Plato's "Gorgias"

At the bottom of this blog's front page, I've listed books I've been reading lately: some textbooks, but mostly the "fun" reading I do in my "spare" time. (I do forget to add some of the things I read, but that's par for the course.)

Anyway, right now, I'm re-reading "Gorgias" and I'm not even sure why. I have always liked the campy opening scene, with Socrates coming late to a dinner party at Gorgias's home, arriving with his young pal, Chaerephon, who made them late because he was shopping(!). Another young man in the dialogue, Polus, gets a lot of Socrates's attention by taking Socrates's bait and answering questions that box himself in a corner, the corner Socrates wants him in.

But Socrates is a bit of a bully, I think, in this dialogue: he shifts the grounds for some of his questions, playing word games to entrap his interlocutors. In fact, the whole interaction seems to be a huge display of testosterone, a kind of ancient Greek antler fight between bucks. The different types of masculinity try to best the master masculinity. But he, through his superior (?) reasoning power, is able to emasculate them all by revealing their faulty thinking.

So why am I even bothering to read it, you ask? Well, I've been curious about the uses of analogy lately: when and how they're used. This dialogue includes SO many that are fun to study. It also contains, at least the translation I have (in Bizzell and Herzberg's The Rhetorical Tradition), plenty of casual language and metadiscourse that enables me to see the dialogue played out on stage: what would Socrates and Chaerephon be carrying when they arrive at Gorgias's house after shopping? What jewelry accessorizes Polus? How portly is Gorgias? And Callicles wears a vandyke for sure.

Words are fun

Scroll through the visual representation of the alphabet on this blog: abcdefghijkslmnopqrstuvwxyz by Dan Waber. He calls it an "acrylabet."

Poetry's power

I'm a poetry fan, and I like to teach students about sonnets: they're an example of formal poetry that most students recognize (think Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets From The Portuguese, especially "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways"); they're also more sophisticated than the nursery-rhymey four-line stanzas that students think of when they think of formal rhymed poetry.

The writer who gets me most excited about sonnets is Edna St. Vincent Millay, who's a master of the Italian form (also called "Petrarchan" after the 14th-century Italian poet who perfected the form, some say). Sure, she uses ten-syllable lines instead of the strictly Petrarchan 7 or 11 syllables, but she uses the classic rhyme scheme: abba abba for the octave, cdc dcd for the sestet.

She also uses the classic content structure: a problem or predicament in the octave and resolution to the problem in the sestet, with the "turn" at line 9. The whole point of sonnets is to juxtapose contrasting ideas, to subvert expectations. Millay's a master at that. But we have to read her sonnets slowly, looking for the grammatical sentences instead of end lines to find her meaning: she's bold!

Here's "Sonnet xli" from 1923 - imagine giving a one-night-stand this kind of brush-off!

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,--let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

What I love about this poem - and Millay in general - is her full acceptance of her corporeality: she's joyful and insistent about being fully human, with all the contradictions and complications that come with living.

Applause for community colleges

On a website called Education Update Online, you'll find the following article from 2005: "Study Reveals Americans Support Expanding Community College System to Serve More Students". Although the article does not make clear when the study took place, with whom, or by whom, and although I can't say I find this particular publication very academic, I *can* say that the article helps me continue with my argument: that community colleges are *colleges* and should, therefore, be funded as such, supported as such, and run as such (rather than high schools or trade schools).

So I googled around the web to find the source of the 2005 article. It's based on a 2004 survey (survey and answers here) conducted by an organization now called Community College Central. This organization has also published an interesting article called "Higher Education More Important Than Ever To Americans, But Record Numbers Fear That Costs May Prevent Access For Many Qualified Students", first published by The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education to complement the 2005 article.

Food for thought as I consider what my colleague Kris told me today: that new full-time hires in the Minnesota community college system must take courses/workshops in the philosophy of community college teaching, among other things. This additional education is new. A good idea, sure, but it seems to me that all faculty, not just new full-time folks, should take it, especially when many of our new full-time folks come from our part-time ranks.

Budget Analysis

My son pointed me to this website, The Budget Graph: A Visual Guide to Your Federal Taxes, which contains a poster representing the U.S. federal budget.

As a technical writing teacher, I'm fascinated by the visual design of this poster. I'm reminded of Edward Tufte's work, especially The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information. (Equally important is his critique of PowerPoint, a version of it here:"PowerPoint is Evil" reprinted at Wired online.)

The graphic designer who created this poster, Jess Bachman, is a 26-year-old who invites folks to "spread the word" about his creation. Please do!

Persepolis

The book Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is Century's Common Book for this year, the first year of the Common Book project. It's a great idea: all college students, staff, and faculty are encouraged to read this book and incorporate it into their courses. We've had great preparation and support for the Common Book, such as summer workshops and presentations by Century faculty experts, a college common book blog, and lists of resources for teaching and learning. These resources and events were created, scheduled, and managed by the tireless and creative colleague, Cullen Bailey Burns.

Amazingly, Cullen was able to get Satrapi to come to Century's campus on April 10! Quite a coup, since Satrapi will be promoting her movie Persepolis, which is based on both our Common Book and Persepolis 2.

I saw the movie this weekend and can't recommend it highly enough. The animation is simple yet sophisticated, layered and nuanced: it takes talent to convey subtle emotions in the eyes of an almost-cartoon face, tweaking eyebrows and mouth sizes to show determination, confusion, fear, ennui. The stylized marionettes based on playing-card images perfectly capture the house-of-cards qualities of the army, leaders, soldiers. The charcoal and watercolor backgrounds are beautiful.

Art

I attended an excellent art opening this evening - my friend Mary Hark, formerly professor at Macalester College in St. Paul and currently professor at UW-Madison.

Her recent work comes out of her year in Kumasi, Ghana, on a Fulbright.

Need a class discussion?

Then watch this video:

"The Story of Stuff" is a 20-minute video argument that needs to be seen by everyone!

It's great for many, many reasons. For one thing, it'll explain to you why our government wants to send some citizens/taxpayers an "economic stimulus" check of a few hundred dollars but doesn't want to contribute an equal amount to things like education, health care, transportation infrastructure, etc. It'll also help understand something behind the partisan wrangling about the economic stimulus package.

Watch it until the end, too, to see ways to act.

New Look!

I'm trying for a cleaner look that still has space for the widgets and links I keep adding. What do you think of this design?

More new finds

I'm not sure what to call the paths I've been taking lately to find new and interesting information on the web: following hyperlinks? trails? serendipity? ADHD?

At any rate, I've found a blog called CyberEnglish today, which is written by an English teacher who's also interested in technology.

I've also watched "Text & Technologies," a talking-head lecture on YouTube. Very odd experience, but I've learned something, I think.

And finally, a person can find TONS of educational stuff online. Try this site "Free Video Lectures" for short courses in everything from Anatomy to Electronics to Philosophy to Web Design.

Another Discovery . . .

The MnSCU Center for Teaching and Learning has a blog, too! Although it's not a blog with frequent posts, I think the list of CTL tutorials from June 7, 2007's entry is worth a look. Check it out.

And also try this small blog called "Civic Engagement and Higher Education" by John Hamerlink who works for the Minnesota Campus Compact. These two ideas are important to me, too.

Much Belated . . .

I have just found out that Century College has a blog! Who knew?

Actually, it's not quite a college blog - more like one person - and some important links don't work.

But I suppose something is better than nothing . . . although that phrase loses its punch in this "instant access, ready information" age. Dead links are especially damaging to an institution's ethos . . . .

Considering logic

In this political season (aren't they all?), we're bombarded with arguments by analogy. Most of these arguments contain the logical fallacy called a "weak [or false, faulty, questionable] analogy." It takes work to uncover the weak analogy, but perhaps this little story (stolen from here) will provide a bit of fun:

Consider: How is a raven like a writing desk? (In other words, how are these two analogous?) Most people might say they're not; they share no compelling characteristics.

Consider this answer: Poe wrote on both of them.

It's a joke, right? We know it's a weak analogy because the answer depends upon wordplay, the two meanings of "on" used simultaneously. (The ancient Greeks called this particular figure of speech or trope a "syllepsis.")

In other words: study logic and rhetoric today so you can become a better argument analyzer. Visit these sites:
Silva Rhetoricae
Gorgias's Weblog: "The Daily Trope"
CriticalThinking.org
Language Log
Electric Rhetoric

Podcast of note

Browsing around the Minnesota Public Radio site, I found this: Grammar Grater, "a weekly podcast about English words, grammar and usage for the Information Age." (I wonder what they think about the serial comma? MPR must align themselves with the newspaper crowd.)

