarship, e.g., to have an argument, to enter into the conversation about a particular area of knowledge forcefully, to be knowledge rather than a supplement to knowledge.
• How do we create/grant professional credit for this? [I]f you build this stuff, you're really building it for external use, as a gift to the world, and usually a gift specifically to institutions and users who are asymmetrically related to the faculty and institutions involved in building digital resources. E.g., to K-12 students, to community colleges, to universities in the developing world, to underresourced colleges. And no matter how much some of my colleagues in history and anthropology may talk the talk of social justice and digital divide, when it gets down to being involved in giving a digital gift, they ask: what's the incentive? Why should I, if that means I won't publish my next monograph in a timely fashion? Who will notice or care if I give a gift of this kind?
• How do we build sustainable institutional support? Wesleyan has started creating a chargeable model for the activities of the Academic Media Studio, but as Burke notes from the presentation (or rather, as the presenters noted), Scholarly collaboration is not free.

I'm sure I'd be able to figure out at least a few possible answers to these problems, but I'm still struggling with the pedagogical questions, I'm not sure how I'd get credit for it in annual evaluations, and I'd need to write grants to support the time I'd need and the technical folks to implement the solutions.

That last sentence is a joke, dear readers. I'm fairly sure my colleagues would be supportive, and I do have a few ideas for support, but Burke has explained the key barriers.

Technology as culture, part 1

When the Honors College asked me to teach one of their lower-division arts/humanities classes this fall, I had two thoughts:

• If I do run for the leadership of the faculty union chapter, it'll be an interesting semester. (For most faculty, an Honors College class is an overload, not part of the regular load.)
• I'm in the social-science end of history. What the heck do I teach?

Because the Honors College classes have less structure than courses I normally teach (to wit, the start of this course's description is "An introduction to western arts and letters..."), I had both greater freedom to design my class and somewhat different (and greater) expectations. An introduction to western arts and letters! I'm an Americanist, and my strength really is in social science history. In the end, I decided to design an introduction to culture studies using technology as a centerpiece, using Thomas Misa's From Leonardo to the Internet and David Nye's America as Second Creation as nonfiction books and a few novels to round it out. My students would disagree with my judgment at this point: if/when I teach this again, I'll have Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and William Gibson's Neuromancer as the fiction.

Having undergraduates write entries in a group blog about class sessions is working well in the last few semesters, giving me a good sense of what students are responding to. It hasn't worked as well in graduate classes, and perhaps that's a difference in the age of students or the frequency of classes.  But this semester, students' blogging has revealed where students are making connections I was hoping they'd make, where they are making additional connections that delight me, and where I've fallen through in setting up themes of the course.

I set up the first half of the course to undercut the technology-as-progress narrative most students brought into the course. Misa's conceit is that the uses of technology has varied among wealth-producing and wealth-consuming eras and places. But since Misa's first chapter focuses on Leonardo da Vinci, that gave me an avenue to ask questions about Renaissance art. As my friend and colleague Greg McColm reminds me, the cathedral in Florence is an opening to all sorts of topics, from winch technology to blueprints to ... well, the use of perspective in art, given the history of the cathedral dome (with Filippo Brunelleschi, who helped propagate ideas about perspective drawing).

In addition to readings and a few other matters, I made students try their hand at technical drawings of ordinary objects (one student had a mousetrap; I couldn't resist!) and then at perspective drawing, and they had to find a description of how European art acquired perspective. The majority of students found descriptions with a progress narrative. I noted the fact, and over the next month we talked about Misa's central question each chapter (was the technology in question wealth-producing or -consuming?). No connections made back to perspective drawings and the overarching narrative.

So we began reading some cyberpunk as a break between nonfiction books, and we had the completely expected discussion about the genre's being dystopian. Then several students complained that it was disorienting. Okay, I said, time to bring European art back into it (after making a few connections with some of the Misa chapters), and I brought out Paul Cezanne's Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses, a painting with multiple perspectives. The students were largely silent while I showed how Cezanne had different vanishing points for different parts of the painting, let alone the non-perspective way of showing depth in the apples themselves. Disorienting, I asked? Er, a little bit, came the general response, but we're familiar with it... though we're sure that it was considered odd at the time!  (That response was expected, though I should have pushed the parallel to the complaints about cyberpunk; are we disoriented whenever we're unfamiliar with a genre's conventions?)

After showing the class how subsequent artists took Cezanne as a springboard for breaking away from perspective, I asked the question I'd been waiting to spring on the class since the first day:

So if early 20th century painters broke away from perspective, why is the Renaissance use of perspective drawings considered progress?

There was a little bit of discussion on that, but not much. So I left class, wondering if I'd see any blogs mentioning it.

It's been several weeks, and not a peep. That part of the course design has now officially flopped. Other things have gone well, fortunately, and the blog entries show that disparate threads in the course are coming together for a number of students. I think I've convinced students that narratives of progress are limited, including with technology (that's a main argument in Nye's book), and while I wish I had nailed the perspective-drawing-progress item, you don't get everything.

