Susan Gibb sends along this mention of backchanneling and other ongoing computing offshoots from if:book. Two issues that come to mind with these complex adaptive projects are resources and large scale modeling in a learning context. I’m wondering if there’s enough information here on how decisions are made about what sort of sifting is to be done; what sort of interaction may “enhance” a learning environment, and how to think about the obvious clutter.
Interesting and challenging.
We should never accuse WebCT Vista of being fast or sleek. In this system built for education, you may delete files but you cannot move them. What if you have a folder with 50 files? Some of its methods, such as submit, are very slow, and why should I have to click on an extra button to open fairly important tools to organize forums?
“Where would you like to put your Topic?” You have to search for this “place.” Vista doesn’t assume that one would work with categories, thus you must find a button to open a new menu to complete this task. The extra step isn’t the problem. The problem is knowing that “more tools” at the bottom of the screen will open this option up.
In my view Vista is “okay.” But I don’t want “okay.”
The two online and hybrid forays this semester are almost ready to go. Upload, test, fix, then start. It’s been somewhat of a challenge working on these courses. We’re working with a new version of WebCT, which isn’t bad really, and my energy level with the courses went from high in July to low in August, sort of the sprint then the slow, warmdown run to the finish line. (Sorry, dudes, the broken laptop has also slowed down letter writing.)
The hybrid literature will be an interesting set up. Online forums for weekly discussions and a brief in-class meeting to clarify things and to discuss issues that rise up online and in the readings.
I will play a little Post Mortem and read some Mastretta to regenerate some.
My good friend Professor Christina Gotowka emailed me an article by Jeffrey Young from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the results of a survey conducted recently by U of Illinois professor Steve Jones. The article is titled “Professors Give Mixed Reviews of Internet’s Educational Impact.” It’s that kind of a summary article that sort of wants you to go after the original survey (or is it a study?) to get at the real meat. Here’s a snip from the piece:
Browsing library stacks could soon be seen as old-fashioned. Most of the professors surveyed, 83 percent, said they spent less time in the library now than they did before they had Internet access. But professors said that online journals, e-mail lists, and other Internet tools had become critical for keeping up with news and research in their disciplines. Ninety-four percent said they allowed their students to cite Internet sources in their papers.
Sixteen percent of the professors who responded said they had taught at least one online-only course. Of those who had taught online, 43 percent said they thought such courses took more preparation than did face-to-face courses.
Mr. Jones said that the survey suggested differences in technology’s effects on different disciplines, though he said he would like to examine that issue more closely in a future study. “We need to be much more precise at how we deploy” technology tools, he said.
He suggested that college technology leaders offer discipline-specific workshops on how to teach with technology, rather than general workshops for all disciplines. “I think we have some real need for that sort of specificity when it comes to getting technology out there for teaching,” he said.
While the original survey may make lots of sense, Young’s persistent use of terms such as Internet and technology and his selection of quotes don’t serve to illuminate anything of substance. What “technology,” what of the numerous aspects of the Internet are we dealing with here? Students and professors are now using the “Internet” to do lots of school stuff, like “communicate.” Huh? As far as I know, arXiv is alive and cooking with real hardwood charcoal.
Jones’ issue of discipline-specific teaching workshops is something that I would suggest only as a means of helping different disciples understand each other. By the way, what does “getting technology out there for teaching” mean? Out where?
I think that people still misunderstand the nature of teaching tools. There’s a sense that learning and teaching will improve, an idea I’ve never understood. Now that we have the Internet (whatever that means?), the world will just smell better and all the poor folk will have bread to eat. I don’t think that’s the point. If you begin teaching with say PowerPoint, learning changes and people “may” learn new things about sea travel in different ways than they did before.
“Educational impact” can mean lots of things and it can pertain to chalk and blackboards, which are technologies. Does a Flash presentation help people retain the information better than a lecture? Is a lecture still better when you’re also trying to teach people to listen? A forum discussion may be a piece of the larger pie of a course on literature. But we still have to see that one piece in the context of the larger dynamic of the learning process. And a good piece of chalk is still a part of that.
Congrats to our good friend Christopher Coonce-Ewing for passing the test. Soon he’ll be in the classroom having lots of fun.
In an online course, no matter how complex, material should be presented in such a way that the content and the experience of that content is augmented by the tech. Susan Gibb has this to say about her experience
Honestly, I wish I could give you the ID and password to show you how impossible these lectures are to listen to and learn anything from because of the poor quality audio. The text notes follow the lecture slides, but much of the audio explanation of the outline format is necessary to understand what is being presented. For example, the text may pose a question, but the answer is only in the audio portion, and the static makes it extremely annoying–I’m talking hours of lectures here–to listen to it all.
