I hear people moaning about being bored and isolated. On the contrary, I have been able to participate in activities I never would have had access to. A great many groups and institutions have put meetings and events online. I’ve had a unique chance to attend the following in the past few months:
Age of Victoria is a collection of scholars who meet as the Victorian Britain group in Facebook to give and attend lectures. I’ve been attending every Thursday since June, and have been invited to give a talk on H.G. Wells. Would that have happened but for the pandemic? I think not.
The H. G. Wells Society meets in London each June, and I’ve been lucky enough to have been there for one of the meetings. But the fun stuff happens in September, around Wells’s birthday. This year I was able to attend not only the general meeting, but also the September event, where Sarah Cole was interviewed by Simon James from the University of Durham about her book Inventing Tomorrow. Again, only because the the pandemic.
The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals has an annual conference, but I’m only given enough money to attend one conference a year, and that’s usually the North American Conference on British Studies. This year RSVP went online as a Digital Salon with a session on Digital Humanities, and I learned a lot about how such projects work and obtain grants, which may be an option for my collection of Wells’ science writings.
MiraCosta College’s Writing Group usually meets a 45-minute drive away from the campus where I work, and a time where there’s heavy rush-hour traffic. Now they meet online in Zoom every two weeks at 4 pm. I have finally joined the group, and am sharing my fiction and peer reviewing the work of others.
I’ve also been able to attend a Stanford University lecture on historical monuments, and of course I’ve already blogged about attending writers’ conferences. Plus I’ve attended sessions on cultural competency and community college planning. On Wednesday I’m going on a tour of the Oxford Science Museum, one of my favorite places.
So yes, it’s horrid out there, and I can’t go to complete the research I began for my H.G. Wells book, or get access to the newspapers I need through the British Library newsroom. But I can certainly take advantage of what’s available, and I’m delighted to do so.
I am examining historical theory again, in an effort to determine where my current research resides historiographically. It isn’t easy. But, since I have judged my own recently delivered paper to be somewhat amateurish in this regard, it is essential.
First, I have to keep in mind that theory is separate from method. Theoretical foundations seem to include the influences of philosophy, social science, economics, and politics. Each of these is its own field, each has many sub-disciplines, and theoretical approaches change over time. This lends to my endeavor a feeling of jumping on and off different sections of moving trains. Methodology can be influenced by theory. One may study a single document very closely, or exhaustively find every possible document on the subject, depending on what one is trying to do. I would describe my method as “traditional”, mostly reconstructionist in that I am trying to reconstruct the past in a way, and empirical in that I insist on “textual” evidence to support my contentions. I lean toward the scientifically rational rather than the creatively post-modern in both theory and method. This makes me, not to put too fine a point on it, old-fashioned.
Back when I was researching the English textile industry in the medieval and early modern periods, my work was clearly aligned with trends in economic history and, to a certain extent, the history of technology. Even if not directly related to my topic, Marxist theory held that different economic groups were in competition, and I showed that merchant and craft guilds were in conflict. But there was no theoretical construct, aside from historical geography, to underpin my argument about entrepreneurs moving the fulling process from town guild control into the hills due to technological advantage. That made my work automatically interdisciplinary. My methodology was traditional, at least in terms of economic history, but the theory was mixed. Nothing contained Marxist determinism, there was no Whiggish assumption of national progress, and I did not reject individual agency — rather I combined several different approaches.
I am in similar territory with my current work, straddling as it does Victorian Studies, the history of education, social history, political history, and biography. Since my last decade or so has been spent in educational theory and practice, particularly as regards online education, I need to update my knowledge before I continue writing.
Victorian Studies, as I discussed in a previous post, is of little help since it tends toward being anti-historical and more literary. Its connection to the history of culture seems to put it on a post-structuralist track that brings in more relativism than I’m comfortable with (see below). The history of education seems to be a discipline full of educationists/educators who do history, rather than historians who study education, although there are some exceptions to this. Political history seems a little more basic (apologies to political historians), since I think I am clear on the ways political behavior reflects the rest of the story I’m telling. To prepare for my application for a National Endowment of Humanities grant, I researched the current role of biography in historiographical thought, and joined the effort to reclaim biography as a valid lens for larger histories.
Rankean models
My guidebook for current historiography is Writing History: Theory and Practice (2nd ed, Bloomsbury 2010). Although a few years old, it’s organized in a meaningful way and declares its intention to focus on historiography only in its influence on historical writing. It’s also focused on British historians, which is helpful. Part I covers the “intellectual and institutional conditions in which professional history developed”. Given the dense and complex nature of the book (this is for students? really?), I was grateful we didn’t go back to contrasting Herodotus with Thucycides (though I’m happy to have my students do that using this article from The Atlantic). Instead, the professionalization of history begins in the 19th century, and Leopold von Ranke is a key figure. John Warren, author of the chapter, describes the tenets of Rankeanism as:
the (albeit partial) reality of objectivity, the possibility of meaningful interpretation of documentary evidence in an equally meaningful attempt to understand the past on its own terms, a rejection of the distortion of that evidence with personal and present needs in mind (p24).
Leopold von Ranke, 1871
This is essentially (a word one uses carefully around theorists) the basic approach of traditional historical scholarship. Warren warns of the danger of paring this down to slogans like “let the past speak for itself” — other historians felt that Ranke’s theory could be relativist, although the rejection of distortion is designed to prevent that. Warren comes down hard on writers like Macaulay (for creating drama and caricatures) and Carlyle (for using history to fight his own battles — see my previous post on Carlyle) and Buckle (whose Comtean positivism made him deterministic). Lord Acton opposed Ranke, insisting that once the facts had been determined, the historian had a duty to impose morality (p30). This argument reminded me of American historian Howard Zinn, whose lectures told me that I had a duty in the classroom to share my point of view (“you can’t be neutral on a moving train”). The section on Louis Namier confused me. Warren accused Namier of using his own psychological issues to guide his methodology (he studied the letters of 18th century MPs to show that their positions were self-centered rather than principled, but ignored parliamentary debates). It seemed to me that Warren was doing the same thing in emphasizing Namier’s relationship with his father as an explanation for his method.
Marxist historiography
I felt quite comfortable in the chapter on Marxist history (I loved reading Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm in college, and visited the latter’s grave at Highgate). Social and economic forces are inextricably entwined, and it never seemed necessary to rely on the deterministic nature of Marxism (after all, the revolution Marx predicted in Germany did not come to pass). The importance of the Marxist interpretation was not in calling for a socialist world, but in opposing triumphalist, nationalist British history, and by implication anyone else’s triumphalist, nationalist history, including America’s. (Who couldn’t get behind that in the 1970s and 80s, when I was in school?) For example, E.P. Thompson’s 1963 The Making of the English Working Class
…advanced an eloquent counter-narrative to gradualist versions of British history as the triumphal march of parliamentary evolution, grounding the latter in violence, inequality and exploitation instead. (p74)
Power to the people! And I realized in this one quotation that this is a theme in my work: social inequality exacerbated by unequal access to higher education.
And, the Marxists were eloquent — that’s why I enjoyed reading them. (This isn’t true anymore — I’d rather read The Spectator than The New Statesman any day.)
Marxist history may not have held sway continually for the past fifty years, but it seems to me like a constant hum, an engine that continues to drive historical studies. I’ll get to the post-structuralists in a moment, but they wouldn’t exist without the Marxist emphasis on class struggle, the insistence that the voices of the downtrodden must be heard. It’s just that the downtrodden are seen in terms of different identities now, and the methodology has far less Rankean rigor.
Positivism and progress
In John Harvey’s chapter on “History and the social sciences”, post-modernism threatened the faith in empiricism and scientific objectivity that was apparently embedded in the social sciences. Claiming that they grew from Enlightenment roots, the social sciences were apparently dependent on the idea of progress. I keep saying “apparently” because I have never seen the social sciences this way, as rooted that deeply in science, but rather as rooted in social theory. Harvey claims they were reliant on ideas of human progress over time. Around the time of von Ranke, professional historians distanced themselves from social theory through the idea of “historicism”, which I would call the supremacy of context — the idea that any interpretation can only be understood within its historical conditions (pp82-83). The rigorous method, reliant on evidence, was scientific, like the positivism that became popular with Comte. But another approach, used by “amateur” historians, was to develop basic laws of analysis and social progress, and theories that used imagination rather than evidence. This conflict between professional and amateur can be understood through what Spencer did to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, applying it to human cultures and creating the underpinnings for prejudice and conquest. (I suspect that something similar happened in anthropology, and led to the social construction of “race”, but for that I’ll need to return another time to Miles Rosenberg’s chapter on “Race, ethnicity and history”.)
The main idea here seems to be that historians would eventually reject positivism, and indeed all theoretical constructs that saw human progress on a continual incline. In an attempt to make history predictive, social scientists created models that may have reflected ideals rather than empirical analysis. Max Weber is accused of this, in his analysis of capitalism as leading to a steady increase in social equality (I love him anyway). In contrast, American historians (“The New Historians”) helped challenge assumptions that national histories show an increase in moral good, for example when Charles Beard claimed that the Founders had created a liberal constitution with the purpose of enriching themselves (1913).
The discussion of individual agency versus society’s forces comes into play here. Structuralists privileged social forces over individual action, while functionalists saw social organizations as “the cumulative result of the efforts of individual agents to meet their own interests” (p 97). Modernization theory was led by American historians, who saw modernity as the creation of rationally-minded societies, with the end being a harmonious world. Historical actors who prevent such progress are the bad guys. It’s this sort of meta-narrative that would be critiqued by…
Poststructuralism
I confess that at this point I was having trouble discerning the details from the overall movements that affected historical writing, so instead of going through the other chapters on anthropology and the Annales school (about which I know something) and psychoanalysis (about which I know little), I tried to get closer to an understanding of how history is done today. That was the chapter on “Poststructuralism and history”, by one of the book’s editors, Kevin Passmore.
Here we start with the divergence of history from literature, yet another 19th century phenomenon. Eventually, some historians go on to challenge the whole traditional, Rankean idea of knowing the past through evidence. In modern times, this takes the form of postmodernism, because modernist history used historical techniques and research that were considered “professional” rather than amateur. Post-modernism questions whether there is deep meaning at all. Instead there are simply forms of representation. Post-structuralism works with the representation of language particularly, where words are only signifiers dependent on other signifiers. There is no concrete truth. Rather language constructs perception, and here’s where it gets tricky.
Michel Foucault, who appears in many graduate student papers
Apparently this perception is constructed through binary opposites. You cannot know what dark is without light. During the 1960s, scholars like Hayden White went further, arguing that history is basically a series of literary tropes (tragedy, comedy) that use historical events as characters. Michel Foucault questioned the modern narrative of progress and reason as framing the story of the west. At the same time, he continued to use the evidential method. But Jacques Derrida went further. If structuralists reduced everything to binary opposites, post-structuralists see that even this meaning fluctuates (pp 127-128). Derrida thus “deconstructed” history, preventing its construction from having any meaning at all. “Class” for example, is constructed and changes in meaning, so it cannot be used as an “essential” category within which to analyze historical events. Thus post-structuralists went gunning for the Marxist historians, especially E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.
Thompson was a social historian, which makes me suspect that “social historian” and “Marxist historian” may be seen as the same thing. Post-structuralists attacked him. White said that he used narrative tropes, Robert Berkhofer claimed that history is about interpretations and therefore no interpretation can reconstruct the past. I would argue that you cannot “reconstruct” the past through historical analysis, anymore than you can “accurately” represent the present. People may witness the same event and see different things. The “objective” or “real” past that these philosophers are fighting over never did exist, just as there is no “objective” or “real” present if you consider all the different interpretations of many different people. All anyone can do is consider as many perspectives as make sense, and judge them according to whatever construct they have.
