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Molly Ivins, one of my all-time favorite columnists, died recently at the age of 62 (NY Times article). That sucks.
Ivins rarely stinted words, and often had her early works edited by people who couldn’t handle her forthright style. Her column ran in hundreds of papers.
Here’s her last column, on exiting Iraq. Also see tributes in The Nation.
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It’s getting to be that time of the semester when I lose patience. From my end of the wire, it seems I’m writing the same things over and over: “Yes, the first post of the week is due Wednesday midnight, it says that on the main page”, “no, you don’t have to subscribe to the forums”, “please use Messages rather than email”. The students, of course, whether or not they read the posts of others, are asking individually and have no idea I’m answering the same damn questions for four different classes.
The solution? Frequent breaks, quantities of ones favorite beverage, and liberal use of emoticons. Sometimes adding that 🙂 at the end of the response makes me go back and change the tone of the note. So very California! Have a nice day.
<![CDATA[An assistant dean had to remove his website about Mormon polygamy from the Brigham Young University server, but he relocated it quickly. So much for a university keeping true to its name by exploring the broadest possible range of topics using critical thinking and intellectual fervor.
In the 1870s, Emmeline Wells, suffragist and activist, was able to publish her own magazine with other like-minded people in Utah, and discuss subjects like polygamy. A wife in a plural marriage, Wells believed that the institution allowed the wives more time to explore their own interests, without being tied to a single household and children if that wasn’t her inclination. It made the man less a center of the women’s lives. The movement against polygamy in the U.S. became so strong that the some of the first female voters in this country were deprived of that right in an effort to force the eradication of plural marriage in Utah.
In recent years, however, polygamy scandals and the perverted authority of polygamous husbands like Warren Jeffs have put the whole issue in an even worse light, and made it difficult for students to understand why anyone would have defended plural marriage. How unfortunate. I wonder if this is just a case of the victors writing the history, or whether the “Survivor” reality-TV inanity is creeping into our perception of the historical past.]]>
Sure, it’s a done deal with a fully online class: students have to go to the internet to take the class. But what if you’re using online materials for an on-site class? I made a few suggestions to a colleague of mine yesterday. We bumped into each other at Trader Joe’s and she said students were dropping her classes because they don’t want to go on the web to do the homework she’s posted. They say they don’t have a computer, or DSL, don’t want to go to the lab…
I have done some things to force my on-site students, comfortably, onto the computer:
1. Do an orientation
The second or third class meeting I reserve a computer lab and we all go there, the whole class. We all go into the class site together.
Why? Most of them are afraid of the computer. It has nothing to do with connections, etc.
2. Demonstrate
The class website is up on the screen every day in class. I show them how to do things.
3. Sell it
I point out how cool it is for me to be able to work at night or whenever. For classes using labs, it’s more convenient than having to go the the lab and log hours there. Be enthusiastic about how they can get information any time about how they’re doing.
4. Use it as a feedback loop
Send everyone an email the first week, with the URL to the site and instructions. Post the grades and feedback there. Post homeworks and exercises that offer immediate feedback, like some automatically-graded multiple-choice items.
We hear a lot of crap about how technology-savvy these students are, especially the young ones, and it isn’t true. They don’t think of technology as we do. It’s just a way to do something. If they IM or txt message, that’s what they know. If they do email, it’s with friends. They don’t trust (or maybe even like) the incursion of school into their internet time, or vice versa.
Many of them are scared to mess something up on the computer. In fact, just this morning I found out a student had erased the entire class wiki, where we’ve all been developing the first quiz. It was no problem for me: I just went back and reset it at an earlier version, and copied and pasted the missing stuff students had added. But this student would be so embarrassed if I singled him out this morning, so I won’t. We’ll all go over the wiki together anyway today, and I’ll discuss things more generally! 🙂
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In the 18th century, fops were men who overdressed, behaved with overly sophisticated manners, acted in an often effeminate way, and spent most of their time conversing with women on issues not typically of concern to men of the day. Many students of history assumed they were homosexual. Sometimes, but usually not, and what’s important is that they weren’t considered to be gay at a time when sodomy laws could get you executed.
