Academia: October 2005 Archive Page

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Ian Bogost: Project Management: Avoiding Mistakes... If I Only Knew Then What I Know Now (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Bogost reminded the group that, despite the fact the room was arranged for a lecture, this is a roundtable.

Why is an academic talking about project management? “After all, uiversities are not exactly known for finishing things.”

About a third of the audience self-identified as game developers, about a third were educators, a smaller group were owners or investors in serious games projects. Dealing with the diverse needs of a heterogeneous group is one of the most challenging situations I face as a teacher.

Bogost’s talking points:

What’s different? Budgeting, Expectations, Stakeholders, Testing, Deployment, Integration, Other Stuff?

Topics called out from the audience: Distributed teams, risk-averse environments, creativity, production pipelines, efficiency.


Some initial tension between the creativity of the designers and the accuracy of the instructional content. An instructional designer noted “There is no such thing as an educational game model,” while there are educational models for other media.

A woman who said she is from a story-basted instructional design company says start with the learning objectives, moves to what she called the “story envelope,” but trying to get away from the opening exposition, a game that has little to do with the story, and then a final story. Bogost noted (without naming) the position of ludologists (who say that games are not fundamentally storylike).

Instructional designers in attendance said they need more game literacy. One member noted, in jest, that “Instructional designers suck all the fun out of the game.”

One speaker spoke of three champions in the mix – the game design champion, the instructional design champion, and the subject matter champion.

Another speaker invoked David Letterman, who says if you ever learn anything on his show, then he’s lost you. Game designers don’t worry about learning outcomes.

Another speaker noted that a serious game is selling a concept that the game will improve learning, and that the outcomes must be evaluated, while the outcome in commercial games is determined through sales. In a conventional design situation, a particular feature might be cut for time, but certain features in serious games simply aren’t optional.

At this point, Bogost asked a very good question. Is a particular instructional component just another constraint, or is it qualitatively different from other constraints?

I noted that, while you might want to evaluate the success of a game based on how many copies you sell, simply spending money is never the intention of a game customer. In a similar way, the creators of a serious game will have a different objective than the players (who may not want to play a game at all).

Budget: One participant mentioned that 3D prototyping must be “evangelized” so that funders can see the value of that particular technique.

Expectations: When speaking of working in risk-averse environments, Bogost noted the importance of going to the top of the organization. One participant warned that, once you educate the stakeholders about the potential of serious games, a problem is that the decision-makers suddenly develop high expectations – but typically that happens after the developer has committed to the project.

I noted that, as a verbal thinker, I was interested in the assumption lurking behind so much of the activity here that better graphics and more polygons equals a more realistic game, which by definition is a better teacher. But I noted that today’s young people are also interested in animation. For example, we need an abstracted version of an atom in order to understand the forces at work inside an atom. I suggested that we shouldn’t forget about the power of abstraction to teach basic concepts. (Bogost gave a thumbs up and said, “Inform text adventures!” The participants seemed to like that.)

On the difference between simulators and games – good simulators depend on outside knowledge, while a good game teaches you how to play the game (through a context that uses rewards and penalties to get the user to modify his or her behavior). Bogost introduced James Gee’s definition of the difference between games and simulation, though Bogost himself holds that there is no fidelity to the outside world in a simulation (and then, after dropping that bomb on the audience, rather comically changed the subject).

A comment from someone sitting next to me -- designers make games too difficult, because they are typically expert gamers themselves, and they tweak a game until it holds their own attention. The gameplay may be too hard for the intended audience to learn.

Developers noted the difficulty of testing their games on their intended audience, but in response to a question that Bogost and I asked at almost the same time, who in the room has funded such research? The crickets chirped in the room, two hands crept up, but when Bogost called on one, the speaker simply asked, “Where’s the money for that kind of research?”

Bogost will run a similar roundtable tomorrow.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Dolly Joseph and Mable Kinzie: Boys [sic] and Girls [sic] Game Play Preferences: Survey Results (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I’m hemmed into an awkward back corner, so I hope the presentation’s good, since I won’t be able to get out easily.