An English Course?

I'm intrigued by a professor's introduction to (or invitation to or commercial for) a UC-Irvine course called Digital Rhetoric 2007. The professor, Liz Losh, produced a number of videos on the topic.

For example, she presents a couple of what I might call "course lectures" that summarize the use of digital rhetoric: "2007, The Year in Digital Rhetoric" and "2006, the Year of Digital Rhetoric"

Both of these "lectures" would be great in any classroom, as would Losh's initial course invitation. In that video, she's explicit that such courses and the area of study (digital rhetoric) belong in an English department. I agree!

(Do you think I'm getting addicted to YouTube?!)

Typography=Visual Rhetoric

I continue my fascination with typography: the relationships between words as words, as containers, as vehicles, as collections of letters which are themselves words, containers, vehicles.

Here are some YouTube videos that I like:

"Typography" by Boca and Ryan Ulrich, which introduces the vocabulary and concepts of the art
"Who's on First?" by Jimmy073, which uses the famous Abbott and Costello routine as the basis for a terrific little typography film
"Adolph Hitler Speech using Kinetic Typography" by sonyaedith, a powerful presentation of an actual 1939 speech by Hitler, profoundly disturbing and great for many kinds of courses
"Kinetic Typography Girl" by Meyrien Janevine, which has great music, too
"Live Out Loud" by Johnny Lee, short and powerful

Thirty Students, 59 authors

The students listed the authors they'd heard of and came up with a list of 59, of whom almost a dozen I know next-to-nothing about (Upton Sinclair? Robinson Jeffers? Edwin Arlington Robinson?).

Which is to say that I'll learn something this semester - hooray!

Webinar

Although this particular neologism bothers me, yesterday I did participate in a web-based seminar (or "event" as Capella University, the sponsor/host, describes it). Intrigued by the topic, "Academic Standards in Online Teaching and Curriculum," I logged into a webspace to participate, a website that didn't make clear how I was to communicate/listen to the webinar (why does no one use consistent vocabulary when describing things?). Eventually, I was able to connect fully, after typing in questions to the "host" (different from the "presenter") who did an admirable job juggling the technology.

The hour-long experience consisted of me watching a series of PowerPoint slides on my computer while I listened on the phone to the presenter talk about the slides. Participants could type questions into the "Chat" space on the website (not the Q&A space which is where I typed my first three questions). The presenter would stop occasionally to ask for questions, which the host would read to her from the website - evidently, the presenter wasn't seeing the same thing we were seeing. Oddly, I could not tell who else was participating: no list of participants appeared, even though I asked for one, and so I thought I was listening by myself for the longest time - and I thought I was listening to a taped presentation because it was so stilted.

Sadly, the slides and presenter were unsatisfying to me because they were both too complicated and too generalized to be taken seriously as "seminar" topics. If listeners did not already agree with the presenter's points and references, they couldn't accept or even understand the advice they were being given. That such an event was called "higher education" frustrates me. I wouldn't prepare something that thin and biased for my undergraduates.

As a person trained in the humanities, I'm used to asking questions, asking for clarification and for support/rationale/reasons/justification for ideas I encounter. In short, I'm a critical thinker. But critical thinkers could not fully participate in this event because they didn't have any opportunity to be truly critical. Sure, we could ask questions, but no follow-ups, so my only question conveyed to the presenter received a woefully inadequate response: mostly broad generalizations without support (along with a sad joke).

I'm frustrated that so-called experts in education provide such sub-standard content - and via the online medium, which further limits the value of that content. For all the presenter's emphasis on "standards" and "outcomes," I do not see that she planned any for this particular educational event. It was much more of a "do as I say, not as I do" experience.

Extremely disappointing.

Reading Lists

Before the winter break ends, I hope everyone gets to finish the reading they'd hoped to do. I'm still working on Otto Jespersen's 1924 book The Philosophy of Grammar, a book I acquired about 10 years ago and have dipped into periodically. I'd hoped to read it rather than dip, but so far I've not managed. Feels too much like a textbook, and I suspect I'm feeling what many of my students feel: why am I reading all this explanation for something that seems obvious?

Another book on my list for break is The Heath Anthology of American Literature, vols. C, D, and E. I have to make some selections from these volumes for a course called American Literature: 1870 to the Present. Any suggestions?

Candidate information

Since I don't watch television, I didn't even know what Mike Huckabee looks like. I get my most of information from National Public Radio, with occasional perusals of The New York Times online.
This collection of images (clipped from a goofy blog called "Vote for Breakfast") reminds me that he's the candidate who is admired for his weight loss, which I'd forgotten. Odd that such a feat would be persuasive as a Presidential qualification.

But another information source I ran into recently is CNNMoney.com. About a month ago, Marlys Harris of Money Magazine wrote an article that analyzed the net worth of the Presidential candidates. Click the link at the bottom of the article to find a candidate-by-candidate breakdown of their finances. Note that Huckabee wasn't even considered a "top White House contender," so he's not included on this list. I wonder where we could find his net worth?

New for the New Year

I recently found out that I can add the New York Times to my blog. I chose the "Front Page" option (although seriously considered "Books") because I thought a "current events" option makes pedagogical sense. See it at left (obviously). I do wish I could figure out how to have a shorter list of items: must be a way.

Christmas Messages

The Royal Channel on YouTube is the official website for the British Monarchy. Here's the link to Queen Elizabeth's 2007 Christmas message. Important and sincere, I think, and with an acknowledgement of technology's power.

In contrast, here's the Christmas message from the U.S. White House this year. This static written message, taken in conjunction with the President's weekly radio address, do touch on some of the same themes as Queen Elizabeth's message. The rhetorical strategies differ significantly, of course, and so the U.S. message seems much less inclusive, much less sincere, and much less moving.

That's too bad.

Community College English?

This Chronicle online article sounds familiar . . . "The Petition"
Happy Break.

Negativity

AT this time of year, negativity is the last sentiment I'd like to write about, but listening to today's MPR interview with Mitch Pearlstein of the Center for the American Experiment was *full* of negativity.

The Midmorning host Gary Eichten said Pearlstein was talking about "reforming public education." Instead, he talked about destroying public education - not that he thought anything about it was good anyway - by letting vouchers and the free market take care of the "problems" of our public educational system. He acknowledged that more money provides access to better education when he asserted that poor "black" families should get vouchers so they can send their kids to "good private" schools rather than the "poor public" schools in their neighborhoods.

So he would rather see that money go to individuals than to the public schools themselves. But the public schools could use that voucher money to reduce class size, provide more one-on-one education, and reconfigure themselves so that they have some of the characteristics of so-called successful privates.

He had nothing but bad things to say about teachers' unions, too, setting up a false dichotomy (one of many logical fallacies in his comments) between unions and "neighbors and community members." "When people see that the choice is between these two groups," he said, "they'll choose the right group."

I am SO tired of the negative public rhetoric about public education, teachers, and schools. We hear this lambasting at every level: our governor, legislators, media (including supposedly "liberal" MPR), every-day citizens. It's come to be a commonplace to say "our schools are failing," when Minnesota's public school system is one of the best in the entire country: despite the disrespect for teachers, teaching, and education for citizenry (which our founding fathers had in mind when they created a public education system).

Teaching professionals persist by and through herculean efforts and despite the constant barage of public disrespect: they're committed to their profession, their subject areas, and their students, and this commitment and achievement simply must be part of the public dialog.

Come on, teachers: let's start combatting the negative rhetoric of "failing schools" by getting vocal about our achievements despite odds, our joys tempered with sorrows, and our pride in the strong students we've nurtured.

Writing Matters

Especially technical writing and usability testing so that people who need to use a document or website can actually use it!

If you don't believe me, read this New York Times article called "Technology's Untanglers: They Make It Really Work."

Ultimate Performance

I just attended the final class meeting of a colleague - he graciously invited me to sit in on this last class of his last course of his last year teaching. He's been at it for 37 1/2 years, and he's on the top of his game.

The course was Shakespeare, the final play "The Tempest," and Ray pulled together the bard's life and work, the power of Prospero, and the power of the humanities in general when it comes to educating human beings. His "lecture" (read "performance" as he so eloquently said) inspired me and another faculty member in attendance, and perhaps even some of the students. A tour de force.