That’s what bothers me about the trends today – the construct being used by angry people, angry at injustice and moral violations, is not even trying to create a “real” past. The effort to do so is at the heart of traditional historical method. Without the effort to be objective, there’s no point gathering the evidence. I also cannot accept the moral relativism implied in the idea that “nothing can be known, so every interpretation has the same value”. I also find such history “romantic” rather than rational or scientific, since it presents the goal of history as being some sort of goodness. Society should be fair and just and right. People should be free and compassionate and collective. When all of this doesn’t happen, contemporary historians go all to pieces and start cherry-picking evidence.
My work
How does all of this inform my work? It clearly makes me, as I suspected before, a traditional, empirical, evidential historian. I admit to a meta-narrative of unfairness being a Bad Thing, but I also think it’s important to understand the sincerity of those who justified unfairness at the time (context!). That probably makes me a classic Marxist social historian. The question is whether it’s possible to write history today without carrying the Marxist social history tradition thread all the way through post-structuralism.
I will not pretend to a deep understanding of any of this through reading a few pertinent chapters, and I’m sure I’ll be returning to this book. There are important points in the chapters on economic history (where more recent historians are developing broader views of “the economy” in a way that incorporates the moral issues and social interactions of the time), gender history (which could be seen as just a type of social history), and intellectual history (which seems to have a more creative streak than I previously understood). But in each chapter I note the influence of postmodern and post-structuralist ideas, and I am trying to understand that their benefit is in opening up history to be more inclusive. But I confess I get stuck when what we’re including are emotions which may cloud judgement, creativity that may endanger objectivity, and suppositions that may not be based in evidence. I still can’t hold with that, and will instead move on to the historiography of the History of Education.
The term “digital humanities” has always confused me. When I first heard it, I assumed it was what I was already doing – applying digital approaches to humanities research and teaching.
But no. Digital Humanities seems to be about applying certain elements of computer science to the humanities, with emphasis on quantification. At least, that’s how I’d put it. Wikipedia says, “the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the reflection on their application”. Stanford University says, “Digital humanities foster collaboration and traverse disciplines and methodological orientations, with projects to digitize archival materials for posterity, to map the exchange and transmission of ideas in history, and to study the evolution of common words over the centuries.”
[I am treading carefully here, since the term is now used by people who have professionalized the subject. Like most new disciplines, it’s already questioning itself.]
When I come across the term, it usually involves word counts, tallying the number of times a word or words is used in a text. I think that makes Wordle one of the first digital humanities tools. Wordle was an applet created by Jonathan Feinberg ten years ago. It counted the number of times a word appeared in a text, and created a tag cloud, with more frequent terms in larger text.
So using another progam, Jason Davies’ Word Cloud Generator, let’s see what happens.
For example, here’s the Declaration of Independence using 400 most-used words:
There are many uses for such an approach. I can compare it, for example, to Magna Carta.
where there is far less about the people.
Even without a word cloud, one can use a basic word search of one can get a whole document in a browser window. So if I have the declaration here, and I do a “find” for the word people, it tells me it’s there 10 times.
So today (stand back!) I’m going to apply this method to HG Wells’ autobiography.
The 19,332 words that result after removing the table of contents and the index took 7 minutes to process (with all words counted):
Hmmm. “Peace” is big, and “Nazi” is small. “Work”, “world”, “now”, “man” “life” are all big. “New” and “still” are the same size. There is no representation of the personality of the piece, which is part of the purpose, except in the words themselves. But really, not very helpful. What if I limit results to the top 25 words?
A little better, but hardly revealing.
Fiction, however, often fares better. That’s why it’s digital humanities, not digital biography. Taking The Sea Raiders by HG Wells at 25 words, we get:
Tentacles! Creatures! Well, that’s more fun, anyway.
Given the current environment in social discourse, digital humanities techniques are being used to ferret out trends in speeches, maps, and censuses, to demonstrate sexism or racism. So the use goes far beyond word clouds.
But I’m still sad. No digital humanities grants for me.
Every October, I work on my classes for next term. Partly this is because the spring schedule comes out the third week of the month, and partly because October has always been particularly difficult for morale and motivation (mine as well as the students’). I’m not sure why. Could be the lack of any real holiday except Halloween (Columbus Day is tainted and it was never a day off anyway), or just mid-term blues.
That’s my excuse anyway, since I’m not supposed to be doing this till after my sabbatical is over. But I am still doing my reading and research. Prepping is more like a break, because mostly what I’m doing is changing settings rather than creating things. It turns me into a non-thinking machine, changing hundreds of due dates and adding lots of links (why aren’t we at a place where I can assign this to someone?). Definitely mindless.
I’ve decided I like the sources and readings for my classes, I like my lectures, so no changes are needed. But at the end of last term, I added two elements to my weekly coursework for two of my classes, then tested again for three this summer. These elements are “Check primary source for points” and “Submit lecture notes”.
So once I’m done, the weekly tasks for each class I teach online will be this:
Due Wednesday:
Read the textbook
Read/listen to lecture
Research and post primary source
Check primary source for points
Due Sunday:
Read and discuss the documents
Submit lecture notes
Quiz
In addition, for the first two weeks there are multi-pages quizzed Learning Units about primary sources. And, three times during the semester, there are Learning Units for the next writing assignment followed by the assignment itself. Writing Assignments are based only on the sources that have been posted in the Boards by the class, and have a scaffolded format that I created myself, so they are difficult if not impossible to purchase or plagiarize. The Final Essay, for the full-term sessions, is based on the third writing assignment, and folds into the grading for Writing Assignments.
“Read the textbook” is linked to the actual textbook pages, except for the one class where I’m still using a purchased book.
“Read/listen to lecture” is linked to my online lectures, hosted on my rented server, which contain audio of me reading the lecture, video clips, etc.
“Research and post primary source” is the laboratory type posting, on a discussion board, of visual primary sources students find on the web, with citations and student commentary.
“Check primary source for points” is a one-question quiz checklist of all the things required for full points on a primary source (image, author, title, date, live link, commentary), so it’s a self-evaluation of their own source, instantly graded.
“Read and discuss the documents” is annotating the assigned textual sources using Perusall inside Canvas as an LTI, which assigns points automatically but I do have to check through all of them and make sure they’re right.
“Submit lecture notes” automatically assigns 2 points when they submit them, and they can be in any format, including images of handwritten notes.
“Quiz” is a multiple-choice quiz based on lecture, documents, and textbook readings.
The grading breakdown is:
Read and discuss the documents
20%
Quizzes
20%
Primary Sources
20%
Lecture Notes
10%
Learning Units
10%
Writing Assignments
20%
Right now, the only class that varies from this is the one US History where I have full discussion. In that class, it’s:
Homework
20%
Lecture notes
20%
Writing Assignments
20%
Discussion
20%
Constitution exercise
10%
Final Essay
10%
The pedagogy, briefly, is based on emphasizing task completion, with grading considerations as secondary. Each individual assignment is low stakes, though with only three or four writing assignments, the stakes are higher for putting all the knowledge together. Assignments that can be graded immediately (quizzes, learning unit knowledge checks self-assessed primary source points, lecture notes) are, so that students can get immediate feedback (yes, I reserve the right to change points if there are inaccuracies or instructions aren’t followed). The addition of lecture notes and self-assessed primary source points adds a metacognitive learning aspect. The work of doing history is engaged in multiple ways, including reading, writing, discovery, sharing, and visual analysis.
Student choice is built in, in several ways. Students choose their own primary sources to post, and their own topics for writing assignments. They can choose which days they work, so long as deadlines are met (each unit opens a week in advance). Lecture note format is up to them, to meet their own note-taking style. Since each individual item is low points, they can choose to miss one or two without it doing serious grade damage. Two attempts are given for self-graded items, so they can go back and correct something without penalty.
My role is guide on the side, in the middle, at the front, and in the end. Instead of grading constantly, I spend my time reading their notes, viewing their posted primary sources, answering questions, writing weekly or twice-weekly communications, conversing with students in the Perusall annotations, and yes, grading their writing assignments. I have had no complaints about how much work the courses are, since most of the things I’m requesting (like lecture notes) are common to on-site classes. Some students appreciate the trust, and the autodidactic opportunities. Others appreciate that I’m there for them, and respond quickly to their individual messages. (On this, I’ve decided that students want the individual approach, but not necessarily for class content – rather they want it for their individual problems and issues, most of which have nothing to do with the subject. My method leaves time for that.) And I can grade more generously, because the point is to do the work, be the historian, rather than show me you’re good enough to do history without me.
There is also something interesting about having the courses this structured. The course itself seems to be its own entity, has its own trajectory and completeness. It is almost like it’s me, the students, and the course. The students and I interact with the course together, instead of the course acting as a weapon with which I beat students using grades. This goes along with the LMS (Canvas – blech), which the students and I can work in (and on, when things go wrong) together — it’s them and me against the system.
So although on the one hand I don’t like the idea of standardizing courses, in this case I’m standardizing what’s good, what works, what meets my pedagogical goals. I am free to change readings, lectures, materials, instructions, at any time. After 20 years of building these courses, I think I’m onto something less subject to the vagaries of passing fads (personalized learning, individual learning styles), dangerous web spaces (MOOCs, open education), and changing jargon (student learning outcomes, guided pathways), and more founded in solid pedagogy.
Over two years ago I wrote a post that got no comment nor many readers. It was one of the only posts where I shared my discomfort with today’s identity politics.
Then this week, I received an announcement of some workshops at the college designed to engender “cultural sustaining pedagogies”. I wrote a five paragraph response to the ideas contained within this concept, explaining my views supporting universal principles over the perceived needs of particular groups, be they racial, age-based, cultural, gender, or otherwise. Having spent several hours writing, I realized there was no one to whom I could send it, and nowhere I could post it, without endangering my job and quite a few working relationships that were important to me. At the same time I realized that this was what was wanted, my refusal to engage, because the entire pretext is that I am not worthy to discuss any of these issues.
But when one attacks history, however, as a discipline, I do feel a professional responsibility. I did some reading about culturally sustainable pedagogies (cuz I’m always in for good pedagogy), and at one point was led to this article on How Racism and Patriarchy is Taught at School, published just a few days ago. It was about truth versus distortion in history textbooks and class materials, and cited as heinous examples phrases like black slaves were people “who came to work on plantations” and “[s]ome slaves reported that their masters treated them kindly”. Now the first of these is distorted enough to be an untruth: slaves did not “come” to work — they were forced and they were brought. Factually, they did not “come to work on plantations”, either — they were sold for whatever the buyer wanted them for. But the second quotation is not factually incorrect. Some slaves did report that their masters treated them kindly. There are primary sources where they say so, and I assign them. I then discuss with my students why they might have said so, what influences there might have been on their perceptions and testimony. But the truth is that they did report this kindness. So we are not replacing lies with truth. We are replacing nuanced views requiring discussion, with untruth.
The article mentioned how teachers should use the website Teaching Tolerance to teach “the truth” of the past. So I went to the site (which is sponsored by the ever laudable Southern Poverty Law Center), and it recommended a “formative assessment” for students. I link it here. Several of the questions are loaded or misleading. For example:
In the Declaration of Independence, what percentage of enslaved people were included in the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
You are supposed to answer 0%, or you’re wrong. This question demonstrates the same sort of oversimplification argued against in the article, just to the other side. Jefferson, like many of his contemporaries, were intellectually and morally conflicted by slavery, but stated in a number of places that men may be created equal, but were then subjected to unequal environments, treatment, birthrights, intelligence, etc. Some included women in “men”, while others did not. 18th century intellectuals argued the many sides of these issues. The “line” about equality was likely written by one man, approved by a committee of five, and agreed to and signed by the 2nd Continental Congress. Some had slaves, some didn’t, some had never owned slaves, some made money off the slave trade, some had vowed to release their slaves within a year, others had promised to release them upon their death, and many worried about slavery in its various impacts, discussing its moral, economic, and intellectual problems. To say that slaves were definitely included would be false. To say that they were all excluded would also be false.
