Author: Lisa M Lane

As you may know if you follow me, I am edging closer to a methodology based on the self-assessment for student work. There are a number of reasons for this. This post will focus on just one: I am concerned about the increasing dependency on the instructor, especially in online classes. As students have adjusted to learning in online environments, as they become more comfortable with the technology, I’ve seen the reverse of what I anticipated. While I expected increased familiarity with learning technologies to increase self-direction, it has instead increased communication with the instructor in a manner designed to, shall we say, selectively individualize a student’s experience.

While I am sympathetic to the ongoing need to experience contact with the instructor on an individual level, I am less enthusiastic about answering multiple messages and emails asking for a repetition of feedback I’ve already given through multiple means, both individual and class-wide. There seems to be difficulty applying public or general feedback to ones own work, even when that feedback (like a rubric) is attached to an individual assignment. It is easier to just contact the instructor and ask, “why did I get this grade?”.

For those of us who provide extensive examples, clear directions, detailed rubrics, and continual feedback to the entire class, this insistence on individual comments which (most of the time) simply repeat what’s been already provided, takes up valuable time that is better spent interacting about the subject matter and the discipline.

In my syllabus, I have a list of expectations, which include:

Students should respond to guidance from the instructor, learn from full-group (rather than individual) feedback, and get help from the Help page and college resources as needed.

The ability to apply generalized feedback to ones own work is an important life skill, and yet I often succumb to the quick email or message response. This is because it is easier (and seems nicer) for me to just say, “oh, you just need to cite correctly as noted in the instructions” or “be sure to use only primary sources” than to encourage their independence in a helpful way. I never want to be the type of prof who barks, “read the syllabus!” Providing the information and pointing to it is one way to encourage some independence, I suppose, but it’s still telling, directing, prescribing. I want a slightly different tone.

So today I got a message:

Hello Professor, I do not understand what I am doing wrong on the essay prompts. Can you help me?

Normally I’d go look again at the student’s assignment and my rubric, and answer specifically. But this time, I wrote back:

Sure! First, take a look at the rubric, to see the areas that need improvement.

Then, take a look at the list in my Announcement – do any of those items apply? If so, how might you fix it?

Then, take a look at the work of your colleagues (especially those I put a “Like” on) – notice any differences from your own work.

Then, go to the Help page and look at the samples.

Let me know what you think as you compare your Writing Assignment, and what ideas you might have for what to do for the Final Essay. Happy to provide feedback!

Certainly there is a chance this will be interpreted as “she refused to tell me”, but I hope not. Instead, I hope that I’m teaching how to do what I’ve told them I expect them to do, and in a friendly way.

The burden of learning, you see, shouldn’t be on me – it should be on them. These days I am taking ever more to heart Stephen Downes’ idea that the professor’s job is to model and demonstrate, and the student’s is to practice and reflect. How can they practice if I do it for them? How can they be encouraged to reflect on their own work?

When students write or rewrite something, and send me, say, their new thesis, I am always happy to provide specific feedback, and they really appreciate that. But I’d like to have a better response to the more general “I just don’t get it” message, so we’ll see what happens.

In my on-site classes, I have students do what my online students do – post a visual primary source in a discussion board each week. The post includes the image, then citation, like this:

Artist: Lydia Dickman
Title: Sampler
Date: 1735
Source: National Museum of American History Sampler Collection

Commentary: According to the source, Lydia Dickman was about 13 years old when she did this. Young ladies will learn needlework and reading at the same time doing samplers. The description tells of the very complex work this is, which to me says that the work expected of colonial women could be very difficult in terms of technical skill. Work in the home could be arduous, but also something of which a person could be proud. (Lydia, unfortunately, died only a year after her first son was born, in 1745. She would have been 24 years old.)

They then use these sources (everyone’s – not just their own) as the basis for all writing assignments.

But in my on-site class, I also bring them up on the screen each Wednesday, and ask students to talk about what they posted. While not “discussion”, I’ve found that students are less afraid to talk to the whole class when:

• they’re seated in a darkened room,
• everyone is looking at the screen rather than them, and
• they are talking about their own work and what they found.

Until today, I’ve left it at that (though I do interject connections to lecture or textbook, or ask questions). But today I had a goal in mind: avoiding President Jackson.

Andrew Jackson is my least favorite president, due to all the reasons everyone cites who dislike him: his personality (common, boorish, and obnoxious), the Bank Veto (which he said was anti-elitist but made it hard for ordinary people to get loans), the spoils system in his cabinet (where he appointed his friends instead of people who knew what they were doing), and Indian Removal (deportation in the name of protection). The commonalities with President Trump are so easy it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

So today I was going to have students present their primary sources, then do a discussion comparing Jackson and Trump, but I’d already short-circuited that by talking about it on Monday, accompanied by this Washington Post article. So instead, I kept a list of non-Jackson topics as they presented their sources (I erased the one about presidents):

So when they got into groups, we did a Jackson thing (deciding a verdict based on this video). Then I asked them whether they kept up daily with the actions of President Trump. They told me that was impossible anyway, and that no, they just lead their daily lives. I said that was the same in the 1820s and 30s – people were concerned with things like we had on the board, other topics and events.

So I asked them to:

1) Select one event or situation between 1824 and 1832 that was not directly associated with President Jackson, and explain why it should have gotten more attention.

2) Do the same for 2016-2018.

Just so you know, they decided that the issues of today not receiving enough attention are:

Global warming/environment
Gun law reforms/shootings
Military conflicts/increased military budges/drone use
Protests like Standing Rock that are soon forgotten

And one group wrote: “couldn’t choose – Trump affects everything”.

For the future, what I liked about this is that it considered a student-created set of primary sources as representing larger topics or issues. I can see how doing that, just deciding on topics based on their sources, can create a set of ideas for them to work with. Even if it’s not in a Jacksonian or Trumpist way.

by Thomas Love Peacock (1896):

In the following pages the New Forest is always mentioned as if it were still unenclosed. This is the only state in which the Author has been acquainted with it. Since its enclosure, he has never seen it, and purposes never to do so.