Social annotation for teaching how to read difficult material

A few days ago, I raved about the possibilities of social annotation. What I barely touched were the teaching purposes of social annotation. Let me provide an example from my masters course in social foundations of education. Below is the root to a discussion thread over the past week on the Seattle and Louisville desegregation cases that the Supreme Court ruled on this spring. The following contains my comments to students, links to the opinions that have my annotations (hold your cursor over the underlined passages to see the annotations), and a few starting questions.

Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007) was as fragmented as the Gratz and Grutter cases. Below are links to the annotated pages of the opinions.

• Syllabus
• Plurality opinion (Roberts)
• Thomas concurrence
• Kennedy concurrence
• Stevens dissent
• Breyer dissent

Roberts's opinion is called a plurality because a majority of justices agreed to the decision but only four agreed (Roberts and three others) agreed on the same reasoning; Kennedy agreed with the decision but for his own reasons. This is a particularly difficult set of opinions to read -- in this case, it is Breyer's dissent that is long-winded (not Thomas's), and then the plurality opinion and the concurrences both refer to the dissent.

A few questions:

• Does this case shut the door on voluntary desegregation? If not, what other options are available?
• Regardless of whether there are options available in the future, the decision will make districts think three or four times before including racial classifications in formal plans to create more diversity in schools. Is that a good or bad outcome?

In my during-semester survey, a few students offered the following comments about Diigo when asked what had helped them learn in the course:

• The Diigo annotation technology has made reading the court cases far more enriching. It as though you are in the room while I am reading the cases.... I wish there were a way you could do the same for all the other readings.
• It really helps to bring clarity to the court cases by reading your comments. I would be confu[s]ed on some judgements or miss important points without the comments. It is the next best thing than [to] sitting in a lecture and discussing interpretations.

Let me be honest: providing this annotation requires a lot of time, and that is time sucked away from other activities (being more proactive on the discussion board, or creating more formal presentations). But I know from prior experience that some readings such as court opinions desperately require some assistance for students, and I was gratified to have my judgment confirmed by students who felt the effort helped them.

Social annotation and the marketplace of ideas

David Rothman has a wonderful idea from the growth of social annotation tools and the development of an open e-book format:

How long until savvy writers pester publishers to let them do interactive e-books? -- where readers' comments can appear in relevant places in the texts or elsewhere in the books. Imagine the possibilities for smart nonfiction writers and those in dream-with-me genres like romance fiction.

I am experimenting this semester with using Diigo to show students in one course my annotations on Supreme Court desegregation opinions. I've been able to provide translations of legal terms (certiorari, de jure, de facto, etc.), tell students where they can skip (e.g., issues of standing, which are tangential to the topics at hand for the course), what passages to read in depth, and some questions to think about specific passages.

There is already BookGlutton's idea for Unbound Reader, based on the epub standard. For those wondering what the One Laptop Per Child initiative is for, imagine an eight-year-old reading a copy of a story and seeing and replying to the comments of other eight-year-olds around the world on the same passage. 

For those who wonder about the monetization of this -- how can anyone make money off free books? -- Rothman has an obvious answer:

A community approach is worthwhile in itself, but along the way would reduce losses to piracy. You're less likely to steal from someone whom you and your friends respect. What's more, forum participation could be among the rewards for those who paid voluntarily for books distributed under Creative Commons licenses.

I suspect that savvy musicians think of mp3-sharing in similar ways, and if we're headed back to the days when vinyl records were the a way to get musicians concert gigs, maybe free books are a way to draw people into other ways to remunerate authors. For those in genre fields (romance, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, etc.), midlist authors might find that approach enormously attractive. And those of us in academe? There are some obvious possibilities that appeal to me to provide access to reading but some possibility for revenues where appropriate, such as books that are free online but that carry a Creative Commons license requiring a "binding license" fee, so anyone can read a book but where publishers or copy shops need to pay to distribute bound copies. This idea adds to that imaginary repertoire.

As Rothman notes, this potential requires a standard for annotation to be folded into the next generation of epub standards.

Roy Rosenzweig

T. Mills Kelly has the best remembrance of Roy Rosenzweig today. Rosenzweig was a pioneer in digital history who began the Center for History and New Media (see the original page). (Hat tip.)

I (heart) The Little Professor

Why I love Miriam Burstein's The Little Professor blog: 

If you sow dragon's teeth in order to reap soldiers, what do you reap after sowing apostrophes? Editors, maybe?

I needed that, on a day of traveling.

Caribbean Frost

In the honors class I'm teaching, I'm trying some without-a-net activities each week to connect technology with social and cultural history. One recent week, I asked students to describe the aesthetics of everyday objects. In a plurality of cases, students discussed the commercial choices involved in consumer-product design--i.e., that the aesthetics are shaped as part of product marketing. (Anyone who has seen Monty Python's Michaelangelo sketch can wonder if perhaps that dynamic holds true in the creation of highbrow culture as well, if in a personal relationship with patrons.)