I didn't catch the speaker's name at first, but it was Dolly Joseph speaking alone, about work that she and Mabel Kinzie did at the University of Virginia. She began with the thick theoretical grounding that I find comforting in an academic presentation -- though the use of “Pedagogy” in Tim Holt’s presentation as a term of insult used by a bully suggests the tension between academics and designers).

Joseph made multiple references to her dissertation... she invited the audience to interrupt with questions, working her way professionally and methodically through her slides, occasionally referring apologetically to information that she was not covering. That did spark a lot of requests for clarification from the audience. I'd like to see more of this study as it develops.

I found the very small statistical sample to be troubling -- 20 students for the survey, and just four for in-depth profiles. In addition the survey was a proxy -- measuring what students said about games, not actually measuring their reaction to games. For instance, rather than giving the students the chance to play four different games, and then observing how much time they spent on each game, the students were instead asked to answer a question about what kind of hypothetical games they would like.

To her credit, Joseph didn't make any grandiose claims about her findings -- she freely admitted the risks associated with making claims on such a small data set, though she did on several occasions express frustration that the data confirmed multiple stereotypes about children. If the data had challenged rather than confirmed those sterotypes, would she have presented her findings differently? (For more on gender and desing, see Utopian Entrepreneur, in which Brenda Laurel describes the flak she got from some feminists who were horrified that her company designed games for girls, and catered specifically to the friendship-related issues that are so important to girls.

What follows are my lightly-edited liveblogging notes.

She was building on her own research on the use of popular culture in education, and mentioned comic books.

Hm…. the presentation is based on comparisons between the activity of two different game camps in Charlottesville, Va., offered under the title “Got Game”.

A survey of the participants of two camps, featuring feedback gathered from a total of 21 participants. While I rather like the idea of having kids give feedback through surveys, journals, and a “video confessional,” that’s just 21 kids – not even a whole middle school class. That’s a pretty small sample to use, and the arbitrary choice of four out of these 21 students leads to problems. As long as a study doesn’t use this kind of profiling as evidence to support a statistical conclusion, I’m perfectly happy hearing what we can learn from the analysis.

The researcher chose four children to profile, with different ethnic backgrounds, learning styles, and gaming preferences.

• One student who liked games with clear goals and good positive feedback and strong closure, and thus liked a game called Bioscopia, which the researcher presented as like Myst. “None of us understood why it was fun.”
  
• Another student frequently asked “What is the point of this game?” Didn’t like educational goals embedded within the gameplay, she wanted to know what she was supposed to learn.
  
• Yet another student preferred collaboration during gameplay, liked controlling social interactions and adaptable goals.
  
• A fourth student gravitated towards complex, realistic problems, with an urban aesthetic, liked action and conflict. Liked to set his own goals.

All four of the profiled campers were proficient in “active play” – under the pressure of time, with rapid character birth and rebirth, starting over from the same point, and dichotomous storylines (good/evil). Educational games that included this kind of play were answered highly. Kids were not fooled by games that inserted quiz questions as barriers.

Explorative play – part of the game world is initially hidden; travel through physical space is important; discovering new areas leads to new challenges. Only one profiled camper liked this.

Problem-solving – Discreet challenges with set goals; hierarchical or parallel, multiple challenges that are generally independent. All of the four students enjoyed these. Clear challenges and readily apparent successes and failures, consequences are apparent. Some educational games are insufficiently challenging for middle-school children. Assembling puzzle-pieces or other simple tasks were not addressing the higher cognitive abilities of the advanced students.

Srategic play – long-term manipulation of resources; multiple pathways; greater complexity 2 of the 4 liked this mode; few educational games employ the open boundaries of this kind of gameplay – the complexity might be too challenging.

Social play – Intra-game, multi-player, and collaborative. Social play was not implicit in any of the games surveyed games.

Said the kids “were wild for” the idea of playing an online social game, but that element wasn’t part of any of the games tested.

Results: Design Suggestions (after looking at case studies of 4 children, from a pool of 21)


I asked the speaker to clarify – these are four suggestions for games that the researcher wishes would exist, because they contain elements that she says these fours students would like. [The ideological force behind the suggestions are at least as interesting as the gameplay suggestions themselves.]