Enjoy the rest of your life, Ray. You've made a difference.

Keeping Up

It's tough managing all the interesting things to read - books, articles, newspapers, email messages, discussion list postings. It's also tough to manage all the things to watch - YouTube, movies, the cats. And then there are those "multimodal" artifacts that I both read and watch: webpages, Facebook, blogs.

I'm finding so many interconnections between the academic listservs I'm on (WMST-L and techrhet are my two most active), especially when it comes to discussing how our students use technology (most of them, anyway). One poster even said that to teenagers, 2 or three years is a generation gap. Sure, but an even bigger gap might be the one I've been living in: I remember using a computer when you couldn't see much on the screen (remember the Osborne?) or when I could watch the cursor speed greenish across a gray/black screen, stopping (throbbing!) to wait for me to type in a command (see this blog for an example). Doesn't seem that long ago, somehow, yet eons ago in other ways.

Here's an interesting take on this odd speeded-up time/gap, especially in terms of what kids are doing with communications technology/social networking (what we called "CMC" or "Computer Mediated Communication" in the old days): "The Death of Email" at Slate.com/

So the question for me now becomes, "How to teach?" Or maybe, "What to teach?" Or maybe, "What is teaching?"

And here's a random list of cool online things to make me think even more about change:
**a YouTube Video "Did You Know?"
**an online journal "Said It: Feminist News, Cuture, and Politics"
**a quasi-academic article "A Professor Pokes Fun at Copyright"
**a blog "Feminist Philosophers"

Two great reads

The early 20th-century Australian writer, Henry Handel Richardson, is someone I teach in my course "Women's Literature: British and Colonial." Her short story "Two Hanged Women" appears in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, my foundational textbook for both women's literature courses I teach. I love the stylistic economy of the story.

The novel I've just finished reading is Richardson's masterpiece: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, which consists of three separate novels: Australian Felix, The Way Home, and Ultima Thule. The protagonist is based on her father, say most critics, and I recommend the entire 900+ pages.

A second good book, Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House, is a collection of essays about writing fiction. I'm just starting it and already I want to copy the essays to use in class.

Student [and other] Writers

MnSCU has a student literary magazine! It's online and called Inkling. Check out the first edition here: here.

I'm no critic of student creative writing: I can't tell if anything's good or not. It's terrible, really, because I'm finding myself being so impatient with mediocrity these days (okay, many of you will say "So what's new about that?") and so I can't read student creative writing. Essays, okay, but poems? Stories? There's just too little time in the day already to read poetry - I don't want to spend that time on student work.

Speaking of poetry, I picked up four good volumes yesterday at Half Price Books:

--- John Balaban - Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong (he translated this 18th-century concubine's poems: really beautiful. Also he was a professor of mine at Penn State, even gave me some advice about poems I wrote as a youngster)
--- Jim Daniels - M-80 (an amazing urban voice that I thought was African American until I saw his photo here - I don't think we're related, and I'd never heard of him, but he's published many volumes)
--- Edna St. Vincent Millay - Conversation at Midnight (really more of a drama than a poem, but the book I bought is a 1937 edition, lovely paper, a gift from one lover to another although I can't make out every word of the fountain-pen-inked inscription)
--- Adrienne Rich - Sources (scroll down this site to see this rare book, a volume of Rich's I don't have, and I'm trying to round out my collection of her work)

Trying to get [out of] it

Decision making is tough, I know. So many considerations, so many complications. And then to have to make decisions for events that will transpire in almost a year - like course offerings for summer 2008 - asks for a fortune-teller of impeccable reputation (or an administrator with accurate data).

Despite not attending the summer course selection meeting, I've been asked to teach a literature course for summer 2008 - I'm happy to do so in order to ensure that the course won't be cancelled. Being a good departmental citizen is important to me, and I'd also like our literature offerings for summer to continue to be robust.

Because faculty members can select the literature courses they'd like to teach - within reason - I reasonably chose one that fulfills two certificate programs (Women and Gender Studies, Global Studies) and two Minnesota transfer curriculum goals (Humanties/Fine Arts-06 and Global Perspective-08) in order to make the course an attractive choice for students. The more bang-for-their-buck, the more likely they are to select a course. It's also a course that will not have been offered any other time during the entire 2007-08 academic year, follows well in sequence with another course we offer, and is one I like teaching.

The last time I taught such a summer-session literature course, it was two-thirds full, mainly with students who were full-time at another institution: intelligently (if we consider the marketing message our community colleges send out), the students were "fulfilling their generals" at a "cheaper price" so that they could continue with their four-year degrees at Augsburg, Bethel, Hamline, St. Kate's, Kansas State, River Falls, the University of Minnesota.

Thus, although I don't have scientific data to support my choice of a summer course, I do have some experiential data and some good intentions.

But I'm told that it's not a good choice because it's a women's lit course and they have "problems with enrollment." Yikes. Surely that assessment can't smack of the sexism it implies. I guess I'll need to have a conversation with a dean even as I try to extricate myself from campus activities - something that's been tough for me on the sabbatical year. How does one truly "rest" and get away when the long arm of the schedule reaches out for another victim?

Addendum: Had the talk with my department chair listing the above reasons, and he's going to talk with the dean, who "will probably go for it" but wants me to know the course is "still a gamble."

Technology Survey

I just had my "in person" interview today on the phone with Amir. It felt good to air some of my concerns - frankly and bluntly and directly. I hope that what we faculty have to say finds its way to decision makers. That hasn't happened in the past, if you ask me.

Now for a couple of videos about the future of education:
TED Talks: Sir Ken Robinson is kind of funny, and his British accent makes his message more palatable.
EDU@2020 looks bootlegged, but Katz's video needs to be seen by lots of us!

Oh, here's the script for the Michael Wesch talk I heard on Friday. I also had a great talk about Educause with an IT expert from Carleton College

Rethinking/Reteaching

Okay, maybe I should just write "thinking" because that's what Michael Wesch reminds me to do. See his videos here: "A Vision of Students Today" and "Information R/Evolution"

Great stuff. But he's challenging educators to give up a bit of their status/cache as "knowers" when he asks them (us? me?) to give students tasks that are meaningful instead of teching them in a 19th-century way.

He also reminds me to tag my entries here - which I keep forgetting!

And St. Thomas University, where I'm typing this and which hosted him, has ended his talk with a spread of food that's embarrassing in its luxury: white linen table-clothed tables with bbq'ed meatballs, chicken satay, cheese and crackers, shrimp cocktail, bacon-wrapped water chestnuts, egg rolls, artichoke dip, red and white wine, pop and bottled water. All to serve 100, but only 60, max, attended his talk. I guess that private school tuition pays off.

Just in Time

The guy who made this YouTube video, "The Machine is Us/ing Us," is Dr. Michael Wesch from Kansas State University. He will be at St. Thomas University tomorrow, and I just registered to hear his presentation called “Human Futures for Technology and Education.”

Another cool thing I've just been reading about on my techrhet list is a website tool called "Late Night Writer." It's a fabulous series of prompts to help reluctant writers (and who hasn't been one of those?) compose either a review or a report. Aimed at junior high and high school students (I think), it looks useful for community college composition students, too!

Forgetting and remembering

I've been forgetting to update the list of "what I've been reading" that appears at the end of this blog page. (Perhaps because it's at the end of the page! Design really is everything.)

Right now, I'm working on Grace Paley's short stories; she's our bookclub writer this month. Her Collected Stories is out, but I have two old copies of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and The Little Disturbances of Man. I hadn't opened them in years, and when I did yesterday, I happily found that Grace had signed them to me. I saw her read when I was at St. Kate's - probably 25 years ago now. Wow. I remember her energy and wit and white hair - and especially how different she was from any woman, younger or older, that I'd ever known or seen. I'd never met a "city woman" before, and she made me want to visit New York City.

In this 1998 Salon.com interview, she claims that "all my habits are bad." You've just gotta love a writer (or any person) who claims this identity.

Clearing/Cleaning

Out and/or up - I never know which verb phrase to use when I'm sorting through my email inbox that is crammed full of messages. I've found a bunch of interesting things, though, from the techrhet list I'm on (a really good listserv with smart people sharing/conversing about the use of technology in rhetoric/composition courses).

Interesting courses:
at RPI called Teaching Communication in Technologically Mediated Contexts
at Miami University called Writing and Writing Studies in a Digital Age
at the U of Minnesota Teaching Digital Writing

This article about "literacies" from a K-12 journal (but still applicable to community college professors/students) called "The New Literacies" provides some good "spoof websites" (including one for a tree octopus!).

