the art of the search

A student emailed me today because, OMG, she had spent, like, 3 HOURS looking for a particular piece of information required for her last paper. (Due tonight, naturally.) And she has to work tonight, and can she turn the paper in tomorrow, etc etc. The usual last-minute drama.

(Not for nothing, this is the same student who has already emailed to say that she "needs" at least a B to get a particular internship she has applied for. I resisted the temptation to be snarky and respond that, well, then she "needed" to do ALL the work and "needed" to do at least B level work throughout.)

It took me less than 10 minutes online to find the information she needed. And this isn't the first request of this sort I've gotten - always with the same results on my part. Which made me wonder: is there any sort of systematic instruction for high school or college students in effective use of Internet resources? The older generation of the professoriate tends to sniff and harumph at the Internet and its information. Yet, there is tremendous value there, and even greater value in knowing how to evaluate the reliability of various sites. I wonder if our nostalgia for print and our snobbery about refereed work blinds us to what can usefully and practically be taught, in order to prepare our students for the Information Age.

online learning: a reflection

Classes end tomorrow, and then there is some catch-up grading, and then the posting of final grades.

Online teaching requires a LOT less mental energy than classroom teaching. Once you've prepped the course, you've already developed your expectations about what students will take away from any given reading or assignment. You might make adjustments if student work is not what you expect, but the basic framework is there.

For me, less mental energy means less involvement. During the regular school year, I think about my courses and my students all the time. In the online environment, I mostly think about students only when I am reading their work and figuring out how not to sound snarky in my comments. There's a lot less of ME in all of it - I've already done the interesting work of choosing subject matter and readings and making the assignments. Now it's basically just the assessment of student learning. The involvement in learning that is a normal part of the classroom doesn't really exist online - there is very little access to the "aha" moments that I really treasure in the classroom.

For me, as for the students, less involvement means more freedom, consistent with the "in your pajamas" claim of online education. I did feel tethered to the Internet in some respects; I checked my mail and the discussion boards about 3x every day most days, perhaps less on the weekends, and I was really cross when we were away and unexpectedly couldn't have Internet access (which turned out not to matter in the least). (My students generally did not post on the weekends, up until the last couple of hours on Sunday nights when things were due.)

With everyone only writing, not talking, the "classroom" dynamic is very different. Although I feel readers can know me through my writing, I think that students don't have the same facility or the same nuance when they write, so that it's much harder for me to know them. For a lot of my students, writing in standard English is either not a priority or not a skill they possess. (That's weird too: I proof EVERYTHING I post online multiple times; I reread everything for clarity; I look critically for unintentionally loaded words and replace them.)

If 80% of human communication is non-verbal (dependent on cues received in the face-to-face environment) one can imagine how much is foregone in online education. Yeah. Maybe that last sentence is a summary of my experience the past 4.5 weeks.

Other observations:
1. I do not yet have a good set of strategies for managing discussion. Because I want students to "converse" with one another, I am loathe to jump in too often and insert my opinion. Yet, if I wait until after the deadline for posting has passed, I am afraid that my comments become irrelevant. Do they ever read all the words I've posted this month? (Heh, sort of like this here blog...)

2. The discussion board is a really artificial "conversation." What would make it more "real"?

3. I do agree that online ed requires students to be more self-directed, and more in charge of what they learn, since there is no one at the front of the room lecturing at them or telling them what they need to know, or explaining the tough stuff. However, this alone doesn't mean that more, or better, education is going on. Do students have the tools to learn on their own? Are they effective researchers, paraphrasers, reasoners, thinkers? There is potential here for a new paradigm of learning, but no scaffolding to allow it to be built.

I feel, therefore I think

Today I graded (oh, how I graded!) a variety of discussion board posts, blogs, and assignments for my online course. The common thread was an inability to present and then support with evidence a rational opinion. Instead I got the same tired lame "feelings" about how the world is or should be. One gem (when asked for a rationale for statehood of a nation of one's choice) envisioned a utopian Gaza Strip, complete with women's freedom to wear whatever they wanted, a new Gaza-language, and immigration from all over the world from oppressed peoples. As if Gaza does not have enough problems already!