1. Cures of the Rainforest: Goal – find plants with potential curative properties within the rainforest. Put together a party with characters who have certain background details. Teaching flora and fauna. [But wouldn’t a game that presented the political and economic choices that must be made by the government of a third-world country that possesses rainforests. Issues related to the economic dependence on tourism, poaching, the jobs of people who might be employed by a local logging company, the agenda of a Hollywood celebrity whose presence on the team would increase publicity but displace a scientist… ]
   
2. Vigilante P.I. – “Solve crimes and bring corrupt businessmen to justice.” Strategy and problem-solving, using mental powers and a bit of muscle. Forensics, chemistry, health hazards. (You would be able to shoot.) A question from the audience: Did you get backlash from suggesting shooting a person would be an appropriate element of a game?
   
3. Butterfly Babies – “Collect, breed, and ‘grow’ butterflies.” “Create a pretty butterfly, but use science to do it.” Biology, genetics, lab procedures.
   
4. Zoo Rescue – “Free a trapped zookeeper by traveling through a maze-like zoo.” Teaching biology and ecology, solving puzzles that lead you through passageways. Surprised to find a child who liked that kind of gameplay.
   

In response to a question I asked about the ideological decisions behind the game design choices, the researcher said that students who were worried about their on financial situation were more worried about saving their neighborhood; those students who had the luxury of worrying about the world did.

Analysis of a survey of the 20 children who participated in the study.

Boys more likely to play on consoles, girls more likely to play on computers.

Both genders preferred to play their own genders and ethnicities.

Girls preferred thinner female characters.

Boys preferred games in the street or sports fields, girls prefer games set in a mall to a meadow. (This result sparked a flurry of questions from the audience, that eventually established that participants were given a survey to take home, and for this particular question were asked to say which of the following four choices would be their favorite setting for a game: streets, sports, mall, and meadow.)

I don’t know how the following was determined, but boys preferred saving adults and senior citizens, girls would rather save young children. (I’m actually just as curious to know more about this item, but since I was one of the questioners about the previous item, I kept my mouth shut so the presenter could get through the material.)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Tim Holt:  (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Remediating the classic Atlas body-building cartoon, Holt presented the scenario in which a big burly organization kicks sand in the face of a scrawny game designer. He suggested that modding is a way to create a great-looking game, that can be used to get further funding, without requiring a million bucks for the prototype. In some ways I'm more advanced than the target audience for this talk, but what Holt is doing now is what I'll have to do if my own idea for an educational game is going to go anywhere.
Holt noted that open-source and alternative development options are available, but he got a little FUDdy on the audience. When Holt, who used to work for Valve (the company that makes Half-Life) first suggested that he would talk about several alternatives to the traditional commercial development process, then admitted that would only talk about modding, the audience chuckled. The presentation walked through the process of using Half-Life 2 as a source for mods.

Differentiated modding - resuing somebody else's wheel -- from the traditional development process. The process starts with buying a commercial game such as Half-Life 2, noting that the companies want users to create their own modifications. Modding is a great playground, but you don't have to start from scratch. Half-Life 2 includes lots of grungy bitmaps, which wouldn't be acceptable for a hospital simulation, of course, but are easily expandable. Holt's laptop has 14 GB worth of content that can be reused in original mods. That content includes code that defines the AI properties or the in-game characters.

Holt showed the Half-Life 2 characters, which his collaborators complained they slouched too much, turning the oppressed out-of-work civilians of Half-Life 2 into confident, confidence-inspiring doctors (with white work boots).

Used Half-Life 2 greenery functions for a forestry simulation, expanding a function originally designed for grass and shrubbery, turning it into a system to populate a forest stretched across kilometers.

"It's too hard to explain to a bunch of foresters why they're running around with a crowbar."

Showed a proof-of-concept game for "Pulse!!" - a first-person medical game that featured an in-game EEG monitor synchronized with an in-game patient. The PC, with stethoscope in hand, touches the patient's chest, and we hear the heartbeat and breathing, based on where the hand is touching. (In the background, slouching hospital workers wash their hands or punch buttons.)

Indicated that in order to do mods, you'll need to play the game in order to understand its capabilities. "If your co-workers don't like it, invite them to play too."