The included Teacher Guide says: “The promise of equality and liberty in the Declaration did not extend to any enslaved people. ” But the passage from the Declaration does not promise equality or liberty. It declares them as natural rights. In fact, the Declaration of Independence doesn’t promise anything to anyone — it lays out an argument and justification for breaking away from Great Britain.
Later on the quiz there’s this question:
Which was the reason the South seceded from the Union?
– To preserve states’ rights
– To preserve slavery
– To protest taxes on imported goods
– To avoid rapid industrialization
You’re supposed to answer “to preserve slavery”. Yes, indeed. But the reason? The only reason? The main reason? There are no historical events with only one cause, and even the extremes of post-modern historicism admit to multiple explanations if not causation.
The Teacher Guide to this question says, “Every secession document cites slavery as the main reason the southern states seceded.” I have not reviewed every secession document, and I’m not sure whether this means official documents from the states, or whether it also includes letters, diaries, etc. Quite a few both official and unofficial documents also talk about states’ rights, but not always in those terms. A great many talk about freedom and independence, particularly in the context of the American Revolution. Preserving slavery was often discussed within a context of property and ownership, even by people who didn’t own slaves or didn’t care for it as an institution. To not understand and discuss these complexities is to commit presentism (the application of the values of ones own era to the circumstances of the past). Presentism, although increasingly popular, does not actually lead to a rational understanding, but rather a “stand”.
The article also says that our country was “quite literally founded on the slaughter, colonization, enslavement, segregation, and ongoing systematic oppression of millions of indigenous peoples and people of color”. Yes, indeed. But it was also founded on ideals, some of which are worthy discussing and defending. We might want to start with representation, open debate, or any of the rights listed in the first ten amendments to the Constitution.
So none of this is really about truth. It’s about correction. It’s about grievance. It’s about telling the other side, because it isn’t being told. A worthy goal, certainly. Telling the stories that haven’t been told is a main responsibility (and joy) of historical work. It’s why we’re here. But the goal isn’t to replace Storyline A with Storyline Z. It’s to understand how both storylines interact, to whose benefit one side takes precedence, and to what extent evidence supports the stories.
But lest we think these issues are new, I’ve also encountered them in reading today about the man I cannot avoid in my work, although I don’t like him: John Ruskin. In Judith Stoddart’s article* on his Fors Clavigera, I learned about Ruskin’s push to develop cultural literacy in working people with whom he admittedly not only had little in common, but didn’t know very well as individuals. What he did know, however, were big social and political trends, and what he saw was a lower class that was forming into groups to create solutions for their grievances.
In brief, Ruskin saw a grievance culture, and radical groups loosely based on socialist ideals without actually examining them (he was likely thinking of the Paris Commune, for example). Their grievances focused on class-based social hierarchy, even though that was not, to Ruskin, the root of the problem. The problem was moral, not structural. Some people may have more of some things in society, and others less, but the people with less simply taking the things from those who have more does not create a moral system. In fact, it just puts the lower classes into the immoral position that the upper classes had occupied. The problem of capitalist, industrial exploitation cannot be solved by the exploited becoming the exploiters. It is solved by doing away with exploitation.
Ruskin thus had just as much sympathy for the conditions of working people as 19th century radical politicians did. Education was the solution, but it was moral education that was needed. This was not “character education” or brainwashing, or even Christian education (though Ruskin himself was pretty darned devout). Subjects like music, astronomy, and botany, for example, could teach that things in life have an order that can be understood (p53). Understanding the universal concept of order could thus underpin the planning of political action. Basic principles could then be applied in a rational way according to the needs of both society and the individual. Ruskin aimed to “replace class consciousness by cultural consensus” (p45). Movements that engaged in action without any philosophical underpinnings were dangerous, because they displaced morality, elevating the same greed and selfishness that had been protested against in the first place.
Even before Stoddart began comparing Ruskin with Alan Bloom’s ideas of cultural literacy midway through the article, I saw connections to today. We have political and social movements, on both left and right, that are not based on moral philosophical underpinnings, except in their insistence that they are. The oppressed may become the oppressors, claiming their own truth and the inadequacy of all other truths, but that does not solve the problem. It is oppression itself that must be eliminated. The problem of people being silenced necessitates eliminating silence, not applying it to those who speak. Kindness, goodwill, and understanding are universals, not privileges withheld from some groups and given to others. It is not only unnecessary to prevent talking about incomplete ways of understanding the past, it is essential that we encourage such talk to make the historical picture more complete.
If one is trying to create Ruskin’s cultural consensus, then the intention of education should be to examine views based on what human beings have in common. The elements that bind humanity together should be openly available to discuss and to use. These elements may change over time, but to abandon a search for larger truths in a headlong drive to redress grievances will be of no more help now than it was in the 1870s.
*Judith Stoddard, “The Formation of the Working Classes: John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera as a Manual of Cultural Literacy”, in Culture and Education in Victorian England, Patrick Scott and Pauline Fletcher, eds. Lewisburg: Buckness University Press, 1990.
This morning’s activities demonstrate some of the difficulties of “rabbit hole” research. This is searching that starts from a single point, and ends up going off into different trails. Sometimes it leads to enlightening information or interpretations. Other times it doesn’t.
This began with (Chrome! Show full history!) an email announcing new history book reviews in Cercles: Review Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone (that’s me, unfortunately). In particular, this review caught my eye: The Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 by Sir David Cannadine, reviewed by Charles Giovanni Vanzan Coutinho of New York. In the last paragraph, the reviewer says that near the end of the book
“…Sir David brings the reader to the late Victorian era, in which the dominant political figure was Lord Salisbury, whose important essay in the Quarterly Journal in 1883, suitably titled ‘Disintegration’, the author explicates for the reader as providing a leitmotif of the entire era: one in which the one-time certainties and confidence of the high-Victorian period no longer seemed to be true…”
Well, this sounded like something I should read, a leitmotif for the entire era I’m studying. Damned handy, I thought.
So I tried a search for “disintegration salisbury” on DuckDuckGo and Google search. Only two links, one to an article in The Spectator, but I couldn’t access it because I’m not a subscriber (more’s the pity, but it’s too expensive to post to the U.S.). The other was a reference, so I tried Google Scholar with “lord salisbury disintegration 1883”) and got the full reference from another paper:
but not the paper itself. Two more articles referencing it were also blocked by paywalls. I tried my college library, EBSCOHost and JSTOR, and only a couple of articles referenced it, neither of which had a better citation than this.
One reference said the article is in another book, Paul Smith’s Lord Salisbury on Politics. Tried Google Books. It was here but there is no preview, search, or ebook. Tried Amazon to LookInside. Nope, on this one you cannot look inside.
So I tried my old standby for old journals, Hathi Trust, and found several sets of full-text listings. I tried the first one, 1883. Not in the first one, then I realized that was only through summer, and ended before page 594 anyway. “10” might be October. Tried the second one, found an item that included page 594 and was October 1883. It said “Disintegration” at the top. But then I went up to the first page of the article (dreading that it was so long since once can only print one page at a time). Here’s what I found:
Well, that doesn’t say Lord Salisbury. Was his name W.E. Forster? Who is that?
No trace of a W.E. Forster by Googling or on DuckDuckGo. Tried another set of Quarterly Review for 1883. Same thing.
So I started tracking down Lord Salisbury. His name was Robert. Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, aka Lord Robert Cecil and at one point Viscount Cranborne. He would become Prime Minister two years after this article. In photos he looks rather humorless. According to Wikipedia, Paul Smith’s book describes him as depressive, neurotic, and competitive, among other quirks. Everyone said he wrote “Disintegration”. Except my primary source.
So I tried The Spectator again. In the flash of the article before it was blocked by the paywall, I saw something that suggested that there is no doubt that Salisbury wrote it. That might imply there should be some doubt. How frustrating!
So I tried a trick. I got my screen capture program ready, then clicked again on the article and took a quick snap before the paywall came up. So devious. I got:
Ridiculous. Deceitful. I feel so bad. Not.
Soooo…it looks like the W.E. Forster is a deceit. Rather, conceit. I do love Victorian writers, but in periodicals important people (or not very important, like HG Wells writing as Septimus, or complainers about Cambridge writing as Cambridgensis) often use assumed names.
Back to the article. It’s very long. It has things in it that might be useful to my research, and even more useful to our current times, such as “Hack phrases are a dangerous snare to an age too hurried and too busy to think” (p. 566). Salisbury was conservative, but liked America: “The Constitution of the United States was framed by men, deeply mistaken, as we think, in that they were hostile to monarchy, but yet fully sensible of the dangers that attended the democracy that they chose…” (p 568). He liked the empire, and was fearful that elements in England at the time, including the expansion of the franchise and political solutions for Ireland, would end it entirely.
He thinks educating the working man was dangerous, at least as it was being done (p 358):
I would certainly put the invention of “race” as a calm teaching of science that corresponds with dangerous passions.
But for me, what’s here is not so much a lietmotif of the era, as one for the Tory position of the era, clearly articulated but not of much help. I keep my tracking, so if I do suddenly need a Tory explication of empire and conservatism by a future PM I know where it is.
And that’s a morning doing research. Many times, things are not what one expects. And sometimes it’s quite difficult to follow the rabbit.
For the subjects I’m researching, in addition to knowing more about Victorian Studies, I also need to look into the sub-field of the History of Education. Victorian Studies is arguably a sub-field of Literature (see previous post), and I thought History of Education would be a sub-field of History. But after looking around, I’m starting to suspect it’s more a sub-field of Education.
First I looked at the organizations that study this sub-field. There are two groups of scholars that call themselves the History of Education Society. One is in the U.S. It publishes the History of Education Quarterly, and belongs to the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE). To find out more about their perspective, I looked at the current list of officers. Their degrees are primarily in Education and Educational Leadership, although a couple have History B.A.s or M.A.s.
The other History of Education Society is in the U.K., out of the University of Glasgow. Their committee has full biographies posted at their website, so finding out about them was easier, but unlike the Americans they don’t tend to list their degrees. For those I could find, the pattern seemed similar: History first or second degrees, Education for the PhD. They publish History of Education (making it difficult to separate from the American History of Education Quarterly in a database search) and History of Education Researcher.
Then I looked at the journals themselves. For the British contingent,History of Education journal is published by Taylor and Francis, one of those publishers who does not provide open access. I am, however, able to access most articles through the EBSCO database at my college library.
The American History of Education Quarterly is published by Cambridge University Press, and also available through EBSCO.
More information is revealed by the content and focus of the actual articles, of course. In addition to seeing articles from such journals pop up when doing subject searches, I like to browse the contents of journal issues. It is usually possible to read the titles of all articles at the website of the journal publisher, even if it’s hard to access the articles themselves. I could tell that for the British History of Education, there are a number of articles focused on British educational history, some on adult education, and several on methodology, which is helpful. So I’m subscribing to the new content announcements so I can keep up (many journal publishers let you do this). The History of Education Quarterly seems mainly focused on American educational history.
Any articles I cannot get through the library’s subscription databases, I can often acquire through our wonderful interlibrary loan librarian, who can get me almost anything! I can often discover in WorldCat who might have a particular item (there are two universities within an hour’s drive). I recently spoke with a student who didn’t realize that students may use interlibrary loan, but they can — that’s what it’s for, whether at community college or university. When I was an undergraduate, I used it all the time. Books came to me at the library after about a week, and photocopied articles came in the mail (nowadays you can often get emailed an electronic copy). I needed some pretty strange stuff back then, as I do now, often from British articles. But the brilliant librarians at Cal State Bakersfield got me those too — they printed them out on the teletype machine. In graduate school at UCSB, these old tomes would arrive at the ILL desk and I would lug them over to the photocopy machine. These days I can walk a few steps to the scanning machine at the college library. But I do miss the sound of the teletype…
Sidenote: Teaching students to do research is a daunting task at a community college. There are few History majors and no methodology classes. We also need to teach the many other skills required for basic historical thinking and analysis. Part of my sabbatical is to create posts that detail my historical research work as a way of demonstrating the process. I’m still working on how to index all this…
To begin my work on Victorian England, I need to examine the field of Victorian Studies. Unlike History, area studies of all kinds are newer disciplines, and I often have difficulty figuring out what they’re trying to do. Every discipline has its own methodology and its own literature – that’s what makes it a discipline. Now that I’m moving away from working with online pedagogy and educational technology, it’s necessary to make sure I am aware of the milieu in which I’m operating.