One of my students chose to examine as one of her two objects a bottle of blue-green nail polish and discovered that its official name is Caribbean Frost (and you can see the colors at Wet n Wild's website, if you wish to confirm this oxymoron). I live in Tampa, north of the Caribbean. It's mid-October, and the high today will be around 90 F. Who do they think they're kidding?

These weekly adventures are worth a small portion of the semester grade, but I hope they're engaging for students, and in some cases students have made some interesting connections. None yet, though, between nail polish and Leonardo da Vinci (where we started the course).

Bloggy bon mots

First, from Kevin Carey:

[W]e've reached the point where people are actually arguing, with a straight face, that the real crisis in American education is the shameful neglect--the injustice--of how we educate smart white men.

Next, from Miriam Burstein (aka The Little Professor):

• Number of leftover bite-sized chocolate cupcakes from yesterday's department picnic consumed this afternoon: 2
• Number of calories in those cupcakes, thanks to the Laws of Academic Calories: 0
• Number of books involving cannibalism on the honors comp syllabus: 3

Update: Third, from profgrrrrl:

I miss primal scream -- only my time to scream is no longer the end of the semester. It's the beginning. So:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarggggggggh!!!!!!!!

My accomplishments are far less witty. In the last few days I have dropped one child off at school, finished my syllabi, oriented one online masters class, taught an in-person undergraduate class, procrastinated planning Wednesday's advanced graduate class, picked the other child up from school, come home, helped clean up after a bearded dragon, and eaten chocolate. I am sure I have done other things, and these are all important, but right now I have no capacity for the angry elegance of Carey, Burstein's eye for irony, or profgrrrrl's refreshing honesty [updated].

Democracy, justice, and teaching

There's been a fascinating discussion developing in response to Aaron Schutz's review of Jeannie Oakes and John Rogers's Learning Power: Organizing for Education and Justice (2006). Sometimes comment threads develop in a few hours. This one is still growing after a few months.

Why vocabulary makes a difference

Notes on student misunderstandings of vocabulary, and how that affects performance:

• citation vs. quotation. One is acknowledging one's sources, and the other is using exact passages and making those passages typographically distinct. Some students misunderstood my advice to cite several sources and turned in drafts where more than half of the words were quoted. I think I cleared that one up... and fortunately, one student was honest enough to explain the misunderstanding.
• argue vs. agree. I think one paper has used argue when agree was meant in the following sentence:  I want to argue with Mr. Quieto about his point that one dropout is too many.

There is nothing for a student to be ashamed of when she or he doesn't know a word. But there are consequences for not clarifying one's understanding or for misusing words.

For the record, these are notes rather than a response to the batch of papers I'm currently reading. I've already come across a paper with a solution in our simulated case that is entirely original and delightfully so.

Reading... but not what you think

Yes, I was at a local bookstore at midnight, getting two copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But I'm in my office this afternoon, reading student papers. I don't get the Harry Potter until I'm done.

In other news, Jeff Solochek reports correctly that I'm now the representative of the Florida Coalition for Assessment Reform on the Florida DOE's advisory committee looking at the FCAT. I've worked with FCAR co-founder Gloria Pipkin before on a few matters, and I was flattered to receive her request. This is an interesting challenge for me, and Gloria and I took a few steps to make sure that the FCAR board was comfortable with my particular take on accountability.

There are a few things that Solochek didn't get correctly. I don't think of myself as an "FCAT critic" but a critic of the current uses of the FCAT. The conflation of the test with the policy is interesting...

The more serious problem is the way that the Gradebook's thumbnail of my portrait is all fuzzy. You can compare it to the image in the top left corner of this page and see what you think. But I understand the need for thumbnails, and I am here providing a slim, 100-by-100 portrait that should accommodate virtually any blog's storage limits:

(after Simpsonization)

Enough silliness.  Back to reading!

The discussion glow

I left the classroom for a few minutes this evening, after telling students to arrange themselves in small groups, making sure that each group had at least one member who had read each of the two books I had assigned the class (half to Gilberto Conchas's The Color of Success and half to David Tyack's Seeking Common Ground). When I returned, I found one circle, everyone in it. I raised an eyebrow, maybe asked a question, and sat on a table behind one part of the circle, listening to the group take turns describing the two books, raising questions, comparing the perspectives of the authors, making connections to some other readings in the course, and then making connections to their own school memories, the work some of them do in schools, and the experiences others have had as parents.

I said almost nothing for half an hour, until it was time for break. I didn't need to.

It was a wonderful affirmation of the term on the last class. Thanks, guys!

When have you had online "aha" moments reacting to others?

For the first time in five years, my distance-learning course is asynchronous, without a live chat, and this poses an interesting challenge.

Oh, heck, let me be honest: at some level I'm terrified at the prospect of an asynchronous-only class, because my teaching style relies heavily on the timed revelation of material and ideas, commonly in one of the following ways:

• Ge