Saved me a bit of time by noting that there aren't really any books out there on the subject of modding games.

In response to a question from the audience, briefly mentioned other platforms such as Neverwinter Nights and the new Civilization IV that offer modding capability.

Noted that, in addition to a copy of the game, you'll need a 3D modeling program (he suggested XSI), a programming environment (Visual C++), and an image editor.

Holt's virtual forest needs a system where people can share data, posting persistent notes within the game world. [That really got me thinking? would that be virtual geocaching? Let players leave audio comments for each other? That would let students annotate the same simulated world in different ways, according to different objectives? that really opens up a huge range of ways to reuse the same generic simulated environment. Lots to think about! -DGJ]

Giving students a virtual patient that they have to take care of day and night [That would be an extremely interesting variation on neopets, or the parenting simulations in which adolescents are given dolls that they have to take care of]

Offered the advice to "keep it simple," as applied to "Pulse!!"

Holt mentioned Garry's Mod - a sandbox version of Half-Life, with a scripting language called Lua.

Played "A Few Good G-Men," a wonderful demonstration of what can be possible with simulation. Perhaps only a scene that features a cold, stiff military officer in a courtroom setting would work. While the clip was fascinating, I would rather have seen a demonstration of a game - using a remediated version of a movie to demonstrate what modding can do.

(Holt's use of the buzzword "pedagogy" in his remediaton of the bodybuilding cartoon was hilarious.)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005 Blogging (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Here's my schedule for the first day of the Serious Games Summit, which starts in a few minutes here in Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington D.C. I do enjoy the mixture of commercial, government, educational and indie content, but the biggest draw is probably the dollars at stake to be extracted from government agencies for military training. I'll check out the booths of course, but the government/military/business angle is not why I'm here.

Signs That I'm Not at a Humanities Conference

1. Demonstrating the seriousness of the situation: Whatley mentioned that one of his EULA (end-user license agreements) includes the warning “death and dismemberment are not our fault.”
   
2. When I asked a question about simulation, Whatley’s response began with, “If I shoot a bullet at you…”
   
3. The word "pedgagogy" appears in one of the presentations, not simply to be dismissed as pedestrian and non-theoretical, but in the speech bubble of the beach bully kicking sand in the face of a scrawny little game designer, in a remix of the classic comic book advertisement for body-building snake oil.
   
4. To be continued??

Last year there was a T-shirt. This year? A plastic bag with a program, a promotional CD from Anark (one of the sponsors) and a few other fliers. (I overheard one of the conference organizers say that nobody offered to sponsor the t-shirts. Shame.)

I certainly hope there are muffins or cookies somewhere around here. [Update: There are.]

Keynote: Peter Perla and Doug Whatley
"What's So Serious about Game Design? The Art or the Science?"

Tim Holt
"Healthcare and Forestry -- Half-Life 2: Meet Serious Games Modding"

I'm conflicted... I'm interested in both of these topics, and may bail out of the first one to visit the second.

Dolly Joseph and Mable Kinzie
"Boys [sic] and Girls [sic] Game Play Preferences: Survey Results"

Lauren Davis
"Inside our Hidden Agenda: Using Contests to Generate New Ideas for Games in Education" (Never got to this. I've actually blogged about the Hidden Agenda effort before, and I would have loved to hear how the project is doing, but Joseph's presentation held my attention.)

Michael Gibson
"Creating Life Experience Through Dramatic Simulations"

Sharon Sloane
"Exploring Game-Based Instructional Methodologies that Reach the Cognitive and Affective Learning Domains"

Ian Bogost
"Project Management: Avoiding Mistakes... If I Only Knew Then What I Know Now"

Well, it looks like the exhibit hall is supposed to be open now.

Update, 01 Nov: See my liveblogging from day 2

I wonder how an English professor would feel spending a week in a physics lab. Not about the scientific work, but about the frequent, ongoing interaction between students and peers, post-docs and faculty. Scientists see each other in the lab, if not daily, then at least weekly. They have frequent lab meetings, colloquia and interaction with scholars at other universities around joint research. --Gina Hiatt --We Need Humanities Labs (Inside Higher Ed)

I agree that academic life in the humanities can be isolating and lonely. While my Ph.D. is in literature, I found myself hanging out in the library's Java programming lab, where I put in most of the hours of a research assistantship, and drinking in the collegiality in what was at the time the school's Engineering Writing Centre.

