Recently in the Academia Category

At the 2009 Educause Conference, Inside HIgher Ed reports on The Cloud.

Woo, who took the anti-cloud position, said that just because higher education is moving en masse toward outsourcing services such as e-mail and data management to external providers does not necessarily mean it is moving in the right direction.

"I'm not sure why every conversation about cloud computing always has to do with 'When?' " Woo said. "Why aren't we asking, 'Why?' "

She cited recent Gmail outages and an anecdote from an organization she had advised who had said a cloud storage provider lost its data. "There are security risks, there are privacy risks -- where is that student data being stored? Where is that research data being stored? .... How is the private sector going to feel when when we can't guarantee that our research data our faculty are generating for them is safe?"

Dieckmann laid out the pro side first from an economic perspective, noting that economy has become a watchword as many IT departments seek to maintain a high level of service even as their budgets are pared down.

The Kindle e-book reader frees academics from having to carry around a huge collection of chunks of matter, but flipping from main text to footnotes is awkward, and the highlighting tool doesn't replace the bracketing, underlining, and commenting that we do between the lines.

In a few days, I expect to be the owner of a new Kindle DX (the full-page reader, designed for magazines and full-page PDF readings). I found the Kindle most useful when I was reading for pleasure.

I have to admit I am scared silly by the idea of a generation of students so alienated from material they are supposed to be immersed in that they rent digital textbooks that they do not intend to keep, cannot dog ear and underline, and otherwise feel totally alienated from. Even the current trend of students not underlining in books so as to preserve their resale value strikes me as appalling. Taking ownership of your education -- and indeed, just learning how to read closely -- means making your books part of your physical environment. In an era when you thought criminally overpriced textbooks full of uselessly pretty pictures and pre-chewed content was the absolute nadir of education, the Campus Full Of Kindles demonstrates we still have lower to sink. If, that is, the Kindles alienate students from their libraries rather than empowering them to immerse themselves in them. --Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed

I hear students tell me that in some disciplines, individual textbooks cost $200. I don't think it's the Kindle that's done the alienating.

Update: MIke Arnzen invokes the Kindle in a good post on teaching creative writing in the digital age. His reflections parallel many of my own, as I contemplate my role as a teacher of journalism.

http://www.60secondrecap.com/resource/

How to Write a Paper

• 1: Get Psyched
• 2: The Thesis Statement
• 3: Organization
• 4: Proving you know what you're talking about
• 5: Your teacher is not a mind-reader
• 6: In Conclusion
• 7: Rah-rah-rah, etc.

Will I miss Geocities? No, not really. In 1998 or possibly 1999, I was teaching web authorship as part of a freshman composition class, and this page from a student project made me keep the "make a Geocities home page" and "make a creative hypertext" project around, even though every semester, a certain chunk of students complained about it. The plug has been pulled on Geocities, but I'm preserving a chunk of what it meant to me, as a teacher.

Miraculously, I, [Name], am able to create my own web pages.  The unthinkable is possible.  My ignorance about the computer world is coming to an end.  I am a student at the University of Eau Claire and I'm creating several web pages for English 110.  Come and check out my first web page at meet the family.  This link briefly summarizes a few childhood memories, personality traits, and individual hobbies. 

At the University of Eau Claire's home-page, you find information on UWEC's registration process, available classes, student services, job opportunities, blugold system, International exchange, and much more.  Search the UWEC home page to get a look at what the college has to offer.   

My English Professor, Dr. Jerz, and some of his students have created several web pages for faculty members and students to benefit from.  The Online Reading Room will guide you to helpful information on how to create a web page, how to write effective e-mails, top 5 tips for note taking, and more.    

If you like to play amusing, addicting computer games, try playing Eliza.  You make conversation with Eliza who listens and talks back.  She asks a lot of questions about your problems and sometimes does not make sense. 

English 110 with Dr.Jerz is not like the other English 110 classes.  His course page is the student's syllabus explaining the guidelines to assigned papers and projects.  Helpful examples of problems students run into when writing papers and creating web pages are also found at this site.  

My essay on how the Internet has affected my education. The challenges that I came across at college with computers were frustrating, but later greatly appreciated.  Computer skills are critical for college classes and in the end the frustration turns into gratitude.  

Read Martha's essay  one her web page about how the Internet has affected her education. She used the Internet in high school for fun and for note taking.  In college she now uses her computer skills for academic purposes.  Even though Martha uses the computer daily, she still feels much has to be learned.