If this is the case, then I’d say she should get her money back, but then again, if the course is required, what is one to do: wait another semester, delay what may or may not be needed to close the degree? The again, even if she’s successful, what good use will the content be put through given the context. So much of education is like this: motions, degree plans, rather than important consideration of the overall importance of the parts.
Another semester has closed. The narrative has found resolution. For me it’s always interesting the way things happen. Number one, students always surprise me. It’s always a mistake to judge early. “These students can’t write, read, or think their way out of a sitcom.” No, they typically can, if they do the work and take it seriously. Some do rise, some will have to try again.
I learned early that the best education is about teaching people to think for themselves, to face problems with confidence, and to act with self-possession and to initiate action deserving of respect. This is why all exams in British Lit are comprehensive: we learn Mill by aiming at Wollstonecraft; we draw from the Green Knight for insight into Paradise Lost. Yet, one of the attitudes I saw a lot of this semester had to do with students putting off for tomorrow what they could do today. I’ll get to “that” when I get to the four year, I hear them thinking. I teach at a community college. Problem is the courses I and my colleagues teach transfer to the four year school. Hence they are “university” courses. They are not preparatory for university; they’re preparatory for deeper study into similar content areas, the addressing of which will have to come at another institution. One of the unstated objectives of British Literature and Creative Writing is to maintain the integrity of the content. That’s one of my jobs. I want students not to “like” Eliot but to respect the work. I don’t want people to take my word for it, to trust in what I think is good description. So we read lots of examples and try to figure out what makes the description tick. Then we write self-generated work and hope it “exceeds” the examples. Do we “exceed”? Let’s keep trying is what I say. “As good” is a static ethic. I’ve seen too many students succeed to begin playing it safe.
I’m now what would be considered a “seasoned” teacher. I’ve been teaching for over 12 years, at three institutions. When I was in school I learned quick what I didn’t want to do for a living. I had the typical jobs: hotel dishwasher, factory worker, and others. I cleaned out the “professional’s” waste basket. Fine. But the image of this work, from my own perspective, gave me enough ambition to work through the trigonometry, an area of math that I still love, but didn’t then consider my bag. There were other bags, but cosine still made enough of an impact to generate topics of conversation over beer. I entered school as a computer science major but found the study confining at the time. I loved to write, so I figured I could always write about the science, and so English was a good path. Nobody told me that I had to write just about Wordsworth. Dr. Wren and others claimed that I acted like a “dedicated generalist.” I enjoy history, science, mathematics, programming, art, and games. Sounds like new media. “Dedicated generalist” sounded good and “is good.”
I know that competence matters, and so do a lot of the students at Tunxis or anywhere else. That’s what the Eastgate talk for the last week has been about. Some grades are about competence; others are about averages: A to start finished with D averages as pass, but what does it mean, really?. Can a student do the work? Do they do the work at the level of excellence. Part of the meaning of this word has to do with royalty, but we mean it in the sense of “to rise.” An excellent friend of mine, a teacher in the CC system of El Paso Texas once told me that “to want to be like” is an ethic of mediocrity, and I buy that as an exemplar worldview. Teachers have to think about “things that rise.” Do we have to be excellent? Of course not. But do we lose anything by doing the work, the reading, and completing what we started? No. Some of the students I’ve seen this semester actually worked hard at avoiding the work or concentrating on other things yet expecting to know what I asked them to consider on their own with some guidance from me. If they’d put the same amount of effort into completion and risk, they would’ve done just fine. Still others weren’t in the right place to complete because they had import things pressing against them, family matters, personal adjustments which competed for their attention. That’s fine too. But a student can’t expect an honest evaluation under duress. An honest evaluation can only come after honest attempts at learning what hadn’t been known or understood, which is always exciting.
Competency isn’t politics. But politics can strive to look like it. Currently, the officials are trying to close down military bases in Connecticut. They’ll make it sound like a reasoned decision, that it’ll save money. Easy waste is easier wasted. We just killed a madman in Connecticut knowing full well that he didn’t know a lot about life to give a damn either way. We’re not very good, still, at managing the proportions at large scales, which may be what the future looks like to some. It’s a continual struggle to know want from need.
Anyway, here’s what I learned this semester:
1. The directions are important. Students who followed them did better than those who didn’t or didn’t bother to try. (Note: following directions is not a measure of competence or of individuality in and of itself. I.e., you can be cool and edgy and still know when the deadlines are. There’s just something silly about not being able cite a source or turn in readable copy. I like as much edge as the next guy, but edge still needs texture and nuance.) I have lots of directions for online students. One of them is to submit papers through email with names and paper # in the file name. The majority of the students ignored this direction even after multiple reminders. Believe it or not, those who got it down were better at organization, authority, focus, and risk. To conform to ActionScript 2.0 I have to note my datatypes just like everyone else.
var sSoThere:String = “Okay, okay!â€;
trace(sSoThere);
2. Organization really does work. Those people who kept to a semblance of organization knew where to go to look up the answer to a question. Good notes, systemic structures, and attention to details made for a marked improvement in finished work.