Although by no means intended as an introduction to the subject, Martin Hewitt’s “Victorian Studies; problems and prospects?” from 2001 has nevertheless provided me a good entrée. Noting the expansion of books and graduate programs in Victorian Studies, the article nevertheless critiques the lack of interdisciplinarity on which the field is supposedly based. Hewitt notes several other concerns, including historians uncomfortable with the word “Victorian” and the dominance of presentist topics (gender, women, imperialism) that use the Victorian era just for examples. But a bigger issue is the fact that historians and literary studies have not really combined in an interdisciplinary way, even while conference panels may be multi-disciplinary. Apparently the most comfortable and useful pathway for Victorian Studies has been the “cultural history” of the 1980s and 90s, although it took awhile to shake off the perception that it was elitist. This was interdisciplinary because it used methods like Foucault’s analysis of culture (p. 141).
But cultural history does not create a disciplinary field that is consistent and has an “agreed focus” (p. 142). The result is that there is no common scholarship, and Hewitt notes a lack of “key texts” (p. 144). This helps me because I couldn’t figure out what those key texts were when I was looking for a way into the historiography of Victorian Studies. Hewitt sees the historiography as fragmented, limiting the impact of important works. Previous historical works also tend to limit biography to a few “semi-canonical” men, such as Carlyle, Mill, and Ruskin (p. 145).
In literary studies, Victorian Studies has become a “sub-field”, and the many journals of Victorian Studies tend to be dominated by literary analysis . When I subscribed to Victorian Studies journal and Nineteenth-Century Studies, I noticed immediately that the editors were almost all from university English departments. As I read the articles, I kept rolling my eyes as the authors seem to plumb the text of Victorian novels for meanings that were obscure, presentist, imaginative, or all three. I found most striking Hewitt’s point that such studies focus on the reading as it takes place in the current reader’s timeframe (ours). The articles use the present tense, as if the characters in the novels are here with us now, while a historical article would use past tense (p. 148).
History, Hewitt notes, is constructive and materialistic, while literary and cultural studies are idealistic and interpretive (p. 149) – I would say “imaginative”. Focusing on the text ignores the history. This is why I dissuade students from constructing theses that seem to show the text as possessing causation (“propaganda led people to hate the enemy”) – we cannot prove such a thesis historically, although it is possible to prove that the text might have been meant to do something, or that something might have caused (or influenced, more likely) a work to be written.
Hewitt’s agenda includes developing a solid historiography, and creating new research based on larger ideas. His prescription for historians (he’s one too) is to broaden the field to include more ideas and their production, combining more approaches. Since the context and environment of the era is embedded in the text, the process is one of sense-making. At least, I think that’s what he’s saying – he loses me when he talks about “syncretic hermenuetics” (p. 153). His focus seems to be on creating intertwinings of text and practices to create something truly interdisciplinary, where the “text becomes means rather than object” and the focus is on the impact (and reproduction) of the text (p. 154).
In determining which texts have been underutilized, Hewitt notes many that I am engaged with, including essays, lectures, and newspapers – forms of communication not intended to be high culture. His ideal Victorianist study combines elements from history, anthropology, ethnography, literary criticism, sociology, and art history (p. 155).
I believe that the goal here is to provide a more well-rounded, thorough, and (by implication) realistic understanding of the Victorian era. I am at a loss, however, to explain why it is necessary to do this through the methodologies of disciplines other than history. I don’t think I realized that I am a history snob until I began reading Victorian Studies journal, and finding myself enjoying it while at the same time becoming exasperated with the lack of evidence beyond popular texts. The field strikes me as similar to steampunk: an enjoyable romp through Victoriana to fulfill present (and presentist) needs by drawing imaginative connections. (I feel the same way about the new genre of “creative non-fiction”, about which I will write more later.) I in no way believe that the historical method can provide as accurate a portrayal as going back in a time machine, but history is adaptable enough to take on the perspectives, if not the methods, of other disciplines and use them effectively. I think I would have understood a plan for a new Victorian History better than I understand a plan for a more cogent Victorian Studies.
Hewitt, M. (2001). “Victorian Studies: problems and prospects?” Journal of Victorian Culture, 6(1), 137–161.
In searching for information about distance learning theory that might inform my research into 19th century distance education, I came upon this article (thanks to Jenny Mackness):
The author is Kyungmee Lee, Lecturer in Technology Enhanced Learning at Lancaster University. Her paper focuses on the discrepancy between social constructivist learning theories and the actual instructional designs for online classes used at places like the Open University.
I have long suspected that the maniacal adoption of collaborative pedagogy was based on very little evidence of efficacy. Instead, in my experiences studying connectivism and constructionist theory, I was aware that such methods were lauded by techno-utopians, many of whom weren’t actually teaching first-year college students. Studies demonstrated student satisfaction with the methods, but not better grades.
Lee notes that despite the insistence on a “paradigm shift” from “old” methods to collaboration and constructivism, resistance implies that the paradigm never shifted at all. The shift has been purely theoretical, and not adopted in practice, where most online classes do not use these techniques. While many studies have chided instructors and designers, implicitly or explicitly, for resisting the new and superior methods, this one subversively questions whether the methods really are better.
Hercules and Bacchus presenting libations while Atë, goddess of mischief and deception, flies above (1778)
It’s an interesting approach, questioning the assumption of a change in the field. While the study does not get into the “new” pedagogies per se, it implies that they may not be better, or may be better under certain conditions, or that people who really want a paradigm shift think they can just declare one. This last is most interesting to me, because it begs the question cui bono?
Many of us assume that if there’s a new technique or tool, it might be better than what we’re doing, or at least be better than older options. We ask questions like: will this work for my students? is this an improvement on what I’m doing? We give it a try.
With a tool, it may occur to us that adopting it benefits the company providing it, especially if we pay for it. If we don’t pay, it’s become increasingly obvious that the “freemium” model either benefits the startup, or that our data becomes the product being traded, a la Facebook.
But perhaps with a method, we fail to ask these questions. To whose benefit is it that I adopt this method? The well-meaning researchers and their careers, certainly. But our students? If so, which students? Does it benefit me as an instructor? How?
I have attempted many different pedagogical models in my 28 years of teaching, both in the classroom and online. None have been inherently better than the others. Each method has advantages and disadvantages. Whatever is trendy, though, is considered a paradigm shift, or a “best practice”. Right now, for example, the Online Education Initiative, which is moving to control all online classes at California community colleges, insists that collaboration among students is required as part of its online course approval rubric. There is little research to support this requirement.
If we consider that a paradigm shift has occurred, we are much more comfortable requiring such methods, as if they were based on research instead of theory and some successful practice. By questioning whether the basic principles are sound, whether there is any support for “best practices”, we give ourselves much more choice. We also give ourselves the opportunity to examine past practices, not as outmoded or disproven (which in most cases they are not), but as possibilities for current and future practice.
Having worked with the Canvas system deeply for several months, and then worked closely with an online student who needed help at various levels, I have concluded that the underlying philosophy of Canvas (and OEI in California) is to remove the information literacy requirement for online learning.
Canvas’ defaults encourage a simplistic, linear course with step-by-step navigation for all tasks. The features for instructors to customize extensively, have students collaborate, and make grading meaningful, are conspicuously missing. When requested in the community, such features meet with success mainly when they adhere to the basic philosophy of simplicity.
The implication is that any depth must exist within the instructional materials accessed through the system. At the top level, the environment in which the student must work, the danger of cognitive overload is mitigated by providing as few options as possible. It is a clear return to 4th grade “computerized learning”, the kind that takes place in a lab. Pupils sit at stations, and the software guides them step-by-step by pressing as few buttons as possible. With visual and touch-screen interfaces, this is now even easier. Complete a small task, get instant feedback, press ‘Next’.
The fact that such interfaces prevent branching, distributed, or complex learning is considered to be a feature, not a bug. All information is “chunked” for easy understanding and assessment.
Back in the early 1990s, we were all excited about the open web and its possibilities for the exploration of human information. We were able to look up things that had previously been inaccessible before, and we developed pedagogies designed to use that easy-to-access information. To do so meant designing our own pathways through the material, to help students turn their study into knowledge.
With the coming of the read-write web, it became possible for users to interact with the software in online spaces. IRC and other forms of synchronous chat had been available, but required some technical knowledge. Web-based interactions, which required little technical understanding, became simpler and easier to use. With the development of private web spaces like Facebook and Google, companies came to control the interfaces, simplifying even further what we needed to know to use the tools, and pruning the content we could access easily.
Although at first there had been plans to teach information literacy as a school requirement, this trend has tapered off because of such ease of use. In many places, information literacy is still articulated as a goal, but is not implemented in any meaningful way. The result has been students who have no idea what to type into Google when asked to find, for example, information about American imperialism in the late 19th century. We already are aware of the challenges of distinguishing between good and bad sources of information, and want students to distinguish between a scholarly source and a pop culture source. But instead of increasing skills, the fear of bad websites has led to banning certain things, through filters in grade schools and syllabus dictates in college. (When I encouraged my student to use Wikipedia to find primary sources, she was aghast, telling me it had been drilled into her head for years never to use Wikipedia for school.)
Increasing numbers of students have no conception of what constitutes a website, or a link, or a browser. With no understanding of how to navigate a complex web page or database, students have become unable to comfortably navigate a complex online course, regardless of the LMS. It is possible that only students with more sophisticated web skills are able to benefit from the learning pathways we design. As instructional designers remove more and more of our responsibility to construct these pathways ourselves, the “best practices” encourage computerized learning goals such as chunking, instant feedback, and tightly controlled pathways at the expense of discovery, integration and community.
While I would prefer, for the sake of our democratic society, a metacognitive awareness of the control exerted on us by our tools, I have to admit the temptation to follow the larger trend. We have successfully trained an entire generation not to think while using an electronic tool. We may no longer be able to expect them to do so for the sake of their education.
It’s only taken me 17 years of teaching online to develop a student survey that is both broad enough to cover all my classes and narrow enough to give me good feedback.
Just sharing a few things here. Total students responding was 131. Most students responding were passing the class.
They still like my lectures the most, and textbook readings the least. They still like posting their own primary sources.
Hours and hours of work on that Help Page and – no surprise given what they email me about – they don’t use it. They do like seeing the whole course on one page (so I won’t switch to showing only the current week, an option in Moodle) and they like my comments and the audio of my lectures (I’ll read it for you!). The None category is a little depressing….
The engagement results are clear, too. They like the lectures and posting their own source. They don’t like reading much. But they really liked what I added this year – the completion checkboxes on the Moodle page. I will be sad to lose that. But note: they like seeing each other’s work, but don’t require contact with other students. I’ve been saying that for awhile – collaboration and teamwork is online classes is not always needed. For my class, engagement with the work and posting what you find may be taking the place of “interaction” among students. They can learn from each other without necessarily engaging in forums in response to each others’ posts.
I hate emotions. Yes, I know that’s an emotional thing to say, but they get in the way of learning more than any other thing.
I struggle to understand why students drop online classes. I’m not getting much help from the research. Compared to the traditional classroom, we know that online students get lower marks (Fonolahi 2014). But we’re also thinking that they need greater social interaction (Boston et al 2009), want more direct instruction and feedback (Gaytan 2015), and apparently do not need to experience a locus of control (Cui 2015).