Thinking this as I watched Prince at the Super Bowl last night. I’ve recently had students tell me they think so much has changed since the 17th and 18th centuries, when men had to dress extravagantly to capture female attention. (This because demographically there were more women than men in the population, thus men had to visually appeal to women in order to compete for mates.) I was thinking, “I should show them some examples from the 1970s, when men wore Afro’s, disco suits, platform shoes, shiny jewelry”.
Then there was Prince, in his high heels, vaguely 18th-century cut jacket, and head scarf.
I also found a film clip on YouTube that shows the typical 18th century fop, from The Scarlet Pimpernel.
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I “attended” the online pre-conference for the Illinois Online Conference coming up in two weeks. “The Not So Extreme Course Makeover Clinic” (see webcast) was intriguing not so much in its content as in its form. The pre-conference effectively utilized the Elluminate conferencing software, which I find vastly superior to the CCCConfer we have access to here. I have found Elluminate easy to use on multiple platforms, and very flexible from a participant standpoint (I have never presented on it). With 75 participants, organization was crucial, and we were immediately broken into groups. A table was shown with categories: Student-Student, Student-Instructor and Student-Content. Each category had two squares, one for those who had an idea to offer and one for those wanting help. We each typed our name into a square, and the moderators separated us into groups. It was quick, painless and synchronous. Participants (some from Australia and Scotland) could use voice, text or both. Although not suitable for any asynchronous use, it was online synchronicity at its most effective.
<![CDATA[So many events move into our concept of the past and are never heard from again. They are referred to in support of other ideas, new points of view, "remembered" as history.
Today one of the first articles I’ve seen that refused to permit this was published, because of an upcoming U.S. study on the Exxon Valdez. The Exxon Valdez was an oil tanker that spilled tons into pristine Alaska waters in 1989, a spill subject to years of “clean up”. A new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that the sludge is declining at a much slower rate than expected, and is continuing a low level of contamination the affects wildlife.
Just this week, Exxon posted record profits.]]>
<![CDATA[Western Civ has plenty of examples of the battle between the sexes, and the perception of gender roles.
Two tidbits from today’s headlines:
Christie Brinkley’s divorce custody settlement had to insist that her husband not take the kids on a commercial airline during a red terror alert.
A pregnant women being driven to the hospital by her husband had her baby in the back seat, and didn’t let him know because she thought it would make him drive badly.
You men are not our protectors… If you were, who would there be to protect us from?
— Mary Edwards Walker, Civil War doctor
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I have already had e-mails from online faculty reflected what I’m thinking too — how overwhelming it is to have students enthusiastically participating and asking questions before and during the first weeks of class.
I get the sense that if we are trying hard to connect and get them involved at the beginning, it will pay off, but it’s a tremendous amount of work the first week or so. When I emailed all my students the Wednesday night before class started, I had two immediate challenges. One, my ISP (AT&T/Yahoo/SBC/whatever) didn’t want me sending emails to 200 addresses. I had to keep unplugging and replugging my modem and router to create a new IP address to get the messages out, 40 at a time. Two, students went into the classes in droves, signing themselves up for Moodle accounts and doing everything I asked them to do the first week, and more!
My IM, Messages and email have been buzzing with enthusiastic, nervous and energetic comments and questions. Almost every took the Tech Check extra credit quiz. The intro posts in discussion have been numerous and detailed (a little too detailed to my mind — why would anyone put their address and home phone number in their profile?)
But it comes down to this, an IM conversation with a student that went something like this:
Student: This is great! Thanks for doing this IM thing. It’s really helpful.
Me: I’m glad you like it, but it’s getting kinda crazy! 🙂
Student: No, it’s not crazy, it’s helpful.
Me: Well, I have 200 students, so I’m kinda going crazy.
Student: Oh, yeah, I can see that!