John Timmons has put out the call for our Interactive Fiction course this summer so for those of you who’d like to join us it’ll be Wednesday nights full of TADS, lots and lots of semi colons, maze metaphors, simulation talk, and considerations of audience. I’m looking forward to it.
Neha? Allison?
Susan Gibb has nice things to say here. She is a wonder and is too kind.
Just the other day we had a nice conversation about CSS, PHP, and the future of otto. We have some interesting ideas in the works for the litmag, the majority of the work being done by Susan, including the leg work to get the thing out into the “eye.” I thought the first issue was a smash; I especially liked the ring binder and think we should consider some handwoven collectors issues for next time. But for this we may need freelance weavers. Anyway, the idea is to play with otto as a Borgesian work. To read otto one might have to seek a resolution in Hartford, perhaps by looking for that slip of paper under a board near Colt Building.
otto as Not otto.
Or perhaps otto as some other otto. otto as overloaded function. Case 1 to case . . .
So, here’s to Susan Gibb.
Fun times today. A crew of us from Sixnut U went up to UMASS Amherst for a conference on assessment. Terrell, Dwyer, England, Fierro, Brown, and myself. Fierro and Brown followed the historians to their area and the rest of us stayed with English. Minutes after our conclave began its portion, Terrell, Dwyer, England and I departed, one by one so as not to raise the demons of decorum. Luckily we were joined by Mary Ann Nunn of CCSU’s English Department and we sat in the strange Campus Center’s sitting area (the entire building seems as if it should crumblel, supported as it is by a few pillars and plinth supports: imagine an elephant standing on tooth picks) and got down to the work that we felt should have been the priority of the conference: getting down to the details of assessing specific items in an English curriculum given the variety of constraining forces that work against us: such as time, student preparedness, paper work, and other resource issues. We needed real answers, not what what we met. We were a little taken back by the subjects that came up (been there done that) and where the conversations in the group seemed to want to go (problem: been there done that). Nothing seemed to fit with what we needed to get done. I think we got some excellent work done anyway.
What is the problem with assessment? First, it’s often missunderstood. There are simple issues. Define an area of competency, either within a course or in a program, and create a fair means to assess the competency and to assess the means of teaching it. Competency here is a jargon term. Really, it’s all about giving students the opportunity to learn a skill and then figuring whether they can do the work. For example, in Creative Writing, one of the outcomes of the course is for students to show that they can write not just dialogue but “compelling” dialogue. Anyone can write dialogue, “Hey, dude, let’s go ‘uptown.'” “Okay,” but students in a creative writing course should be able to demonstrate an understanding of the difference between flat dialogue and the power of indirect reference and how such indirection deepens the element of character for the audience’s experience of a story. “I hear uptown’s dark, unfriendly; it drips.” “Depends how hard we hit it, squeeze it.”
The outcome is important. Next thing is to come up with a means of measuring different levels of the competency, such as excellence, competence, or null. Typically, this is done with standards. My comp students will know that this is necessary because all assessment requires the use of an evaluative claim, hence the application of qualitiative and quantitive standards (measures) of evaluation. All grades are arguments. But I don’t like grades. I like to evaluate a course’s outcomes and to divide credits by which standards were met and which need work; hence I will often have mutiple grades on a student paper in comp, measuring grammar, the focus of the paper, the presentation, the quality of the research and more. But this method must be cheated in order to meet the obligations of a transcript. I’d like to see a day were students can keep working on an area that needs strengthening because the reality of learning is that even in a comp course, a student may indeed be able to write a thesis but can’t show that they “get” analysis.
More difficult issues have to do with the variety of work students and faculty do at a college and university, assessment being one issue in a complex system and stream. Every program has critical components, different ways of measuring, and different audiences; they have different visions of the future and the present. In addition, institutions often have the will but not the resources to both establish and then carry through with the objectives. The teaching alone is difficult, intense work. Having to shift the priorities of complex systems, which is what academic departments are, is demanding as well. Axes don’t cut ideas. At Sixnut, we work hard at providing good stuff to the student, we worry about maintaining the integrity of subject matter, and we pay attention to the world because we’re a part of it.
Assessment discussion, it seems to me, can get people talking about what matters; but it can also become a stale expression of mechanical reflex and fad. Can mass assessment be worked smoothly in a functioning academic department? The answer is in the detials. What matters in education is the course, the student, and the integrity and dignity of discplined approaches to problem solving.