 Danielle's essay is about her experience with the Internet.  She had some computer experience in her high school anatomy class looking at a fetal pig, but she came familiar with e-mail in college.  Now Dr. Jerz is challenging her and every student in English 110 to become less ignorant about the computer world.

For my creative hypertext, I wrote three essays from three different perspectives.  I wrote one essay from my dad's point of view, one from my point of view, and one from my point of view if I would still be living in Kansas today instead of living in Minnesota.  The three blurbs below give a brief summary of each essay.

Most students spent their spring break somewhere warm while I spent my break in Kansas visiting relatives.  A little conversation never hurt anyone even if it's farm talk.  With age comes an appreciation of understanding to not take history for granted.

Read from Dad's perspective of Kansas.  He tells how the vacation was through his eyes telling the highlights of the trip were seeing his sister, brother, and old friends.  Abilene recaptures old memories and by visiting he creates new.

Just imagine what life would be like if I would have remained living in Abilene.  Read the what if life where lived differently.   I go to college in Kansas, I am going to school to become a Vet (I hate animals), and I never had the chance to travel.  For my spring break, my brother and I take a trip to New York to visit my sister and trust me cowboy boots and hats don't fit in with the New Yorkers.

I don't use APA style, but this article about nine pages of corrections to the APA style manual caught my eye.

"It's egregious," said John Foubert, an associate professor of education at Oklahoma State University, who bought two copies of the book - one for his office and one for home - when it was released in July. "These are the standards for how we write our manuscripts and how our students write their papers .... The irony is so thick."

The corrections include four pages of "nonsignificant typographical errors" and five pages correcting errors in content and problems with sample papers in the book. The APA also released four corrected sample papers in their entireties. One correction is "Page 88 - Change last line under 'Exception' to read 'Spacing twice after punctuation marks at the end of a sentence aids readers of draft manuscripts.' " Another is "Page 64 - First paragraph, line 2, insert a comma after 'e.g.' " --Inside HIgher Ed

Course management systems (CMSs), used throughout colleges and universities for presenting online or technology-enhanced classes, are not pedagogically neutral shells for course content. They influence pedagogy by presenting default formats designed to guide the instructor toward creating a course in a certain way. This is particularly true of integrated systems (such as Blackboard/WebCT), but is also a factor in some of the newer, more constructivist systems (Moodle). Studies about CMSs tend to focus on their ease of use or how they are used by faculty: their application, for good or ill. Few discuss the ways in which they influence and guide pedagogy, and those that do only note their predisposition for supporting more instructivist methods. Current research also ignores the fact that many of the new wave of online teachers are Web novices entering the field without a deep understanding of online technology. A closer look at how course management systems work, combined with an understanding of how novices use technology, provides a clearer view of the manner in which a CMS may not only influence, but control, instructional approaches. --Lisa Lane, First Monday

I just got a phone call from the parent of a prospective student I spoke with on a campus visit over the summer.  The student has decided to come to Seton Hill, and the parent told me that the time I spent talking with the family over the summer was a major factor. (I'm sure the scholarship the student recently won had something to do with it, too.) 

Our admissions office works very hard, and I'm always happy when I hear that something I've done has made a difference.

Okay, I admit it, being known as the academic expert on a singe indie computer game from the 1970s is something like saying "I'm the handsomest one-eyed pirate on this particular ship, today," which might well be true, but doesn't exactly mean very much.

Still, I'm thrilled that I could be part of Jason Scott's forthcoming text adventure documentary.  I had a fever of 101 when he interviewed me a few years ago, and then a few months later he offered to fly me back to Mammoth Cave for a follow-up interview, but that semester I had missed three weeks of classes due to pneumonia, and I was barely on my feet again, and my systems were operating at about 40% capacity at that time, so I had to turn him down.

Anyway, it's great to see evidence that he's making progress on his movie.

Finishing off a first version of the Adventure portion of GET LAMP, I am reminded of some of the shortcomings of the documentary form - when there's a ton of information, an absolute pile of detail or aspects about a subject, you will be given a tantalizing amount of insight into a subject but crave more.

Or maybe you won't crave more. For some, the subject covered over a few minutes will be sufficient. But for some of us, a certain few, you want to find out every last thing. And not just find it out... find it out definitively, where observation and verification rule the day, and not best-guesses and what-is-saids polluting the landscape.