A notice to the reader and political protest together.

Full text of the novel available at Gutenberg.org.

As I go through routine grading of primary sources (marking rubrics for six criteria for each assignment), I often think about Laura Gibbs’ non-grading routines at the University of Oklahoma.  Her grading system is explained to students here, and I have looked at it periodically for many years, like a diabetic outside a bakery, wishing, wishing…

My primary justification/excuse for not going into an honor grading system has been the number of students I teach. To fabulous profs like Laura, the grading is secondary to the ongoing feedback provided to each individual student. That level of granularity is impossible for my classes of 40 students each. I have also always felt the system would be difficult for the community college level of work.

At the same time, I have worked hard, using Canvas’ rubrics, to establish grading norms that are easy for students to understand, making the feedback, if not fully individualized, at least in-depth and helpful.

Now the overall objection to “declarations” or honors grading, where students declare their work as complete, I hear from many people, as I’m sure Laura has as well. The big one is: “students will cheat”. They will say they are done when they’re not. They will say they covered all the criteria when they didn’t. They will say they wrote all this themselves when they didn’t.

I worry about that too. But my view is changing, oddly enough because my view on plagiarism has evolved over the last 30 years of teaching.

Here’s where I am at the moment. I have students who plagiarize passages out of the book or off the internet. They put them in primary source commentary, discussions, and writing assignments. I catch a lot of these, eventually. I don’t use TurnItIn, because it steals the students’ intellectual property. Rather I rely on my experience reading student work, and Google’s search for phrases I find suspicious. I am almost always right when I suspect plagiarism.

When I find it, I inform the student privately that it’s not OK, to see the syllabus and catalog about plagiarism. The last few years I’ve asked them to discuss with me what plagiarism is, and to promise not to do it again. This last may seem strange, but it’s been helpful. And this term I’ve been asking those who want a regrade to not only tell me what plagiarism is, but to rewrite their work by messaging me with their original work with all the plagiarized passages in parentheses, followed by their revision.

But there’s the larger context. A number of years ago, we were told that we cannot kick a student out of a course for plagiarism. Then we were told we cannot give them an F in the course either. All we can do is give them an F on the assignment they plagiarized. This implied a new view of cheating at the state level. It also reinforced the idea that I am the police officer, responsible for finding plagiarists and catching them. But the punishment is to be limited.

I find that I no longer accept any of this. Plagiarism is cheating – it is an academic crime, yes, but more importantly it is dishonesty, which is a moral crime. It is very difficult to legislate against a moral crime. This country has extreme problems today with the whole issue of cheating and dishonesty. More and more it is seen as OK so long as you don’t get caught. That’s not morality. That doesn’t teach anything at all. I catch you, I give you an F. So you don’t do it in my class anymore. That’s the lesson: not that it’s wrong, but that it’s forbidden.  By some teachers. Sometimes.

At Laura’s institution, there is a group that deals with academic integrity, and states its intention to foster such integrity, inside and outside the classroom. At my institution, the page on academic integrity seems more concerned with the student right to protest an instructor’s punishment.

The moral responsibility for student plagiarism and cheating should not be on me. It should be on the student.  I have become, in today’s world, much more concerned that the student understand the unethical nature of plagiarism and other forms of cheating. I want them to feel it inside, but I have not the time, skill, or knowledge to Socratically take them individually through their own beliefs to guide them toward a universal morality. Instead, I take the approach I’ve mentioned when I catch it. But there must be many, many plagiarized passages I miss. Why? Because if they’re really good at it, I won’t catch it. So I’m only catching the students who aren’t very good at it. Perhaps someday those students will change their minds. But the habitual, hard-core offenders are just proving they’re right to cheat, because they get away with it.

I can’t work in that world anymore. I would like to move to a system where I ask them to promise honesty at the start, and declare that they have completed their work as best they can. Then, if they cheat or plagiarize, I’ve done my best to ensure that they know that what they are doing is cheating and lying. The moral burden is on them.

Being less brave than Laura Gibbs, and subjected to different conditions, I will be adapting her method. My whole class won’t be honor-graded. I am keeping the quizzes and the writing assignments as is. I am keeping the reading annotations in Perusall, because I’ve seen it helps students complete and grapple with the reading. But today I have designed a short quiz for each primary source assignment, and I plan to do it for each homework. The single question asks them to check off criteria on a list. These are the same criteria I currently use on my rubric. As a Canvas quiz question, this is “multiple answer”. All the checkboxes checked will lead to 100% for that assignment in the gradebook, or fractions thereof if not all boxes are checked. It’s up to them to be honest.

I plan to roll this out with my two mid-semester start classes, after spring break. But the idea may be bigger than a self-graded quiz. If I do this for both primary sources and homework, the emphasis of the course will shift toward their own work, and their own assessment of that work. In classes where I don’t have homework, I may well add it, in this self-evaluative format.

So, does all this mean I won’t engage their work, won’t read it all, because they’re doing the “grading”? On the contrary. It will make it possible for me to focus on their work better, to discern patterns, to help the students individually who need help. And when I do catch cheating, it will enable me to place the responsibility where it belongs.

After years of advocating that professors teach their own way, in a manner that suits they own pedagogy and talents, I still find myself avoiding the big one…discussion.

And yet, this term I’m teaching an early American history class, one I have not taught for many years, in which I have perversely planned a discussion every week.

So now, I’d better figure out how to do it. Yes, I have read many books, articles, and blog posts on creating good discussions. I’ve even done it with one of my classes online, after years of having discussion boards feature anything but discussion. And I’ve seen many wonderful instructors do a great job in the classroom. But in many ways, it isn’t ME.

It’s not only that I’m a classic lecturer. It’s that I tend to interrupt people (a major failing), and nod when a student says something cool in such a way that they tend to stop talking. I talk about openness and academic freedom and freedom of speech, and how I want them to talk openly. Then I keep talking.

