Academia: June 2008 Archive Page

I'm not a big fan of SHU's content-management system, Jenzabar, but because the service was recently overhauled and upgraded, I thought I'd give it another chance.

How frustrating -- the site breaks the "go back" button.  Every time you try to go back, it dumps you into a general screen, and of course then you can't "go back" to where you were before.



If the site has to break the go back button, wouldn't it be kinder to completely block the action, so at the very least you stay where you are (a minor disappointment) rather than dumping you back into the main menu (a significant usability hit).

Inside Higher Ed goes to hell.

Job Listing #666. University of Hell at Seventh Circle. Visiting Assistant Professor, two years (with possibility of converting to tenure-track position at culmination of two-year appointment). Beginning September 2009. Teaching load of forty-three courses per semester, with no more than thirty-nine preparations (i.e. instructor will teach more than one section of some courses). No official committee duties, but will be expected to contribute occasionally to departmental administrative work. Competitive salary, given local economy. Candidate must exhibit evidence of strong potential for both research and teaching, and significant flexibility in his/her expectations. For further information, repeat the name "Mizrakreth, Chair of Hiring Committee" three times.

Raymond stroked his chin thoughtfully. After a minute he began chanting "Mizrakreth..." After all, it couldn't hurt just to get a bit more information.

A good overview of the issues relating to using Wikis in the classroom. From the NCTE Inbox Blog:

The benefits for collaborative writing should be obvious. Wikis allow multiple authors to edit a text easily. While the video doesn't discuss it, wikis include tracking information so anyone can look at who makes changes to the texts and compare the different versions at different points in its creation. Try to do that with a collaborative paper written in Word.

From a University of Minnestoa press release:

"What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today," said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university's College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study. "Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout. They're also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology. The Web sites offer tremendous educational potential."

Greenhow said that the study's results, while proving that social networking sites offer more than just social fulfillment or professional networking, also have implications for educators, who now have a vast opportunity to support what students are learning on the Web sites.

"Now that we know what skills students are learning and what experiences they're being exposed to, we can help foster and extend those skills," said Greenhow. "As educators, we always want to know where our students are coming from and what they're interested in so we can build on that in our teaching. By understanding how students may be positively using these networking technologies in their daily lives and where the as yet unrecognized educational opportunities are, we can help make schools even more relevant, connected and meaningful to kids."

Interestingly, researchers found that very few students in the study were actually aware of the academic and professional networking opportunities that the Web sites provide. Making this opportunity more known to students, Greenhow said, is just one way that educators can work with students and their experiences on social networking sites.

Inside Higher Ed:

Student newspaper advisers are something of an endangered species these days. They often get caught in the middle when administrators and student journalists clash over content, and in more than a few cases on college campuses in recent years, advisers -- sometimes faculty members with tenure or tenurelike protections, but often vulnerable staff members -- have found themselves losing their jobs. (High school newspaper advisers are even more vulnerable.)

"All you have to do is look around the country to see how many conflicts there are," said Mark Goodman, the Knight Chair of Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University and former executive director of the Student Press Law Center. "This has really gained steam."

It was with several recent such controversies in mind, and numerous instances of censorship at high schools in California, that the state's Legislature overwhelmingly approved legislation this month that would prohibit a college or school district from firing, suspending or otherwise retaliating against an employee for acting to protect a student's free speech. Last week, with the measure, SB 1370, sailing for passage and a trip to the governor's office for Arnold Schwarzenegger's hoped-for signature, the University of California quietly revealed its opposition to the bill.

In a letter to State Sen. Leland Yee, the legislation's sponsor, a lobbyist for the university system "respectfully" warned Yee that the university did not expect to abide by the requirement if it was enacted.

Although the First Amendment doesn't apply to Seton Hill because we are a private institution, I'm happy to work under an administration that upholds the principle of academic freedom.

Chair: Ken Anderson (University of Colorado at Boulder, USA)
Enhancing Access to Open Corpus Educational Content: Learning in the Wild (Long Paper)
Seamus Lawless, Lucy Hederman and Vincent Wade

Lack of relevant and accessible digital content hampers the implementation of e-learning. As these eLearning tools begin to try to offer personalization, the tools require access to an increasing amount and variety of content. eLearning educators are compelled to generate their own content, which can be an excessive workload.