To that end, as regards the game Adventure and its roots in real caving, as well as exactly what parts the two authors played in the project, you will simply not do any better than Dennis G. Jerz' Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky. It is, very simply, the last word on the subject - I can't imagine anyone going further than this into the history and aspects of Adventure any of us might want an answer to. --Jason Scott

I'm looking for a current book that presents gaming theory at a level appropriate for a 200-level undergraduate course.  I have only scanned through the section of Tanja Sihvonen's work, Players Unleashed! Modding <i>The Sims</i> and the Culture of Gaming (PDF), that deals with Colossal Cave Adventure. I'm not too happy with what I found there, since it seems I disagree with a Wikipedia article. (See footnote 251.)

Yes, it is true that several of my sources claim a 1975-76 date, but the phrasing suggests that some of my sources might agree with the 1972 date.  In fact, except for people who were simply repeating what they had read about the creation of Colossal Cave Adventure, not a single one of the sources I interviewed specified a date before 1975, and the earliest digital evidence is dated 1977.  To put it another way, every single one of the sources who played Crowther's original game specified a date of 1975 or later.

Those "written sources, including the Wikipedia entry" that mention the 1972 date are wrong, as I explain in the article Sihvonen cites. (Why do I suddenly feel empathy for every B-movie mad scientist who shouts "Fools! I shall crush them all!"?)

I can, and do, regularly edit the Wikipedia entry to remove the factual errors, but what can I do to combat the errors that made it into print before I published what I found out about the timeline?

Of course, Sihvonen is right -- it is a fact that many sources have printed the 1972 date.  I listed several of these sources in the section of my article where I thoroughly debunk them.  And who am I to argue with ink on paper?  All I have on my side is thoroughly cross-checked oral testimony and e-mail messages from people who have first-hand knowledge of the events in question. How can that stand up against "many written sources"?  What was I thinking!

One day, perhaps I can spend months and years gathering primary information, carefully assemble it all in a coherent, insanely detailed package, get it peer reviewed by scholars who know what they are talking about, and then somehow, if fortune blesses my efforts, find a magic way that the full text of my findings could be available, for free, somewhere in an online digital network, so that I could direct interested readers to paragraphs 79-83 of a document located at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009.html.

Yes, I interact with students via e-mail and the Web. And computers can be great for teaching when it's difficult or impossible for students to get to a brick-and-mortar classroom. But for me, teaching involves f2f (there, you see, I've gone and used a computer term in a sentence). I want to listen to students talking to me, to one another, having a spontaneous conversation about the subject. It's fun. It's energizing. Online, I just don't feel that kind of electricity. It's probably just a personal preference.

But I do see some significant downsides to distance education. It's touted for all the wrong reasons. It's cheap: yes, perhaps, if you discount the price of the technology (it turns out that computers cost more than people, that computer techs cost more than entry-level instructors, and that software costs more, not less, than textbooks, and it must be constantly upgraded). --Dennis Barron

[F]our-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn't have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.

Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual--hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. "It sounds like a scam," Solvig thought--she'd run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. --Kevin Carey, Washington Monthly

In his Inside Higher Ed blog, Joshua Kim writes:

A transformative step that learning technologists can participate in proposing, pushing, guiding, leading, managing and maintaining would be providing a campus-wide blogging platform and institutional aggregation site. Here are some guidelines for what this could look like...

Here is the text of a comment I posted:

There is, of course, a value in creating a private online space for a specific class, but if we put our best stuff behind the Blackboard firewall, or if the content disappears into the Facebook or Twitter data sink, then we're missing the chance to use the web as a public resource.  Thanks for posting these guidelines. I like your thinking, Joshua, and I hope that more faculty and administraors will see the value of social networking technology.

In the fall of 2003, as a new hire at Seton Hill University (a small liberal arts college near Pittsburgh), I used MovableType to set up blogs.setonhill.edu, offering free, no-advertising blogs to students, faculty, and staff. 

The default template I provide is subtly branded, with a modest logo and link, but students can (and often do) choose a different design.  The fact that the blogs live under the setonhill.edu domain gives the student writers clout, and the frequency of posts and the pattern of cross-linking is interpreted favorably by Google (our aggregator has a respectable Google PageRank of 5.10).

We paid a one-time fee (about $300, I think) for a site license that permits 300 active blogs.  Each year, I've opted for an annual tech support package that has saved me hours of troubleshooting time, at a price that's about what we pay the web host.