Couple this with the article in the Atlantic on Starbucks helping baristas go to college. What’s working to keep students enrolled, the article points out, isn’t just the money for tuition. Contracting university ASU has in turn contracted with a company to provide personalized monitoring. Students are called and encouraged to stay on track. Most need assistance with their confidence as much as working their way through bureaucracy.
The undercurrent here is emotions, the affective domain. I suspect a great deal depends on how students feel. If you feel comfortable in a class, you stay in the class.
On-campus classes often have a built-in comfort/affective boost, because students have been in that environment for 12 years of school. We remove that when we go online – I understand that. And we assume that because students communicate with each other and with parts of society on cell phones and computers, that the environment is familiar, but we know that for learning it really isn’t.
So we worry about the social online environment. Will students feel isolated? Will they feel they aren’t really in a class?
But now I have to add: will they feel it’s too much work? will they feel they don’t have time to do this class? will they feel that other classes are easier than mine so they’ll drop mine?
My classes are friendly, I’m friendly, I reach out, I email when people are struggling. I use their names. I track all these students. I contact them. I do not phone them or go to their house, though (I’ve had an admin suggest that, but there are many reasons students take online classes, and one is privacy).
Since this post in 2009, my drop-out rate has increased. I have done surveys on why they drop, and asked them. In response I’ve reduced the workload, especially the number of writing assignments. I’ve considered publisher cartridges and programs. I’ve even considered switching from Moodle to Blackboard or Canvas, but if I switch, then my very best pedagogy (the History Lab) won’t work because the LMS won’t let me batch grade posts.
And then I start to wonder, why is all the pressure about retention put on faculty? Some newer studies suggest that retention in courses students take for online breadth-requirement classes (like mine) is 64%, about 10% lower than on-site (Wladis et al 2015). If I had more history majors, it would be closer to 81%. All the studies acknowledge “external factors” (reading level, GPA, online class experience, jobs, family support, etc.) and yet all the advice is that faculty should do things to make the classes more inviting, more engaging, more relevant to their current lives regardless of the subject (Park and Choi 2009)
Could the institution help? Yes, I think so, but how they could help would be controversial:
1. Create a barrier. Students attempting to enroll in an online class would have to do something to force understanding of the self-direction and commitment required. Perhaps this would be an interactive tutorial, but it should be something that keeps popping up throughout the semester as a reminder. This might help students feel like this will be hard, this will be a challenge, this will require effort.
2. Have the college contact them. Not the teacher, the college. According to this article, at the University of West Georgia, retention increased when faculty reporting students they couldn’t reach to academic advisers who tracked them down and offered cheerleading services.
I have more research to do, of course (I’m stashing all my Diigo bookmarks here). Many of the studies are based on student surveys, and I know from faculty evaluations that these seemingly “objective” surveys are usually based on how students feel when they respond to them. Some of the research (Croxton 2014) is tying together student satisfaction and retention in terms of theory. In a world where some students want trigger warnings and controls on free speech in order to protect their feelings, any focus on how students feel, and how their feelings affect their decision to drop the class, would be helpful.
In my last post I detailed my experiment for Fall, wherein I will teach one section of modern U.S. History online using a publisher’s course package, adding only my own discussion topics (four) and writing assignments (five). All other presentation materials and assessments will derive from the package. The class will take place in Blackboard, our fully supported college system.
There are challenges already. The package is set up by chapters, yet chapters cannot be assigned individually inside Blackboard. I have “linked” my Pearson package to the Blackboard class, but all this means is that a button can be used from inside Blackboard which takes you out to the Pearson site. (Supposedly the Blackboard gradebook will reflect the Pearson grades – I’ve “linked” that too.)
But that’s not the real challenge – it’s the material. For each chapter, there is a long list of resources: document activities, image activities, map activities, “closer look” features. Since each of these has at least one question attached (I assume that’s the “activity” – there’s nothing else active here), I assumed these were multiple choice questions, for automatic grading. Turns out most of them are “essay” questions, all of low quality (i.e. “what is x talking about in this document?”), that I would have to grade. I’ve assigned over a dozen for each chapter. Besides, the whole idea of the experiment was to be using their pedagogy as much as possible instead of mine.
So now I’ve spent many, many hours creating multiple-choice questions, one for each document or image. Because I’m an experienced teacher, my questions are good and require critical thinking even though they’re multiple-choice. That in itself may undermine the experiment.
The other (huge) challenge is the quality of the materials. Not only are the questions stupid, but the items themselves do not contain full citations. Some are just copyrighted “Pearson”. Many do not name a photographer, or just say “Library of Congress”. Some don’t even have a date! They let you into just enough code that I can kind of correct some of these by adding words to the title. But there are audio files with no lyrics or transcripts. And, worst of all, the primary source video clips (Edison’s footage of Annie Oakley, footage of the Rough Riders) are in low resolution and look terrible. I could find better quality of the same footage using Internet Archive. There are also typographical errors in the transcript and in the titles and descriptions of the sources.
The interface for me requires a lot of deep drilling to do things, and the system persists in showing items I supposedly made invisible because I won’t be using them. It does, however, distribute any changes I make across the system.
Clearly MyHistoryLab is just a book supplement, rather than a full course cartridge, and yes, I expected much more. REVEL, their new, more interactive program, only became available yesterday, so I can’t use that yet because I don’t have time to play with it and make assignments. Stuck with MyHistoryLab for this semester, I can only hope this will be a semblance of the experiment I planned.
As Rhizo15 leaves the week about content (obviously I was not paying attention), I feel obligated to be the voice at the back of the (now empty) room saying, “But I like content!”
I love it. I’m the kid who sat on the floor reading the encyclopedia. I’m the student who got thrown out of the library when it closed. I’m the one looking up studies on the internet. I love content. All content. The expression of human knowledge, going back for centuries. Give it to me. In books, online, in text, on video. I want it all.
Why do we diss content in favor of connections? I like connections, I learn from them, but only when I bring something to the table. What do I bring? What do my students bring? Understanding of, or questions about, content. Content is what we’ve read, seen, heard.
Let’s not remove content – please don’t take it away. If we do that, we’ll all be connecting and communicating, but about what? About connecting and communicating? I like information – it gives me something to argue about.
Say, all these Rhizo15 tweets and posts I’m reading – they’re content! The product of other people’s minds, set out for me to absorb/enjoy/dispute/misunderstand. We create content, we share it, we respond and the response is more content.
I’ve MOOCed and rhizomed and connected and I still love content. The content we’ve inherited, the content we’re given, the content we discover, and the content we make.
I can’t measure learning, only the symbolic artifacts of learning.
That’s not so strange. We measure civic responsibility by how many people vote, but we can’t measure how “good” those votes are, the extent to which they are backed by intelligent thought or research into the issues. We can only measure outcomes.
As a college instructor with over 200 students and no assistants, I’m in an impossible situation to assess learning. I can only assess outcome achievement. I pretend that I can create assignments that will produce symbolic artifacts of learning. Then I grade the artifacts.
But it’s all a ruse. A student comes in with certain skills. Perhaps they already know how to learn, or have already learned the subject. They get As and Bs because they are engaged and eager to learn. When I give them an A for producing excellent outcomes, I have no idea whether I am grading their learning. What if they already knew or had examined the material before my class? What if they did all the work, but it didn’t change their mind or approach in any way? The “A” is a measurement of outcome achievement, regardless of background.
Similarly, the student who turns in no work at all may have learned something, something amazing, something that may or may not have related to what I taught, but was connected to my class. I’ve had military wives who learned, not history, but how important it was for them to have somewhere to be each day. I had a surfer guy who learned that if he synthesized information and then created his own interpretation, his conclusions were valid and could be important to others. I have students who learn that if they are polite to me and treat me with respect, they will in turn be treated with respect, and students who learn that faceless institutions don’t have to be impersonal.
If my measurement for that were individual, it wouldn’t relate to their grade in History. If my measurement were societal, I’d need to look to society. When I look to society, I see an awful lot of people behaving as if they’ve learned nothing from history. So instead I hope that they learned what they needed, whether or not I was able to assess it.
I confess to disappointment in my recent reading of research on online teaching.
There are many articles now expounding the benefits of faculty being assisted (whether they like it or not) by instructional designers. Many of these are written by people getting degrees in instructional design or PhDs in vague areas of Education. In addition, theses like this one (1) claim that faculty who design their own courses cannot articulate design concepts (or “instructional development processes”), and therefore need serious help. Another study claims that competencies should be based on the many roles online instructors must undertake: developer/designer, educational expert, evaluator, facilitator, scientist of their discipline, lifelong learner, organiser/manager, social director, technologist. (2) It’s a wonder anyone wants to teach online at all with a job description like that.
Of course, the fact that such “competencies” have been invented along with the whole field of online instructional design, may be part of the issue. And few acknowledge that the field itself contains serious conflicts of ideas and may be based on techno-utopianism. (3)
One paper (4) does indicate that some of the problems we see in asynchronous online education may be the result of students who do not have the skills to succeed in classes coming to online classes in increasing numbers. But in general, the blame for any problems in online classes falls on the instructors, through the argument that they lack proper training.
Faculty teach. Some cannot articulate educational principles as taught in schools of Education, because they are experts in their field rather than Education. Can quality online classes be developed by people who do not have degrees in education, instructional design, or educational technology? Yes, indeed – I have seen many. The major requirements seem to be passion for ones discipline, passion for the online learning space, and a willingness to learn new skills to create the desired learning experiences for students.
But the pattern in the literature shows a desire to “professionalize” online teaching, via
1. the development of a body of “research” (in this case primarily through the proliferation of doctoral theses based on small sample sizes),
2. the advancement of fields originally focused on supporting educators, but now claiming to be leading educational reform,
3. the creation of “best practices” and “competencies” (designed to ferret out “worse practices” and create standardization), and
4. the promotion of the idea that current online faculty are desperately in need of assistance.
Cui bono? Well, those earning degrees in instructional design and educational technology, particularly those who want jobs in educational administration. For-profit online universities also benefit because they can more easily justify standardized courses taught by poorly-paid staff. So do public and private universities expanding their Ed D programs, online and on-site, to bring in those grad school dollars. The proliferation of journals and associations benefits publishers (many of them closed presses). And those who already have jobs in educational administration have more ammunition to reduce the influence of independent faculty, and limit creativity in the name of accountability.
I spent last week at the Connected Courses workshop, where amazing people are creating an open online class about, basically, how to teach an open online class. The energy was such that it reminded me of my previous life working in the theatre. The design and beginning development of that class in many ways looks like our POT Cert Class looked last year. Or really, two years ago, when we ran it in WordPress, using the FeedWordpress plugin to aggregate the feeds from participants’ blogs.
But there’s a huge difference between POT Cert and the Connected Courses theatrical productions. Connected Courses is supported by a grant structure and has staff, techies, a paid director, and many resources in addition to the design team I got to be part of. A Best Play Tony would send 20 people up to the stage. POT’s certificate class has been run by community theatre style volunteers: myself, the POT leaders who wanted to work on it, and the generous moderators and mentors (faculty, ed tech folks, and others) who paid it forward after getting their own certificate or joined out of altruism, love, appreciation, or insanity.
La Cage Aux Folles original cast, 1983
We have no money to act as either motivator or thanks – this is not professional theatre. We refused money years ago, because it corrupts our artistic freedom. But this isn’t a world where people can really afford to work for pizza (or retweets or good reviews), and no one wants to run the same show year after year. We must economize. Even Les Miserables and La Cage aux Folles have pared down their production designs. I think a lot of the POT Cert cast and crew have tired of doing it.
Another reason for ennui may be because the class never seems to move forward. Even the best, most experienced online instructor could become bored with the same interpretation of the same play.
I teach History to community college students. While my methods and materials may change each term, the students do not – they are beginners in History in the same way the faculty who need the POT Cert Class are beginners in online teaching. In both cases we’re trying to help newbies, not only by teaching them methods and having them explore content. Like any good play, we have a message. For History, my message is that primary sources can be put together into diverse narratives that answer the needs of society at the time. For online teaching, POT’s message is that faculty must begin with their own pedagogy, and then select and control the technologies that support and expand that pedagogy in the online environment. It’s the reason POT exists – to start faculty with pedagogy rather than letting technology control them. We don’t want an audience who’s seen this show before.