So the question is how to change the format without changing my personality. Recently, planning the first big class discussion, I may have stumbled on to something. A step-by-step format that brings in ideas without it being me bringing them in. A process that keeps things focused enough that I can step back.

I have assigned an article for students to read for tomorrow: Why Study History? by Peter Stearns. It’s fairly straightforward, but I want to get at the deeper aspects. I’ve prepared one page to put on the screen and guide me through:

Ideas

Stearns outlines several justifications for studying  history.

What does he mean by:

• Understanding peoples and societies?

• Understanding change?

• Moral understanding?

• Identity?

• Citizenship?

• The ability to assess?

---

Application: which elements are a factor in this case?

Confederate monuments (5:53)

This case:

AP history class protests of 2014 (3:24)

and this case?

Howard Zinn (3:06)

---

Weekly Write:

What’s the main reason you think we should study history? Use one point from each of the three cases to support your main point.

I’m hoping this heavily guided path will help keep me on track and allow for responses, by providing particular things to respond to as applications of a larger set of ideas they’ve discussed. We’ll see what happens…

It seems like such a good idea to embed things in Canvas. All those wonderful iframes. You can embed anything you like!

Well, no you can’t. You can only embed secure (https://) web pages and files. But that’s OK! Your host, Lunarpages, like many others, offers free shared SSL. All you have to do is change all your URLs. I did this with not only Hypothes.is, but many other things: lectures? embedded! pdfs of textbook pages? embedded! pages with cool stuff? embedded! images on my home pages? embedded! Canvas and an external host, BFF!

Until today. I log in to Canvas and all my images are gone. Ditto all my embedded syllabi and pages. I try the SSL URLs in my browser. None work. I contact my host, Lunarpages.

Excuse me? I knew the Fand server was being upgraded today, but was told it wouldn’t change anything. Now they want $109 to keep the functionality I had yesterday. Bluehost has free shared SSL. Reclaim Hosting has free shared SSL. I found out today that even my college’s home folders have free shared SSL. According to Lunarpages’ own pages, so do they. But not as of today, with no notification, nothing.

This is not the first time Lunarpages has made me crazy. For years they pestered me periodically about “high CPU usage” and shut down my pages. Last time it was hackers from Mars or something. I am not a company, I sell nothing, all I have are 19 years worth of teaching pages, images, videos. I had to take down my decade-old WordPress blog, because it was being hacked. I had to move it here, to WordPress.com, the island without a salad bar. Isn’t that punishment enough?

Evidently not. Now I have to spend the week before the term starts manually changing URLs back and unembedding pages in Canvas. Now everything will be linked out and ugly. This morning I was surprised by a recent Canvas Community post asking whether anyone was simplifying their courses. I had no idea I’d be spending days doing just that.

Thanks, Canvas and Lunarpages. You’re making the web what it is today.

…do the reading?

…participate in discussion?

Well, I don’t know. But here’s what I’ve been doing, and I’m pretty happy with it.

Getting students to do the reading

Here’s where the rubber hits the road on accountability. Like most people, I assign quizzes designed to make sure they “do the reading”. But unless you have 100 questions on the weekly quiz, or get draconian about quiz timing (I don’t time any quizzes – I think it’s rude in an online class), they can skip to answer the questions.

Besides, I don’t really want them to do the reading – I want them to engage it, as scholars do all texts. I want them to observe, note, ask questions. So, since few of my classes have discussions, I’ve combined reading and discussing using group annotation, originally in Hypothes.is and now using Perusall in Canvas.

I call each week’s reading “Read and discuss the chapter and documents”. The only link to the reading for the week is that one – they cannot access the reading without being inside the annotation program. Reading and discussing is 20% of the grade. I suggest in the first week what they might do to appropriately discuss, and set auto-grading accordingly. My student surveys suggest it worked well, though some balked at having to do it since the grade percentage was so high. To me, that means it’s working!

Getting students to participate in discussion

This may be the longest-standing concern about online classes, especially if you naturally encourage and enjoy discussion in the classroom. I enjoy it, but have trouble getting it to happen naturally, so perhaps that’s why I have spent more time trying to make it happen using technology!

This last year, I had a new class in early American history, and I didn’t want to write quizzes (laziness is actually the mother of invention). So I designed discussion boards around a short video prompt from a series on controversies in American history. These are simple, and just present a couple of sides on an issue. Using my patented two-step discussion process (well, ok, it’s not patented, but I did do a presentation on it in 2010), I allowed the first half of the week for responses (often emotional and immediate, since here I wasn’t tracking their reading). Then I came into the discussion on Thursday for my “Take discussion from here!” post. This post, in a different colored text, summarized the discussion they’d had so far, mentioning students by name, then suggested a different (deeper) direction for the second half of the week, based on their responses.

Discussion was worth (you guessed it) 20% of the grade, given in two 10% grades, one a mid-point and one at the end, with feedback. Student survey responses at the end of the class featured rave reviews:

I absolutely love the interaction from the discussion boards. There is a lot of reading but it is not difficult. I also loved Lisa’s constant interaction and getting the second part of the discussion board going by setting up a prompt. I loved this class!

The discussions were very engaging and forced students to really think about and consider the topics, not just memorize dates and events.

I really liked the discussions because it’s not an online class where we just take quizzes every week, but we get to form arguments and change our perspectives by our classmates.

Make it important: the magic 20% (or more)

I’ve come to the conclusion that whatever important thing we want them to do, it must be worth at least 20% of the grade. If I really want them to read, our grade percentage should say so. If the goal is discussion, ditto. 20% is a serious grade swing. The only complaints I got from students on either of these techniques was that they wished it wasn’t 20% or didn’t realize until late that it was 20%. They owned that this was their problem, not mine.

If I’m going to dedicate hours and hours to designing discussions, and creating second posts, it can’t be a 10% assignment (to me, 10% says “optional”). I’d be comfortable, if I didn’t also have them doing primary source posts, at 30% for either of these.

This post was inspired by the wonderful faculty at Yavapai college, and their posts  about professorial participation in discussion and getting students to read.