Trends --content creation moving from the linear authoring of publication to the aggregation of existing; rise of the prosumers, who produce an consume content in increasing volumes.

WWW already holds content useful for incorporation in eLearning options, but the issues of content discovery, repurposing, mean that even WWW content isn't an easy solution.

Address the reliance of eLearning systems on bespoke proprietary content. Open content availability reduces the need for educators to reinvent the wheel every time they create a course. Addresses the information overload in eLearning experiences. Help students identify what is actually relevant ot them in their specific educational context.

Open Corpus Content Service -- OCCS -- WWW and selected digital content repositories. Discovery and harvesting of content -- open-source web crawler, JTCL and Rainbow classification.  Indexing with NutchWAX. Visualization -- didn't catch the acronym.

Train the Rainbow text classifier - this dictates what gets included in the cache of content.

[My humanities-trained mind is crying out for examples! I'm putting a lot of conceptual information in temporary storage caches, but the buffer is running out of room.  The speaker is actually very good -- but I'm waiting for the payoff that I'm conditioned to expect a humanities presenter would have started to deliver by now. I'm learning just how important the little chart with inputs and outputs is as a convention in scholarly presentations in this genre. We're spending a lot of time on the left-most edge of a rich flowchart that I gather will start moving across the page... we're still on "Training." there we go, now we've got the "Crawling" section. Steve sitting next to me is looking up terms the speaker is using... I'm net yet sure I need to put that level of new information in my neural net until I've seen what it all adds up to.]

Okay -- now we're being walked through an example crawl --

The educator prepares the crawl by identifying the subject area, with seed file generation and training set generation Ran for almost 2 days, found 370,000 + URLs, passed some 67,000 on for further processing, judged 36,000 at 90%.  Had human subject matter experts evaluate the returned content to find out how well the computer's predictions mathed the human expert decisions.

[Drat... at this point the Seamus says he's not going into heavy detail -- yet this is exactly content I was waiting for.  This is the material I'd like to have seen so that I understand what the system is designed to do, but it's what he rushed through because he judged it as less important.  Steve just shut his laptop. Coincidence?]

U-CREATe interface integrates a link to OCCS.

[Okay.. I think I've finally made the phase shift.  I came to this talk expecting to read a book. Instead, I got a very meticulous description of new tools for constructing books. Or, to pick a different metaphor, I came expecting to watch a dance, and I got an detailed analysis of how muscles work on the cellular level.  Now we're getting usability results -- the convention of the scienctific research paper is to deliver the conclusion last, but humanities papers start with the thesis (the answer to the research question).]

Social Web Applications in the City: A Lightweight Infrastructure for Urban Computing (Short Paper)
Frank Allan Hansen and Kaj Grønbæk

Allan says his work focuses on linking physical places. How to do digital physical linking using 3D barcodes. Present programs built with this infrastructure.

Background -- trying to use ubiquitous hypermedia to support urban web applications -- want to let users brows and create and share information while they are mobile in an urban environment. Not just browsing, but browsing information related to the urban environment where they are.

Anchor information in the physical world; identify aspects of the physical world that we can use to anchor our links. GPS offers one sensor useful for anchoring links.

Ubiquitous link anchors: ID Mapping. Not a static model; we specify an anchor value and the system finds resources that match that anchor value. The 2D barcodes [a pattern of squares, not bars -- that name 2D barcode seems oxymoronic -- new to me, but an established term.] provide a visual anchor for the link. A URL can be converted in to the 2D barcode, scanned by a cell phone, and used to deliver a resource.

Examples... TagBlogger -- 2007 Arhaus festival, lets users access official location-sensitive information; create and share digital overlays. Had to develop the software and deploy 2D codes in the city. Tags on official festival posters; also tags along a route [pedestrian, I presume].

[I wonder... did the barcodes get vandalized? At any rate, sounds like an interesting project, and far more workable than the old CueCat debacle, which would have required people to carry a specialized device around and tether it to a computer.]

A State of the Art Survey of Soft Skill Simulation Authoring Tools (Short Paper)
Conor Gaffney, Declan Dagger and Vincent Wade

Conor presents. There are physical simulations (you learn about the physical object); procedural simulations (flying an airplane); soft skills (take place in a social context, based on interpersonal relationships).  Sales, interviewing, leadership.