Those were great experiences. I also had an experience that was, if not actually hellish, like a visit to the world of "Office Space," and a living lab in which I learned how managers can alienate and undercut the work of the managed. Of course I liked the money, and everything worked out for me in the end, but quite frankly, most work in the humanities IS solitary. I realize that hard and serious work is done in group environments, but in the humanities we don't first *do* research and *then* write it up -- typically the writing *is* the research, along with the requisite reading, and most of us need quiet and some control over our schedule in order to get that work done. I can't imagine going to an office 9-5, and punching in, just so I could start reading "Hamlet".

I got through it all just fine, and I welcome the collegiality in play at my current job. I think of all the grad students whose work I know of via the blogosphere, and I imagine how different my own grad experience would have been if I'd had access to the kind of online support groups I see in action everyday online.

Currently I work a very WIDE room for my freshman composition class. I'd estimate it's about four seats deep and ten seats wide. When I lead a standard class discussion, I have to march the length of the room -- from the door to the window at the far end -- and project my voice rather loudly when I'm on one side or the other. But that doesn't bother me. What's troubling is that it spreads the students far apart from each other. It divides them; and there is a sort of "faction" mentality that seems evident to me when debates get hot: one side argues against the other, from the comfortable distance of the double-wide trailer sized room.

You don't have to be a communications theorist to recognize that students tend to territorialize their space in a learning environment. --Musical Chairs (Pedablogue)

Last fall, whenever a student got up to give an oral presentation, I would sit in their vacated seat. I enjoyed the chance to see the room from so many different perspectives.

This great entry on classroom space got me thinking a little more about how my students' relationships with each other in the blogosphere affects the in-class dynamic.

In the past, when I've offered a free, no-bad-consequences draft review, I'm always disappointed at how few students take me up on it. I did notice that some of the same students who wouldn't submit rough drafts would have at least something prepared for an oral report. Perhaps they don't mind getting a zero on a rough draft when I'm the only one who knows they didn't do the work, but when I call on their name for their oral presentation, they didn't want to have to say "I'm not prepared" in front of their peers.

I thought I'd try to put this phenomenon to use, and started planning informal oral presentations a day or two before a rough draft was due. I eased the freshmen into it by letting them present on a personal topic of their own choice, so they would feel more comfortable presenting. For all my classes, I made it clear I wouldn't mark them down for saying "um" or for fidgeting.

While I saw the oral presentations as a way for students to try out new ideas without necessarily churning out pages and pages of detailed support, and while I thought the student papers improved markedly after we workshopped the thesis statements and supporting ideas the students floated during their informal presentations, too often the students were simply focused on getting through the presentation.

Displaced from the comfortable anonymity of their accustomed seat, students felt too vulnerable to appreciate constructive criticism. I graded the oral presentations very generously, because I wanted to reward and encourage the process rather than evaluate the product, but the anxieties students felt about performing made their way into their evaluations at the end of the course. Students didn't mention how much better their writing was as a result of their oral ordeals. Some even complained that their peers' presentations were so lame and repetitive that they would have preferred me to lecture more. My efforts to create a more student-centered learning environment seemed to invite a backlash. So a little reorganization was clearly in order.

This term, I've drastically reduced my reliance on formal student presentations. I let students know I don't want them to enter the classroom as a blank slate. In my lit classes, I've been distributing the teaching task, diffusing it among the whole student body, making it part of the routine environment of the classroom.

Each student needs to prepare an "agenda item" they have prepared in advance, and that they will be ready to share if called upon. I ask them to post a brief entry on their blog, 24 hours before class, in which they offer a quotation from the assigned reading, and state what their "agenda item" is -- that is, what they plan to talk about, when called on in class. Then, they bring to class a 200-word reflection, that mentions by name a student whose blogged idea has helped them develop their ideas about the assigned text.