College Life

- Or should I say "University Life" - surely is more robust with extracurricular activities. Tonight I watched the University of Minnesota's women's volleyball match against Illinois. The Gophers lost, but what a pleasure to see these athletes perform. The university band was terrific, too.

A community college just can't replicate this kind of enrichment - what can we do instead??

The people knew

Back in the day, as the students say, in the 2000 election, the voters in this great country chose Al Gore for their president. Now he's won a Nobel Peace Prize.

(P.S. Anyone remember the Butterfly Ballot from the 2000 election?)
(P.P.S Speaking of elections, anyone care to look at the REAL distribution of votes in the 2004 election, a visual representation that shows the HUGE bias in the media's "red state, blue state" characterization? Scroll down to see accurate color coding. This cartogram was prepared by professors at the University of Michigan.)

Three Big Surprises

They're from Ben Reynolds of the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University. Today, in an email sent to a listserv I'm on, he wrote that we higher education professionals have the job of telling undergraduates these three surprises:

"Everything some grownup puts in print isn't True."
"Some questions have no one, correct, answer."
"We [professors] want to know what you think."

A great list, I think, and I'd like to think that all three of these are true for my colleagues, too.

First One

In my sabbatical plan proposal, I said I would be doing primary and secondary research on pedagogy. My primary research would consist of observing colleagues from other campuses.

So tomorrow is the first observation: Dr. Ruth Cronje in the English Department at UW-Eau Claire, has graciously allowed me to sit in on her first-year composition course and her scientific and technical writing course. She'll be teaching about summaries in the comp course and syntax in the stc course. It'll be great!

Beautiful October

Today's the kind of weather that I remember from the past five years' worth of first weeks in October: it's sunny blue sky, yellow leaves, bright windy sun. The past five are memorable to me because I've spent them driving to Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter for the annual Nobel Conference. The drive follows the Minnesota River for quite a while: a lovely valley. I didn't go this year - and yesterday was full of rain, so not going was a good thing.

But I'll get my driving fix in this weekend when I go to Chicago for the TYCA Conference, where I'm on a Saturday morning panel with folks from Century. Still not sure what I'm going to say! But the drive should give me good thinking time.

This noon, I had a shiatsu massage for the first time. I'm getting Rosy of Blue Heron Bodywork to help with my old shoulder injury. She's a former student of Josh's, and he gave me two sessions with her as a Christmas present. Today's session felt great, although I'm ruining it by sitting at a computer!

Okay, David

This post's for you.

I've been ignoring this blog in favor of the personal blog - mainly because I'm trying to wean myself away from Century. It's really hard for me: I still read some college emails, still volunteer to go to meetings about a new college initiative I'm interested in (a "publishing center" at Century, which would be so cool and would be a good thing to have for our students). I get razzed by my pal Cullen, who sends me emails saying, "Why are you reading this email?! You shouldn't be reading your college emails, except those from me." I love Cullen.

And also, I've done almost nothing related to college work or my sabbatical work - just read for fun as I clean out my bookshelves. I figure I should read the books before throwing them in the Goodwill box. Last week, I started and then skimmed through Silence in October by a Danish writer named Jens Christian Grondahl. It was awful, despite the good review here, because the narrator was so mannered and full of himself. An entire novel inside the head of one man (or woman or girl or chicken) should be a novel inside an *interesting* head, say for example Mrs. Dalloway. But this Danish musing on lost love and the inability to really know other people was just really irritating.

Today I finished a great epic, depressing, invigorating 1992 novel called Was by Geoff Ryman. He calls it a fantasy/history, but I see a collage (or bricolage?) of voices, times, characters, facts, dreams that all circle around the Wizard of Oz: the play, the movie, the fans, the actors, the story. Frank Baum's a character in the novel, as is Judy Garland, Aunty Em and Uncle Henry, Dorothy and Toto. It's a brutal, beautiful work.

How's that, Dave? Why don't you post info on your Duluth conference?

Resources I don't want to lose

The EPIC movies
EPIC 2014 on YouTube

"Lesson in Manipulation"

This video from the Christian Science Monitor shows how easy photographs can be manipulated. We all know this, of course, but this video shows how common this "editorial technique" has become. Many would say, "What's the problem? You want to make a certain statement with your photograph - visuals are messages, after all - so why shouldn't I emphasize what I want so that my message is stronger?"

Ever hear of ethics?

I think this video would be a good teaching tool for lots of classes.

"Wikipedia Editors"

I'm intrigued lately about the news that a 24-year-old graduate student has created an online tool that will allow anyone to identify the editors of Wikipedia entries. It's called WikiScanner and you can link to it here.

(Just a side note: I'm so proud of myself for figuring out the HTML to allow me to put links manually into my blog's body instead of just the title, which can be done via WYSIWYG using Blogger's tools. This need only appears when I'm using Zoe's MacBook; on my home or office PC, the Blogger WYSIWYG tools allow in-text links -- I wonder why the difference.)

Okay, back to the cool WikiScanner: you can't really find out the actual *person* who made the edits (for example, I edited Century College's page - correcting some mechanical errors and adding the name of our WGST chair). But you can find out the owner of the computer that was used to edit (such as the CIA or PepsiCo or the Republican Party). You can then make the logical inference that an employee of said entity (or person who has access to the computers owned by these entities) made the edits.

Find out more about Virgil Griffith, the fellow who created this tool.

"Inside Higher Ed"

I'd forgotten about this blog until a colleague pointed out yesterday's viewpoint article: about losing one's work because a thief stole one's laptop! I'll have to remember to read this blog regularly if I'm going to feel connected to higher ed during my sabbatical. But maybe I'm not supposed to feel connected - maybe that's what the sabbatical "rest" is about?

What to do?

When almost all of your friends and relatives are getting ready for the new school year and you're not? I read good junk (Robert Wilson's espionage novel The Company of Strangers was yesterday's candy), organize my bookshelves (an ongoing project), attend public readings (last night's included my excellent pal Cullen Bailey Burns as a winner of and plan a trip across country (which will involve visiting friends/relatives who are beginning their new school year!).

Sabbatical is hard.

"Victoria Mikelonis, RIP"

Yesterday, I received word that my former professor from the U of M, Vickie Mikelonis, died as a result of her two-year battle with cancer. I've been scouring the web for obituaries, planning to link to one, but I've not yet found anything. I guess that means I'll have to write up a little bit for myself:

I got to know Vickie when I took an Intercultural Communication course from her in about 1996. She was a strong, extremely knowlegable professor, slightly scattered because she had so many interests and informative opinions on topics, but always student-centered. She pushed us to think beyond the classroom and beyond the theories we were learning, encouraged us to think of ourselves as research professionals instead of mere students, and then provided us with the tools and contacts in order to become those professionals.

Thanks to Vickie, I traveled twice to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The first trip was to conduct a three-week, eight-country research project involving technology transfer in medical institutions, a project that had its origins in an assignment from Vickie's course. My colleage Doreen Starke-Meyerring and I interviewed about 40 doctors, medical professionals, and administrators about how they were using the computer equipment and access provided by the American International Health Alliance (AIHA). The resulting report is here: http://lrc.aiha.com/English/ProjectInfo/Eval-innov-Eng.pdf

The second trip was a direct result of the first, and I was invited by AIHA staff to conduct a 10-day "Train the Trainers" course in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Vickie helped me tremendously as I prepared curriculum. She prepped me for teaching folks who had experienced education under a communist educational system, folks who were used to following orders instead of innovating, folks who saw the world hierarchically instead of collaboratively (or "flat" as Thomas Friedman might say).

She encouraged me to borrow one of her exercises, and I did: she passed out bundles of Tinker Toys (I used K-nex) to groups of students and asked them to build the highest structure that they could build using the toys. The students typically work in their small groups to complete this task. After they finished, Vickie would explain the lesson: she hadn't told them to create *individual* structures; rather, they could have built an even taller structure if they would have pooled all of their toys instead of keeping only those they were given in their groups. Although some students would complain of a "bait-and-switch" feeling to the assignment, Vickie's point was that we come to a task with lots of previous experiences doing tasks. To truly innovate and move beyond what gets us stuck, we have to work with others in ways we haven't before. This exercise was especially important for people who had grown up in the Soviet Union and were now living in independent states.