Typically you get a short clip of the person being simulated, the learner takes on a role within the simulation, and learns by doing.

The simulations are cost-effective, convenient if online, save, educationally effective.

Demo [Thank you for giving the example this early!]

Teaching psychiatric medical students how to deal with patients (this is PARRY for the 21stC). Looks like the same mechanism for adaptive tree fiction.

Difficulty with soft-skill simulations -- difficult to compose. Not only the complexity of the dialog, it also has to be educationally sound simulation.  [I wonder if anyone in our family therapy program would be interested in a tool like this.. .obviously I'm interested in the ability to create a model interview for journalists, but the mechanisms will likely be similar to what a family therapist might face.]

VISIOn Composition Tool; Experience Builder; Captivate 3.

• VISIOn sems to be an outliner
• Experince Builder is accessible through a web browser.
• Captivate 3 most typical type of composition tool out there... approach is more towars hard skills, limited soft skill applications. No back links -- artifact of the procedural hard-skill origins of the tool.
  

Conor then went through each option and evaluated each on the key requirements... the lack of backlinks makes me completely reject Captivate 3 for my own interests, and to be honest I think I'd feel more comfortable working out the structure in Inform 7.

Will present more about the ActSIM composition tool.

Mark B - the sentimental novel is intended to teach us how to act and behave in certain situations. How does an environment devoted to writing hypertext differ from an environemnt designed to teach soft skills?

Brent Batson (via):

Academics have long talked of the "academic conversation." Now, Web 2.0 has called our bluff. We live in the midst of a non-stop world conversation. But, are conversational skills (in writing) important and, if so, how do we teach them?

Inside Higher Ed:

Understandably, professors frustrated with large class sizes turn to technology such as clickers in an attempt to engage students. Often, the technology become the handmaiden of an administration bent on sustaining huge classes where students need opera glasses to see the instructor. No wonder students are bored; answer their cell phones and text messages to friends. Of course, there is nothing untoward about a professor wanting to engage students, about wanting to maintain their attention and elicit their responses. Sadly, today's educational zeitgeist insists that to reach the 21st century learner professors must use a blend of technology, education and entertainment. There is an assumption that today's student is long on technology skills, but short on attentional abilities. To engage students we must entertain them.

I don't attend many science/technology conferences, so the genre of the one-minute poster presentations is brand new to me.  The genre is akin to the haiku or flash fiction -- it's a research paper bared down to the bones.  Flash scholarship?  60-second-scholarship?

About 20 people pre-loaded their slides onto the conference room computer, then lined up in the aisle. Each was given one minute to present their ideas. The host had an ooga-ooga horn that he squeezed when the one minute was up.

It's painful to watch someone cut off in mid-sentence, but it's a fascinating genre. Plus, this one-minute pitch is designed to get the conference attendees to stop by the presenter's table later on.  It's an efficient way to for conference attendees to sample all the posters, and it's a good chance for the presenters to encapsulate why their work is worth a closer look.

Okay, now that I've processed what I think about the genre, I'm ready to shift my focus to the content of the talks.

Paper 15 and 16, on on improving/expanding browser functionality were the most relevant to my interests so far. Paper 18 explicitly mentions blogs, so naturally I'm interested.  Paper 19 "Social WebEx Usage" is an educational tool that interests me; from the quotes from students it seems to be teaching Java, which is not an application I'd need.

Students whose posters are rated the best will give 10-minute talks tomorrow, and the winners of that will go on to the next phase.

Inside Higher Ed raises an interesting question. If a student paper learns that sensitive information in an unprotected computer file, and then writes a story about it, how should the administration react after learning the paper still has a copy of that protected information? Here's what happened at Western Oregon University:

In a letter sent to university officials late last week, the College Media Advisers Board of Directors condemned the university's response to a student newspaper article published in September. The story revealed that sensitive information about student applicants, including their Social Security numbers and grade point averages, had been left unprotected from public view.

In response to the article, university officials rifled through the newsroom in search of a copy of the computer file containing the sensitive student information. The paper's adviser also lost her job amid the furor, and a student was disciplined for copying the file and violating university policies designed to protect private information.

