Education: May 2007 Archive Page

Playing a game may teach the player that he can optimize the game only in certain ways (or that the game is impossible to win, like Global Thermonuclear War); but it's open to question whether the optimal game strategy corresponds to an optimal real-life strategy.

As we see more of this kind of thing (and I think we will), we as consumers of educational and editorial games, are going to need to stay alert and savvy, conscious of the way a game's rules can look like they emulate real life constraints without actually doing so. A case in point is the way Electrocity lets me participate in a fuel market without experiencing any repercussions at all from the fossil fuel burning by the people in the next town over. Would it be better all around if I just kept it in the ground? Maybe, maybe not -- but within the game there's no incentive to think about that. --Emily Short --Educational and Editorial Games (Emily Short's Interactive Fiction)

God forbid we manage to think about the phone as a learning device. I guarantee you that none of the sponsors of the bill have ever typed "define insipid" (or any other word, for that matter) into a text message on their phone and sent it to 46645? (Try it sometime.) I know I mention this a lot in my presentations, but I'm wondering why cell phones aren't a part of my kids' curriculum between now and the time they graduate from high school. I'm wondering why teachers aren't picking up their cell phones and finding answers to the questions they're asking, modeling the technology for their students. Why they aren't talking about ethical and effective use instead of making sure kids check them at the door. --Will Richardson --It Takes a Vision  (weblogg-ed)

A well-phrased response to Pennsylvania House Bill 1245 P.N. 1570 bill that would prohibit electronic devices from schools:

The possession by students of telephone paging devices, commonly referred to as beepers, cellular telephones and portable electronic devices that record or play audio or video material shall be prohibited on school grounds, at school sponsored activities and on buses or other vehicles provided by the school district.

Yes, it's annoying when students use their cell phones instead of pay attention during class. Now, this bill applies to children, not college students, so I have the luxury of saying that when one of my students wishes to pay attention to a gadget instead of class, I try to think of that as the student's way of sending me a message. That message may be "This part of class has become boring... move on to something else," or it may be "No matter what you do today, I am more interested in my gadget than in learning." Either way, it's information that I can use.

I don't really get that annoyed when a student's phone starts vibrating, though it is kind of ironic when a phone shifts from vibrate to some silly tune because the student has momentarily left the phone at his or her desk in order to give a formal report. I never have to say anything in such cases, because the student is usually embarrassed enough.

Even in the paper-and-pencil classroom, instructional technology has the potential to be abused. Once during a class discussion, a student kept tearing pages out of a notebook and crumpling them up quite dramatically. At first, it seemed as if the student was responding negatively to a new turn in the discussion -- as if to say, "The notes I took in the past few minutes aren't worth anything of that's where you're going with this discussion," and I could see the behavior was distracting the other students. But as this continued, I could tell the student wasn't even listening to the discussion -- I was witnessing a wild brainstorming session, in which the student was trying to nail down a thesis.

Possessing and using the paper wasn't the problem -- there are times when the ideas are flowing and you've just got to work them out. Yet the student was not aware of the effect the noisy crumpling was having on the class discussion. The solution is not to ban paper simply because it can be disruptive if a student noisily crumples it during a classroom. The solution is instead to create a supportive culture where students think of each other as resources, not cogs in the "listen/take notes/memorize/spit back" educational machine. And once again, because I teach students who choose to be in the classroom, I realize that school teachers have to spend a lot more energy on maintaining discipline, since they are expected to teach all students, not just the ones who want to be there.

A couple years ago, my dean asked me in passing if I thought the new media journalism students should be required to have laptops. I said no, and I still feel that way. I don't think all liberal arts students NEED laptops. A few students who rely exclusively on computer labs do complain about the amount of time they have to spend online for my classes, and I have adjusted the way I teach with blogs in order to make it possible for a student to log in once, rather than follow a thread as it develops. SHU is considering a program in which students sign up for PDAs; that would really open up the classroom to some new possibilities.

Yes, I would like to teach students the kind of sustained, penetrating critical thinking skills that are necessary to comprehend and produce traditional vehicles of knowledge and inquiry, such as the lecture and the essay. But gadget-loving teens come into the classroom with a huge set of experiences and strengths that the traditional classroom does not tap.

Tools for Teaching Basic Programming Concepts

Alice and Scratch. Filing for future reference.

We should be jumping for joy every time a student plagiarizes, because that means our existence as teachers of composition is validated, as we have something to teach them - citation, research, the need for critical thinking. We should get down on our knees and thank the Internet for making it easier to plagiarize, because it means we will be employed for the foreseeable future, stemming the metaphorical digital tide. We should be eternally glad that plagiarism is seen as a problem that needs fixing, because if all incoming students cited their sources fairly and accurately and did clever research out of the box, then there wouldn't be much for us to do. We should leap to the opportunity to teach here. Plagiarism is a blessing, not a curse. --Mike Duncan --Objections to Turnitin (Bad Rhetoric)

Plagiarism as the felix culpa of rhetcomp. I'm not very comfortable with the idea, but it did make me think.

I do use the service... recently I noticed a suspicious paragraph, and when I used turnitin.com to print out the documentation in support of the wrist-slapping I was planning to implement, I found four or five other uncited paragraphs from the same source -- something I wouldn't have caught otherwise.

I tell myself that this student has learned an important lesson, and that it's a good thing I caught this problem early, on an assignment that wasn't worth 1/3 of the course grade.