Since blogs.setonhill.edu went online, nearly 600 users have created about 25,000 posts, attracting about 40,000 non-spam comments. I have often wished for the time to do the coding necessary to rank blogs by recent activity (in the last 24 hours, in the last week, in the last month, in the last year, and "all time"), but for now a list of recently updated blogs keeps the most active blogs visible.

Usually every semester, students get comments from the author of a textbook or academic article we've used in class.  Students posting their homework on The Scarlet Letter or the Associated Press Stylebook are likely to get some random search engine traffic.

A former admissions director blogged faithfully for some months before leaving for a different job, and the library, the student paper, our National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, some students involved in our Study Abroad program, all of my journalism and literature students blog on the system, and about a dozen other classes taught by other faculty members have experimented with blogging.  Several faculty members have experimented with using a blog as an official professional presence, and one colleague got a book deal out of a collection of essays he posted to his blog while on a trip abroad. 

I don't censor what the students write.  Of the 25,000 blog entries on the site, I'd say that only three crossed the line into destructive irresponsibility and offensiveness, and the authors of those posts withdrew almost immediately after posting them. (Those posts are still online, but you'd have to know what to search for in order to find them.)

Assistant Professor of Composition/English

Institution: Seton Hill University
Location: Greensburg, PA
Category:
Faculty - Liberal Arts - English and Literature
Posted: 09/09/2009
Application Due: 11/13/2009
Type: Full Time
Notes: included on Affirmative Action email
Seton Hill University seeks specialist in Composition/Writing Studies for tenure-track, Assistant Professor of English, beginning fall 2010. The faculty member will teach composition and related courses in the Undergraduate Writing Program, with additional generalist responsibilities in English. 4/4 course load. A Ph.D. in Composition/Rhetoric is required. Additional experience in literature desired. Background in writing program administration, assessment, and/or writing in the disciplines favored.

Seton Hill University is a Catholic, liberal arts University, educating traditional and non-traditional undergraduate and graduate students. Classes are offered in a variety of formats - day, evening, and weekends. Seton Hill has a student-centered campus culture based on Catholic values, acceptance, community and service. The campus is located 35 miles east of Pittsburgh. Visit setonhill.edu for more information.

To apply, send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, official transcripts, a written sample of scholarship, a statement of philosophy of teaching composition, and a composition syllabus. Applications must be postmarked by November 13, 2009.
Application Information
Apply for this Position through My HigherEdJobs
Postal Address: Dr. Laura Patterson
Undergraduate Writing Programs
Seton Hill University
Seton Hill Drive
Greensburg, PA 15601
Email Address: patterson@setonhill.edu

The Seton Hill registrar describes how her devotion to mathematics and logic has helped her serve her community.

"Nearly everything I need to know, and that I currently believe, I think I've learned at school board meetings.... I've survived seven elections, I've been beaten up by the press, made deep friendships and bitter enemies. I've been threatened, accused, betrayed, but most of all rewarded." Barbara Hinkle (8.4Mb MP3)

I'm keeping my media skills limber, posting pictures and audio that I took during Seton Hill University's discussion of This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women.

Top-down grading by the prof  turns learning (which should be a deep pleasure, setting up for a lifetime of curiosity) into a crass competition:  how do I snag the highest grade for the least amount of work? how do I give the prof what she wants so I can get the A that I need for med school?  That's the opposite of learning and curiosity, the opposite of everything I believe as a teacher, and is, quite frankly, a waste of my time and the students' time. There has to be a better way . . .
 

So, this year, when I teach "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," I'm trying out a new point system supplemented, first, by peer review and by my own constant commentary (written and oral) on student progress, goals, ambitions, and contributions.   Grading itself will be by contract:   Do all the work (and there is a lot of work), and you get an A.   Don't need an A?  Don't have time to do all the work?  No problem.  You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart.  You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points.  Add up the points, there's your grade.  Clearcut.  No guesswork.  No second-guessing 'what the prof wants.' No gaming the system.  Clearcut.  Student is responsible. 

But what determines meeting the standard required in this point system?  What does it mean to do work "satisfactorily"?  And how to judge quality, you ask?  Crowdsourcing. --Cathy Davidson, HASTAC

Wonderful stuff from Steven Krause.