My emphasis in the old days was design, and in many ways it still is. Our current POT Cert design was moved from WordPress to Google Sites last year in order to simplify production with a smaller crew. As always, participants had to set up and run their own blogs, but instead of their posts feeding into a central blog via FeedWordpress, they had to post a link to their work in the discussion, and conversation took place at the Site instead of on their blogs. This worked well with the 25 or so participants we had, though I will never forgive Google Sites (or the many discussion forum alternatives) for not nesting replies cleanly, as WordPress does.
The number of participants in POT Cert has gotten slightly smaller each year, likely because there are now so many alternative shows competing with what we do (and I ain’t no Michael Eisner). Unfortunately, many of these Broadway alternatives provide technology training rather than pedagogical preparation, and are developed by educational technologists rather than in-the-trenches teachers. So what we do continues to be important. We rage against the Disney-fied edtech commercial culture machine.
Last year’s class in Google Sites was hard to run with three facilitators, though it was easier than in WordPress (FeedWordpress can have problems that would frustrate anyone who doesn’t code). And even with audience participation, the show runs too long for current tastes. At 24 weeks (a badge for each semester, and a certificate for completion of two semesters), it is a bit too Angels in America.
So this summer Laura and I began to design a self-paced learning pathway, with only six units, as a static WordPress site. It’s like the TV version of our class. The idea was that people could use the pathway themselves or in cohorts at their institutions. Communities using the content could be run elsewhere if desired, like friends sitting around a living room to experience it together. Or people could do the pathway on their own, and somehow automatically get a badge. But then the Connected Courses workshop reminded me that the cohort aspect of an open, online class is extremely important. The audience must feel and hear each other for it to work. I realized that the “self-paced” idea likely wouldn’t fly.
La Cage Aux Folles 2008 revival, London
I think the new production will involve something like this:
1. Separation of the show from the audience
This allows for more flexible use of the content, and a bit more instruction. And as we write it, Laura and I sense the joy of creation. Perhaps someday it will be a book, its own script.
2. Assigned seating
Although anyone may use the content, we do need to “run” the community, and have continual feedback from other community members and ourselves. Without content, it’s just a community. Without community, it’s a disembodied course. With content and community connected, it’s a class. What happens on stage is only half, or less than half, of a successful show.
3. Audience as creators
Our current class has always required participants to blog every week, with the final post of the semester and year consisting of a list of annotated links to all their previous work. It is that post, combined with their self-assessment, that we used to evaluate for the badge or certificate, since it puts everything in one place. Calling the blog posts something like Portfolio Assignments will make that clear from Day 1.
4. Angels in the Outfield instead of Angels in America
If it has enough content, and more options for more experienced people, it should be possible to put what we need into a 12-week format.
So that’s where we’re headed, at least for now…I think we’ve got a show.
Lately it’s been kind of eerie in the world of open online classes, at least those taught by folks whose work I respect the most.
This year, our Program for Online Teaching leadership for the POT Certificate Class was down to three overworked facilitators, plus our wonderful moderators and those who let us use their videos. The class was definitely a Small Open Online Class, and since it had assigned readings and a schedule, and since MOOCs have become mega-commercial horrors, I no longer call it a MOOC of any sort anyway. For such a small group (60 registered originally), the community was fabulous, both supportive and knowledgeable. A little over a dozen learners completed and earned a badge for spring semester, and/or a certificate for the entire 2013-14 year.
The format of the class was different from the previous year (2012-13), where I had struggled (as a non-programmer) with FeedWordpress to bring in everyone’s feeds. Instead we used a Google Site. We asked everyone to post a link to their blog post at the Site, and engage in discussion at the Site instead of in the blog comments. I was able to bring in blog feeds easily using Gadgets.
Now, when it came to our POT Cert Class this year, there were some issues. I wasn’t delighted with the non-nested discussions in Google Sites, and we discovered that three people couldn’t really run the class effectively, even with moderators, when all three facilitators work full-time plus. But the need, at our college and elsewhere, for pedagogically-based learning about how to teach online is still there. So we decided to create a self-guided Learning Pathway instead.
Then I discovered there was already a Google Plus Community, to which I was invited, called Learning Pathways. Aha!
Anyway, I started creating the new Pedagogy First! Learning Pathway (work in progress is here), and my colleague Laura Paciorek has been helping. The idea is that the pathway is essentially comprised of curated content and assignments for a portfolio, and that any individual or group could participate and use the site for a “class” or individual study. Then for community, we plan to use our own POT Google Plus Community (mostly because some folks don’t like Facebook, where we also have a POT group).
So then I find that Jim Groom has created a self-directed class for ds106. Based on the successful Headless ds106, it is called the Open ds106 Course. Aha!
The synchronicity is striking, or at least it strikes me. And the trends for these classes, and many more, defy a number of assumptions I made when all this cMOOCishness and openness stuff started. I mean waaaay back in 2005 or so (which is also when I started the Program for Online Teaching).
(NB: I am deliberately ignoring xMOOCs, those based in commercial or university-commercial collaborations. My focus here is on what I’ve called Task-Based MOOCs.)
I am surprised to see that when it comes to task-based open online classes:
1. We haven’t ditched the “course”.
While we all acknowledge the importance of connections and helping people be nodes in a network, what this looks like in practice isn’t that different from any other sort of dedicated community that uses online space to interact. And we all continue to create some sort of teacher-designed content, even if it’s just a pathway through assignments or a schedule or a set of expectations.
2. We don’t have a wide variety of platforms from which to choose.
I believe that Alec Couros began designing open courses in wikis, but now is using WordPress. Jim Groom’s ds106 is WordPress-based also. So was OCTEL. Hybrid Pedagogy’s MOOCMOOC used Instructure Canvas, but for most of the open classes and cMOOCs, WordPress seems preferred. I’ve moved back to it myself with the Learning Pathway, although the discussion will be in G+. I recall when the choices were more diverse, and even a time when Alec and I were searching for an open discussion program that featured nested posts, as in Moodle and Ning.
3. The personality/persona of the instructor continues to be a factor in the success of an open class.
Jim Groom, David Wiley, Dave Cormier, George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Alec Couros, Jesse Stommel — all have distinct, interesting personalities and teaching styles. Participants, even while creating communities and connections, are guided not only by the design of the class but by the instructor’s presence. Without a teacher who inspires, an open online class is just a website.
Given these similarities, do we now have models for independent open online classes? And when it comes to designing an open online class, have we hit our stride or are we in a rut?
I read carefully a recent article in the San Diego Union-Tribune called Online Class Takers Less Likely to Pass. I am interested in online successful retention rates, the percentage of students passing the class. For online classes at community colleges, successful retention has always hovered around 10% lower for online than traditional classes.
The 10% holds. According to the article, online class successful retention rates are about 60% at California community colleges vs 70% in traditional classes. The article wants to examine why.
But it also presents an even bigger gap. The article says:
Researchers also found that achievement gaps are exacerbated in the online world. For example, the gap between white and African-American students in traditional classes was 12.9 percentage points; that widens to 17.5 points in online courses. They said that might be partly a reflection of the digital divide, where some students don’t have access to computers and broadband.
I’ve heard this argument many times, that the digital divide makes it hard for students to access the technology they need to be successful in online classes. I think someone needs to acknowledge that this is far less true now, in this state, in this country, than anywhere, ever.
Historically, those with lower incomes tend to purchase items for social reasons, even at the risk of sacrificing quality in housing and food. This has been true since at least the Victorian era, and Thorstein Veblen even wrote a book about it in 1899. I have a number of socio-economically disadvantaged students, and they all have smart phones.
As for race, according to Pew research, more AfricanAmerican and Hispanic people in the US have smart phones than “white” people. And, if we want to get away from race and look only at income, 47% of people earning less than $30,000/year have a smart phone.
Although I don’t recommend taking an online class on a smart phone, many of my students do.
In addition, all the college’s students have access via our computer labs on all our campuses, and local public libraries.
This is not that kind of digital divide.
Someone needs to talk about three very real reasons that there is an offset online achievement gap for certain groups:
1. The primary pedagogy of online class continues to be text-based.
For most online classes, the assignments include reading text. Lots of text. And students must write for most of the heavy General Education classes, and they must do it in standard written English, at the college level, on their smart phone or a crowded library. It seems to me likely that those who do poorly with text would have a better chance of success with alternative assignments. That said, such assignments may not be considered appropriate by the instructor as a way of determining whether material was learned. In my history classes, you must write.
2. Students expect flexibility of time to mean less time.
This is mentioned briefly in the article, that students may enroll thinking an online class will be less work. I think it’s just a confusion between flexibility and total time. Self-directed students budget time appropriately, but others assume that because they can work any time, the total time for the class will somehow be different. If you ask students how many classes they can handle during a semester, they often assume they could handle more if the classes were online.
3. The lives of those struggling to meet basic needs is not conducive to the concentration required of online classes.
Here we have to make the jump from race, which is the focus of the article’s statement, to class, which is more to the point. When you are raising your siblings and carrying two low-paying jobs to feed everyone, even if you have a smart phone there may be no good space in which to work. There’s no time to go to the library. I have a number of students from military families and others with very complex arrangements at home. I have students who have been thrown out of the house and are living in their car. For these people, the time spent in a classroom may be the only time they have to focus on the material. Online classes are a poor option.
This last one is the divide no one wants to talk about, because it involves getting into a deeper discussion of poverty, and the lack of social services and public money available to help. Start talking about this, and you must talk about food stamps and living in a country that provides help for tuition at community colleges but can’t help people with hunger and living circumstances. It’s easier to blame poverty itself for failing to provide the means to buy technology.
If the reason for achievement differences were access to technology, the gap would have narrowed in this age of the rapidly increasing adoption of mobile technologies. But it hasn’t – the 10% hasn’t budged. It won’t surprise me if the larger gap holds too.
After over a decade of this, I’m looking forward to the discussion of the digital divide getting broader.
I have followed, and even worked a time or two, with Jenny, and am always interested in watching whatever she is working on. Since I missed the first session on November 19, I viewed the recording to catch up on the ideas. Then during the session, I had printed out a footprint map and tried filling it in for the POT Cert Course.
To oversimplify enormously, the idea of the footprint is based on a kind of map for a particular course or “complex learning environment”, and the emphasis is pedagogy and course design. The base map is a circle, with more structured, prescribed learning experiences toward the center, and more “emergent” (self-directed, expansive, connectivist) elements toward the outside, with “chaos” being the ultimate outside edge. The circle is divided into four areas: Open/Structure (the space or environment and how it’s set up), Interactive Environment (the extent of contextualization and interactivity), Presence/Writing (the learning process and product, or the way the learning is realized), and Agency (self-direction and autonomy of learning). A blank map, available in Word (I just printed out the image) looks like this:
Each quarter of the circle contains many factors that can be scaled across from more prescribed to more open (here’s one of the charts to explain each). Each can be marked on the map with a dot, and then the dots connected to make a shape. The more the shape is inwards, the more prescribed and directed the experience. The more near the edges the shape is, the more it emphasizes emergent learning. You can see other people’s examples of their courses here.
My interest at first was mapping out the design of the POT Certificate Class, because I knew that much of it is prescribed and I would like it to be more open, although that’s difficult with beginners. I would be mapping the class from the point of view of the designer. As I began, Scott Johnson, who was also in the session and has been with us at POT Cert, offered to map from the point of view of the student. Here’s mine – a footprint of POT Cert as it actually is, rather than my ideal:
Then Scott emailed me and said something about evaluations, and suddenly many possibilities occurred to me:
POT workshops could have faculty map their courses. We could guide them through as we were being guided in this workshop.
