Education: April 2004 Archive Page

Because she does all of her teaching online, Ms. Achterhof can handle many more courses, at many more colleges, than she could face to face. She is an adjunct professor of business and management at four institutions, in three states, moving among her teaching duties with the click of a mouse while her black Labrador lies curled at her feet. She hardly ever sees a campus, spending much of her time at home here in a 100-year-old cottage next to a small lake. --Dan Carnevale --Part-time professors, in demand, fill many distance-education faculties (Chronicle)

Interesting... "Carnevale" means "farewell to the flesh."

My last two classes talked me into holding class outside today. There wasn't much we could really accomplish, especially during the evening class (which was supposed to run until a few minutes ago, but I let 'em out a half hour early -- sshh, don't tell my boss). Last term I started a ritual of snapping a picture of my class on the last day... I'm not sure what it accomplishes, but it gives a good sense of closure. (It never feels right saying good-bye to a class when I'm about to hand out the final exam.)

Almost done...

Under the guidelines, which go into effect in the fall for Princeton's 4,600 undergraduates, faculty are expected to restrict the number of A's to 35 percent in undergraduate courses; for junior and senior independent work, the percentage receiving A's will be capped at 55 percent. --Princeton faculty approves grade-rationing plan (CBS/AP)

Complaints I often hear around campus (our students don?t read/write) are turned on their head when we see the kinds of writing circulating around the economy of expression called the Web. Not everyone?s there yet, but many are; many we don?t realize are our the students in first year writing sitting there bored because of some textbook or uninformed instructor asking them to write about ?a controversial issue? or their favorite shirt. Take it to the Web. There you?ll find the bizarre ideas and beliefs many of us hold linked together in Shaviro?s imagined connected world (Sci-fi? Life-fi as well). There you will create something to write about. --J Rice --More Blog. Less Talk. (Yellow Dog)

What do films like Independence Day, Armageddon and X-Men have in common? The answer is that apart from costing millions of dollars to make, they all feature in a new course called Physics in Films that is being taught to students at the University of Central Florida. Costas Efthimiou, the mathematical physicist who teaches the course, believes that non-science students learn more about the fundamentals of physics by studying films and science fiction than they do from more traditional approaches. --Physics Goes to Hollywood (PhysicsWeb)

• Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left York at 6:36 p.m. travelling at 55mph, the other from Peterborough at 4:19 p.m.at a speed of 35mph.
• The plan was simple, like my brother Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
• She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
• It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

--how not to write metaphors (Schoolzone)

This list of howlers is prefaced with the note, "These are (allegedly) metaphors from actual GCSE essays." A lot of the items on the list are not metaphors but similies (only the latter of which uses "like" or "as"). But they're still funny. In the right context, many of these would actually be very good.

One of them, however, is a faded derivative of Douglas Adams's descripton of the hovering Vogon spaceships: "The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't."

Diaries and journals are a longstanding fixture of writing and foreign language classes. Journals are also commonly employed in other subjects, including lab notebooks in the sciences, and sketch books and portfolios for teaching the arts. Teachers often encourage students to keep notes of their own, and sometimes use these notes as an additional indicator of their progress. The earliest uses of weblogs thus far have been as replacements for writing journals. Despite difficulties, there are several advantages to the use of weblogs in this setting, especially in that they provide a more immediate and social environment for writing (Kajder & Bull, 2003), which when combined with the improvements to student writing that seem to accrue simply by moving to a computerized form of journals (Goldberg, Russel, & Cook, 2004), represents an obvious area for experimentation.

There has been a move over the last decade toward using portfolios of student materials to improve evaluation and learning. --Alex Halavais --Weblogs as 'replacement' educational technology (Alex Halavais)

Friday afternoon I had the pleasure of sitting through a number of final presentations from graduating English majors. My colleague Mike Arnzen blogged about the online portfolios that some students chose to produce instead of traditional 3-ring binders.

While praising the information management and convenience of the online portfolios, Arnzen also noted a few downsides -- one of which was the fact that an e-portfolio is geared towards serving up the final product, rather than presenting a coherent reflection on progress.