The board, which represents student newspaper advisers, denounced the university's "lack of understanding of basic journalism principles and ethics." But in detailing its dissatisfaction with the university's actions, the board also offered help.

The university punished the student reporter for making a copy of the file that the university was responsible for protecting, which sounds like shooting the messenger. Was it necessary to copy the entire file in order to write the story?  Hm... I might have taken a few screenshots -- just enough to back up the story. The interim adviser blames the fired adviser:

"Her firing was entirely justified," said Yehnert, an English professor. "She was a terrible media adviser all the way around."

Want to quote 5-25 words from an AP story? That'll be $12.50.  ($7.50 for non-profit or educational use.)  The AP has published a form that details the cost of an "Excerpt for Web Use" license.

The AP has a right to discourage people from posting the full content of articles online, just as you or I retain the copyright to our own writing (unless we explicitly give those rights away).  But to charge money even for brief quotations is to reject the Section 107 of the Copyright Act -- known as the "Fair Use Exception." 

§ 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Note that copying an entire book (or song, or movie) in order to avoid purchasing it is not "fair use."  Showing a clip from a movie in class, or posting quotations from a novel to back up a review or literary research paper, are all covered by "fair use."

Access to the words of public officials, as reported from various news sources, is an important part of the democratic process.  A candidate being interviewed on ABC should be able to quote from what an opponent said on NBC, and someone who calls in on a CBS show should be able to quote from what a guest said on CNN. The Fair Use Exception recognizes that anyone engaging in "criticism" or "comment" should have the same the ability to quote brief passages from published materials.

Chronicle

Kristin Roovers, a postdoctoral fellow at the Ottawa Health Research Institute who was found by U.S. investigators last year to have wrongfully doctored images published with her scientific research while at the University of Pennsylvania, was suspended last week pending an investigation into her work at the Canadian institution.

As long as those pesky neighborhood kids stay off of Joseph Epstein's lawn, the rest of us can read his Weekly Standard essay about the generation gap in education. I went to a Catholic high school, where I figured out that the whole point of requiring uniforms and "Yes, Sister... No, Sister" was to give the kids something concrete but harmless on which to focus their rebellious energy.  I could come to school in mismatched socks and a garish tie, and nowhere in the student manual did it say I was doing anything illegal.

I always pictured the sisters snickering behind their office doors. "Young Jerz thinks he's hot stuff because he managed to get ahold of a stack of signed hall passes." (I used them to get out of class so that I could work on the sets for the theater productions, but of course the teachers wouldn't have let me out of class if they thought I would cause trouble or fall behind.)

Epstein makes a good point about the role of feelings in literary analysis. I always cringe when a student dismisses a text because "It didn't hold my interest."  (Bad book! How dare you challenge my world view or create an occasion to reflect on something outside my personal interests?)  Since Seton Hill University markets itself as a caring place, and I chose to work at an institution that would reward me for expressing a personal interest in my students, Epstein would probably see me as part of the problem that he's identifying here.

What do you think... does he go too far? Am I defending the coddled millennials because I identify more with them than I do with Epstein's generation?

The most impressive students I had over my 30 years of university teaching were those I encountered when I first began, in the early 1970s, who almost all turned out to have been put through Catholic schools, during a time when priests and nuns still taught and Catholic education hadn't become indistinguishable from secular education. Many of these kids resented what they felt was the excessive constraint, with an element of fear added, of their education. Most failed to realize that it was this very constraint--and maybe a touch of the fear, too--that forced them to learn Latin, to acquire and understand grammar, to pick up the rudiments of arguing well, that had made them as smart as they were.

So often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one's feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to--but did not--write: "D-, Too much love in the home." I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement.

From Inside Higher Ed, an article about a Facebook app designed for college recruiters:

The solution they came up with essentially offers a series of "challenges" to students interested in SUNY Plattsburgh. Each challenge requires them to upload video or photographic evidence that they fulfilled their mission, so to speak -- anything from attending a sporting event on campus, visiting Lake Champlain or wearing Plattsburgh gear in nearby Burlington, Vt. The idea is to get prospective students excited about Plattsburgh traditions long before they even think about applying -- say, ages 14 or 15 -- and to pass on the application to friends who also might be interested.