My students in history classes could do it, and I could see how their view compared with mine (another form of student evaluation).
K-12 teachers could use this across the curriculum, sharing their maps with each other.
Department members who don’t get along could map their own course to discuss differences in pedagogy.
Because what this system does, in addition to providing a way to think through ones own pedagogy, is create a presentation of ones course that can be seen at a glance and compared to others. It’s much easier than visiting a dozen classrooms or clicking through a bunch of online classes. It could spark conversations about pedagogical goals.
What it doesn’t do is dismiss the more prescribed modes of teaching and learning. Although they are closer to the centre and therefore literally less “edgy”, more controlled environments, materials and assessments are by no means considered as irrelevant. This is refreshing, as in my own experience I have found it very difficult to apply the utopian connectivist principles I love as a learner to my role as a teacher of underprepared community college students.
In the chat, Jenny commented that the idea here was balance, but perhaps it is more than that. These map lines can become fluid, changing at various times in the semester, or even for the individuals in the class. Perhaps a class begins with, for example, very limited agency, but as the course continues, that agency becomes more emergent. That’s what happens in my classes – as the semester goes on students have more and more freeedom to bring in resources of interest to them, while at the beginning things are much more instructor-directed.
Although I will undoubtedly make some adaptations, I will be using this somehow, to generate conversation by having participants actually do something (instead of just telling them to “reflect”). A light bulb went on with this – there are many places it could go.
Educational research clearly indicates that effective online teaching includes elements such as professorial enthusiasm, use of multiple tools appropriate to the pedagogy, personalized attention to the students, guided pursuit of student interests, and collaboration, even to the point of creating online communities for learning.
Market forces clearly encourage the use or purchase of set systems to house online courses (Coursera, iVersity, Udacity, Instructure), taught through easily standardized modules that don’t need much monitoring, with flexibility and convenience the prized elements for consumers (oh, sorry…I meant students). They offer products, processes and support that will save universities money while they make money through their product. It is in their interest to have only their product in use, if possible tied in with their own support structures to provide a seamless experience for their…um, students.
Market forces do bow to popularity, of course. Online tools that are used by large numbers of people are integrated or plugged in to the systems. Google Docs, Facebook, and LinkedIn can be part of your class, even in Canvas! (Gosh, that’s exciting.)
So, back to that research (and you thought I’d forgotten). The approach promoted by the POT Certificate Class emphasizes the pedagogy of the individual instructor, supported by the use of appropriate tools. Everything I’ve worked on for the past decade has been in the direction of empowering instructors to empower their students to learn, by emphasizing the instructors’ knowledge and approach, realized through cool web tools that the fit the task.
But the tools will not be there if the market forces prevail in education. They will become expensive (think Ning) or unavailable. Faculty who design their own courses, and teach them using tools that fit their imagination, will become fewer and fewer. It won’t be worth the time to create a course in such an old-fashioned way.
Governments and universities are clearly aligning themselves with market forces, in desperation. That desperation is not just financial. It is, ironically, based on lack of knowledge. Little consideration is taken of the research. Market forces, in the forma of educational product companies, couch their products in the illusion of innovation, but what they offer is packaging. They make the process of learning so much less messy.
Trouble is, learning is messy. It can’t be broken down into outcomes and modules. Teachers know this, and the research shows it. But all that can be ignored, and so much money (and hassle!) saved, by having assistants facilitate carefully packaged courses instead of faculty teaching them. No need for faculty – they can be replaced with “content experts” on teams of course designers (yes, I know, it’s already happening, in lots of places).
So ultimately, programs like our Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class (now between semesters) will become anachronisms, teaching skills that are no longer used, like penmanship and typesetting. And by then, there won’t be many pens or typesets to choose from anyway. It will all fade away.
Last year, the POT Cert Class was set up in a WordPress blog, and I used the FeedWordPress plugin to pull in everyone’s blog posts. As an open class, some people participating in the class were doing cool things other than following the syllabus, so there was a separate Deep End page for their posts, where I used HungryFeed. The whole setup is explained here and here.
It became too complex for one person to handle, particularly when that person is me and problems occurred, like feeds not being pulled in and the fix being code-level.
But as I set up the WordPress blog (which was there for the syllabus, widgets, static material), I realized that there was no need for two systems. After consulting with my colleagues Jim (our blog meister), Laura (our commenter and organizer), and Todd (our captain of synchronicity), I shifted the whole thing to a Google Site. There was no need for the Community, since I had some old gadget that could do discussion.
The only miscalculation was that my old gadget nested discussions, but when I moved the discussions to the new site, they didn’t nest. This made me angry, but I got over it. In the first place, each person would be posting a link each week, and everyone would reply to them anyway. And in the second place, it wasn’t worth going back to WordPress just for that. I will miss nesting, but it had just become necessary to simplify.
It was also, as Todd pointed out to me (after his initial concerns about Site, which he works with a lot), an opportunity to learn while doing while learning while doing. That’s what POT is all about anyway. So the fact that I’d never run a Google Site shouldn’t matter, and will be a challenge, and what the hell.
Yes, we’re missing some things doing it this way. Some things are bad:
1. I created a Google Form to have people register, then I manually Share the Site with them, getting their info off the registration form. So they must have a Google account (and I thought a gmail address, but it seems OK so long as the whatever address is accessed via Google). Google does not allow people to just have comment permission – everyone who comments must have full edit permission. But I trust everyone in the class – I know they won’t mess up the site. So as names come in, I must Share with full permissions.
2. Sites will only allow use of a limited number of “gadgets”, which are kind of like WordPress’ widgets but far less flexible.
3. I could not figure out at first why people who were logged in to Google already, and were given full permissions, could not comment. Turned out there is a little, tiny, teeny-weeny “sign in” link at the very bottom of the page. I turned it into a big button. I also found out that when other people log in, they see a link to a Google survey. So I did this next to the button:
4. The list of those allowed to Share cannot be reorganized, so it’s hard to see if I’ve added someone already.
5. Gadgets are blind. You cannot see them until you save them, so you can only see them in non-edit mode, so if you use a lot of gadgets it’s hard to see what the hell you’re doing.
6. There is a Google Discussion gadget that I could have used instead of my old gadget (I still have no idea where it came from) but that would require putting everyone into a Google Group, yet another little Google box that would have to be set up. Then the forums would be gadgets. Yick.
But I’ve been able to do some cool stuff:
1. Weekly discussion links in the Navigation menu.
This took a little work, but Site’s More -> Edit site menu settings let me add pages, call them what I wanted, and put them in the order I wanted into the menu.
2. A good substitute for those feeds.
Although it’s not the central way to read everyone’s work, I was able to create a page of feeds using the same gadget over and over.
3. The site can be open yet protected.
Everyone can see everything, but only those with Edit permission can comment.
4. More cool things I don’t know about yet.
But I’ll find them!
Do I have reservations? Only about every five minutes. How could we do this? How could we put our discussions into such a space, dominated and controlled by Evil Empire #2 (or is it #3? I’m losing track)? What if Google cancels Sites next month?
Be flexible, Todd tells me. Be nimble. OK. Let’s do it.
Let’s say that David Wiley is right (and why shouldn’t he be, as king of the open course?). He writes:
Our traditional pedagogies scale poorly beyond 30 or so people because they were developed in the context of teaching 30 or so people. I think it’s safe to assume that, in the same way that our pedagogies-for-30-people degrade as the number of students goes up, pedagogies-for-1000s-of-people degrade as the number of students goes down. Pedagogies for 1000s of people probably function so poorly in the context of 30 people that we’ve never even really tried them before. In other words, we’ve never taught 100,000 people at a time before, and consequently we’ve never developed pedagogies for teaching this many people at once – the last few years just show us trying to shoe-horn pedagogies-for-30 into MOOCs and then publishing articles about the astonishing drop rates.
And I commented there:
Well, some would say that connectivist learning theory is the approach indigenous to the online environment, and it often tends to be attacked in the same breath with MOOCs. But I like the idea that something very new is needed. People keep talking about “scaling up” old pedagogies. Maybe it isn’t about scaling anything up after all, but rather creating something entirely new (maybe not even based on connectivism). Maybe the new model could be something between the one-teacher model and the peer-grading model.
So let’s give it a try. Hmmmm…in between the one-teacher model and the peer-grading model.
I’ve got it!
Start with a team of teachers or professors. They approach the MOOC like writing a textbook – each controls a section that is in their area of expertise. They write the curriculum, assignments, select all materials for that section, record a video if that’s their preferred mode (and only if that’s their preferred mode). And then they moderate the whole class with all the other profs, assessing and providing feedback to students, dividing the workload. We could “scale” based on the number of students – at 30 students per prof, that’s about 33 instructors for a class of 1,000 students.
It’s kind of what we do in our open online class-formerly-known-as-a-SMOOC (or Shhhhmooc, since we like to keep it quiet), the POT Certificate Class, where a different expert moderates discussion each week, based on readings and on their own video introduction to the material. Only this would be bigger.
Think of the employment possibilities, which take care of Jonathan Rees‘ concerns (and mine) about doing away with qualified professors when our society needs them the most. More professors employed!
Think of the quality – no work assessed by uneducated peers, but rather by real professors. No “teams” where the professors are relegated to the role of “content experts” while IDs and ed techs take the lead – they would operate in a clearly supportive role.
Think of the academic freedom – each professor controlling their own content and approach for their section of the class. There would be variety, too, of method, readings, focus.
Think of the connectivism – possible in this environment, but within a more traditionally-organized “course” that can be transferrable and assessable, and thus count for credit at real universities. Instructivist, constructivist and connectivist approaches could all be used in the same class.
“I hate MOOCs because they’re automated and my stuff is peer-graded and I don’t have time for it and it isn’t accredited anyway and professors shouldn’t just be performers and everyone’s gonna lose their jobs.”
“I love MOOCs because the university system is too expensive and it’s just lectures anyway and I didn’t learn anything when I want to a traditional university and students are paying too much for gymnasiums and administrator salaries.”
We’ve got a series of conflations that I’m seeing over and over, to the point where everytime I read an article about MOOCs (and especially the comments after each article, like here at Bloomberg), I can only sigh.
MOOCs are not all created equal. We can’t keep treating them monolithically.
Conflation 1: All MOOCs are taught the same and I hate them/ love them because of this.
As anyone who’s taken ds106 or the Connectivism MOOCs can tell you, all MOOCs are not taught the same. Even the xMOOC and cMOOC distinction that George Siemens created and that I’ve used before isn’t the full story. There are MOOCs with paying students sponsored by real accredited schools with real working professors, and MOOCs that are proto-commercial and provide no individual attention at all. You could group MOOCs into types (go for it), but they’re not all the same so one should at least try to distinguish.
Conflation 2: MOOCs let the third world get knowledge so I love them.
MOOCs can provide a collaborative shell for pre-recorded lectures from big universities that have been available on YouTube for years. That’s good, but it doesn’t provide the “education” the lesser-developed world may need without some form of accreditation accepted in that location. Some MOOCs could help enormously. Others will become like Nestlé, offering something to the third world for free and then charging later for the formula once the babies are hooked on it.
Conflation 3: MOOCs are economic solutions used by universities so I love them/hate them because of this.
MOOCs cannot solve the problems of public education, which is plagued not only by mismanagement but by public misconception about its worth and role in society. People in financial trouble want lower taxes and lower prices and don’t take the long view. Will universities turn toward MOOCs to save money? Yes, they will. Should faculty do something about that? Yes, if they can (but without public support I doubt it will work). Are MOOCs being offered that are about an opportunity to learn, or to offer open education, instead of saving money? Yes, some are.
What isn’t being conflated?
The concern about professorial jobs, both existentially and in terms of roles, is a clear issue. The MOOCs with an instructivist pedagogy set up a model for super-professors performing in well-produced videos. This threatens both professors’ jobs and the whole idea of what it means to teach. This model implies disdain for both constructivist and connectivist pedagogical models. So we must separate those, too. There is a labor issue. There is a pedagogical issue. Let’s talk about those.