I'll never forget the consternation I watched in the dimly lit, chalky-walled, Russian-language-filled room where my students worked with their structures. This lesson about innovation came up later in the role-plays they conducted (also scripted from ideas I got from Vickie), so I guess the students learned through their discomfort.

Thanks to Vickie, I had two unforgettable opportunities in an amazing part of the world at the end of the 20th century. She was an extraordinary teacher and human being, and she will be missed by so many of us. Good bye, Vickie.

Snafu U

Could be the name of our college because of all the screw-ups this fall. Right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Folks in charge who don't know enough about what they're supposed to be doing. Dependence on technologies that are only partially functional or usable. Reliance on folks who talk rather than do, alientate rather than conciliate, pose rather than problem-solve.

I'm supposed to not care about these things for a year because I'm on sabbatical. This, perhaps, will be the hardest thing for me to accomplish while I'm away.

"A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto"

Click on this link to find a strong message relating to information sharing, storing, retrieval, expansion, and use. I found this YouTube video by accident on the blog of a Capella University librarian (!).

Out of the loop

That's what it feels like since I'm not getting ready for fall semester. I realized this obvious thing in a BIG way after I listened to a bunch of colleagues at the Happy Gnome tonight for a reading sponsored by Phantasmagoria, our college's literary publication (not a student publication). After the excellent prose readings (Cheri Johnson, Greg Mulcahy, Thaddeus Rutkowski - if I could add links to this post using the computer I'm on, I would - sorry), I chatted with my pal from the English department and our college president. Or, rather, I listened because I don't really have that much to say because I'm on sabbatical! I'm having a hard time getting my sense-of-self to correspond to my sabbatical state since it's the first I've had in over twenty years of teaching. My teaching identity is one I've had longer than my mom identity - so part of my sabbatical will be finding out who I am when I'm not a teacher!

"Bridge Collapse"

At 6:15 p.m. this evening, my daughter called while I was in the office: had I heard about Highway 35 collapsing? Don't I drive on 35 to work?

No, I hadn't heard. And no, I drive on 35E, not 35W, which is the fateful highway. She was relieved, obviously, and then tried to call her brother who lives near the collapse site. Couldn't reach him. I tried, many times, finally getting through at about 6:45 p.m. to find out he's fine and was on the other line talking to his dad who's visiting his folks in PA, wondering if we're all okay, too, after hearing the first bit of news.

Lots of heart-felt conversations this evening with far-flung family and friends who've heard and seen the news; lots more to come as we hear about those who've been lost.

What paper does to a person

If that person is me: I have to read everything! That's no big discovery, but as I wade through my files and piles (and my history), I read things I've written (some good!), things I meant to read and discard (some old news, some stuff I should have known), things I meant to give to students or colleagues.

Here's a partial list:
-- the raw data (completed surveys) from a research project I did in 1996 with two colleagues from grad school (we queried a large number of medical professionals from Central Asia and Eastern Europe who were partnering with hospitals in the U.S. through an organization called the American International Health Alliance)
-- the PowerPoint-generated transparencies we used at our presentation of that research to the AIHA's 1997 meeting in Atlanta
-- notes and handouts and notepads and receipts from many, many conference presentations (in New York, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Bloomington, Bemidji, Chicago, Houston)
-- doodled-on and cryptic-note-filled agendas from many, many meetings: departments (English and Women & Gender Studies), all-college, "duty days," elearning committee, assessment committee, Women of Distinction committee, AASC, union, Q&S Club, college-readiness project, discipline workshops, and more
-- college-generated announcements for the last three years (everything from calendars to phone operating instructions)
-- textbook catalogs for composition, literature, technical writing, women's studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, basic writing, developmental writing, business writing, film studies, Hispanic studies, rhetoric (these all got recycled)
-- final exams from six-years-worth of giving them in courses at Century
-- student portfolios - at least fifty - from students who haven't ever picked them up (although they said they would)
-- newspaper clippings and newspapers and newsletters
-- forms (for grade changes, sick leave, reimbursement, purchases)

Oh, I give up: this list is so boring and incomplete. Let's just say that I've read a LOT of information lately, re-filed some of it, and tossed (make that recycled) much of it. This last is hard for me because I also like the materiality of paper (once upon a time, I had a card-making business), and I'll save stuff just for the texture/color/weight/cotton content.

But a purge is good, a purge is good, a purge is good. Yep.

Is this accurate??

"ENFPs are introspective, values-oriented, inspiring, social and extremely expressive. They actively send their thoughts and ideas out into the world as a way to bring attention to what they feel to be important, which often has to do with ethics and current events. ENFPs are natural advocates, attracting people to themselves and their cause with excellent people skills, warmth, energy and positivity. ENFPs are described as creative, resourceful, assertive, spontaneous, life-loving, charismatic, passionate and experimental."

Seems like a good profile for a teacher/professor (which indeed is a career option listed as good for ENFPs, but of course it's also listed for about six other personality profiles!). But on a different day, I could have answered questions differently . . . so how accurate is this description?

"Book Smarts"

Click on the YouTube video (made in the UK) to find a quick "commercial" for good books.

Hmmm, I wonder how many students (or others for that matter!) concur with this use of books? I mean, some of us revere books, thinking that they're artifacts of value, repositories of the best of human values, ways of demonstrating the value of our profession. I've read at least four in the last week. ;-)

Typography

This Yahoo! video clip was created by students at Vancouver Film School. It's good. Check it out.

Typographics - Vancouver Film School (VFS) @ Yahoo! Video

"Finished in Two Sittings"

That's what Melissa Dahl, MSNBC.com's intern, said. I, too, finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in that same time-span. I liked it - as I have the other six books - because of the rolicking, detailed emotional ride Rowling sets out before her reader. She understands hooks of all kinds: emotional, visual, chronological, literal. A good read, but I wouldn't want to teach it!

Archives

That's what I like to call what I've accumulated in my office: found the textbook I used in 1990 to teach Technical Writing the first time I was at Century (called Lakewood then). I just couldn't toss it, not with my tidy marginalia: "Stress in class!" and "Note" and "Day 2 Exercise."

I've been trying to empty out the space so the sabbatical replacement can move in (he's been asking) and also so that I can start pruning my paper: like lilac bushes, take out a third every year. But I've been in that office for four years (having been across the hall in a closet for two before that), and so I have not adhered to this lilac-pruning maxim.

Today I had the following terrible-true thought: These archives must now become a potential data-source for research! "How does community college tech writing differ over the decades?" or "History of pedagogy via personal archive." I've got the artifacts. I really don't need such a project, of course, but I do need to get back to some kind of research. Get thee to the library!

Paper Cuts

So my pal Night Editor has her pulse on the current book scene: I'm jealous, of course. Here's a blog she introduced on her blog: Paper Cuts, by folks at The New York Times. Isn't that just the best title? Check it out.

Ten Days

That's about how long I'm into my "summer vacation." All week long I've been meaning to go into the office to clean it out, but all week long other tasks/opportunities have kept me away: sedum and geranium and Chinese lantern transplanting, not-the-best-novel reading, letter writing, bill paying, meal preparing, daughter chatting, biking. One of these days, I'm going to read an academic text - but I suppose I should count Adrienne Rich's Diving Into the Wreck and Arts of the Possible (Norton 2002), both of which I've read this week. She's amazing: brilliant, compassionate, angry. I need to read her newest book of essays, Poetry and Commitment (Norton 2007).

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

I suppose I like the Wallace Stevens' poems best, but these short animations might intrigue students. Click above to see them.

In the midst

Of grading, naturally, for the end of the semester. One voice tells me "Why read things closely at this point? Just assign a ballpark grade and be done with it." Another voice says, "Remember how much you hated working hard on a final project only to have the professor ignore your work? Don't be like that professor."

So I'm reading closely but trying not to write comments except for small notes with scores at the ends of essays and projects.

Perhaps going to this website, Campus Calm, will help me.

By Monday?

That's the target date for finishing grading. Let's do the math: 24 student x final exams/papers/projects (minimum 6, maximim 10 pages each) = 144-240 pages of student writing to read.

I know it doesn't sound like much, but when writing is not felicitous (I'm being generous here), I have to read between the lines, figuring out what the students are trying to say. It's tough assigning writing projects as a demonstration of student knowledge because so much decoding is required of the reader (me). The documents don't exist in isolation - at this ending-point of the semester, I read as I think about what writing advice I've already given students (I've seen drafts for many of these folks), what the writers have said in class, how they've demonstrated their knowledge (mastery?) of the subject matter in other ways (usually verbal, of course - I've had a chatty, chatty bunch this semester!).

