Education: July 2006 Archive Page

Capitalizing on youthful passion for video games, school leaders hope to keep more kids in school by offering the chance to conceive, design, build -- and sell -- their own video game.

"That's what they love," said David White, the school's chief academic officer. "That's the hook." --Scott Elliott --Reading, writing and video games (Dayton Daily News)

Sounds pretty good to me.

Although professors may hope to remove obstacles to success, innate personality and other environmental factors may influence learning more than what we are able to offer with the short number of hours we are in contact with students. Yet, there are some tactics that seem to encourage real engagement in undergraduate core classes: --Shari Wilson --Moving Past Survival (Inside Higher Ed)

So, why do you want to study literature, knowing what you now know?" I wondered if studying a century of cynicism had altered their motives in the slightest.

They were all considering graduate school, but their answers had little to do with what I knew they would need to write in their application essays. Sitting in a circle in the grass, backed by purple hydrangeas, they offered the following motives:

• Formative experiences with reading as a child: being read to by beloved parents and siblings, discovering the world of books and solitude at a young age.
• Feelings of alienation from one's peers in adolescence, turning to books as a form of escapism and as a search for sympathetic connection to other people in other places and times.
• A love for books themselves, and libraries, as sites of memory and comfort.
• A "geeky" attraction to intricate alternate worlds such as those created by Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and George Lucas.
• Contact with inspirational teachers who recognized and affirmed one's special gifts in reading and writing, often combined with negative experiences in other subjects like math and chemistry.
• A transference of spiritual longings -- perhaps cultivated in a strict religious upbringing -- toward more secular literary forms that inspired "transcendence."
• A fascination with history or science that is not grounded in a desire for rigorous data collection or strict interpretive methodologies.
• A desire for freedom and independence from authority figures; a love for the free play of ideas. English includes everything, and all approaches are welcome, they believe.
• A recognition of mortality combined with a desire to live fully, to have multiple lives through the mediation of literary works.
• A desire to express oneself through language and, in so doing, to make a bid for immortality.
• A love for the beauty of words and ideas, often expressed in a desire to read out loud and perform the text.
• An attraction to the cultural aura of being a creative artist, sometimes linked to aristocratic and bohemian notions of the good life.
• A desire for wisdom, an understanding of the big picture rather than the details that obsess specialists.

Those answers defied everything they had been taught in my theory seminar. Nevertheless, they were all, in different degrees, the answers I would have given as an undergraduate. --Thomas H. Benton --Goodbye, Mr. Keating (Chronicle)

An interesting personal essay, that begins as a reflection on Dead Poets Society, a film that I confess I've never seen.

I blog almost every one of Benton's Chronicle essays, though sometimes he lays it on a bit thick. Still, it's not so much the elegiac tone for his idyllic undergraduate experience that attracts me, but the intensity of his self-scrutiny: "You have to spend so many years conforming that, by the time freedom presents itself, you don't know why you became an English major in the first place. You might even have contempt for your seemingly naïve students, who represent the self that you had to repress in order to be a professional."

I remember the time at my previous job where I asked each student in a small, intensive upper-level seminar to prepare a demonstration of an unusual cybertext artifact. I asked one student if she was ready to demonstrate a particular text, and she said she was. After she spent two or three minutes fumbling with the computer to get it started, it became clear she didn't know what she was doing. This was the very first time she had even looked at the text, and she was supposed to carry a class discussion for the next twenty minutes. And she just didn't care. She didn't come to me for help outside of class, she didn't send me an e-mail asking for an extension, she didn't blurt out an apology. And I felt like the bad guy for asking her to sit down.

It's not the naïve students who trouble me -- though I confess I'm glad I don't teach creative writing courses, since I've seen plenty of talented but undisciplined beginning creative writers become paralyzed when they realize just how much time and effort goes into revising, polishing, and proofreading a creative work at the college level.

If students are naïve about their own talents, and if they've complacent and puffed up by the easy As they received in high school, they can burn out and become alienated (especially when, at the same time, they realize the competition is so stiff that they get cut from the team, they don't get called back after auditioning, they run for office and lose, and so forth). So here, the quote from Mr. McAllister seems worth reflecting on -- that asking students to apsire for greatness can be risky: "When they realize they're not all Rembrandts, Shakespeares, or Mozarts, they'll hate you for it."

But underlying that warning is the notion that Rembrandt, Shakespeare and Mozart had so much talent that they didn't have to work hard like the mediocre slobs whose work they outshone. That's getting it all backwards, of course. Of course education, class, the political machinations of patronage and sponsorship, and dumb luck all combine to affect an artist's career, but few people have achieved anything of value without working hard at it. Talent isn't a ticket to easy street. We waste those talents if we don't work extra hard in the very areas where we're primed to succeed.