My sister, in fourth grade, teaches the argument-plus-three-pieces-of-evidence. Evidently this is something that needs to be reconstituted for 13th grade.

The half-blood prince

I've been visiting my in-laws, but that's no excuse for not posting, since they FINALLY have internet. (Ah, the 90s, what a marvelous decade.)

We all saw the Harry Potter movie on Friday, and it was most enjoyable. That doesn't stop me from having critical "issues" though:

1) the characters seemed flat and shadowy, merely sketched-out, so much LESS than their personality-driven selves in earlier films;
2) the whole adolescent crush/romance thing reads as a weird distraction. Is this a teen film about romance, or an adventure/magic story? The film doesn't do a good job of integrating both.
3) I missed a compelling, forward-driving goal or narrative impulse here. The story arc isn't much of an arc.
4) The climax (no spoilers here!) is not really played for what it could be, and the film suffers dramatically because of that.
5) Revelation of what the title means seems thrown-off, a bit of exposition just to clear up all the stray bits. In fact, I still don't understand the implications.

Apparently, I never read this particular volume of the series. My SIL says it has a LOT that didn't appear in the film, so perhaps I will read it in August.

August! One small month of summer remains! I must make it COUNT!

curiosity and initiative in students, with a side order of pride

Argh, yesterday's post apparently got filed in the ether. I sort of remember clicking on the publish key, but maybe I closed IE too soon thereafter?

What has happened in my online class (it happens in the regular classroom too but for some reason (less contact overall, probably) it's more noticeable (and annoying) online) is that students who don't know how to do a thing I have asked them to do simply don't do it. I ask them to submit a single file but they don't know how to cut and paste things: they submit 3 files. I ask for a Word file as an attachment but they are using macs and don't know how to Save As a word file: they dump all their work into the body of the email, with crazy-sloppy formatting. Or they are using a different program and submit whatever file format their program defaults to. (Which reminds me of a possible Curmudgeon Girl post on MS Works: wtf?)

This happens with more substantive matters too, like reading a text and not knowing what the words mean, but not looking them up. When I tell them college readers LOOK UP words they don't know - it's part of reading - they just shrug and look vacant.

I think that college-age students are more proactive about other aspects of their lives (let's hope) but it's so weird to me that they have so little curiosity about HOW to do things and so little desire to do them as expected. This is reflected in classroom behavior too: very passive, almost never any questions about content, just about "what do we have to know about this for the test? How long does our paper have to be?" etc.

Some educators take the position that we aren't making the content relevant enough, so that it becomes just a pointless memorize-and-forget exercise for students. I appreciate that, and I've gradually modified the content of my courses to try to reflect issues and questions that I think students should be interested in. Nevertheless, I am leery of the position that student inclinations about relevance should govern content. Their worlds seem very narrow to me and I think it is part of my job to open up the doors and windows and let some new ideas in.

Textbooks: don't even get me started

I am still trying to decide between my usual textbook or none at all for Human Geography (I've taught it twice just with readings, the first time poorly, this summer more successfully - but it is like working without a net); and between 2 textbooks (have used neither) for Economic Geography. The old EG textbook SUCKS, so booorrrrrring.

Book orders were due back in April. I do love the non-accountability of being a professor.

I think I should just flip a coin and place the order(s) and see how it works out. The students mostly don't read them anyways, so I am investing a lot of mental and emotional energy in a decision that has limited impact.

student-centered education versus consumer-centered education

Online ed is a real winner for college administrations: lots of dough rolling in; reduced expenditures on physical plant; trend towards adjunct faculty, who have neither the clout, nor the time, nor the emotional connection to the institution to protest being abused; no pesky in-person students - thus no on-campus drinking, violence, or vandalism.