Wish me the ease and time (and perhaps red wine) to read this work with continued generosity.

Almost done

Last day of the summer session is supposed to be tomorrow, but with the computer problems, I've extended my students' deadlines for 48 hours. Frustrating for all of us. It'll mean that I have TONS of grading to do in a very, very, very short period of time. Yuck. But better for them.

It's Getting Old . . .

. . . blogging about computer problems. I've been reading student work for the last hour, and I've wanted to return it via our course website. But for the last hour, our course website won't allow me to access either of my courses, and I'd told students I would get back their progress memos tonight. Also, my passwords for my email account don't work (emailing students their work was my plan B). It's the last week of class, so these glitches are especially infuriating.

Documentation

I just sent an email to the MN Campus Alliance, who asked for an updated description of the college's GLBTQA campus resources. Here's what I sent:

*Q&S [Queer & Straight] Club
*/The Q&S Club is a student organization that invites all Century College students to meet together to discuss and explore GLBT issues, plan campus events, support GLBTQ students, and foster an inclusive community. Weekly meeting topics and activities vary, from planning our table displays at every semester's Student Activities Fair to watching movies together. Q&S student representatives attend twice-monthly Student Senate meetings to update the rest of the student body about the club's activities. Club advisor is a faculty member from Century's Women and Gender Studies Program.

*Ally Training Program
*/Century College's Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED) program provides GLBTQ Ally Training sessions every semester. SEED invites a staff member from OutFront Minnesota to conduct the training. Participants are awarded an "ALLY" sticker, which they can then display in their offices and doors. Currently, 48 Century Faculty and Staff have earned ALLY stickers. The Ally Training Program also maintains a website: http://centuryseed.project.mnscu.edu/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={20047333-9660-46B7-85C5-39FFB0C184C7}

*WGST 1071: Introduction to GLBT Studies
*/This three-credit college course, the only GLBT course existing at the two-year college level, is offered twice yearly. It is taught by faculty from Century's Women and Gender Studies program, the oldest Women's Studies Program at a two-year college in the country. The course fulfills part of the requirements for the 15-credit Women and Gender Studies Certificate from Century College, the only two-year college in Minnesota to offer an academic certificate in WGST.

*"Dealing with Diversity: GLBTQ Issues in College"
*/This seminar is offered every semester as part of Century College's award-winning student retention initiative called Student Success Day. Facilitators include faculty from Century's Women and Gender Studies program. Students who attend this seminar receive certificates of participation and handouts that include resources and FAQs.

Makes it sound as if we have an inclusive, enlightened campus, doesn't it? Amazing how language can hide reality.

Tired Tallying

But feeling proud of my team! Seventeen volunteers in total helped out this weekend: today's group included Emily M., Amira, Emily P., Wade, Laurie, Amber, Char, Debbie.

Other sightings this year: former Century students Pancho, Laura, Tony, Jesse, Jeanne. Current students Joe, Amanda, Jake (who didn't even know about the student club). Dr. Whitney G. Harris, MnSCU's executive director of equal opportunity and diversity, AKA the big cheese for diversity in MnSCU, was surprised and pleased to know we have the oldest Women and Gender Studies program in the two-year colleges, and he offered to teach a course for us!

Brochures distributed this year: Auto Service Technology, Accounting, Business Administration, Business Management, Chemical Dependency, Computer Science, Criminal Justice, Emergency Medical Technician (including Paramedics), Horticulture, Interior Design, Kitechen and Bath Design, Marketing, Medical Assistance, Office Technology (both general and medical), Prosethic Technician, Public Safety, Visual Communications Technology, Women and Gender Studies.

Trinkets distributed: six window clings, 65 lip balm, 65 keychain/flashlights, 75 pens, 150 Smarties, 160 Double-bubble gum.

I guess I should add the two pans of Rice Krispy bars to this list somewhere . . . and maybe tally up my out-of-pocket costs: over $10.00 for sure for Smarties, Double-bubble, Rice Krispies, marshmallows. My total hours working on this weekend: 16 just at the park; another two for traveling and schlepping; another eight for organizing, sending emails, producing volunteer charts, gathering materials. Sounds like over 25 hours in the past week have gone into this event. Wow.

The Art of Representation

I just spent eight hours managing our college's table at the annual Twin Cities Pride Festival in Loring Park, Minneapolis. For the most part, the volunteers who agreed to staff the table showed up - eventually - and represented the college pretty well. Students included Tammy (with her daughter Shannon), Courtney, Selena, Fanneice, Thomas for a moment or two. Staff included myself, Wade, Brian, Jill and her beau Zach. Tomorrow we'll have another half-dozen folks, and this total number of volunteers (could be 18!) is the highest it's been since I took over as Q&S Club advisor (and Pride table czar).

Only two other two-year MnSCU colleges from the Metro area were there: MCTC and St. Paul College. Last year, we also had Inver Hills and Anoka-Ramsey. This year, we were supposed to have Dakota County, but they cancelled at the last minute. Hmmm. Four-year MnSCU institutions were Metro State (of course with its full-time staff and university support), Moorhead (the same group of leather men always sits at a table with about 4 brochures), and Bemidji State (They get the award for driving the farthest distance!).

The MnSCU section of College Row was least inviting, I think (despite the Smarties I bought to hand out and despite Brian's feather boas decorating our canopy). Other colleges had games, prizes, photo collages, plenty of giveaways, and trained admissions people as greeters. One of the private colleges, St. Mary's, had a Hawaiian theme, complete with a limbo pole and grass hut.

But we managed to chat with over 40 festival goers, including the father of a former Century student, current Century instructors, and current Century students who didn't know we had a Q&S club or an Intro to GLBT Studies course at the college (note to self: advertise!!). Five folks signed our email list, and that should help us build the club next fall when I'm on sabbatical and Brian takes over as club advisor.

Tomorrow we'll be out again - luckily we have a cool site under a tree and under our canopy. I haven't yet made rice krispy bars like I did for today's gang - I guess I'll have to whip some up in the morning.

Extreme, extreme frustration

Both mine and my students:

Tech Writing is a tough course for most students because it requires accuracy and correctness as well as the ability to read and process complicated instructions. It also requires that they think about audience and purpose in a way most of them have never thought about it before.

Now add the online component, which creates a less-than-robust learning environment, and some students get really overwhelmed. Now add summer session, which asks students to compress the work of a sixteen-week session into six weeks. Now add computer glitches that 1) make it impossible for me or my students to access our course website for extended periods of time, 2) send error messages when we post discussion questions or take quizzes, and 3) do not allow students to download documents that I have uploaded into their personal "drop boxes" with my comments.

Significant work is due *right now* in my course since it's the last 10 days of the course. A small-but-vocal minority of students misunderstood the last assignment and have to re-do it.

Panic has set in, I'm getting angry email messages, students threaten to drop the course. I'm sure they're trashing me and the course in the private "Student Lounge" discussion space on the website - wait, they can't get into the website!

When it comes to our technological infrastructure, I do not like how my college treats its staff or its students. I'm very, very ready for my sabbatical, and I hope the technology will have improved when I get back, but I'm not hopeful. Things have been getting worse rather than better, I think. This current frustration is just that - the current one. I have many, many more frustations, including the fact that when I have communicated past frustrations/suggestions, they are not heard.

Ouch. I'm crabby.

A Marker with a Lot of Ink

Click and watch!

Continuous Discovery

Teaching really is about adaptation, trying new things, discovering new problems and solutions. Teaching online adds an extra layer to this process - or maybe I should continue using my metaphor of magnification: I've always said that the internet is just a big magnifying glass: all that's in our culture, terrific and terrible, can become larger, faster, wider, farther - extreme-ified (that should be a word).

Case in point: teaching my tech writing students makes me think about verbal register, the types of words and phrasing I use to convey tone. What are the different effects of ending an extended comment to a student with one or another of the questions below:

Do you get what I'm trying to say?
Do you get what I'm saying?

Do you get the point I'm making?
Do you get the point I'm trying to make?

Does this make sense to you?
Does my explanation make sense?

Do you understand what I've said?
Do you see what I mean?
Does my message help clear things up?

I've used all these variations in an effort to get students to let me know they've read my feedback - ending with such a question is my new discovery teaching online this semester. A question provokes or invites or requests or demands a response, and then I know they've read at least some of my feedback.