I am catching up on some recent readings in online teaching:

Scarpin, Mondini & Scarpin, Technology and Student Retention in Online Courses
Study indicates that student motivation and quality of information in the class are important to student retention in online classes, but that social influence on the student (from peers, fellow students, family), self-efficacy, and the quality of the system don’t matter much to retention.

Annette Backs, Promoting Online Learner Self-Efficacy through Instructional Strategies and Course Supports
Not too surprising that self-efficacy for online students means asking their profs and peers, not using the available systems of the library, counseling, or LMS support.

Melanie Shotter, Exploring the use of workshops to encourage educators to use online learning platforms
Workshops get educators interesting in making greater use of the LMS.

Kirsty McClain, The Satisfaction and Success of Students Enrolled in Online Education at Mississippi Community Colleges
Students completing an orientation are more satisfied with their online course experience.

Research Center for Digital Learning and Leadership at OLC, Online Faculty Professional Development Framework
Yet another stifling list of “best practices” designed to privilege the research findings of people who rarely teach and still talk about “adapting” pedagogy to online while writing their dissertations using a research method originally intended to determine the impact of technology on warfare, all to add to the already bloated pool of Ed.D.s . (Oh, did I say that out loud?)

I continue to seek ways to use annotation as discussion, instead of a discussion board. Last year, I road-tested Kami (commercial) and Hypothes.is  This term I have been using both Hypothes.is and Perusall, which work with Canvas. Sort of.

Hypothes.is

Last year I piloted the new Hypothes.is/Canvas integration. I was excited about the ability to use SpeedGrader to grade annotations, even though some people were against the very idea.

It worked in that I could:

1) Embed in a Canvas page or link out

I posted last year about embedding Hypothes.is in Canvas. I could create hypothes.is-enabled pages to be embedded in Canvas. This turned out to be a poor idea – the Canvas menus on the left (there are two) take up too much screen space. To add both a document and a right-hand annotation sidebar didn’t work.

But there was still a real estate problem, even when linking out. Each week the textual primary sources were there on HTML pages to be annotated. I had to change CSS to reduce the width of the web pages to account for the Hypothes.is sidebar, which tended to overlap the text. This made highlighting difficult.

2) Easily follow conversations, which had far more participation that a discussion board

However:

1) Separate accounts made it hard to identify students

SpeedGrader graded according the Hypothes.is account student name, not their name in Canvas. (Students had to set up a separate Hypothes.is account to start, and they could choose a name different from their Canvas name.)

The two separate accounts also made it hard for students to know where to “sign in”, Canvas or Hypothes.is.

2) Groups kept class private, but choosing a group was one step too many

You can make a group for a class (another step for students to sign up for the group), but the default Hypothes.is setting is always Public. So students would not use the drop-down to choose their class group, and their annotations would end up in Public so wouldn’t be counted properly.

3) Students wouldn’t know to click the Submit button

Again, there were too many steps. After creating the annotation, a separate Submit button was required to have it work in SpeedGrader by loading as an assignment. If they didn’t do scroll down and use that button, SpeedGrader couldn’t find the annotation, but the student thought they made one.

4) The Gradebook would sometimes show a “URL submission” for students whose annotations could not be found anywhere, so it was unclear whether the student posted at all.

The integration and double-account problem was so frustrating, that this term I did not integrate with the Gradebook. Instead of using the Hypothes.is LTI, I just created via pages (by just adding http://via.hypothes.is/ to the front of the page URL), and linked out from Canvas. The separate account names were still a problem, but it was a small class and I  had them do self-assessments where they quoted a few of their own annotations. I used Jon Udell’s query engine to track numbers. The engine didn’t work well using the page URLs (it didn’t report all the annotations), but if I put in each student’s account name separately, I could at least compare how many annotations they did with their self-assessment.

So why use Hypothes.is at all?

First, its business model is superior – it is built for education by wonderful people.

Second, Hypothes.is is the best choice for using with HTML pages. Using web pages allows multi-media elements, as part of the web page, to be “assigned”. For several documents I have audio files, and want a play button on the page so students can hear the document read to them by a person.

Perusall

This year I’m also trying Perusall, inspired by Dallas Hulsey’s post over in the Canvas Community. Here I went for full Canvas LTI integration, or bust, on one course.

Last month I posted on Facebook:

My colleague Laura wanted a demo, so I did one (yes, it’s 9 minutes long!).

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ddjqm2q5IY?rel=0&showinfo=0]

Some comments on Perusall:

1) Auto-grading is creepy and a tool of the devil, and I love it

Although I hate the very idea, the auto-grading feature makes it possible for me to spend more time talking in the annotations to students. I have it set now at 4 annotations, but that isn’t really a set number – it means the equivalent of four good annotations. Perusall defines good with some sort of algorithm that includes length of the comment, but also other mysterious factors. So the trick is getting that number right for what you want, and being specific about what students are expected to do.

2) Instructions are important

I put them on the first week and kept referring to them. Invariably students who didn’t earn full points just didn’t do enough. When they did a variety of activities, everyone got full points, and had more fun, and conversed more.

3) The question mark thing is cool

If anyone uses a question mark in an annotation, or clicks the question mark in an annotation, it emails everyone with the question. Students are used to answering questions, and I got good varieties of responses so long as I asked good questions (like whether Milan Kundera’s comments on graphomania could apply to texting).

4) Images and videos are allowed in the annotations

This made the comments so much more interesting, once students realized they could do this!

5) I don’t call it “annotating”.

To me, it’s object-based discussion, replacing a discussion board. The link to the textbook chapter is called “Read and discuss the textbook”. For primary sources, it’s “read and discuss the documents”, and for articles “read and discuss the article”. Students cannot miss what they’re supposed to be doing.

6) The only way to access that week’s reading is through the Perusall interface, so students don’t get confused.

It opens automatically as an assignment link. The readings can be downloaded and printed from there if they want a paper copy. So no links to a complete “booklet”, just links to that week’s reading.

In fact, the only real drawback is:

PDFs only. You cannot do web pages, so multi-media doesn’t work as a source for discussion. Some instructors feel this is so important, they’d rather use a tool like Voicethread.

Cassandra told two types of stories. The ones among her own tribe, the Historians, were generally understood by both Oldsters and Younguns, and they could be quite marvelous. But gradually the other type of story was told, warning that advantage must be taken of the Good Times, or the Bad Times would come. They were stories of the freedom of story-telling itself, and the absence of story boxes to contain them. They were stories of a Golden Age, but it wasn’t a past age, not yet.

The Others weren’t that good with stories, or didn’t trust them. They feared the open landscapes, the freedom to fly, the complexities of creating their own tales. So when the gods provided story boxes, they bought them, first just a few, then in ever-increasing numbers. Cassandra warned that stories were better without boxes, or with boxes one built oneself. She would show her own boxes, and people were in awe, but they felt they could not build their own and that the gods were, after all, there to take care of them.

The gods rejoiced as the Others adopted the story boxes. The Younguns loved the mini-boxes, where they could tell stories only to each other and the Oldsters couldn’t see. The Middlings, except for Cassandra and a few other troubadours, bought the larger boxes. They didn’t realize that only certain types of stories fit the box, and that over time, all the stories would begin to be the same. Some people didn’t care, having never valued the stories in the first place. They wanted to do their work and relax in the evenings watching different stories they thought were their own choices, but were actually provided in precise sets, sold by the Merchants.

Cassandra knew the intention of the gods from the beginning. Their design was to control all the stories, to make them countable and storable, to own them separate from the story-tellers. The tales, they knew, had value. The tales were the creations of the tribes, and relayed knowledge and wisdom to later generations. Encouraging them to be uniform, to make them all the same size and shape, allowed the gods to winnow out story-tellers who threatened their power. But there was no need to impose the story boxes by force or cunning. They sold themselves in their simplicity and convenience.

So over time Cassandra’s darker prediction began to unfold. The boxes began to merge into one big box, and the gods tended the box for everyone, to keep the stories safe. Security was key, they said, so that heritage would not be lost in such dark times. They merged the stories into Content Areas, and produced synthesized versions of the old natural tales, distilling them. Then they invited Cassandra and the other troubadours to good-faith meetings, where they could bless the new ways with their old wisdom. The gods were surprised when their generosity and inclusiveness met with rebuff.

Thus knowledge was lost, and the gods controlled the narrative. And they knew it didn’t matter. In time no one would remember a world without the story boxes anyway.

The Institute of Historical Research published a blog post yesterday that I find intriguing, for two reasons.

First, of course, is food. Restoration celebrity Samuel Pepys loved food and drink, and the history of food is a great way to approach the era.

But the other thing that’s intriguing is their quiz. In order to answer, you must use their digital library British History Online, a new collection of primary sources from the medieval and early modern eras. Would this be a good way to get students to learn to use a database?

I have gathered several from the recent conference, talking to other profs, and seredipidity, so I list them here so I don’t forget:

1) Create quiz questions that ask students to analyze something instantly

Most of my quiz questions ask students to carry over something from the readings, which makes sense since I think of the purpose of quizzes is to make sure they did the reading. But today, a student wrote me that there was a quiz question about a source she said was missing from the lecture, a 1949 Ford ad:

I looked and she was right. But she and four others had already taken the quiz. So I checked all four, and added a point for any wrong answer. But then I wanted to change the quiz for the others. So I just change the wording of the question from “Which is not a factor in the 1949 Ford ad?” to “Which is not a factor in this 1949 Ford ad” and added the image of the ad to the question (very easy to do in Canvas — yes, you heard me).

Looking at it, I saw I was asking a completely different question. Instead of asking them to look at the lecture and see something (which wasn’t there anyway) and answer a question on the separate quiz page, I was asking them to analyze the source in front of them. Well, that’s the skill I want to test anyway. Now I’m thinking about all the quiz questions, in all the classes – maybe I could do more application of knowledge, and still keep the questions auto-gradable…

2) Deal with attendance for on-site classes

I tend not to emphasize attendance, since quizzes, sources, and writing are all due in an online format.  But this semester I have four students who post work online but do not attend. Since I ask each student to introduce their source as I bring it up on the screen, those students are receiving the same points, while only those attending are doing the further work of presenting what they’ve posted. That’s not fair.

I am very flexible about students who cannot attend, having them instead do work with my online lectures. But those arrangements aren’t being followed by these students, so I will now only assign half points when students post a source but aren’t in class to explain. I wrote emails to this effect half an hour before class. One student returned to class within an hour.

3) Stand fast by open textbooks

I almost abandoned the open textbook American Yawp last week. One reason was because the pdfs created when saving its web pages are too big for printing, and for on-site classes I like students to bring a text to class. The other problem is that there are no ancillaries, no test banks or quizzes. But I decided to keep it, have them read online (or print if they wish), and demand only that the primary sources be printed for in-class analysis. I’ve put in too many hours working with the text to abandon it, and when I looked at other options, they weren’t very good. So I’ve added “Book Notes” in front of my lectures, and my plan is to bring the chapter up on the screen and “annotate” it aloud to start class. As for quizzes, I’m adding a chapter summary to the homework, right before the part where they get to bring in something that interests them.

4) Consider PlayPosit

Students watching videos tend to be passive about it. Tools like PlayPosit allow the instructor to force a video to stop a video at any point, and start again only after a student answers a question or reads a note. A student watching a lecture (I have these for my early American online class) would have to stop and be “accountable” for what they’ve seen, or review it in a different way, before continuing. This mimics what I do in the classroom. I tend to stop whatever video clip I have on, to explain and ask questions.

5) Continue annotations of the text, and consider it for lecture

For the past few terms, I’ve used Hypothes.is in a limited way, because it has remained clumsy in its interface despite wonderful efforts on the part of Jeremy Dean and the team to make it work well with Canvas. This term I’m testing Perusall instead in my 8-week Western Culture online class, and it’s working better. Its connection with Canvas is almost seamless, and I’m able to adapt an auto-grading feature so I can spend time reading and responding. It occurs to me this might be even more fun with lecture.