The best students will learn, retain and understand the material they are taught in class no matter how it is presented. However, there are many students in the class who do not have the attention span to concentrate for the whole lesson, who get distracted or do not do the required reading because they are simply not interested. It is these students who benefit from the circus approach to teaching. --Marc Zimmer --Life in the Circus (Inside Higher Ed)

This observation of Zimmer's isn't presented as a complaint; instead, he sees the situation as an audience awareness issue, and analyzes the various ways that professors can meet the students' desire for inspiration and spectacle.

Looking at the last two semesters taught by the author before the text adventure game and the most recent two semesters, every measure of student satisfaction is better. The only measure that might be troubling is perceived student workload.

This project is very large. Even with high-level architectural design and many useful snippets of code presented in class lectures, students work very hard in this course. The amount of work and new material requires a considerable time commitment from the instructor for office hours and other outside-class contact time. It also requires the selection of a good teaching assistant to provide additional time for questions to be answered. We are examining using a Wiki or similar shared editing space to assist students in asking, answering, and finding previous answers of questions; the efficacy of such a system is pure speculation at this point.

The integration of writing, oral presentation, program design, and coding makes this course a fantastic introduction to software engineering. This helps to overcome students? tendency to compartmentalize, thinking writing is for English class, coding is for computer science, and never the twain shall meet. --Brian C. Ladd --The Curse of Monkey Island: Holding the Attention of Students Weaned on Computer Games (Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges)

Fascinating article on a computer science course that uses a text-adventure project as a way of meeting liberal arts curriculum demands.

Nowadays, when I sit down to read a book it is so hard to like it. I have forced myself to stare at a page for as long as it takes before I could grasp what I was reading. My attention span for slow paced readings and a teacher standing at the front of the room lecturing is lessening by the minute and I am determined to get it back.

I love technology and what it has done in my lifetime but I have suffered the consequences of constant stimulation. (Whenever I do Homework, the TV is on, my cell phones going off; I'm looking up movie times and the radio's blasting.)

Back then, my mom says she was happy and proud to put herself through college..."not everyone was as privileged as I was," she said...and receive such a reputable degree...I hope I feel that same way when I end this chapter of my life and in the meantime I will respect my professors as if they were doing me favor and spread the word. --Juli --College Etiquette (from a college student's perspective) (Juli's Views)

Even if Juli hadn't ended with a Valentine to the teaching profession, I'd have been very interested in the content of this essay. I've been thinking a lot about attention spans lately.

Both my children are lively and energetic, which means it's hard for them to sit still. All through the month of June, I've been going to the office just one or two days a week, and the rest of the time I've been doing the family thing.

Peter is well into that magical age of childhood when he finds almost endless amusement in a diverse range of activities such as burping, farting, and making up songs (about burping and farting). While I used to worry about his short attention span, now I find he gets fixated on something. ("Can I have a root beer now? I really want a root beer. Daddy, I really want a root beer. Can I ask mommy for a root beer? Did you forget about my root beer? Okay, while I wait, I'll pretend I'm drinking a root beer.")

He has picked up my interest in "god games" (like Sim City, Civilization, and lately, Black and White), and will sit for hours with a book on animals, chess, or robotics (he's eight, by the way). He's also becoming quite an expert on his scooter. He is very quick to lecture his sister when she's not being cooperative, and that can be a problem (since we have to keep reminding him that the best way he can help Carolyn learn to behave properly is to behave properly himself, so that she has a good example to follow).

For the last few days, I've been spending time playing board games and card games with my four-year-old, in part in order to increase her attention span.

She can't quite sit through a full game of The Magnificent Race, but that's okay, because Peter and I just alternate taking her turn for her when she has to wander off to do other things. But a hand of go fish or concentration is much more her speed. (I'm also teaching my daughter to read, which is a pleasure. I've been spending about a half hour a day with her, usually in two chunks. It's a challenge to get her to sit still, it's great to see her progress, and my wife looks on me with love whenever she sees me working so diligently with Carolyn.)

We were all sitting on front of the TV, ready to watch the space shuttle launch. Leigh had space books spread out in the living room, and we had freeze-dried ice cream ready for an afternoon snack. After Peter read her a book about space travel, Carolyn announced, "I don't want to be grow up to be a painter any more. I want to be -- an astronaut painter!" Or maybe she meant "astronaut-painter."

At any rate, we have been working hard to give them experiences that are richly linked, so that instead of flitting from subject to subject, they develop the ability to make connections that are both broad and deep.

Last week, I was participating in a faculty training session, and I was really interested in the material being covered, so I opened up a blank word processor page, and started typing notes. The facilitator, hearing the typing keys, politely asked for "us all" (meaning me) to pay attention. I switched to my PDA, where I tapped away more frantically in order to keep up. I'll keep this in mind the next time I presume that a student who is clicking keys or pushing a button is not paying attention.

Nevertheless, my favorite classroom at Seton Hill (Admin 405) has about 25 computers around the outside of the room, and tables in the middle. That means there's a physical break between lecture/discussion and online work.