Adminstrators can tout the convenience: no commuting time! No parking hassles! Do schoolwork when and where you want! In your pajamas!

There is little if any discussion of the pedagogical benefits of online education: it's all about the consumer convenience. As if education were a 6-pack of soda, made available when and where you might be inclined to desire it. As if education were just another errand in a busy day: drop the kids at daycare; hurry to the office; mail some letters at the post office; do some online learning.

I am old-fashioned but this to me devalues higher education. (Thus I wonder about Prez Obama's plan to increase the number of students in college; do we really need to do more of this low-level type of "higher" education?)

We collectively oversell the convenience, but surely we undersell the commitment and self-discipline and TIME that it takes to do well in what is essentially self-directed learning. I think students are allowed to form the idea that if they check in a couple of times a week, do some reading, and write a few paragraphs here and there, then they have done the work of a full-credit, in-the-classroom course.

(Rude awakening for my current students, although they have not complained.)

the student's annotated bibliography

Not that we even HAVE a research methods course in our department, but if we did, and if I were asked to teach it, this article would probably be useful:

"Scaffolding and reflection in course-integrated library instruction" by Bordonaro, Karen; Richardson, Gillian in Journal of Academic Librarianship; 30 (5) Sep 2004, pp.391-401.

The idea is to require students to keep a research journal, which is a sort of bloggy (thus chronological) annotated bibliography. I required annotated bibliographies last fall and got lists of weblinks from the more conscientious students (NOT annotated) and NOTHING from the others. It was worth only 10% of the paper, as I recall.

I don't do a lot with research methods, and I probably should, even in the intro courses.

curmudgeon girl and her fantastical electronics

I have, at various times, imagined some useful electronic devices:

1.The one that, when pointed at some jerk's boombox on the subway, really does cause the boombox to boom, exploding all over the jerk and then settling into plastic fragments of silence after a gentle rain of applause from the other passengers.

2.The one that, when pointed at some idiot driver on his/her cell phone, would terminate the call. (The deluxe model would render the cell phone permanently unusable.)

3.The one that, when pointed at some slacker student's cell phone while they were secretly texting in class, would cause the phone to terminate the texting and then play a silly song like the Chicken Dance. There would be no way for them to silence it, and I would make them stand up in front of the entire class and do the dance.

See? Electronics COULD be our friends! Bwah-hah-hah!!!!

ramping it up on the writing front

We had the "kickoff meeting" with the publishers today for the textbook project I am working on with a colleague.

It's exciting! My favorite part of a project is looking at the single sheet of paper that outlines with great clarity all the integrated parts that will come together seamlessly just according to the schedule. (Ah, if life imitated my dreams!)

Also, due in part to one of the academic blogs I often read, I've been thinking about a book proposal for my dissertation. I had originally been against the idea (so sick and tired of the topic!) but I am reconsidering, and I wish (oh, how I wish) that I had been more open to this at my defense, as I most certainly would have gotten a bunch of useful advice about how to proceed.

I would want to compare the work I've done on communist heritage tourism with the same phenomenon in other places. I figure I could brush up on my German (already far superior to my Polish language skills) and go to Berlin next summer with my startup money! Then maybe the Czech Republic thereafter; I have to think about that.

It's been good to be away from the dissertation research for 7 months. But looking over some of the text, I am sort of anxious to be back in it. (Which is a gift from the universe; articles MUST be written and submitted this summer!)

lost threads

I have a scribbled post-it note here for blogging that says "eco-ridicule" but alas I have no idea what I meant when I wrote that two days ago.

There is a week available to "cover" political geography in my online class. I am thinking about working through some basic concepts, sketching various historical conceptions of geopolitical reality (the empire, colonization, the nation-state) and then spending some time on the geographical dimensions of current conflicts. One student is interested in North Korea; another is in the Army so has definite opinions about Iraq and Afghanistan.

