Getting cheerier

I received a lot of feedback on my last post -- primarily on my Facebook page (I sort of forget that I have the two linked). Thanks to everyone who's been sympathizing, strategizing, and listening to me.

Now here's another piece to cheer me up: In a recent Inside Higher Education, the excellent scholar and professor Dennis Baron [ignore the IHE typo of his name in the URL] answers questions about his new book on teaching, writing, technology, and history. The book's called A Better Pencil.

Baron offers a perspective I know but often forget -- that people being what we are (and have been), there is (and has been) more good than bad when it comes to how people teach, learn, and communicate with each other.

I especially like these lines about online education because they reflect my reality:

"But I do see some significant downsides to distance education. . . . I fear that completion rates for many online courses are still disappointingly low, that the quality of much of the education is also lower than what happens in the classroom -- of course I’m thinking about the kinds of courses that I [and] my colleagues teach, ones which don’t require memorization of a body of knowledge but instead call for analysis, speculation, exploration. Courses where reading is intensive, where group discussion produces many insights, and where evaluation can’t be done by machine." (emphasis added)

These are the kinds of courses I value, too, full of the kinds of spontaneous insightful moments that can't be predicted but can only be recognized and cultivated organically by an instructor who's paying attention to all of the people in the room. This instructor knows that "knowledge is socially constructed" and that the room of people s/he's with is a social organism with knowledge-making potential.

The whole interview is good: read it!

"Brilliant!"

This BBC3 video comes via The Garance.
What if Facebook was our real life? What if it already is?

Facebook Surprise

Today I found out that my brother-in-law, who teaches art at Mercyhurst Prep in Erie, PA, has a Facebook group devoted to him: it's called "I have a shrine to Dr. Borowicz in my closet."

Pretty awesome.

What's cheating?

An interesting article on Slashdot makes me ask the question. The article's called "Student Faces Expulsion for Facebook Study Group," and the comment thread offers a bunch of takes on the issue. (For a fuller version of the article, read "Student faces Facebook consequences.")

Seems to me that study groups are always helpful for learning something and that technology is just a magnifying glass, letting those study groups happen more quickly and remotely. In fact, students say that a Facebook study group is a "valid studying technique in the information age." Makes perfect sense -- as a technique for *learning* stuff.

But the way for instructors to find out if any particular student has learned anything [either with the help of a study group or not] is to provide some kind of opportunity for said student to show s/he has learned. In fact, I call tests and quizzes "opportunities to show me what you know" whenever I give them in class.

So I can't see why Facebook study groups would be cheating: if they're used to take exams, when those exams are not group exams, then they'd be cheating.