But not all students like doing it. I did have a student, on his mid-term self-assessment, tell me that “I don’t annotate to learn, and I don’t need to do that, so I didn’t”. There’s a misconception here that I’ve offered a self-learning tool rather than a required exercise that benefits all. It’s interesting that he saw this as qualitatively different from discussion. I don’t — to me annotation is just object-based discussion. I’m going to continue working with (and articulating) that idea.

6) Totally subjective grading

I have found rubrics to be a half-way measure. If I don’t use them, I get asked why they got the grade. If I do use them, I get the same question phrased differently. Either way, despite breaking down graded factors (source use, writing, formatting, thesis quality), showing them samples of good student work, and “liking” the best assignments (all posted sources and writing assignments are visible to the whole class), my students seem resistant to learning through example.

Today’s students also, more than ever, try to negotiate their grade at the end of the class, which has caused me to do bizarre things like make their final score invisible a week before the final exam, just so they don’t argue .17% or something. What I haven’t made clear here is that I’m a professional, and that I grade their work as such. My profs used letter grades, and a few comments. They assumed their marks would be to be treated with respect. I am considering heading that direction.

7) Honors contracts

Oh, contracts – the bain of my existence as an Honors instructor. We have the ability here to take a student in a regular class, and contract with them to do Honors for that class. I have never been able to make it work to my satisfaction. Students are unprepared for the independent nature of research. This is tied to the idea of undergrad research, above, but it goes beyond into what makes something Honors. We are only allowed 5 contracts per instructor per term – too many to do individually, and too few to do collectively, with them learning from each other. I am consideirng an invitation only system, inviting good students from this semester to join me for Honors in any course next semester. Plus, he idea about teaching databases is in my head now, so I might want to use that.

Well, that’s enough for now. Back to work!

It was last on the program page, last in the size of the room, and last on the schedule as the last session of the conference (so people kept leaving to catch planes): Teaching British History Now II (the last teaching session, of two): The Present in British History Classrooms.

Although the chair was Simon Devereaux of the U of Victoria, it was Kali Israel of the U of Michigan who wanted the session. The original idea was to discuss the issue of how we historians should bring what’s happening in Britain nowadays into the classroom. Kali was coming from an emotional place, when the lack of historical context in reportage of the Scottish referendum caused her angst. What happened in the session was a much larger, wide-ranging discussion of our current difficulties and how we can justify our discipline.

But on the original topic, one way Kali handles this is to present to students “history for revision”: things that are “hot” again because of something that happens. Allison Abra (U of Southern Mississippi) uses study abroad in London and sites in southern England to connect current events directly and on the fly.

But most interesting to me was Charles Upchurch of Florida State University, who has developed a pedagogical method addressing a number of needs: answering the neoliberal critique of history as a useless field, opposing administratively driven pressure to teach online with the goal of replacing teachers with filmed lectures, and resisting the downsizing of Humanities programs. His method is to have students engage in intensive undergraduate research, something that is very appealing to the administration and through which he can achieve a number of goals. Students select a topic of interest to them within the course parameters (his Brit history classes cover about 150 years only), and they use historical databases (Old Bailey, Parliamentary Papers, etc) to do their research using primary sources throughout the semester, building up to a big paper.

Mondays he lectures, Wednesdays there’s discussion (but in a larger sense, including their projects – I wasn’t too clear on this), and Fridays are database days: the first 1/3 of the semester spent demonstrating databases to students, then shifting to students taking the class through the databases they’re working in, and for the last 1/3 everyone workshopping their papers collaboratively. The sense of community is high, the academic standards are high (but with no harsh penalties), and everyone improves. Instead of grading everything, exemplary work from one student is graded live on the screen, and students somehow through self-assessment (?) use that example to improve their own work. (I put the ? because this last might not come across with community college students.)

The overlaps are considerable with what I do in my classes. Class size is 40, like mine. He ends with 30, as I often do. The focus is on their own topics and primary sources, which is the foundation of my method. The difference is I do it online (and, of course, I have first-year students). When I pointed out that his goal of making lecture capture online courses impossible could be achieved within an online environment, I became the faculty-driven online pedagogy expert in the room (which, I suppose, I was).

What’s of use to me there, though, isn’t the goal, but the method involving the databases. I have had Honors Contracts fail continually because of student problems using databases. Charles stated outright that we must teach students to use historical databases. He said that librarians pretend they can do this, but they can’t. Put so starkly, that answered a number of issues for me. Despite my deep love of librarians, they are not historians, and databases are not just databases. Historical databases are different and require particular skills. Duh. I’ve been thinking that’s not my job, teaching how to use technological things (databases, LMSs, etc) – that’s training, which I denigrate as not using my skills. He teaches this in class, on the screen. YES. Of course. Instead of just class exercises, activities, and discussions, my Wednesdays could include this. (He also made a point that we should force students to use the databases — even ones like J-STOR just to get assigned articles — to make sure the markers are there for supporting paying for the databases). In fact, if I think about this too much, I may end up engaging the same technique to make sure they find good visual primary sources and cite them properly each week…not just Honors students, but all students.

Other aspects and solutions to the “history as a discipline” issue were discussed by the group. We should justify research skills as being important in many professions. We should specifically point out the history of what’s happening now – student minds begin in the present. We must impart the diversity of our expertise.  Although there was concern that our lectures must not make contemporary events seem pre-determined (this happened, then this, then – ta dah! – terrorists attack the London bus), I was sure that pulling the threads through to current events was something we owed to our students. On the question of the decline of “expertise”, Charles pointed to Antiques Roadshow, where people bring items to experts to discover their connections to the past.  Engagement to the past should be automatic. Perhaps historians are the gatekeepers…

Another useful thing for me resulted from the discussion, through Laura E. Nym Mayhall (who presented yesterday). A couple of weeks ago, I had students work on my own research, helping me find Horace Byatt’s house in Midhurst. I was of two minds about this, but I needed the help of visually-experienced people, which many of my students are. Laura does research internships where the students work on her research. And they love it, just like the students who helped me (when I set the project of house-finding aside, they demanded to know what I had concluded). Say, that might be a good idea for Honors Contracts too!