The danger of the conflations is that all MOOCs will become the same, that the Coursera model will be the only one available, that universities will think it’s OK to accept protocommercial MOOCs for credit without examining the individual courses. What’s happening is that intelligent discussion of MOOCs is buried in the blog posts of those in the trenches, while the Chronicle, New York Times, Bloomberg and other big media adopt the simplistic models for their analyses, which are rarely written by anyone who knows anything about education.
Your course is designed by an instructional designer, and your assessments are graded by computer or by someone in India. The question is — are you still the teacher?
As a professor, I have been designing, delivering, and agonizing over my own classes for 23 years. This didn’t change when I began teaching online 15 years ago. I found the knowledge I needed to create my classes and I did it. I have never used an instructional designer, a design team, a TA, a grader, or anyone who was paid to help me with creating my classes. My knowledge of pedagogy has come from readings and classes I did on my own, and the wonderful people of many professions in my network, many of them online professors and teachers also.
It’s about the role of the professor, especially at a community college.
In addition to teaching, I read a lot of work by PhDs in instructional design and technology, and I keep up with the “innovations” emerging in the proto-commercial educational world. In an exchange awhile back, my Twitter colleague Jennifer Dalby, an instructional designer, made an analogy between teaching a course and a symphony. One person wouldn’t compose, perform and conduct a symphony, so why would the same person both design and teach an online class?
So I thought about this and realized, no, it isn’t like a symphony (although the likes of Beethoven and Mozart did compose, perform and conduct).
It’s like making a movie. And I want to be Orson Welles – writer, director, actor. It’s my class. I write it when I create the syllabus and collect the materials. I direct it when I teach and assist students. I act when I’m lecturing or presenting.
But now that we’ve professionalized “instructional design” (and other aspects of education that used to be considered support rather than primary functions), I feel there’s a movement afoot to have me just act. Someone else has a degree that says they are more qualified than I am to design my class, in collaboration with me as the “content expert”. They want to do the writing, create the storyboard, tell me what the “best practices” are.
They are trying to turn me into Leonardo DiCaprio instead of Orson Welles. They want me to profess, to perform, to present, and that’s it. (They’ll record that, so my students can view it later. Others can set up a “course structure” around my performances.)
Well…that’s not OK. As a professor, I do not simply profess – I teach. All the decisions involved in teaching should be made by me. It’s not that I don’t understand the limitations (transferrability concerns, student learning outcomes), but beyond those limits the decisions about which materials to use, and how to use them, and what to have students do, and how to assess that, etc. etc. etc. should be mine. Doing those tasks are teaching.
At community colleges, we have the ideal teaching environment. It’s the one place between the restrictions of the K-12 curriculum dictated by states, and the research-based non-teaching focus of universities. At the university, I suppose some faculty might beg for instructional designers, especially if teaching isn’t what they want to be doing. At community colleges, we have no such pressures – the main job we have is teaching. This shouldn’t change just because we teach online.
There are a couple of risks in letting things continue the way they are heading:
1. Our profession will be de-professionalized. This happens as parts of our job become other professions. It’s like outsourcing key parts of your job. What will happen if they offer a PhD in Assessment? in Attendance? in Essay Assignment Design? Will we all become Leonardo, adding our special touch to the work of others, instead of creating our own?
2. We help perpetuate the myth that teaching online is too hard for ordinary teachers. It isn’t 1998 anymore. It no longer takes deep technical knowledge to teach online. Instead it takes the desire, a lot of energy and some self-acquired knowledge. But if we are all told that we need instructional designers and educational technologists to help us, from baby steps to final course, we will become totally dependent and our creativity will be stifled.
3. The courses could become cookie-cutter. The LMS already encourages this. If everyone chooses from the same set of instructional design “best practices” recommendations, variety will be lessened. As individuality succumbs to standardization, students will become more accustomed to the same platforms and approaches, limiting their thinking and their learning.
(And yes, if you’re thinking gosh, this sounds like an anti-MOOC argument, it could be that too…)
Welles demanded, and got, full artistic control of his work. He tried new ideas, acted and produced, worked in different mediums. No, there aren’t many like Orson Welles (or John Huston or Woody Allen or Robert Redford). But striving to attain that level of creative control should be expected, supported, and applauded in community college education. We should take back our classes and teach them.
Much of the arguing about Massive Open Online Courses in their xMOOC (proto-commercial) form is about whether it is possible to teach large numbers of people well. This post is partly in response to questions posed in Google Plus by Donna Murdoch, asking about the claim at Hybrid Pedagogy that “Pedagogy is unfazed by numbers”.
For the most part, xMOOCs consist of three elements:
1. Presentation – usually in the form of filmed set lectures and assigned readings
2. Interaction – usually in the form of asynchronous discussion forums, often monitored and/or moderated by staff from the LMS company or graduate students
3. Assessment – most often in the form of multiple-choice quick-grade quizzes and/or robot-graded essays and/or written work reviewed primarily by peers
Those unhappy with the xMOOC pedagogies (including Laura Gibbs and Jonathan Haber ) complain of poor pedagogy in terms of the interaction and assessment elements, which seem far removed from the professor. At the same time, companies offering such courses insist that their pedagogy is sound. Can both views be correct?
Interestingly, I’ve read few complaints about the quality of the content offered in these classes. This means that the debate about mass pedagogy has two aspects. One is whether the lecture format itself relays good information and well-supported professorial interpretations – this seems to not be a problem. The other is based in the very old argument over whether lecture/presentation itself is good pedagogy.
Then you have to determine what good pedagogy is. Perhaps:
Presentation: Good pedagogy presents quality content in ways that encourage depth of exploration
Interaction: Good pedagogy provides an opportunity for exploring such ideas with others (experts and non-experts)
Assessment: Good pedagogy creates opportunities to demonstrate what has been learned from that exploration
With this model, many xMOOCs provide good pedagogy for presentation, but weaker pedagogies for interaction and assessment. This is primarily because with mass numbers of people, the type of learning shifts from the individual to a more collective experience. The difference of opinion is about whether that shift makes it harder or easier to achieve good pedagogy. (If this seems familiar, it is the same discussion over 500-seat lecture halls and discussion sections being run by graduate students, a debate that pre-dates the internet.)
If you are focused on individual learning and individual evaluation of that learning, either for self-improvement or to be assessed for a grade/credit/degree, then the interaction and assessment elements of xMOOCs can be disappointing. Individualized learners are self-directed enough to do the work and learn well on their own given the presentation, but their efforts at deeper exploration are adversely affected by lack of professorial contact, feedback and input.
If you are focused on crowd-sourced learning and self-actualization through communication with others, xMOOCs may be disappointing for similar reasons. Presentation quality may be high, but presentation is secondary to exploration – it is just a jumping off point. With formulated discussions and automated assessments focused on absorbing that presentation content, there is less opportunity to extend exploration.
But if you are trying to earn that degree in the cheapest, easiest way possible, the xMOOC may provide the model for you. Similarly, if the subject is of only moderate interest, or your focus is to “learn the material”, the quality of presentation offsets the difficulties of interaction and assessment. In fact, broader and deeper interaction and assessment would actually get in your way – deep learning takes time, especially in a larger group.
The weakness of the xMOOC in terms of interaction and assessment are, I’m afraid, directly the result of scale. Deep discussion may occur among people with little experience in a subject, but without that experience it is more likely to be superficial. Assessment may provide an opportunity to demonstrate new knowledge, but when relegated to multiple-choice and robo/peer-graded writing, it is more likely to simply tally retention of content.
Again, none of these ideas should be surprising or new. Those who object to presentation pedagogy in general (the long line of education reformers who continually critique the lecture-based, industrial model) don’t think lecture is good pedagogy anyway and criticize xMOOCs for that reason. Those who object to the commercialization of education (including myself) criticize xMOOCs for that focus. Those who believe that MOOCs are open and free and democratize college-level knowledge, though I think they’re naive, see xMOOCs as a solution to the cost/learning/social problems that plague higher education. But they also see their pedagogy as inherently good, and I just don’t believe that’s true.
Back when I was researching the English textile industry in the medieval and early modern periods, my work was clearly aligned with trends in economic history and, to a certain extent, the history of technology. Even if not directly related to my topic, Marxist theory held that different economic groups were in competition, and I showed that merchant and craft guilds were in conflict. But there was no theoretical construct, aside from historical geography, to underpin my argument about entrepreneurs moving the fulling process from town guild control into the hills due to technological advantage. That made my work automatically interdisciplinary. My methodology was traditional, at least in terms of economic history, but the theory was mixed. Nothing contained Marxist determinism, there was no Whiggish assumption of national progress, and I did not reject individual agency — rather I combined several different approaches.
The main idea here seems to be that historians would eventually reject positivism, and indeed all theoretical constructs that saw human progress on a continual incline. In an attempt to make history predictive, social scientists created models that may have reflected ideals rather than empirical analysis. Max Weber is accused of this, in his analysis of capitalism as leading to a steady increase in social equality (I love him anyway). In contrast, American historians (“The New Historians”) helped challenge assumptions that national histories show an increase in moral good, for example when Charles Beard claimed that the Founders had created a liberal constitution with the purpose of enriching themselves (1913).
No trace of a W.E. Forster by Googling or on 
The other History of Education Society is 
In literary studies, Victorian Studies has become a “sub-field”, and the many journals of Victorian Studies tend to be dominated by literary analysis . When I subscribed to 
The implication is that any depth must exist within the instructional materials accessed through the system. At the top level, the environment in which the student must work, the danger of cognitive overload is mitigated by providing as few options as possible. It is a clear return to 4th grade “computerized learning”, the kind that takes place in a lab. Pupils sit at stations, and the software guides them step-by-step by pressing as few buttons as possible. With visual and touch-screen interfaces, this is now even easier. Complete a small task, get instant feedback, press ‘Next’.
Although at first there had been plans to teach information literacy as a school requirement, this trend has tapered off because of such ease of use. In many places, information literacy is still articulated as a goal, but is not implemented in any meaningful way. The result has been students who have no idea what to type into Google when asked to find, for example, information about American imperialism in the late 19th century. We already are aware of the challenges of distinguishing between good and bad sources of information, and want students to distinguish between a scholarly source and a pop culture source. But instead of increasing skills, the fear of bad websites has led to banning certain things, through filters in grade schools and syllabus dictates in college. (When I encouraged my student to use Wikipedia to find primary sources, she was aghast, telling me it had been drilled into her head for years never to use Wikipedia for school.)
But that’s not the real challenge – it’s the material. For each chapter, there is a long list of resources: document activities, image activities, map activities, “closer look” features. Since each of these has at least one question attached (I assume that’s the “activity” – there’s nothing else active here), I assumed these were multiple choice questions, for automatic grading. Turns out most of them are “essay” questions, all of low quality (i.e. “what is x talking about in this document?”), that I would have to grade. I’ve assigned over a dozen for each chapter. Besides, the whole idea of the experiment was to be using their pedagogy as much as possible instead of mine.
Some don’t even have a date! They let you into just enough code that I can kind of correct some of these by adding words to the title. But there are audio files with no lyrics or transcripts. And, worst of all, the primary source video clips (Edison’s footage of Annie Oakley, footage of the Rough Riders) are in low resolution and look terrible. I could find better quality of the same footage using Internet Archive. There are also typographical errors in the transcript and in the titles and descriptions of the sources.
I love it. I’m the kid who sat on the floor reading the encyclopedia. I’m the student who got thrown out of the library when it closed. I’m the one looking up studies on the internet. I love content. All content. The expression of human knowledge, going back for centuries. Give it to me. In books, online, in text, on video. I want it all.
This year, our Program for Online Teaching leadership for the 
MOOCs are not all created equal. We can’t keep treating them monolithically.
There are a couple of risks in letting things continue the way they are heading: