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Thoughts on a Wednesday morning before classes commence

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Wednesday, September 22, 2010, 7:49 AM

Prelude

Getting away from lectures, even with 500+ students – why, and how so?

“Less is more.” “Well, they need to know it all.” “How much do they really know when they ‘learn it all,’ and in what ways do they ‘know’ it?”

Active Learning: when depth, and when breadth? For we cannot know it all, nor can we know it in all ways, in 15 weeks, 4 years, or 12 years.

Students “taking something of value” away with them

Taking learning to another level: Internalizing

Taking remembering to another level: understanding

Taking external knowledge to another level: integrating

Taking all our knowledge to another level: action

Exposition

What is in short term memory, what in long? And what do students do with what is in long-term memory? Does it sit there? Is it integrated into their own system of knowing and understanding, into their own system of truth? Is it applied? Is it connected to reality of mind or physical space? Is it judged? Is it dialogued with? Is it argued for and against? Is it interwoven into the reality that all is connected? Is it valued? Is it devalued as necessary? Is it applied to integrity, morality, and wisdom? Is it applied to honesty? Is it deeply probed? Is the question ‘why’ asked? Is the question ‘in what context’ asked? Is it applied to action, memory, philosophy? Is it connected to ego or to goals of peace or to understanding? Does it answer the question, “Why are we here?” – as teachers, as students, as living organisms, as human beings? Does it give students more than the five-minute university of Father Guido Sarducci from “Saturday Night Live,” now available on Youtube? If not, what has to change? Does it go beyond education as a commodity and actually address quality of life? Freedom? Community? Quality of life for all – people, plants, animals, the ozone layer, the air, soil, and water? Isn’t it all connected, interwoven? And if so, in what ways are we helping our students explore that, and in what ways are we using our research, scholarship, and creativity to advance this? What is the bedrock, the foundation, the underlying philosophy which drives our enterprise? Which drives our thought? Our action? Our relationships with our students? Our essence? Our truth?

What is it of true value that our students and we, too, acknowledge as true value, that our students will take away with them and that will not only stay with them, but which they will continue to explore, understand in new ways, have varying perspectives on? From poetry to electrical engineering, from philosophy to music, from physics to nanotechnology, in what ways do we go beyond “vocational school” and beyond “getting a job” to “advancing the quality of life of humans, animals, the planet,” and “ getting along?”

We as a campus are not separate from one another. As all life and ideas are intertwined, so too are we. Yes, Electrical Engineering and German do indeed have something in common, have mutual interests and understandings as well as divergent themes and goals. We are a community of seekers of truth. We are a community. We are seekers. We are here to serve – not our egos, but “truth,” even though we know truth is not a concrete static entity. Perhaps more than truth, it is our purest, humblest honesty we are here to serve. We are here to serve understanding, and we are here to serve compassion and action to the greater good, even when it is difficult to do so.  Our scholarship, research, creativity, teaching, and student learning, our action and thought, our students’ action and thought – all of this is one and the same endeavor in various manifestations.

We are community and individuality, the self and other, the individual and society, and our endeavors – no matter what they are – happen within a social and cultural context, and within goals that are complicated, mixed, and sometimes both for better and for worse. We are called upon by the greater good and the need and the truth as we see it in our most honest and purest form/selves/depths to understand, to act selflessly and with integrity, as much as possible, and to help our students, our metropolitan area, and the world to do the same. Whether Confucius said it or not, “Better to light one candle than curse the darkness.” (Which of course is very culturally loaded as well, since light is not all good and darkness not all bad. Just as too much light will kill us, so too will too much darkness. Balance. And certainly humans have egos and anxieties, … but balance.)

The questions I have posed are in a way “universal” questions, and while in a way they have “universal” answers, yet each person’s exploration, answers, and resulting actions are individual manifestations of those themes. What we do here at the University is a symphony, and each of us produces variations on a theme, not by Mozart, but by us. So while my answer is not your answer, and no true answers are truly alike, yet we are playing the symphony, the symphony by us, each and every moment of the day, and at night in our dreams as well.