Friday morning in "Drama as Literature," we were discussing the first two acts of Hamlet. Because I checked the student blogs before class, I already knew the students were talking about Hamlet's madness, Gertrude’s complicity, and the dramatic effectiveness of the ghost. The first student who spoke mentioned being inspired by a second student's blog entry. The second student then mentioned being inspired by a third student's entry. This went on for a string of six or eight students, for about fifteen minutes, each building on what the previous student had said, before the first pause in the discussion.

During that pause, I called attention to what had just happened, and praised the students for sustaining the conversation on their own.

When the students in this class give informal presentations, I split them up into small groups, and send them out to a courtyard or patio. I float around and try to listen in on the discussion, but my physical absence reminds them to think of their peers as their primary audience. Several students blogged about how much they enjoyed the experience, and the informal reflections they submitted afterwards were overwhelmingly positive.

Once when I was late to class due to a domestic incident (I told the class it involved a shower curtain, a large spider, and a potty-training toddler), I sent word via the division secretary that I'd be a bit late, and the students went around the room and shared their agenda items. When I did show up, they seemed quite pleased with themselves for having been so productive on their own.

I'm a little spoiled, since all the students in that class are English majors. I'm also teaching two sections of a lit seminar and a news writing course that includes students who are less than thrilled to be there. While some students are enthusiastic and dependably well-prepared, it's clear that some students haven't made the class a top priority. That's okay -- I got a C in my college Latin course, and it wasn't because I disliked the subject or the teacher, it was just because I chose to put my time and effort elsewhere.

The news writing class is changing the focus from a series of short exercises to some longer, more in-depth units, so I'm hoping I can use some of blog-enhanced classroom discussion techniques. In the next five or so weeks, we'll work our way chapter-by-chapter through two books, and I plan to have the students sign up for a particular chapter, and let a different student take the class through the "agenda item" sequence each time. At 32 students, that's large by SHU standards, but as a writing class, it's large by any standard. I'm going to let students know I expect them to participate regularly, and I'll start asking them to evaluate and reflect on their own contributions to the online and in-class discussion.

When I switched places with the students who gave oral presentations last year, I was trying to send a message that, for the next 20 minutes, I was just one of the students. But the act of trading places with the students emphasized the difference between us. When I wasn't sitting in a student space, I was The Teacher.

By asking all students to prepare agenda items, I am distributing the authoritarian role of the agenda-setter. It is sometimes stressful for me, since I have to work twice as hard weaving connections between the student agenda items, filling in gaps with 5-minute mini-lectures on catharsis or the role of the raisonneur.

I still haven't worked in "anagnorisis" or "the fourth wall," and earlier in the week, three students in a row asked me a question that stumped me. There were three high school seniors visiting the classroom that day, and I kept having to admit my ignorance. I'm teaching without a net when I let the students set the agenda -- but the 24-hour lead time really helps. I have time to prepare those 5-minute spurts of info, when I notice the students are hungry for background information on the Protestant reformation, or if they're puzzled by a mythological reference, or they're curious about the author's biography.

Rather than letting the students take turns being the "sage on the stage," I'd like them to take turns being the "guide on the side," and shouldering the responsibility. In a typical class, some student has usually checked the Wikipedia entry for an author's biography, or has read the author before, or got inspired and did some outside research.

Musical chairs is a good metaphor, but I'd like to think of removing the empty chairs that separate the students, until every student is connected with his or her peers all the time. If we all swap roles and trade ideas as rapidly and smoothly as my lit students did in Friday morning's Hamlet class, I think we'll all enjoy the result.

A. A suburban teenager's online diary, bursting with angst-y Goth poetry and "creative" grammar.

B. An alternative news source that can break stories the mainstream media won't touch.

C. A scholarly notebook, where a professor reviews books, brags about student accomplishments, and posts occasional cat pictures.

D. A list of web addresses, often focusing on a theme (such as data encryption, homeschooling, Latin-American economics, or ferns), recorded and evaluated by a meticulous web-surfer.

E. Any of the above, especially when updated frequently, and where visitors can add their own comments.

(Answer: E)

---

Seton Hill's blog site, blogs.setonhill.edu/nmj, developed by Dr. Jerz, allows any member of the Seton Hill community to keep an on-line journal (or comment on someone else's). Blogs are used both as a formal teaching tool and as an informal forum for students, faculty and administrators.

