Category Archives: Teaching

Education Speak

At the college we’ve talking a lot about ability-based teaching and learning. Invariably, this had led to discussion about the diction of education as a matter of practice. What is an educational objective, for example? In the mean time, I’ve been having interesting conversations with students who are beginning to think not in terms of grades but in terms of abilities because of the way I’ve presented evaluations in British Literature and elsewhere, especially in the development of research projects. The core of the ability-based architecture is the articulation of active verbs, such as those modeled by Bloom in the famous taxonomy, which cashes verbs in a cognitive framework. Practically speaking, after observation comes analysis. How does a student learn chemistry? How do they grow into the domain of science? When can a student go beyond identifying relationships to drawing insight.

Here’s an example. On an exam, I asked students to identify a concept and to explain it in a particular context. The context was Romanticism. The concept was metaphor. The question is meant to provide students the opportunity to identify then to connect not to generate interpretation or argument. In working through the question, the student writes about Romanticism and about metaphor and I can guage to what degree the ideas square against the discipline and to what the degree the student is drawing insight from the material. In talking to students about how to improve in their precision, how to evaluate their own work, we get to engage in hardnosed talk about Barbauld, Blake, and Mill.

Spatial Learning

Writing with a hypertext tool is a learning experience in and of itself. I think real learning is captured in the journey: you learn as you go and when you hit a snag, you figure the problem out, connecting what you know to what you don’t, and then entering a room with objects that look but really aren’t familiar. Knowing what a metaphor is is just a beginning. One of my mentors, Rick DeMarinis, wrote in a story that story is a great teacher. This is a complex and nuanced idea.

So it goes with spatial literacies. My son (aged 4) has a ball with video games, and so do I with him. I grew up with games and game-like spaces: tennis, football, Go Fish, and the walk to school. S is growing up with DVD interactivity, the PS2, and a world of manipulatable virtual spaces. His in-game “girl hero” has become a persona. My persona or alter-ego was GI-Joe. Our experiences with play are similar but different.

The video game has allowed him to practice reading with a purpose not just reading “to read.” If he can’t read, he can’t play. They’ve allowed him to critically decode abstract objects, such as icons and buttons. They’ve offered an opportunity to experience, evaluate, and chose between multiple kinds of spatial representation in order to make different decisions. In one game, he must toggle between 3 different representations of the same space–2D top-view, 3D elevation, and 3D 3rd person POV–in order to orient himself to and make decisions about a particular objective in a game. This has generated an interest in mazes and maps, including a card game that “teaches” geography.

Good Models

Good models are a requirement in the development of habitable space. Jeremy Heibert is doing just this at his weblog in regards to learning spaces. He’s definitely delivering in larger ways than I am in my own efforts at a “flexible center” using wordpress as a tool that pulls information into a complex hypertext node with links out and links in. The content management system is influencing my thinking here, but my model doesn’t give the student lots of freedom to mold the space. WebCT Vista is my anti-model, because a “course manager,” while striving to be a learning space, can easily become a rigid tyrant.

I guess the weblog model could indeed evolve into a flexible development space for work, play, demonstration, and thought, but at the moment I’m more worried about the code-side of the machine (maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about this). Additionally, I worry about a concept of accumulation of tools, which is beyond my control. Realistically, someone else is going to make the decision about which eportfolio system will become the standard. My gut tells me I’d rather the student decide how they want to deliver and organize the goods. I go back to the flash or storyspace model. The stage area wants you to think about what to put into it. Flash is a thinking space, as is Storyspace, like boxfuls of Legos.

The Hypertext Habit

In a few Years Sixnut will be pretty heavy into software that tracks and maintains custom general education, course, and program outcomes (i.e., what people can actually do after completing a course of study, like “build a house”). We’re going to be hearing a lot of about outcomes assessment at a national scale in the news with the feds now turning to the charms of national tests. At Sixnut, we’re not thinking about this (well, I’m not at least, I shouldn’t speak for everyone), we’re thinking about hypertext and the need to connect one thing with other things.

eLumen is essentially a metonymic system that depends on physical connections between digital ideas. The genuine link is a relation or association between the data, say a course that links to a specific outcome or skill concept or grouping of learning issues. Understanding the physical relations isn’t all that easy. A nice hypertext habit is good for this, thinking not in terms of a linear sequence, but in terms of the spatial qualities of ideas, data, images, whatever. Moreover, eLumen allows for the visualization of connections across disciplines in such a way that faculty who want their students to demonstrate learning in writing can provide their students institutional credibility in this regard.

Tests

The New York Times reports on this initiative

A higher education commission named by the Bush administration is examining whether standardized testing should be expanded into universities and colleges to prove that students are learning and to allow easier comparisons on quality.

Prove to whom?

We don’t need more tests. We need to open the space and let teachers teach. How about a standardized test for commissioners. Now there’s an idea.

WordPress and Modularity

The design note post below is really about the notion of modularity and connections in new media. A sequence is, of course, a kind of module where A may lead to B or to A.2 if A and B are cogent enough. At Spinning, Susan Gibb is weaving in a circle of modular elements (I’m using modular here to make a point about connections: can’t have a module as a thing to itself), ranging from current pubs to Boethius, as new as anything else to a reader unfamiliar with Theodoric and the Ostrogoths. I persist in the idea that age is illusion in the practical and everyday. This post could turn into one about reading. Reading is also on my mind since at Sixnut we’ll be talking a lot about it over the coming years. At Spinning, there’s a connection between Boethius and Tom Bisell.

Reading as connection, often having nothing to do with books and sentences, but with links, sauces, and dust bunnies.

Design Note

In another area, we’re thinking about conceptualizing different syetems for teaching using current and emergent tools. Here’s a summary. Let’s say that, hypothetically, students and faculty may enter a course in a weblog interface with tags adjusted in sidebars for a variety of things:

1. A list of courses
2. A list of course contents, readily available in whatever form (docs, wmvs, swfs, slides).
3. Links to preassigned research materials
4. Links to a forum (such as bbPress), chat, or other communication tools.
5. And then a list of feeds from the above tools, itemized by a) most recent and b) comments made directly to the student or faculty member since their last session.

(Note that everything here is one click away)

6. Another area could be designated for external feeds from the library, relevant publications, and even other types of communities given the subject matter: newspaper section articles, culture and descipline publications, and portfolios.

(Note, everything is still one click away).

One additional point to make has to do with flexibility. This kind of system might make using information technology a little more friendly for casual users of the system. For those not teaching online or hybrid, the system would be much simpler to use for those who just wanted add a few things for students to use: syllabus, a few articles, whatever.

A lot of this thought comes from James Farmer with other ideas stemming from Jeremy Hiebert.

Literature and the World

This project at The Valve sounds like an interesting series to follow. I don’t know Franco Moretti’s work, but I find the subject interesting.

Given events over the last few months at Tunxis, I find myself growing more and more concerned about literary studies or, more to the context, English Departments, the study of literature being one part of the work. I recall a class discussion when I was a student. A colleague of mine asked the professor if he could write about a particular author. The prof said no because the student wouldn’t be able to find any scholarship on the subject because the author under question was too new. I found this response–now and at the time–rediculous and naive.

But to the point. I’ve never really been interested in the Canon as a thing to take all that seriously, but the professors where I went to school did. The student who had an interest couldn’t pursue it, therefore in the context of the course. Perhaps he would have generated some scholarship if given the chance. But he didn’t have the chance. I can understand a foundational series of studies that introduce students to a tradition–these are the kinds of courses I teach. But what is the breadth of the tradition? Numerous authors, thinkers, and prophets influenced human experience and expression and they should be read. Chaucer, for example. But I have no problem using Bacon in British Lit since his ideas form a trail and a surface that had an impact and form an important topology of questions that keep coming up.

What I’ve seen are potential faculty coming out of English Departments with a Canonical view of the landscape: what I call the English Geek. But landscapes change. If a student wants to focus on Chaucer, that’s fine by me, but what’s the reason to do it? What about the definition of a landscape or “not” defining it at all? Why isn’t Michael Joyce and the “other Joyce” a part of the breadth of experience in upper division courses or in graduate school? What is the breadth of experiencial space in the English Department that can go beyond “culture studies” or “theory”? (I never understood the use of this term in either Composition, literature, or literary criticism.)

I think studies in the English Area should be intensely interdsciplinary. I don’t know if this is part of Moretti’s program–I aim to find out. Conceptually, it should invite digital cameras, scripting, science, religion, and anything else that’s part of the human lifeworld into its metabolism and be flexible enough to grow its boundaries or, to lift a term from physics, its degrees of freedom.

bbpress and tags

Excellently put by Jim Revillini

there’s no doubt about that – tagging is a novel approach to information organization. it’s one of the best systems that the web has adopted and until something better comes along, information systems should make use of it.

. . .

vista’s structure is rigid and hermetically sealed in a proprietary JSP/java applet world. it will die once enough educators rally around the fact that you can’t teach every single course the same way online. the membranes of structure need to be breathable and stretchy – in technology terms: extensible.

vista HAS NO METHOD for organizing ideas. you are right, you could create a better education environment with bbpress and a little training. i think mediawiki might even be a more suitable learning environment, although i’m not sure if there is a tagging extension for it yet. if not, it’s GOT to be in the works.