Representing the world champion, the "going to hell in a hand-basket," the eternal the youth are getting worse and worse, and carrying on the tradition of complaining about students that dates back in western culture to at least Isocrates, I give you Stanley Fish's "What Should Colleges Teach?" on his New York Times "blog." Judging by the many comments here that repeat "oh yes, the students are so much worse today than they used to be," he's clearly the champ and the crowd favorite.  And why wouldn't he be?  Isn't it much more satisfying for grown-ups to note the weaknesses of youth?  After all, to do so simultaneously suggests that the grown-ups of today are both "better" than the current youth, and it suggests that the previous youth (e.g., today's grown-ups) were also better than the current youth ("When I was their age, we learned this stuff.  But now...").

In the challenger's corner, we have Clive Thompson and his WIRED article "The New Literacy," in which he argues that "it's not that today's students can't write.  It's that they're doing it in different places and in different ways."  Boos from the crowd; looks like Thompson has an uphill battle.  Let's see how this works out.

(Ding-ding-ding!)

I love the scare quotes for Fish's "blog".

Last week, I spent a little while doing the rounds, trying to drum up some advertising customers for the student paper. Ordinarily there's a student who carries the role of business manager, but when we're in between student workers, or outside of class time, I try to push things along.

There were twenty different things I'd rather have been doing at that time, but the money goes directly to support the school's educational mission. We recently replaced our six-year-old hand-me-down computers with a couple of new ones, and over the years we've students to training workshops and conferences in New York and elsewhere.

So here I am, going door to door, mentioning that I'm trying to sell ads, and watching eyes glaze over. 

"I can give you two minutes," said a guy in an apron.

It was a humbling experience -- being blown off by a guy wearing an apron.  I didn't even have two minutes of stuff to say -- I just mentioned that his competition down the street just bought an ad of X size, and leaving my contact information. 

But it was a good experience, too. 

I'm used to walking into a chattering room full of students who immediately settle down and wait for me to start talking. A small handful of students who feel very comfortable around me will politely mime a wristwatch check when I've run over time; most just sit there and wait for me to finish. Of course, it's my goal in the classroom to let the students do most of the talking, but on the first day of classes, the students are perfectly happy listening as I go over the syllabus. I also spend part of my week working on committees with other faculty and staff members, so it's not as if I expect the world to revolve around me.

I wasn't mad at the busy employees who didn't even look up from their desk during my pitch, who didn't give me their name or accept my card, who didn't take the copy of The Setonian.  Instead, I was feeling guilty for all the times I have blown off a sales representative, thrown a sales pitch directly into my spam folder, or avoided eye contact with someone wearing a "Vendor" nametag.

A recent article in Inside Higher Ed offers a gentle rebuke to the edupunk movement, which celebrates do-it-yourself technical solutions over the pre-packaged corporate products. If a few admissions and hiring decisions had gone a different way in the past, I might very well be peddling educational software or textbooks to busy professors.
 

The Golden Rule for Ed Tech Vendors

• Many of the people in the for-profit world in fact come from the non-profit educational world. You will be surprised that their backgrounds, interests, and passions will so closely match your own. For this reason, they tend to identify too strongly with their customers, and will be unhappy when they think their companies actions are not in the best interests of the colleges and universities that they work with.
• If you talk to your ed. tech. vendor representative you may be surprised to the degree that they believe in the profit-motive as a motivator for innovation. They have often left the slow and hidebound cultures of academia precisely because of the slowness of traditional institutions to change and innovate. They like that their success or failures can be measured by bottom line evaluations, in hard profit and loss numbers. They will believe, and they will be correct, that it is the for profit educational technology world that is responsible for much of the innovation in higher education. --Joshua Kim
  

Any college professor knows the depressing feeling that comes when you stay up late marking a stack of papers, and a high percentage of students don't even bother to pick them up.  One instructor made an art installation out of abandoned student essays. 

As an instructor of art for the past 7 years, I have had the disheartening experience of encountering illiteracy at the college level with a frequency that far exceeded my expectations. Having taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Fresno City College; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, FL; and Bakersfield College, I decided to collect the hundreds of student essays written for my classes that were abandoned by their authors (the fact that these students did not find the retrieval of their work to be important was in many ways discouraging enough). I decided to archive these student essays as documentation of the growing illiteracy problem, for what I found in the contents therein mirrored and sometimes surpassed the following data.