At least that's my hypothesis, my hope. (How are those two things different? :-)

Many points of contact

Or maybe the title should be "many points TO contact" because my students can get to me in so many ways:

Electronically, I get at least a half-dozen pages a day, about the same number of emails, and even more messages via the course website (normal for the online course, of course, but the non-online course students still send messages to me when they upload their essays, for example).

Traditional technology includes the telephone, and I've received about 8 phone messages from students this summer, which averages out to almost a third of my students contacting me this way. That statistic isn't quite accurate, though, since the same students prefer to use the phone.

F2F, of course, is the primary way my students contact me: coming by the office (a few of the online students prefer to ask their questions this way - first time I had that experience was last semester!), staying after class (what a long conversation after the midterm on Monday!), and the conventional in-class discussion. With only two courses, I can actually know my students well, and the points of contact don't feel onerous or incomplete or supplementary or not-the-point: they feel necessary and surprisingly useful, for the students and for me. I can be more thoughtful with them and about them than I can be when I have upwards of 100 students.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that education happens when the points of contact are multiple, sustained, and engaged rather than overwhelming. This observation is not news.

Free Lunch!

Today's campus activity involved cotton candy, Famous Dave's BBQ, watermelon, and lots of Greek-Mediterranean food that I don't know the name of. Yum. The festivities included tie-dying t-shirts, listening to music, and other stuff that my brief perusal didn't quite take in. (Too bad our college doesn't have a website where these events are publicized.)

Summer school at its best, I'd say, on the day that my students took their midterm. A good combination!

More Technical Difficulties

So I just found out that the pager in my online class has been non-functioning for a week: I'd wondered why I hadn't heard from students via that tool! Here's what happened: I'm both an online instructor of my own courses and an online student in two colleagues' courses (because I'm reviewing their courses for them). In my student role, I began a quiz in a colleague's course to see how it worked, but I didn't ever "submit" it because I was just reviewing the course. The software will not allow students who have unsubmitted quizzes to use the pager function - makes sense, I suppose, so students won't page each other with answers to quizzes. But I got NO notification that my pager was disabled, and I wonder if this particular function should be a default.

Anyway, so students have been thinking that I've been ignoring them. I had over a dozen pages waiting for me when I finally got things fixed, and I've had another eight in the last hour. Oh, the joys of technology.

Technical Difficulties

Been reading/grading tech writing students' instructions all day today - with lots of interruptions because of computer frustrations. I'm working with a couple of computers - a Mac laptop for getting online to retrieve/send information and a Dell desktop for reading/commenting on students' work. Both computers are slow, freeze when I don't want them to, and need some kind of professional attention. Time for a PC doc visit!

Creating Quizzes

I've just spent three hours creating a 20-point quiz for my Intro to GLBT Studies course. Why, you ask? Here's the story:

The students and I meet today in cyberspace instead of on campus. We agreed to all be together in the course "Chat" from 1:15-2:15 p.m. In preparation for that synchronous chat, they are to have read a chapter called "Historical Explanations and Rationalizations for Transgenderism" by Gordene Olga Mackenzie, a terrifically interesting 27-page article about the (mostly German and American) theories about transsexualism, transvestitism, and transgenderism from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century. Since it's such a comprehensive article, names and dates figure prominently, something I don't always stress in my courses because I never remembered well in my own schooling. But students seem to like having the fixed certainty of a name/date association, so I often include a few such questions on quizzes, especially open-book quizzes like this one.

But just which names and dates will choose? The most important, you say - easy answer, right. But is Alfred Kinsey more "important" than D.O. Cauldwell, the first American medical doctor to use the term "Transsexual" in the medical literature? (It was 1949, the year after Kinsey used the term in his opus The Sexual Behavior in the Human Male). Is Richard Krafft-Ebing more"important" than Walter Williams, the anthropologist who attemped to introduce the term "amazon" as the female equivalent of "berdache"? (It still hasn't caught on, and I hear "berdache" used by all kinds of contemporary GLBTQ scholars when they talk about any "two-spirited" Native Americans.)

In these two cases, I've made the judgment call: Kinsey and Krafft-Ebing are on the quiz (they contrast nicely, having opposing scientific motivations: one progressive, one conservative), and Cauldwell and Williams are not. I can defend this choice, of course, but the point I'm making here is that thinking through selections such as these makes quiz creating a time-consuming process.

I haven't even mentioned how hard it is to craft good questions! Questions that elicit the answers you want from students while simultaneously not giving those answers away. (That metaphorical construction is interesting, isn't it?) Wording is crucial, especially with multiple-choice questions, the kind I use most often for online quizzes (although rarely in f2f classrooms) because they allow both teaching and testing at the same time (that is if you provide a good series of choices - my daughter has been great at helping me craft these choices because she's a good guesser, one who sees patterns in the teacher's multiple-choice answers and uses them to guess).

Anyway, the point here is that the whole process has taken me three hours: to re-read the chapter, mark important passages, construct fair questions, eliminate redundancies, clarify ambiguous wording, and finally type all these questions into the clunky software interface we have (selecting the correct "properties" and "restrictions" and "display options" so that students get meaningful information on their end). Whew!

A Fair(y) Use Tale

Of course we all know about the interesting things on YouTube, but this particular 10-minute video is useful for teaching about copyright and fair use. And I don't just mean teaching my students about these things, either.

Working from Home

I have to say that working from home (working at home? via home? in home? What is the appropriate preposition?) is not my favorite thing. I'm getting used to a MacBook - the keyboard is odd, too flat or something. Because I don't yet feel comfy working with the wordprocessing interface, I still need to take student work to my desktop for editing/comments/grading. Then I upload their work using the laptop after downloading their work to a flash drive (just a tiny thing), uploading to my desktop, downloading again, and finally uploading graded work to the "Dropbox" for our course. I can leave a message for them when I return their work, but I've learned that my message should not be anything related to the evaluation of their work: students who drop the course are erased from the website, and any comments I've made to them are erased, too. So I keep copies of all work and send a "Here's your latest assignment" message when I return their graded work.

All these tricks I've learned the hard way by teaching online (or should I say "teaching" online: I just don't think of it as teaching in the way I'm used to teaching - too thin!).

Time Warp

That's what an online course is: I sink into a time warp! I'm sitting in my office, and I've been responding to students in four ways for the past two hours:

1. Student stops by for a face-to-face chat about his portfolio from last semester. He had said he'd be here on Thursday, so I'm not ready for him, and he'll come back tomorrow.
2. Students (about 3) find the "Page" function on our course website and page me while I'm reading student discussion postings. I return the page - sort of "instant messaging" them.
3. Students send email messages to ask for clarification, greet me, and answer my questions. I write back to all seven of them.
4. Students post messages to the discussion board for the first two topics in technical writing. Since the first topic is introducing themselves, I respond to every posting (20). Since the second topic asks them to speculate about why summarizing is the first assignment, I respond in general by sending one message to the whole group.

And it's only the third day of the semester.

Whew.

New Semester

But I'm not really finished with the old one! Grades aren't due until tomorrow, though . . . .

Today was the first day of Summer Session 1, and I've got two courses: online technical writing and intro to glbt studies. Both were active today - again I am energized by energetic students!

I won an award

At least according to my math colleague who's three doors down from me. She walked by the office today when I had my door open and commented, "You win the award for the office that's even worse than mine!" That's right - I have piles of student papers and portfolios on every surface (table, floor). But the end is in sight!

Finals Week

This finals week should be busy - as they all are. But I've just read partial final exams from my WGST 1071 class: those students have learned something this semester! I'm proud of their work. I hope that this glimpse is the beginning of good things to come from all of my students.

That Panicky Feeling

I wonder how many students realize that instructors feel the same end-of-the-semester panic as they feel - okay, maybe not the same, but similar.

The final reading-through of student work enables me to see who's taken advice, who's not able to do so (for a variety of reasons), who's needing to take the course again. With writing, because it's a skill, taking the course a couple of times gets students up to where they need to be.

I am plowing through my files, looking at final re-writes, grading revisions, recording scores, calculating attendance, getting reading to do some calculations. Actually, I don't like calculating their final grade until the end of the semester because I don't want to interact with a student in a way that says "Oh, this student isn't ever going to get more than a X grade, so why bother with substantive comments?" I think that ALL of my students deserve to be taught, even those who won't pass my class this semester. They've all paid their tuition, so they all deserve my engaged attention. It's too easy for me to write-off the slackers if I know that they're flunking anyway - that seems unfair to me. So I refrain from doing any math until the end of the semester. But I still feel panicked and pressured about it!