This activity is set in a research group that is developing an antivenom for spider bites. In the opening scene, Nelson Pogline, a talented graduate student, dies unexpectedly at a university reception. As a detective, you must use chemistry concepts to determine if this was murder and if so, solve the case. You can interview suspects using Quicktime movies, investigate the crime scene for clues with Quicktime Virtual Reality images, and analyze the evidence from the crime lab. --Mixed Reception (chemcollective.org)

Haven't checked this one out yet.

He said, "Mr. Moio, I have something that I would like you to have." Without hesitating, he handed me an old, leather-bound book with an embossed title reading, "English Poems." I thanked the student and opened the front cover to discover that the book was published in 1902. Explaining to my student that the book was more than 100 years old, I thanked him again and told him that I could never take such a valuable possession away from him.

"No, really, it was my grandmother's," he said, hands in the air in protest of my attempt to return the volume, "I told her how much you like poetry and she gave it to me and told me that she wanted you to have it to thank you for helping me in Language Arts." --David Moio --A Nice Little Story to Cap off EL312 (DavidMoio)

A wonderful teaching anecdote, from a student of mine who is about my age (with a bigger family to support).

It's stories like this that remind us why we love to teach.

The VSTF process converts display of text such as this first sentence from the U.S. Declaration of Independence

into this:

--Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting: A New Method to Enhance Online Reading (Reading Online)

Fascinating. The indented version really does seem a lot easier to read, perhaps chiefly because the first word in each line is often a preposition or other small word that one can usually guess from the context. Such words are so common that they are easily recognized, even when the eye is focusing on the next word in the line. So there is less back-tracking of the eyes.

The article is packed with statistics that show that students comprehend better when they learn texts formatted in this manner.

The researchers are selling an online service that reformats text on the fly, so naturally the research is going to emphasize the benefits of such a service, so keep that in mind.

The economics of book printing dictate that books are less expensive (and therefore accessible to more people) if the print fills up as much of the page as possible. But there is no such restriction on electronic text. As monitor screens get wider and wider every year, I have often wondered what to do with all that blank space on either side of the legible columns of text. This looks like a useful option.

Over the summer, I'm planning to create some new online handouts for my journalism class, so I'm blogging this for future reference.

A Chinese student was transferred from his high school to an "alternative education center" (?) after his parents found he had designed a Counterstrike mod with maps based on his school. Two parents learned of the map he made from their kids, and they informed his parents, who in turn reported him to the Fort Bend Independent School District administrators. --Fort Bend school trustees put off video game appeal (Houston Chronicle)

It's important to note that it wasn't just the fact that the student designed a game map that depicted the school, but that the investigation turned up swords. Further, the parents reported their own son and gave the police permission to search his room. Police found nothing worthy of a criminal charge, but without any evidence that this young man had any unusual (ore even typical) anti-social tendencies, I hope all parties can resolve this quickly.

The fact that this kid happens to be Asian wouldn't have anything at all to do with it, would it?

It does look like some members of the school board feel the body has overreacted. "He did it [designed the game level] at his house. Never took anything to school. Never wrote an ugly letter, never said anything strange to a student or a teacher, nothing," according to one board member. Other members stayed away from the meeting where the student was trying to get them to appeal the decision, so it seems that overreaction will stand for now.

One thing that I feel very strongly about since I began my post-secondary literary studies, is that high school teachers tend to teach the students all sorts of things that need to be un-taught when they get to college. It drives me crazy! Shouldn't we be teaching students skills they can build on when they get to college, not skills and habits they have to break in order to be successful in post-secondary education!?! So, one of my goals when I teach is not to teach my students things that they need to be un-taught later. That might mean expecting more out of my students than the average high school English teacher, but I think in the end it will benefit them greatly. --Lorin Schumacher --Lit Crit's Usefulness in Pedagogy (LorinSchumacher)

Lorin is a sophomore English and education student at Seton Hill. As part of a student Tiffany Brattina's blogging carnival on education, Lorin blogged this thoughtful essay.

The picture shows Stacy Snyder of Strasburg wearing a pirate hat while drinking from a plastic "Mr. Goodbar" cup. The photograph taken during a 2005 Halloween party was posted on Snyder's MySpace Web page with the caption "Drunken Pirate."

"The day before graduation, the college confronted me about the picture," Snyder said Thursday. "I was told I wouldn't be receiving my education degree or teaching certificate because the photo was 'unprofessional.' " --Brett Lovelace --Web photo haunts graduate (Lancaster Online)

The kicker? Snyder is 27 years old.

The denial of degree happened last year; the news hook in this story is that the former student has now filed a lawsuit.

Certainly she showed poor judgment by putting that photo on her profile. Since my only alcohol consumption is about one glass of wine per year, my own attitudes about drunken photos are biased.

Snyder surely learned in her education classes why parents hold the teachers of their children to such high ethical standards. It looks like the school system where Snyder was doing her student-teaching may have been involved. According to the lawsuit, "Conestoga Valley officials told the college their students wouldn't be allowed to perform student-teacher requirements there if Snyder was not punished."

For good reason, universities don't publish information about disciplining students; neither Millersville University nor a Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education would comment on this story. We don't know whether this were just the latest in a long string of unprofessional incidents, in which case it might have been the straw that broke the camel's back. If this were an isolated incident, then denying the education degree seems very harsh.