--Look Like If The Words Are Bleeding

I suppose, too, that there's some self-selection involved -- perhaps the students who care least about their writing are the most likely to abandon their essays, while the best writers were proud of their work and wanted to pick it up. A lively discussion on the comments page.

The context in which the students' intellectual property is used -- as evidence of the nation's illiteracy -- is problematic, as is the fact that the students weren't given the opportunity to consent to their work being used this way.

Zombie math. Yay! (PDF. Boo!)

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all. --  Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress

Mike points out the professor named "Robert Smith?" ("the question mark is part of his surname and not a typographical mistake," according to the BBC).

Many specific things come to mind when I ponder writing a 200 word paragraph on my identity as a writer. First of all, when I think of producing that many words about my writing identity, I think of my ability to start immediately writing, using the first thing that pops into my head, since the word count is so important.  A second tip for producing the required number of words on my identity as a writer is to repeat the assigned writing topic as many times as possible. But most of all, I think of how useful it is to begin with a couple of unrelated points about my identity as a writer, and then bring in a random third point, unrelated to the first two, and by calling it my "most important," giving the impression that I am building towards a conclusion. Finally, after repeating my points about starting with the first thing that pops into my head, frequently repeating the assigned topic, and picking a random point to call the "most important," I can squeeze out more words by summarizing what I've written. Therefore, I hope these 200 words convey a specific point about who I am as a writer.

Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., recently introduced a grade called FD to deal with cheaters. The letters stand for failure with academic dishonesty. --Calgary Herald

FD for cheaters? Why not FU?

(Thanks for the suggestion, Josh.)

If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can't cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then -- before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world's largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world's largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before. -- Fast Company

I'm happy to see open content and edu-hacking getting some mainstream attention. It's a little depressing to see the focus on the commercial potential, though given the source of the article, that focus is not actually surprising.

I'm all for training students in fact-gathering, clear writing, and getting a sense of the outside world. But I'm wondering if the time-honored student newspaper is still the best way to do that.

Has your campus found a more contemporary way to get students the benefits that newspapers used to offer? Maybe a way that doesn't automatically doom them to the ashbin of history? -- Dean Dad, Inside Higher Ed

Here's the comment I just submitted:

At the first meeting of a journalism class this past January, I tore up a copy of the student paper.

I'm the adviser for that paper, so I softened the blow a bit by first assuring the students that I thought it was a good issue -- well designed, with accurate and lively content -- and that it was serving its on-campus audience well.  We have no intentions of dropping the print edition, or even scaling it back. But I did feel the need to dramatize the deep, permanent changes that journalism had undergone during the past year.

I was hired in 2003 to start a "new media journalism" program at a small, private liberal arts school.  Our NMJ students regularly blog, and I've taught classes on podcasting, web design, and gaming culture.  Our program aims to provide students with core writing skills and transferable new media skills -- not the least of which being how to use a complex software tool, and the ability to integrate several such tools (and whatever new tools they will encounter after they graduate) with their core writing skills.

Even in the middle of a huge shakedown in the journalism business, our recent graduates have been hired in the past year at a major network in New York, and at a community daily here in southwestern Pennsylvania.  Some have found jobs in related fields (technical writing, editorial assistant, paralegal), while others have opted to use their skills in grad school or the Peace Corps.

Combining words and technology can be a tough sell; some of our best writers in the program have made it known that they can hardly stand computers.  But I refuse to prepare students for a profession that will not exist by the time they graduate.

Within five years:

(1) Many online journals and magazines now only publishing traditional text-based fiction and poetry will, as part of their online offerings, publish digital literature on a regular basis;

(2) Most major universities and many colleges (if they don't already) will offer courses in New Media, and those courses will cover/include digital literature;

(3) Accomplished scholars who assess the whole of digital literature by examining exemplary models from early hypertexts will be saying "oops!" and seeking a vocabulary that accepts the continual flux and explosive change of current practices in digital literature;

[...]

--Alan Bigelow, Netpoetic

I'm teaching "Writing about Literature" this fall, so I should be up on the new changes in MLA format.  (Via the Reeves Library blog.)

I like some of the changes in MLA 2009, including labeling the source of a publication ("Web" or "Print" or "DVD" or the like) and standardizing italics instead of underlining (which has become strongly associated with web hyperlinks). 