"Students who read my professional blog can see what I do when I encounter a new concept," says Jerz. "They see me testing my initial reaction against the facts as they emerge. They might see Dr. Arnzen [SHU associate professor of English] politely disagree with me. They might see me change my mind, or post a correction. That's very different from the dynamic you find in the traditional lecture."What is a blog? (A Multiple Choice Quiz) (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This appeared as a sidebar in Seton Hill's alumni magazine. Becca Baker, from our PR office, asked me to submit 200 words defining "weblog," and I was feeling quirky and unconventional, and the quiz question was the result. For the intended audience, I didn't feel it was necessary to specify the reverse-chronological order of blog posts, but if the definition were a little longer, I wish I could have fitted that in somehow.

The main article was about my colleague John Spurlock's Fulbright-sponsored visit to Montenegro, where he blogged about his encounters with the students and ordinary citizens, in entries that were sometimes touching, sometimes hilarious, and always illuminating.

I'll try to get a PDF of the article online in the near future.

Subject: The expository lecture as the principal means of instruction.

Inciter: The expository lecture is simply a talking textbook that has endured too long since the invention of printing.

Subject: The student-selected curriculum.

Inciter: According to the interest theory of value, the value of academic subjects is not intrinsic. It is bestowed on them by the interest that students bring to them. It follows that students should study only those subjects in which they are already interested.

Subject: The purpose of a college education.

Inciter: "If then a practical end must be assigned to a university course, I say that it is that of training good members of society. ... It aims ... at cultivating the public mind, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasms and fixed aims to popular aspirations, ... at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life." (John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University) --F. Champion Ward --Filling a Gap in the Doctoral Process (Chronicle)

Now that we're at the midpoint in the semester, I think my literature students have for the most part grasped the idea that a college lit course demands more than the ability to summarize plots, analyze characters, and apply the themes of a literary work to the student's own life. Their high school teachers praised those skills, and for students who haven't taken any lit since high school, getting them to make the shift is a challenge.

I first asked them to turn to close reading, so that they can practice supporting their claims with evidence from the texts, rather than details from their own lives or personal opinions about love, sin, gender, etc.

Yes, a paper on one possible meaning of the titular bird in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" makes a good topic, but such a paper isn't an argument unless it considers alternative views.

The students have submitted their rough drafts for their first big paper, and so far the papers have been very rough indeed -- but I expected that. It's a struggle to get students to collect a bunch of academic articles first, and then build an argument based on the sources they've been able to find, rather than having them write out the opinion they held before they conducted any research, then have them looking through the databases to "find quotes to support" the opinions to which they've already committed several pages of nicely-crafted prose.

Given that the rough draft is only worth a few measly percentage points, I've been pleased with the effort most students have put into it. Several students who got the draft "wrong" revised it after I gave them initial feedback, and submitted it along with a note saying they weren't asking for credit, they just wanted to know whether they were now closer to the right track.

I've warned students about the "bottom of page 3" problem, in which students who aren't quite sure what their argument is churn out three pages of general fluff before they hit on a really good idea, which they develop for half a page before tacking on a conclusion that basically says, "Therefore, this paper has [repeat introduction here]."

I wonder if these examples of "inciters" will be of use, as we try to move from a collection of interesting observations to a paper that has been written entirely in order to defend a particular thesis, so that the reader won't discover on page 4 what the paper is really about, but will rather be introduced to that controlling idea in the thesis paragraph, if not in the very title of the paper.

I like the two-tiered set of goals described by my colleague Cynthia, a professor of psychology. "I approached my sabbatical with two sets of expectations: the must-do project and the wish-I-could-do projects," she said. "I accomplished the former, but didn't get to the latter, unfortunately."

I happen to know that, if I set low goals, that's all I will achieve. So I'm aiming high, but trying to find balance between my work and my personal life in a couple of ways. --Lee Tobin McClain --Going on Sabbatical (Chronicle)

Lee is my colleague down the hall. Since she's not been coming to English faculty meetings this year, we're giving her all the tasks nobody else will volunteer for. (Just kidding!)