Late Night Peepers

My Comp 1 class has just ended - 9:57 p.m. It's supposed to go until 9:50 p.m., but with workshop tonight, the last few questioners hung in there. One of the joys of a late night in the office: dark outside and the frogs chirping-peeping-singing outside my window. Even though it's not open. Even though I'm on the third floor and quite a ways from the pond to the south of campus.

Those spring persistences: hardworking students and chirping frogs.

Don't want to lose her . . .

An *excellent* student has just sent me an email message saying she's feeling overwhelmed and needs to drop the course. This email has arrived AFTER the drop date for the semester, AFTER I'd just returned a lovely essay by her (one of the best in the class), and AFTER an especially insightful series of contributions she made to our class writing workshop. I know that students have full lives and that my class is only one of her priorities, but I'm shocked at the (potential) loss of this excellent student.

She's a returning adult who thinks college isn't the place for her - but it is! I see her just once a week in the evenings, which isn't enough time to make those casual "nice job" or "good to see you" comments that you can make when you see students a couple times a week. I've sent what I hope is an encouraging email asking her to stay. I hope she can.

Grammar Ninja

I have been assisting Scott Simonsen's ITT 2080 Technology Planning and Architecture class, all computer guys. I had hoped that Grammar Ninja would be fun as a starting point for talking about sentence construction. Unfortunately, none of the classroom computers could access the game, not through Windows or Linux. They all claimed it was because Flash sucks, but I don't know. They all tried valiantly to access it - some could hear the game but not see it; others could not hear it but could see part of the questions. Very frustrating. But they were good sports.

Creating an Exam

The process I go through for creating a fair, reasonable, challenging exam for my students always wears me out. I spent three hours creating one for my night class, and this is after I brainstorm with them about the content they'd like to see on the exam. "Knowledge is socially constructed," I tell them, "so tell me what you've learned this semester so I can ask you some questions about it and you can show me what you know." Often, students just want to list names and stories ("I remember Jamaica Kincaid's 'Girl'!" or "I liked Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried'!"). So I can create a matching section with this information, but it's not exactly higher-order thinking (remember Bloom's taxonomy?).

Anyway, I'll say more about this in a while - after I answer the phone that's ringing right now!!

What's wrong with this picture?

Late January - I return for the new semester to teach in my usual computer classroom. It's been painted (very pretty curried squash color), but the back-wall whiteboard is missing. I submit a request asking if/when/can the whiteboard be replaced. I use the web-based request system that I've been instructed to use (clicking on a link called "Information Technology Service Center" and filling out a ten-field form that I have filled out many times before but which cannot retain my identifying information).

Late April - I receive a voice mail message regarding my request for the whiteboard, a nice man who notes that it's been a long time since I submitted the request. He says that I submitted the request to the wrong department and must resubmit to "Facilities," which I look for on the web-based request system. There, I find a link called "Plant Mainenance Service Center" with an ten-field form that's identical to the "Information Technology Service Center" form, except for the word "Maintenance" in the header. I must re-fill in all ten fields because this form does not recognize my computer. I submit my request again.

Even later in April - I receive an email notification from an Automated Mail Service that my request (called a "Work Order") has been completed. The notification reads as follows: "I reclassified this. It was submitted as a bulletin board request. White Boards are not covered by the policy. Status: Completed. Please do not respond to this email."

So now what do I do? Who is the "I" above? Will the white board ever show up? And who could possibly have mistaken a white board for a bulletin board?

Infrastructure and communication: two HUGE problems at my institution.

Editing vs. Grading

I don't think I've mentioned that I've been doing a bit of editing/proofreading - something I love and have to say that I think I'm pretty good at. And editing isn't the same as grading: I get to suggest changes without assigning any evaluation to those changes. How refreshing!

One big document was a legal thing: report about a child custody dispute. The other document was a manuscript: novel/memoir that moved me enough to email my own mother (the protagonist's mother dies of ovarian cancer). For both of these projects, I did have to call my pal who's an M.D. to check out the "facts" about specific medical terminology. She never fails to answer my questions, and she's one of the smartest people I know.

Here's where playing softball comes in handy for an academic: softball friends know a lot about a lot of things, and I can ask my softball pals (with whom I've been playing for probably 20 years) about a range of topics: medicine, other health care topics, social services, the phone company, high school teaching, private school administration, small business ownership, computer-geekiness, physical therapy, city administration, accounting. These are all specialities of my teammates.


My message? Anyone who teaches in a college should play a team sport. :-)

Safety First?

Yesterday, I was going to post something about the Virginia Tech tragedies, something related to education, something like "We education professionals have always been at risk - this tragedy could happen anywhere" or something like "What could have so profoundly affected this young man that he had to act in such a ferocious, powerful, permanent way?"

Today, I hear the spin and pop of our media: clamoring for first-person accounts from student witnesses, attempting "analysis" that only reinforces the racial and class divides in our country, setting up an ugly clash between pro- and anti-gun groups. As if the Second Amendment has anything to do with the current state of violence in our country.

Our college president sent a message to the entire college community, a good move, I think, although his focus on safety seems wrong to me: a human being can't be kept "safe" from incidents like these.

Century Colleagues,

It is with great sadness that we extend our sympathies to the students, staff, and families at Virginia Tech. We share in their grief and distress over the senseless shooting deaths of 32 students yesterday.

As our thoughts turn to the safety and security of our own campus, I want to reassure you of our commitment to keeping the Century campus safe and secure. The College has policies and procedures in place designed to prevent such tragedies, and our public safety staff remain in a state of heightened awareness and vigilance. We will continue to monitor what is learned from the incident at Virginia Tech, and we will use that knowledge to improve our own response plans and campus security.

Please contact Mark Holper, Director of Public Safety, or Ron Anderson should you have concerns about the safety of any member of our campus community. This terrible loss reminds us all of the value and the need for supporting each other as a community.

Larry Litecky
President

'tis the Season

For letters of recommendation! I've been asked by at least a half-dozen students, which makes me feel proud. I'm pleased that they consider me a good judge of their achievements and skills. Most of the students who've asked me to write are exceptional, and it's a pleasure to articulate this fact to the awards committee. (I write an awesome letter, if I do say so myself.)

Even more important to me, though, is that the students themselves hear how exceptional I think they are: I always give them a copy of the letter for their own files. I remember how proud I was when my professors praised me - I'm returning the favor.

Actually this semester, I've been trying to be the kind of professor that I wished I'd had as an undergraduate: I've been listening a LOT more to students who come to me to talk about their lives, their worries, their worlds. Sure, I'm behind on my grading, but when someone drops by and says (like yesterday), "I'm just bored so I thought I'd come talk to you," I'm thrilled. Okay, maybe a little panicked and irritated because I was trying to read a bunch of reports to prepare for a meeting, but what's more important that talking with a first-year student who's trying to wrap her head around Peggy McIntosh's "invisible knapsack" idea? Or the student who's working for the City of St. Paul and begun teaching her co-workers what she's learning in our technical writing class? Or the student who's started a gay soccer league and wants me to pass out his flyers to students in my Intro to GLBT Studies course?

Today, I'm feeling all the exceptional energy of my work: it's a good day.

Two cool things

1) I've been re-reading Mrs. Dalloway for my British Lit course, and I'm reminded that Virginia Woolf is a genius. I hope my students resist the urge to read SparkNotes or GradeSaver instead of the novel itself.

2) Lake Superior Community College has a helpful peer review site for faculty teaching online. We at Century should steal some of it!

PainInTheEnglish.com

Found this link when I was looking for an answer to my question about using "age" vs. "aged" in the following sentence: Zoe, age(d) 19, attends McGill University.

Still don't have a clear answer to that question, but the website I discovered is cool!

Too Long (or maybe too short)

Well, this week has been a long one - it's two weeks, really, I suppose. I said I was going to post something about the 4Cs conference, but I've not gotten around to it because I haven't even caught up with my students' papers! I didn't "work" very much over the break, which means that I didn't read/grade the midterm exams and midterm essays that my students turned in before they went on break.

My philosophy is that students should have a break at spring break, so I don't ask them to turn in their midterm work after break. But that means I have a ton of work during break. This break, I spent most of it at a conference, so I didn't get much grading done.

Hmmm, does this sound like whining or rationalizing? I'm not sure anymore . . . :-)