I have mixed feelings about the de-emphasis of the URL, though, since it formulates the omission of information that could be very useful to future scholars. Here is how the Purdue OWL puts it:

No More URLs! While website entries will still include authors, article names, and website names, when available, MLA no longer requires URLs. Writers are, however, encouraged to provide a URL if the citation information does not lead readers to easily find the source. --Purdue OWL

URLs from databases, which generally end up crammed full of soon-to-expire session IDs and irrelevant search terms, are useless in a bibliography, so I won't miss them. 

But URLs of static pages can be very useful, particularly if the paper is submitted electronically.  The MLA is still very backwards when we compare our bibliographic procedures with the disciplines of math or engineering, which long ago standardized citation methods, so that whole bodies of papers can be slurped up into a database and the resulting data massaged endlessly.

There might be several different pages in a blog that contain the same information -- such as the blog home page, another page that shows entries from the last month, a category list that shows the last 20 entries, and the permalink. So, a scholar may "easily find the source" on the day he or she looks it up, but weeks or months or years later, that same page may only appear in the static date-based archives and in the permalink.

Listservs, a trademarked software for running e-mail lists whose name is often used to refer to the lists themselves, were once a "killer app" that tempted many professors to try the Internet in the first place, back when many established scholars were skeptical of computers. A Chronicle article nearly 15 years ago proclaimed the exciting new world of academic e-mail lists, calling them "the first truly worldwide seminar room."

"This is the academy of the 1990s, where 'being connected' has taken on a whole new meaning," the 1994 article went on. "Attending the right graduate school and being published in prestigious places are still important, but establishing a name for oneself online has become the newest way to win recognition."

But now collaborating online with colleagues is so accepted that scholars are trying new tools that are easier to use and, well, a little more exciting. When was the last time someone enthusiastically recommended a new e-mail list to you? -- Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

And you thought the secrets to academic success would involve sensible stuff like "Study for two to three hours for every hour of class" or "Keep up with the readings" and "Meet all the deadlines your prof sets."

But those won't help you game the system, which is the strategy Don Asher presents as the real key to success.

• This is not about being smart. This is about being savvy.
• Sign up for more classes than you can possibly take, and drop boring or difficult professors sometime in the first two weeks.
• If you get a bad exam or quiz score, ask the professor what you can do to earn extra credit. Reading an optional book, writing a one- or two-page paper, or even just helping the prof out with mundane tasks such as setting up for class can push you back into the A column.
• Professors are people, too. They worry about being liked, whether they're gaining a few pounds and whether or not they're good at their jobs. So go visit them.... It's probably not a great idea to focus on grades only, as in "What do I need to do to earn an A in your class?" Get your professors to help you be a better student. And maybe ask, "Have you lost a little weight?"

The truly savvy student would recognize that pushing chairs around for profs will probably make the profs gain weight, therefore making them even more susceptible to weight-loss flattery.

The following started out as routine e-mail feedback on a freshman essay, but I thought it came out well enough that I might want to use it again.  I don't want this to get buried in my existing handout on thesis statements, so I figured I'd just post the good bits here.

A good academic thesis is precise -- it makes a specific claim, backed up by concrete, verifiable evidence.

As you begin the writing process, you may have no idea what your own attitude towards your topic is.  Or, you may have a strong emotional reaction to a subject.  Either way, your thesis will grow stronger as you supply concrete details that move it away from the general and towards the specific.

Sample Thesis: "Money as encouragement for good grades, many teachers believe it can be useful."

Let's start by revising so that the thesis makes a claim about the topic (the value of rewards in education).  At present, the thesis simply claims that "some teachers" happen to hold an opinion about the topic of money rewards.

Slight Improvement: "Many teachers believe financial rewards can be a useful educational tactic."

It's not clear from this statement what claim your paper is about to defend.  Either of the two following revisions would be clearer.

• "Although many people believe X, recent studies show Y is a better solution than X."
  
• "Recent studies have confirmed the practice of doing X is more effective than Y."

Of course, you'd have to follow up with specific reference to the "recent studies" that you mention. (Note -- a news article or random website that refers to the "recent studies" is a very weak citation; most professors will expect you to be able to refer to the specific academic publication, government report, or other authoritative source.)

Some People Say...

Of particular note is the vague reference to what "many teachers believe."  In casual conversation, or during a classroom discussion, it's fine to use a general phrase like this to introduce ideas that you know you've heard somewhere before, 

But in academic writing, a phrase such as "some people say" is far too vague.  Your instructor will expect you name the specific teachers, to quote their exact words (if you interviewed them yourself), or cite the page numbers of their published opinions (in academic journals, or possibly news interviews or statements they have posted on their own websites). 