And a caveat: we must always remember that “language is the semblance of communication,” whether dealing with our research, scholarship, and creativity, each other, our students, international negotiations, or something else. If we keep that in mind, perhaps we will not kill each other so easily. (That caveat was the didactic part of this essay.)

So, then, in what ways does all of the above intersect, interact, communicate with those forces that have been put into play, also for better and for worse, which ask us to think about students’ modes of thinking, about outcomes, about assessment which is not grading but can use the same means, about active learning, about lecturing, about large classes, about small classes, about the use of technology as a tool to do what pencils, pens, and books cannot? I believe if we forget to constantly address all the above questions – and maybe you can think of more – we are not doing our ecstatic duty to ourselves and to others. Our highest calling is our purest, deepest honesty, that space within us which seems truly wise, that space where our fears and anxieties do not reside, where insight and the aha moment preside. And it is not eradicating ego; rather, it is going beyond ego to another space, in which we allow ourselves to feel safe – and dare I say happy, so that we can get on with our truest calling that does not monitor ourselves and others, but, like the meteor, is on its own trajectory, going where it will go.

So what does all of this have to do with best practices in teaching with technology? Most probably, everything.

Learning with the Web

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You are right, Matt, that the web is the place/space for much learning to take place. In modern languages, for example, there is nothing in our classrooms and hardcover books that can replace some of what the web can do. Conversely, some of what is done in hardcover, physical books and in our classrooms cannot be found elsewhere. The task is to be clear on what’s what – on what the web allows us and our students to do/explore/learn/think about that we could not in any other way in the past and what the “older” tools and materials and spaces allow us to do as well.

The web has fulfilled the thirst and yearning of some language teaching professionals for access – access to languages and their cultures and subcultures and regional and national and extra-national cultures, to the sounds and sites of those cultures, to the public and private spaces in those cultures to which we have access through the web, to ancient parchments and old architectural sites, to manuscripts and books and pictures of the authors and their families and friends and spaces and penmanship and so forth and so on, to the ways in which current generations of human beings are accessing those ancient to current communications and verbal interactions and responding to and speaking with them – through print, online print, visuals, video, sound, and talk, translation and interpretation. The web provides all human beings access to worlds of cultures, if they only know 1) how to access them and 2) how to interpret them in effective and productive ways.

The web provides context. It provides food for our ears, eyes. Two of the senses are stimulated, as is the cognitive sphere, and perhaps the emotional as well. Maybe even the physical, as body changes occur depending on our emotional states. It does not provide taste, touch, or smell – yet (:-)?). It is not exactly like “being there.” On the other hand, it is breadth – lots of possibilities for accessing things and people that “are there.”

For modern language students it can – and it is coming – be the portal for getting to know people from the places where the language is spoken, for speaking face-to-face with those people, for developing networks with those people – for personal satisfaction and also for positive change – groups working together across the world on sustainability, for example.

If used well, the web can help us do simple, yet profound, things. Take, for example the images sites on search engines. If you plug into a search engine in other cultures and languages, type in a word or phrase in that language, you will see what visual concepts the native speakers in those cultures have in their heads. You will see what comes to mind. Take, for example, sitzen (‘to sit’). If you go to google.de and click on Bilder (‘Images’), you will see how German speakers visualize sitzen, and in what contexts they publicize those ways of seeing the concept. You can see nuances that are culture-specific in the German word for ‘youth,’ Jugend. You can type in a word or phrase in the regular web search portal and find out how that word or phrase is used in written, maybe even spoken discourse, at least some of the time. You can hear how real native speakers use the language in various regions and various contexts.

And that is only a small bit of what students can do. What we need to teach them is how to navigate, and to be sensitive to possible intention and how to interpret that on the web – just as we do when we teach them to analyze older or newer language, literature, texts of other sorts, etc.

Teaching the Controversy in a Web Class

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I think we can agree that live classes are not mirrors of web classes, or vice versa. But there are some fundamentals that transcend the medium in which a class is taught. On the positive side, engaged professors make a difference, whether it be in a live class or a web class. Also, unleashing student’s creativity rather than squashing it makes a big difference in class morale, regardless of the class being online or live. I won’t list the lousy things in course design and instruction that plague live and web classes equally. We can leave that for another day.

I just had a great experience in my web class that I’d like to share.

The students in my web class have been emoting a lot lately in the message boards because they have been learning about the Dirty War in Argentina in the 1970’s, in which some thirty thousand people were disappeared (detained, tortured and murdered, without having their bodies returned). Students have been surprised to learn about this episode in Argentine history, and have responded very emotionally, with sadness, and [justified] self-righteous anger. How can this have happened? Why is it we never knew about it? Why is it more people don’t know about this? These are the questions that keep on coming up on the message board.

One student, however, has offered a dissenting voice on the message board. She intervened to say that while she shares people outrage and sadness, she is concerned about the fact that no one is talking about how, in recent years, the U.S. has ‘illegally’ detained people suspected of terrorism and even exported them to CIA “Black Sites” where they are interrogated with “enhanced” techniques (often a euphemism for torture.) Rather than bemoan the past, asks the student, why not engage with the problems of the present?

It’s pretty provocative, and it’s pretty brave. They say that “teaching the controversy” is always a good technique for fostering engagement. But what’s making me happy today is that it was a student who is trying to teach the controversy. Regardless of where you fall on the issue of the detention of terror suspects and the issues surrounding the War on Terror, this is a debate worth having. The generals responsible for the Dirty War in Argentina committed their crimes in the name of the fight against Communism, at the height of the Cold War. Is it possible to compare this to the U.S. Government’s extreme and unorthodox measures to combat terrorism? At its bluntest, do the ends justify the means? It will be interesting to see if students reply and how. As I said, there’s no single answer to this question, but there are different positions to be articulated, defended and argued.

I’ll come back and keep you posted.

Course Contracts in Web Classes

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A few years ago I read an article about how professors were using course contracts in their live classes. The argument is that having students sign a course contract outlining course policies and expectations helps to avert discipline problems in class, and provides faculty with a firm ground from which to react when problems arise with students. (I wish I could find the original article to link here, but I can’t, sorry!). The kinds of items that can go on a class contract are: attendance rules, policies regarding tardiness and plagiarism, classroom comportment, etc. I’ve experimented with such contracts over the years and did not like them that much. They really do set an unfriendly tone, and if they make a difference maybe it’s because they scare students. Plus, no one wants to be treated like a criminal, and course contracts can send the wrong message to an entire class when there are only a handful of prospective flakes in it. Be this as it may, the point is that course contracts are a way of making students stop to read the fine print and gain awareness of what is expected of them. By having students sign a document, you ensure they pay attention to your ground rules.

What I have really been enthusiastic about over the past few years is using contracts in my web classes. My favorite version of this is to require students to fill out a course clearance form before being cleared for registration. This is only possible if you have a supportive department chair and office staff willing to work with you on implementing this extra bureacracy. (Below I will speak about an alternative approach to the same concept, one not requiring office staff to manage contracts for the faculty member.)

My course clearance form, which varies from semester to semester depending on my needs, course to be taught and experiences, requires students to initial and acknowledge that:

  • They understand where to go for information about the class (my course announcement page, or bulletin board).
  • They understand that I will send them instructions on when and how to begin in the class to their UTA email address.
  • They understand important requirements.
  • They understand that it is their responsibility to start their web class on time.

The reason I began implementing this is because I was having problems with students not logging on to their web classes until 3 weeks after the start of classes and then pleading ignorance about where to go to begin. Also, students would get anxious and start calling me and our office staff for information about the class, creating extra stress and pressure for everyone involved. Another problem I had was that student expectations of what would be entailed in a web class did not track with mine. The course clearance was a way to make students aware that what they were getting themselves into was a class that would be appropriately challenging. Finally, there are also students who claim ignorance about the importance of having and checking their university email accounts, and the course clearance form helped me avoid the whole “I never check my UTA email, please email me at wackycentipede@coffeebeansEmporium.com”.

I quickly noted a difference after I began using a course clearance form. My students were better across the board and many students who inquired about the class did not end up registering. I had succeeded in doing some weeding out and streamlining my own work flow during the semester.

Here is a copy of one of my course clearance forms.