I, of course, am still lost in a Cold War fog. I read recently that Mackinder's 'heartland' concept was making a comeback, about 100 years after its birth.

community character? How define? Legal to enforce?

Someone in our town is proposing to rip down a single-story office/light industrial building in our downtown and build a suburban-style cul-de-sac instead. The existing building is no great shakes, but I find the light-bulb style proposed roadway (50-foot right-of-way; 120-ft diameter of asphalt at the bulb, just for 3-4 house lots) just such an aesthetic shocker - so out of scale and character with the traditional downtown street grid - that I wonder what arguments can be made to stop it - or at least build it differently.

Land use law in the US affords little scope for fitting developments to their particular circumstances. Our town could have adopted a different set of regulations for areas like downtown (this is what the neo-traditional planning codes are all about) but we haven't. So we get one-size-fits-all regulations, in which applications MUST be approved, because what is required for a 1000-lot subdivision out in the countryside is the same as what is required for a 3-lot, one-acre property smack in the middle of land that's been developed for the last 300 years.

The hearing for this sucker is next month. I'll be interested to see if anyone shares my views on this.

the value of time off-grid?

In 1988, I went on a camping trip to Isle Royale, in Lake Superior. We got dropped off by the ferry at one end of the island, and the ferry picked us up at the other end, 35 miles distant. We saw maybe 3 other parties of 2-3 people in our 7-day jaunt. I thought there would be lots of time in the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other routine for sustained contemplation of my life, my goals, and my path. In reality, I looked at scenery; I thought about how hot and achey I was; I slapped at bugs; I dreamed of my next meal: and there was very little contemplation of the ethereal in favor of the material.

(To this day I don't eat Rycrisp, or drink Wyler's powered drink mixes, because of how much of a staple those items were on this trip and how very tired of them we became.)

Yesterday, I was out of town and without Internet for about 24 hours, and hoo-boy did it make me twitchy. I hear a lot about the value of shutting out all that electronic noise, but really, I think I thrive on it. It feeds me and stimulates my mind. I need that: I don't achieve much without it. No, that doesn't make me a digi native (too old; and I prefer the term digital SAVAGE (thanks, B)) but there is something au courant about the constant stream of information (and most importantly what we make of it) that defines this time.

on not bowling alone - Fourth of July issue

Last night, as dusk fell, I sat alone on the front stairs for a bit and listened to the sounds of my neighborhood celebrating - people laughing; kids shouting; bottles clinking; fireworks popping or booming; fighter jets screaming through the sky. You could just sense the contentment and happiness.

Having good weather after about a month of rain of course contributed to the sense of well-being. But I like to think it was something more - a feeling of solidarity and community in celebrating our nation's birthday.

We don't get much explicit sense of this, which explains Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone. But there are flashes of it, and they are worth noting. (Even the crab-master who whined in the comments on my other blog that if our town REALLY wanted to raise some money, they'd be ticketing all the owners of the illegal fireworks going off in his neighborhood is building community, in his own curmudgeonly way.)

The Evolution of God...

...is a new book by Robert Wright that is getting excellent reviews. It's a sort of cultural history of the idea of God. (In a similar vein, my students will be writing a (very) short cultural history of the idea of nature week after next. Good fun.)

Wright's book is an intimidating 567 pp so I don't know if I'll tackle it, but the idea of reflecting the idea of God through the dominant culture is an intriguing one.

Curmudgeon Girl asks...

...since when did it become ok for service industry people (pumping your gas - and yes, the RP is too delicate a flower to do it herself - serving your takeout coffee, ringing up your groceries) to text or chat on their cell phones WHILE THEY ARE HELPING YOU? And then you are a bee-atch if you return to the counter because the coffee is all wrong?? Or if you sigh loudly when the cell phone gas station dude takes 2x as long to pump the gas because he only has one free hand?

What, I ask you, is this world coming to??