But my freshmen who have been blogging almost since the first week of school will have a tremendous archive of material to consult when they are seniors. Those students who choose to submit electronic portfolios will probably be the ones who have taken plenty of new media journalism courses (and if I'm the instructor, I imagine they'll be blogging). To compensate for the weaknesses of the online portfolio genre, and to help students take fuller advantage of the strengths of the online medium, perhaps we need to rethink the reflective introduction assignment, which currently assumes that the student will write an ordinary prose essay. For those students who choose to submit an online portfolio, perhaps that introductory essay needs to be rethought as a series of individual blog entries, which themselves contain links back to important blog entries from the past. Thus, instead of clicking on items in a table of contents, the evaluation of an online portfolio will be like reading a hyperlinked narrative, written with the full knowledge that the very nature of the WWW means that the reader of an online portfolio will be reading the same way he or she reads any online text -- looking for bold keywords, bulleted lists, subject headings, and links, and slowing down to read in more detail only when the text is particularly interesting.

Link found via KiarosNews.

I'm sitting in class
and it hurts my ass
I stare at the clock
and watch the time pass.
Tick tock; Tick tock
the professor; I mock.

The class is like hell,
unfortunately no bell
to ring to ring to let
me be free
I can't wait
I have to pee! --Amanda Hoffer --Cover slam...whaaaaat (Hoffer's Log)

Amanda says she wasn't writing about my class... her sense of timing was impeccable, drawing a lot of laughs from the riveted students. One of the many excellent performances at tonight's "All-American Poetry Cover Slam," part of my "American Lit 1915-Present" course.

By the way, I responded by reading "Did I Miss Anything?", which predictably got mixed reactions (the education students loved it!).

This was another one of those days when I remember why I wanted to be a teacher. I also feel we had a good day in "Intro to Literary study," though the students there weren't feeling quite as relaxed about poetry -- I've been asking them to wrestle with "Prufrock," and of course they have other work to do as well. Still, all in all a good day.

The study raised new questions about the teaching of history after it found that 11 per cent of the British population believed Hitler did not exist and 9 per cent said Winston Churchill was fictional. A further 33 per cent believed Mussolini was not a real historical figure.... Some 27 per cent of people interviewed thought Robin Hood, whose story has been featured in films by directors such as Kevin Costner and Mel Brooks, existed whereas 42 per cent believed Mel Gibson's Braveheart was an invention. More than 60 thought the Battle of Helms Deep in the Lord of the Rings trilogy actually took place....

Fictional events that we believe did take place
War of the Worlds , Martian invasion - 6 per cent
Battle of Helms Deep , Rings Trilogy - The Two Towers - 3 per cent
Battle of Endor , The Return of the Jedi - 2 per cent
Planet of the Apes , the apes rule Earth - 1 per cent
Battlestar Galactica , the defeat of humanity by cyborgs - 1 per cent

--Cahal Milmo --1066 and all that: how Hollywood is giving Britain a false sense of history (Independent)

And I, for one, saulte our new cyborg overlords...

Of course, it's Hollywood's fault -- how dare Californians presume to educate Britons? Listen to me now and believe me later, U.K. -- if you want your sense of history muddled beyond belief, get your own movies!

Honestly...

Note: An editor should have caught this: "More than 60 thought the Battle of Helms Deep in the Lord of the Rings trilogy actually took place." That should be "More than 60 people out of the survey of 2069," or, as the last paragraph in the story specifies, just 3%.

Small academic organizations looking for publicity but lacking the funds for a web designer, teachers interested in exposing their students to feedback from real-world audiences, and individuals who simply like to write may all find weblogs valuable, even outside the setting of a composition classroom.

We already see barefoot and pajama-clad students in the classroom; I think it's high time to make the classroom more visible to the student 24/7, preparing them for the life-long learning habits and intellectual attitudes towards life that our catalogs and recruitment brochures promise they will acquire by the time they leave.

Bloggers who are excited about their work tend to intersperse required blog entries with personal ones, reading and commenting on blog entries written by students who are not in their classes; this can energize a whole community. Several students directly compared blogging to discussion boards, and explicitly stated that they did not put as much effort in their discussion boards because they knew nobody outside the class would ever read their work.

While blogging has percolated past the computer programming, new media, and journalism departments, and is making inroads in composition and literature, the potential for blogging in first year experience, recruitment, retention, and alumni relations is almost completely untapped. (Collaboration, anyone?)

(A "Teaching and Learning Forum" at Seton Hill University.) --Dennis G. Jerz

--The Blogosphere: What's in It for Me? (An Introduction)Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I just presented to a small group of faculty, staff, and administrators. Mike Arnzen also presented his professional development website, Pedablogue.