My first session today was clearly for fun: Historians Read Detective Fiction. Well, I meant it be scholarly – it said it was about the “Golden Age” of detective stories, which I naturally assumed was the late 19th century. But no! It’s the interwar years, apparently.

Since no one “had technology” (as the chair put it) we listened to short papers without visuals, which was fine. Although the first paper by Michael Saler was in the program as being about Dorothy L. Sayers, it was actually about Raymond Chandler, and the theme seemed to be this: we see post-Great War detective stories as being based in modernist rationality, but actually there is a great deal of irrationality about them, and an invocation of magic in the use of words, particularly Chandler’s more bizarre juxtapositions (“as eyebrowless as a French roll”). Such writing was an attempt to “re-enchant” modernity through language.

Elizabeth Prevost‘s paper on Agatha Christie in Southern Africa was about a book I haven’t read, The Man in the Brown Suit. Christie wrote it after returning from her only trip to sub-Saharan Africa, where she and her husband had witnessed African landscapes and the revolt of white workers against the De Beers mining company. Her book, with an independent heroine who solves the mystery, was cast as the reclaiming of female independence through imperial travel.

Laura E. Nym Mayhall’s The Struggle for Meaning: The Press in Golden Age Detective Fiction examined the role of the press as a character in the novels, noting connections at the time between journalism and crime fiction. But of greater importance was the role of aristocrats in both (I must remember in my own work that which I think is the thesis is likely just the point of lesser and more specific importance). With the decline of the upper class as a political power after the Great War, aristocrats were cast instead as celebrities. Newspapers and magazines reported on their marriages, divorces, and public disgraces, and people ate it up. The main example in detective fiction, of course, was Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey,  an aristocrat traumatized by the war but setting things right (with the press a frequent character). Her focus on newspapers within the genre was a great way to narrow what could have been a huge subject.

Commentary on the three papers included the use of travel narratives to pad a book, the inappropriateness of Christie’s European but nativized “little brown baby” at the end of the book, and a contention that the lines between genres mustn’t be ignored.  A more interesting point was that it’s possible that the idea of entropy, a “discourse of degeneration”, is likely more important than any artificial difference between modern and anti-modern. That makes sense to me as fitting with the post-war malaise.

Historian Peter Stansky, who attended the session, was delighted that such literary examinations were being done by historians, noting with sadness that despite the moniker British Studies, few literary scholars attend. There was some discussion about whether what these scholars were doing was considered “history” given the literary focus, and audience members with experience did comment that some historical journals would not accept such topics.

Since there were no 19th century sessions on the menu, I indulged myself in Doing British Studies in the Age of Brexit and Trump, an examination of what the hell we’re supposed to do now. Having been in the UK for the Brexit vote, and here in the US for the Trump vote, and having predicted the results of both, I feel a connection. While there were no solutions, historians clearly felt a responsibility for holding on to Enlightenment rationality, and participating in civic life. There was also serious concern about university administrators and lack of defense of academic freedom. The “Trump effect” was felt by university scholars in England, Canadians trying to recruit emigrating talent, and American progressives. While there was some discussion about whether 2016 was the start of a new epoch, the most useful advice was the call for historians to use their skills to keep pushing truth.

The lunchtime (burgers!) paper was Yasmin Khan on The British Departure and South Asia’s Partition of 1847. Its focus, like many of the revised histories of the British empire, blamed Britain for harm, this time in its inaction. The violence in South Asia following independence has apparently been considered just an India issue, since the British had left (or were leaving). It was, after all, Indian-Indian violence. The British government elites were divided about leaving, and used the possibility of violence as a justification for both staying (to mitigate it) and leaving. The British military was ordered to protect British and Europeans only. Brits who returned to the UK felt they were powerless to help, especially in the Punjab. Government inquiries were either not called for, or were dropped. If the narrative of Indian imperialism was the story of a civilizing mission, the violence on partition seemed to show its failure, which may be why Britain has refused to own partition as part of British history.

I’ve learned (and this talk was an example) that there is much emphasis these days on revising approaches to transAtlantic slavery and to the British Empire.  Luckily, the examinations of both topics at this conference were complex and informed by advanced scholarship, rather than pushed by agendas of retribution or self-righteousness. The other concern I’ve had in recent years, in both American and British historiography, has been the acceptance of emotions as a valid area of historical inquiry. But here, the papers that worked with emotion were all examining it from an objective point of view (Pollock’s paper from yesterday on repentance is a good example).  The quality of all the papers I’ve seen here is incredibly high, which was noted at the reception tonight by visiting scholars. And with the reception held at the Denver Art Museum, who could complain?

I am here in Denver for the North American Conference on British Studies, which I have not attended in many years.

It was an interesting trip. By the time I got on the plane, only middle seats were left. That’s OK – it’s just me – so I took the first one that had room for my bag above it. The pregnant woman on the aisle got out so I could get in. The guy at the window seemed irritated and aloof. He stared out the window. I chatted a bit with the woman (she was returning from a trip with her hubby, a “babymoon”, which is apparently a last childless trip), and then I just read my book (Arabella of Mars, as influenced by the Steampunk convention). The flight attendant came by with snacks, and the woman said no thanks. I took mine, and the guy took his, grumbling about the woman on the aisle, that she could have got hers – someone would eat them. He was clearly hungry, and devoured his snack then stared out the window again. When we landed, I’d read half my book (it’s really good!) and the woman let me out, saying she needed help with her bag (looking vaguely behind her – I figured her husband must be in the back of the plane).

We got off the plane, and the guy beside me had her bag and was sort of walking near her. I’d been sitting between a married couple the whole time. Some babymoon.