OK, so what if a course clearance form is not an option for you because asking this of your local department staff is out of the question? The same principles behind my course clearance form can be incorporated into a quiz or assignment that requires students to acknowledge elements of the class and your policies. For example, you can quiz students on your own syllabus, and make it worth 5% of the final grade. The point is, you want your students to know how your class functions and what your expectations are from the outset. This enables you skirt all subsequent discussions of “I did not know that I had to do X” or “Can you please accomodate me with this?” etc. etc. Save your negotiations with students for things that really matter, and take the annoying, piddly stuff out of the equation. Help students internalize your expectations right at the outset, it will make your life easier.

–Christopher Conway

One Semester in the Life of a Web Class…

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We often ask our student to reflect, in writing, on what they are learning. But how often do we challenge ourselves to do the same as teachers? This semester I set out to chronicle my experiences teaching a web class, week-by-week. I realized that my past experiences with teaching web classes were vague and jumbled in my mind, and I thought it worthwhile, for myself, to keep an ordered record of my experiences this semester. By writing it all out, I hoped to work through issues and concepts that might otherwise just fade away without being resolved in my mind. I chose to put my diary online for others to see. It can be found here. It’s not very intellectual, or polished, just a record of experiences, affirmations and frustrations that ebb and flow every week.

Sometimes people ask me what it’s like to teach a web class, and I find myself unsatisfied by my own ‘overview’ responses. For me there are so many ups and downs in the experience of teaching a web class that it is difficult to summarize it simply with a pat answer. Next time someone asks me what teaching a web class is like, I’ll say check out my blog posts! It’s all there: my mistakes, my successes, the good things students do, the bad things they do, everything that is on my mind at any given time during the semester.

Ego, Passion, Desire, Love, Respect, Relationship, and Attention Span

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My reading of the posts in this blog, and the links posted by the writers, got me to thinking and wondering about attention span.

What is the research on long attention span? I find we talk a lot about short attention spans when dealing with lectures. However, people of many ages seem to be able to attend for long periods of time when involved in other tasks: games, sports, creative writing, other kinds of writing, conversation, falling in love and obsessing on the person of one’s focus, mulling over an unsolvable situation – constantly and continually, obsessing on an idea — reading, writing, and talking about it, telling one’s own stories over and over … and over, watching a movie, playing guitar, doing research, partaking of an exciting discussion where we want to jump in.

So what is it about education that puts students to sleep and bores them?

I understand those who state that students do not listen to and absorb ideas in greater than 10-15 minute segments, when those ideas are produced in the form of a lecture. Most of us have experienced students’ nodding off or their attention wandering, as we closely watch what they are taking in when we are talking.

I have also noticed in my German Media on the Web class, taught in a computer classroom, that the computer seems to hypnotize students, and they must literally be pulled away in order to, as a group, attend to small group discussion, or to listen to anything I have to say, or to do a task like providing me with ideas about stereotypes of Switzerland which I can then put on the board for all to see. (My ideal German media on the web classroom: computers, break-out areas for small group or whole class interaction, chalk/white board for brainstorming, and screen for examples and shots of critical websites — also a latte machine.)

So what happens in the brain that makes students nod off or lose the thread when listening to lectures? What makes me nod off when listening to someone? What is it about a computer that hypnotizes students in a face-to-face class with computers in the classroom? And, on the other hand, what makes me attend again to a lecture (if the lecturer is not someone like the great Hans Kellner, who I understand mesmerized students when he was here)?

I’m coming to the conclusion that it has to do with what is happening in the brain and how the brain is processing ideas. It may have to do with tapping in to “expertise” and “experience,” and what we ourselves are bringing to the table. It may have to do with passive reception of authoritative knowledge versus bringing an attitude, an interest, a motivation, an agenda, or previous knowledge and understanding to the task of “listening to a lecture” – or a different frame of reference – different from that of the instructor – SCARY, or doing a different kind of task. It may have to do with choice. It may have to do with having a real reason for attending to ideas. A real reason for attending a face-to-face class. A real reason for attending an online course.

The following story is an example of what I’m talking about:
I recently attended a lecture, and I sat next to a student who was nodding off. I realized that the speaker was very knowledgeable, but that there wasn’t much that students without background knowledge in the field could grasp onto. I realized that I too was a bit bored by it all, until – until I heard the speaker say something that tapped into my understanding and previous knowledge, and that tapped into a new idea (for me) that I began having about the subject matter – an “aha” experience. After that, and for the rest of the lecture, I listened attentively, because I wanted to see if what he said continued to fit into this new framework or frame of reference that was happening in my mind. There was now a reason for listening to the lecture that far surpassed “getting information” from him or “politely thinking about the topic” – a real reason, my reason. The reason for attending had to do with me – not with him. I was having a new thought separate from him, I was enjoying that experience, and I was gleaning the “confidence” fallout from having what I considered a good idea, and I was enjoying making connections! Pleasure!

How do we get away from the fear and the “knowing” that students have about us – that if they say something we do not like, it will affect their grade? Some students don’t care. Others are quiet because of this. How do we avoid being the professor who said, “I don’t know what you think about this poem, [or theory or factoid], and I don’t care”? Even when students frustrate the heck out of us?

So learning theorists and scholars, am I on the right track? Is engagement something much more than attending and “being there” mentally? Is it passion-, desire-, even ego-driven? Is true learning perhaps totally passion-driven? Think of people like Einstein who let everything go in order to think all the time. Is it relationship? Do we hate to interact with profs who disdain us and therefore leave their content behind? Do we love to interact with profs who respect us and become energized and we change our majors because of them? Do we know the difference? (Yes, of course.) Do we as profs love to interact with students where there is mutual respect – they for us and we for them? If we disdain our students, do we sabotage learning? If they disdain us or are afraid of our grading them, how do we change that?

We guide them, compassionately, to the challenge. It is our prompts, our thinking, our interventions that make the difference. But it’s not the punitive and rigid intervention of the past. It has to be something different. Or?

Are these ideas too “affective?” I don’t think so, if we go beyond the surface of what is being said. After all, we are not organisms that are made up of three separate parts: body, mind, and emotions/spirit. We are whole organisms, whose affect plays a great part in our intellectual endeavor: what we choose, why, with whom we interact, and the environment in which we either develop our capacities or kill them, or something in between. “Create an environment in which people can thrive.” How do we do that for all students who are willing, no matter what their background?

Ideas

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iol2Here are some of my ideas I am doing. I teach LIST courses (Literacy studies) in the College of Education and Health Professions. I am a second year professor. Here is  my webpage: http://www3.uta.edu/faculty/peggys/index.html

1. Blogging with both online Master’s students and pre-service teachers in a shared space.

2. Using student authored video and professor authored videos. The professor authored videos are generally mini-lectures, book talks, or brief demonstrations. The students have reported they like them. Please feel free to leave comments on any of my YouTube videos and ideas on ways to better use the YouTube site.

3. Another thought I have about information sharing from the web on our course blog for Literacy Studies: teachers and teacher candidates often look to the web for teaching ideas and activites that are “ready to go”. However, we need to teach them how to carefully and critically evaluate this information. There’s “too much information” on the web.


How can we as educators of teacher candidates best steer students towards web resources that they can use and evaluate  for their current and future lesson plans? E.g., how do we teach them to “navigate” the teacher resources out there so they don’t go straight to the worksheet sites.
The blog might be one tool to compile resources, foster their own searches, and have them use targeted, “pre-filtered” websites like http://readwritethink.org which is a site affiliated with our major literacy professional organizations.

http://www.youtube.com/user/peggysemingson

Welcome to “Soundings”!

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magna-vox

“Soundings,” a best practices network for pedagogical technology at UTA, came about as a result of discussions I have had with many of its now-authors—talks which highlighted for me the need for an electronic space where we might reflect on the deeper questions of technology in teaching, learning, and education.

Watching the creative practice of Gina Thames, Chris Conway, Lana Rings, Blake Carpenter, Peggy Semingson, Carolyn Guertin, and so many others on campus has been and is a constant joy for me. What better than to ask them, and all of you as readers, to reflect on their practice? So that is just what I did. And with the expert help of Scott Massey in shaping and making this space functional, you are now about to enter one of the most fascinating digital gatherings I can imagine.

And so, as any good host would, I stand here at the virtual door, greeting all of our invited and occasional authors and readers to this space. Now, on to the digital hors d’oeuvres and main courses….