And I am. But it’s good to know I’m catching them early, because I want to know who’s committed and who’s not, who’s a novice and needs extra help, who can lead the others. It’s exciting…but exhausting.
Twitter? I guess it’s the newest thing in social networking. The Unethical Blogger says:
Twitter allows the masses to finally answer the question “what are you doing?”
To me, it looks like a txt form of what students do walking around San Elijo with their cell phone: “Yeah. Whatcha up to?… I just got out of class…no…walking out back to smoke a cig…yeah..I gotta class in 10 minutes…you going over to Mom’s later?…uh huh…”
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In this case, as I lay in bed listening to the clock ticking, it occurred to me how many people don’t. I have a number of clocks, and the watches I wear are all wind-ups, most of them bought on eBay.
I object to digital clocks and watches on the grounds that they make no functional sound and do not demonstrate the sweep of time. Time moves, it passes, it doesn’t just add up like a numerical equation (i.e. McDonalds’ “24 billion served”). It is cyclical, like our bodies, our lives, our history. The face of a real watch shows the sweep of time; you can see not only how far the day has gone but how far it has yet to go.
And the sound is not only of time itself ticking away, but of the actually function of the device. Not an electronic beep that has to be set, but the tune of the watch mechanism functioning. And when it stops, that stopping is completely predictable — I must wind it every 24 hours. None of this “ohmigod I’m late — my watch battery died!”. I become part of the passing of time.]]>
We haven’t even started the semester, but already my students are coming into the classes, which I opened last Wednesday. I sent them all an email with instructions, since the classes are in Moodle rather than Blackboard. My first assignment is to take the Multiple Intelligences survey and introduce themselves in the context of their survey results.
Many of my students are rating very high on nature and body movement, then music. I guess I was expecting more visual/spatial, since I’ve been trying to cater to visual learners. I’m going to track this, and get a general result for my 150+ students all together, and see what comes out. I need a way to do this electronically, huh? Anyway, I’ve got to think about how to reach nature and body movement learners, though I have recently learned that online body learners do better in online classes if they have the computer on a high counter, and can move around the room and come back easily as they work. What do I do with a nature learner in a history class?
A little less linear and a lot more complicated, our Blogs, Wikis and RSS workshop explored these more interactive tools for online learning. Jim Sullivan’s blog is rich in links and information, and his All Things Californian group class blog is a great example of how the tool can be effectively used. A good place to start would be either Edublogs or the old standby Blogger, now owned by Google.
I presented wikis, which are collaborative, editable collections of web pages. Students in one of my classes last semester drafted their quizzes (password is history103) in a PBWiki. The current Technology Master Plan is being developed in a schtuff wiki. I linked to it using a button in Blackboard, and the external URL, which can be done with any web-based program you’d want to use.
David Megill introduced us to RSS feeds (explained the “Oprah way” at this page), which can be collected and presented to students for selecting articles and topics. I use My Yahoo, which I didn’t realize was technically an “RSS feed aggregator” to get the latest articles from the BBC, movie listings, weather, and postings from the few blogs I read. But the fun part is making pages of feeds like this available to students, which David does with not only text feeds but podcasts, using Feedburner and iTunes.
At this morning’s Program workshop, I created a model I kind of like so I’m going to share it. It’s an approach to learning multimedia based on three areas:
Input —
For lectures, I recommended recording onsite lectures using an MP3 recorder around ones neck. You could also use a USB microphone (either free-standing Snowball type or good quality headset). To get the best quality, stand rather than sit, and make sure the environment is very quiet. Save audio files as .aiff, the largest but best quality format. For video in class, use a digital camcorder, the files of which can be easily loaded into a computer. On a PC running Windows XP, the built-in Sound Recorder can be used. On a Mac, Audacity or iMovie is best.
Output —
Sound files should be in small sections, saved in a compressed format: .mp3 is the best quality, or .mov, .wav. iTunes can import .aiff as .mp3, and other programs you might use to edit (such as Audacity) can save as .mp3 or .wav. Quicktime Pro can convert anything to .mov, Quicktime’s native format, with a wide variety of compressions. Sound Recorder can compress a file to a smaller size. 22050 Hz Mono is best for lecture. Video output should utilize the H264 codec, which provides the best quality for the lowest file size.