Things got scarier at the hotel. The NACBS is just a group of innocuous historians, but another group was there too, a conference of Colleges of Arts and Sciences. The place was crawling with deans: assistant deans, associate deans, new deans, old deans. They were in the lobby, the elevators, the restrooms – it was an infestation. I started to get hives. This helped:

Then things got much better when I got to say hi to my UCSB mentor, J. Sears McGee, without whom my life would not be as good as it is. Then the sessions began:

Pedagogy

There are only two sessions here on teaching. The first featured Nina Reid-Maroney from Huron College in Canada, who had helped create a transAtlantic undergrad research project called Phantoms of the Past, where a group of their students went to England for a week, and a group of students from Huddersfield came to Ontario. The class connected two “sites of memory” (not sure why they’re called that rather than commemorative), Skelmanthorpe Weavers Cottage in England, and Eldon House in Ontario. The point was to emphasize how the slave trade connected the two countries. Then Neil Brooks discussed assessment, and how such projects present problems for traditional assessment, since you need students to have to room to create work that’s meaningful to them, and that may result unexpectedly from being exposed to new things.

The other presentation, by Susannha Ottaway of Carleton College in Minnesota, focused on going “deeply digital” in a class studying workhouses in the 18th century. She had a team of grad students and others help undergrad students create Digital Humanities work, which was also used by the Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse Museum.

Both projects had “public facing webpages”, and both required students to use technology. For the Transatlantic course at Huron, the faculty were challenged by students not being willing to use Twitter and other social media, which surprised them. I suggested using more academic/work sites like the ones used by the workhouse project (Omeka, Twine, WordPress) instead, to separate students’ personal from their academic personae.

Although I certainly couldn’t imitate anything like either of these projects (we’re talking serious grant money here), I did gain one thing I can use. The workhouse project used their grad students to create a finite research archive for students. If I did this myself, and had students working in individual ways using the same general resource, I could prevent a huge problem I’ve had with my open-ended Honors Contract projects. My students, having never even seen a library database, have no idea how to research a topic of interest to them, and they don’t tend to stick to it enough to learn. I’ve had too many Honors Contracts fail, and a set evidence base might be a solution. Yes, it will cost them some independence, but I think the skill set is more important.

Piety

The lunchtime (lunch was odd, because it was Mexican – I’m from California but it was good anyway) keynote was Ethan H. Shagan of UC Berkeley on The Knowledge Problem in the English Reformation. This was  bit problematic for me because I was trained as a medievalist when it comes to theology. Shagan is interested in the history of religious belief, and how that belief is defined. The central argument of the Reformation was about the source of knowledge for religious belief.

A key text was a book called The Leviathan and the Air Pump, where Hobbes and Boyle fought it out later, in the 17th century, over what constituted knowledge. Hobbes rejected empiricism as knowledge, since it is subject to interpretation. This is similar to William Tyndale during the 16th century, who believed that fides historica (“historical faith”) is mere opinion, because it’s believed only if there’s convincing evidence. Real faith is “feeling faith”, which needs no empirical proof and is intrinsic, being located in the heart rather than the mind. Catholic Thomas More, conversely, claimed that all faith is historical anyway, and does rely on authority outside the individual. He claimed Tyndale was in fact empirical – he just believed Luther’s authority over that of the Church. The difference seemed to be that “feeling faith” is felt by the individual – the tenets of the faith apply to the individual personally, while “historical faith” is more general. (My difficulty was that I couldn’t see the argument as being much different than Bernard of Clairvaux versus Peter Abelard, the 12th century theological smackdown).

Because Protestantism was so difficult for practitioners, a middle ground was sought that helped reconcile the extreme views, with Jesuits and Arminians contributing to compromises. And my favorite part of the talk was actually one thing the speaker said, that the “act of writing history deploys evidence to make knowledge claims”. That may help my students better understand what we do.

Persona

Here Elise Garritzen of the Univeristy of Helsinki shared her preliminary research on paratext as evidence for Victorian historians being divided into professionals and amateurs. Paratext means stuff in books other than the text of the book itself; this includes frontispieces, prefaces, and (her focus) title pages.

Her data, from examining 131 history books during the late Victorian era, showed interesting patterns. If one defines a “professional” historian as one with a professorship (since doctorates were uncommon), then the professional historians filled their title pages with lists of their “credentials’. These included mentions of their college, degrees, honours, etc. – 14% of them listed six or more types of “credential”. Amateur historians, even if they had credentials, tended instead to emphasize their previous publications. Female historians also didn’t list degrees and honors (few had access to such things) but used their husband’s name or family at first (Mrs. J.R. Green), then once they were known switched to their own name (Alice Stopford Green). (I wasn’t sure about this point, since the first Green book was 1894 and the second 1908 – there was rather a lot of suffragism and feminism in between that might also have influenced such a name change.) Professional historians also never dedicated their books, and never posted a photograph of themselves in the front. Thus historians used title pages and other paratext for self-fashioning a persona that marked the division of the discipline.

Why did I care? Well, the fact is that I only have a Masters’ Degree (I began in a PhD program and took 3 years to write a thesis, but that’s a whole other story). I want to publish in history. But am I a professional? I have a professorship of sorts. I publish in my own name. But I would not be likely to list my degrees and certificates on a title page – I’d be more likely to list previous publications. In Victorian times, that would mark me as an amateur.

I did listen to a couple of other talks. I use Linda Pollock’s book Forgotten Children in my lectures, so was happy to listen to her talk about repentance as a personal and political norm for male elites in the 17th century, delivered brilliantly at breakneck speed. A number of today’s politicians should take it to heart. I also heard a discussion of cows and morality that dealt with the history of science, understandings about animal behavior, and the ethics of factory farming (right before lunch), and Rosalind Carr’s presentation on politeness as a factor in the British takeover of New South Wales. I just missed what looked like a fascinating discussion of transporting turtles across the Atlantic in 1866.

Traveling here (I have friends in Denver but am not in love with the city) I am reminded that I am not traveling in England, which I’d rather be doing. But if I’m not, it’s nice to be here with a bunch of historians who wish they were traveling in England, too.