Introduce the opinions of credible authorities by naming names and citing a good source.
 

Instead of saying "many teachers believe it can be useful," actually state two or three good things about debate. 

Compare:  Which gives you a better idea of what the author is saying?

A)     "Many people believe that video games are worthwhile, but there are problems with too much gaming."

B)      "While the claims that video games teach hand-eye coordination are sometimes overblown (Smith 123; Perkins 234), multi-player games teach teamwork and leadership skills (Brown 213), and simulation games exercise the kind of problem-solving skills employers say they want in their new hires (Speer and Lee 23).  Nevertheless, the most hardcore gamers (defined by Jones and Green as playing more than 20 hours per week) run a greater risk of being overweight (Lincoln 232), spending less time outdoors (Johnson 12) and exhibiting anti-social behavior (Young 130).  For these reasons, the Johnson County School Board's May 2009 decision to put a gaming lounge in the library lobby is not a responsible use of taxpayer dollars." 

If your thesis looks like A), try to make it look more like B. 

Weaknesses of the "some people believe" approach... what's the real problem?  Are these unnamed people wrong to believe this?  Are they not really credible authorities, so the problem is that these people aren't the most reliable source of information?  Do "they" have an ulterior motive that would keep them from giving sound, trustworthy advice?  Is their value system actually flawed (like someone who wants to let his pit bull roam through a daycare center's backyard), or are we talking about perfectly respectable but conflicting value systems (early risers who complain about parties at midnight, or late risers who complain about lawnmowers at dawn?)

Revise for Detail

"Although some people believe X, they don't realize the problems X really causes."

"Although [detail P] and [detail Q] may at first make option X seem attractive, a closer examination of X reveals that [detail L], [detail M] and [detail N] all expose X as a faulty solution.

You might be asking yourself, "Where do I get all those details to add to my paper?"

If so, you might still be thinking of research as something that you do at a fairly late stage.  If you first write out your paper as an opinion piece, and only start "looking for quotes" after you've already written out your conclusion,  you'll only be skimming for details that already support what you've written.  Human nature will cause you to ignore those details that challenge your opinions.

Embrace the thought-altering possibilities of a fact or claim that doesn't already fit your world view.  Your instructor is less interested in seeing you supply facts that back up the opinions you already have, and far more interested in seeing how you form new opinions about issues that you would never have thought about before, had it not been for the new stuff you learned while you were doing your research.

When you can spell out the complex relationship between specific details that youv'e learned, you're probably ready to start churning out the paragraphs. 

"Although details P and Q challenges claim X, supporting details A, B, and C make a stronger case in favor of X."  

This is just one possible way to organize a paper -- it's not the only way. 

If you're still at the vague "some people say" or "there are pros and cons to topic X" phare phase, then a little more research is still in order.

I missed this when it came out a few weeks ago.

At Hopkins, Knudson uses Twitter as an extension of the classroom, asking students to raise questions, hold discussions online, keep up with breaking news and share links to interesting stories. She believes the limited number of characters allowed is a useful way to remember to choose words carefully, cut clutter and realize how much can be said in a small space, like a haiku.

There are people known for their writing on Twitter. As one example, she pointed to Arjun Basu, who has thousands of followers for his short-story tweets: "The marriage ended somewhere on a two lane road south of Cleveland. The kids in the backseat sensed it too. The kid in the trunk had no idea."-- Susan Kinzie, Washington Post

My wife was horrified when she turned on the computer to look something up online, and noticed that my blog now includes a Twitter feed. "I learned to deal with the idea of you being on Facebook," she said, "but Twitter?"

The gradual, and almost invisible, transformation of many "liberal arts colleges" to more comprehensive institutions is similar to another gradual trend that has reshaped the composition and the work of the American academic profession. Over the past three decades, colleges and universities have replaced tenure-track faculty positions with part-time and full-time term-contract positions -- a phenomenon Jack Shuster and Martin Finkelstein referred to as the "silent revolution" in their book The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). This piecemeal process at most institutions was not the result of a careful review of academic staffing needs or a systematic effort to improve the quality of instruction and scholarship. Nor was it the outcome of a national debate on the nature of the academic profession in the 21st century. -- Roger G. Baldwin, Inside Higher Ed