I've been planning to ask for a temporary teaching load reduction to invest time in an open-source educational videogame concept I've been kicking around for a year. It's time to get cracking on that proposal -- once I've turned in next midterm grades.

For the rest of the week, it's marking, marking, marking.

--Teaching Carnival II is here! (Scribblingwoman)

A great collection of teaching links, highlighting what teachers who happen to blog are saying about their work.

I see students calling me over to their desks to ask about a word problem, and half the time me reading the word problem aloud to them is enough to answer their question. I see students skimming over paragraphs of text (not that I blame them) and then asking me what they really needed to read in order to solve the problem. I seldom see any indication that students are reading their textbooks beyond skimming over the examples so that they can match them to the homework questions. I’ve lost track of the number of students I’ve tutored, or fielded during office hours, who did not avail themselves of the indices of their textbooks. The reason they couldn’t show that two events were mutually exclusive was because they didn’t know what “mutually exclusive” meant, nor did they think to look it up. --This is why my little college-math-ed blog has so many readers (Tall, Dark and Mysterious)

Because I typically teach writing and literature courses, the class in which I teach the most "content" is currently News Writing. I've ejected the huge $80 textbook in favor of several smaller books, each of which I can reasonably expect the students will read cover-to-cover. I carefully scoured key chapters of those readings and populated my opening lecture with references to them, so that when students encounter that key lesson just before it becomes important, sometimes they get an "aha" moment when they realize they've already learned (in class) the information that's being delivered in more depth in text. But because I chose just the right books, and knew them well, I can tailor my in-class presentations to deliver what the books leave out.

I confess, making all that material fit together was very hard to do. I can imagine, if I didn't have the luxury of picking the textbooks I wanted to use, and if I were mandated to deliver content X so that students will pass test Y, I can see how I might lean more on delivering short in-class explanations of what students "really" need to learn, while still virtuously assigning chapters that cover the material I'd like to teach, but don't have time to emphasize in class. This might lead students to depend on skimming, and might train them to respond quickly and vivaciously to points I brought up in class, while not helping them develop the ability to respond to material that they themselves read.

So... reading how a math professor parses the "students aren't prepared" problem has helped me see how I might respond. I'm still not sure what the solution is, but I can't simply blame the high schools of America, since, like it or not, it's my job to help the students pick up the pieces.

While things have settled down a bit, this time of year is very stressful for freshmen. I've got a high proportion of freshmen in two of my 200-level classes, and while I pause every so often to deliver a particular message to the freshmen, I'm not teaching them as freshmen courses, so we are together confronting the challenges of collegiate work.

While blogging has real intellectual payoffs, it is not conventional academic writing and shouldn't be an academic's main focus if he or she wants to get tenure.

But to dismiss blogging as a bad idea altogether is to make an enormous mistake. Academic bloggers differ in their goals. Some are blogging to get personal or professional grievances off their chests or, like Black, to pursue nonacademic interests. Others, perhaps the majority, see blogging as an extension of their academic personas. Their blogs allow them not only to express personal views but also to debate ideas, swap views about their disciplines, and connect to a wider public. For these academics, blogging isn't a hobby; it's an integral part of their scholarly identity. They may very well be the wave of the future.

[...]

Academic blogs offer the kind of intellectual excitement and engagement that attracted many scholars to the academic life in the first place, but which often get lost in the hustle to secure positions, grants, and disciplinary recognition. Properly considered, the blogosphere represents the closest equivalent to the Republic of Letters that we have today. Academic blogs, like their 18th-century equivalent, are rife with feuds, displays of spleen, crotchets, fads, and nonsenses. As in the blogosphere more generally, there is a lot of dross. However, academic blogs also provide a carnival of ideas, a lively and exciting interchange of argument and debate that makes many scholarly conversations seem drab and desiccated in comparison. Over the next 10 years, blogs and bloglike forms of exchange are likely to transform how we think of ourselves as scholars. While blogging won't replace academic publishing, it builds a space for serious conversation around and between the more considered articles and monographs that we write.--Henry Farrell --The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas (Chronicle)

A welcome antidote to the Chronicle's recent Tribble twaddle.