Integration —
For beginners, the sound or video file can simply be posted or linked in Blackboard, or a link inserted into a web page. Embedding the file into a Blackboard page or a web page is not difficult, and puts the file in a specific place. Unless you work with code, however, it will not be possible to determine whether the file will open inside the Course Management System, in the browser, or in a stand-alone player (like WindowsMedia or QuickTime).
Some from our workshop today (Brief Introduction to Online Teaching), some from afterward: a bit of Q & A.
Interesting NY Times article (sign up for free account) on colleges using Second Life to teach online. I’ve been thinking about looking into this, and the whole idea of creating such a virtual community in an educational setting. It relates to the discussion of whether it’s a good idea to co-opt teenagers’ social web world and using it for education. I’m recalling a side discussion at the Tech Plan Retreat over how students move to the next hot thing: from MySpace to Facebook to Bebo , because their space is being taken over by our generation.
One of my weakest areas recently has been online discussion, and not just because Blackboard’s new discussion board is execrable. I’ve been reading up on a good method for summarizing student’s contributions and moving the conversation forward: Collison et al’s Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators (2000). I created a summary for our roundtable workshop next week.
The main idea is that the instructor’s posts are “interventions” in the discussion. They should list mini-quotations from several student posts, noting common areas, tensions, etc. in the thread. The instructor then could take on one or more roles, generating a new direction, setting up a concept for reflection, mediating a polarized discussion, or offering an alternative view. All this while trying to avoid grandstanding or hijacking the conversation. The point is to guide the students’ interaction with each other in a way that furthers class goals, answering the needs of the larger group.
I checked out both Delicious and Magnolia today, trying to find a way to organize my disparate bookmarks in a way that might help others also.
It’s a bizarre idea, social bookmarking, but it makes some sense to use any means necessary to pare down the vast library of the internet.
I also used Google’s blog search for the first time.What shocked me was clicking on links to blogs on my chosen topic (“online teaching”) and finding lists that were obviously connected to ads for other things entirely.
I also noticed there are already sites containing feeds from several social bookmarking sites, trying to compile them, like popurls. Man there was a lot of junk there.
None of this is helping organize my multiple sets of bookmarks in three different browsers on three different computers — it’s just helping me add to them!
In this case, of a Dallas Tele conference on the challenge of retaining online students (2001). Enchanted by the ideas of Joyce Bishop of Golden West, who had great ideas about multiple intelligences in online learning. I’m following her advice and have changed the first week’s discussion in all my online classes to have students take a Multiple Intelligences Assessment and discuss their results and what they need to make the class a successful experience for them.
The Program for Online Teaching at MiraCosta College is offering several workshops next week — everything from a Brief Intro to Advanced Interactivity. Check it out at the Program Website.
PDP/flex now has web-based signup (you have to sign in as usaname).
<![CDATA[In a recent review in Atlantic Monthly, Christina Nehring criticizes the premise of Esther Perel’s book “Mating in Captivity”. Although she agrees with Perel’s basic premise that everyday life kills eroticism, her suggestion opposes Perel’s view that sex must be further worked on between couples. Rather, Nehring claims it is time to remystify rather than demystify sex, to make it more mysterious.
I find this interesting because in one of my favorite books, When Passion Reigned: Sex and the Victorians (Patricia Anderson 1996), it is argued that this is exactly what the Victorians were doing. All the nonsense about strict sexual morality and covering up table limbs and such was an intentionally mystifying veneer, not a cover-up for the fringe activities of Victorian brothels.
So I suppose the call is to reVictorianize sexuality. ]]>
<![CDATA[Check out a wonderful “Letter” from the author of “King Leopold’s Ghost” to George W. Bush, and a piece on why Iraq is not another Vietnam. ]]>
