Leslie M-B

Make students curators

July 17, 2012 By Leslie M-B

This post is a contribution for Hack(ing) School(ing)

What would happen if we made students practice curation—actual curation?

I emphasize actual because “curation” has become a digital buzzword over the past couple years, but it’s been defined pretty consistently to mean not much more than finding, selecting, and sharing resources—mostly online content—with one’s readers. A common objective of this kind of curation, according to content marketing specialists, is to make yourself valuable to consumers who are too busy to find this material, synthesize it, and contextualize it in a way that is useful.

All too often, this kind of curation is driven more by marketing imperatives than intellectual engagement with one’s world and one’s audience. In this essay, then, I’m talking about another whole order of curation, what museum folk might consider “old school” curation. Really, though, I’m advocating bringing together old school curation with digital tools that allow for creation, contextualization, argument, and engagement.

Critical and creative thinking should be prioritized over remembering content

That students should learn to think for themselves may seem like a no-brainer to many readers, but if you look at the textbook packages put out by publishers, you’ll find that the texts and accompanying materials (for both teachers and students) assume students are expected to read and retain content—and then be tested on it.

Instead, between middle school (if not earlier) and college graduation, students should practice—if not master—how to question, critique, research, and construct an argument like an historian.

California’s history and social science content standards for public schools offer a list of “intellectual, reasoning, reflection, and research skills” high school students should develop in conjunction with their content knowledge (40-41). Here, paraphrased and consolidated, are several of those skills:

Students analyze how change happens, or fails to happen, over time, and understand that change affects technology, politics, values, and beliefs.
Students recognize the complexity, and sometimes indeterminacy, of historical cause and effect.
Students use maps and documents to interpret patterns of migration and immigration, environmental impacts, and the diffusion of ideas, technology, and goods.
Students connect events to physical and human characteristics of the landscape; analyze how people have altered landscapes; and consider the environmental policy implications of these characteristics and alterations.
Students evaluate historians’ arguments; identify bias and prejudice in historical interpretations; and evaluate major debates among historians, analyzing authors’ use of evidence.
Students collect, evaluate, and employ information from multiple sources; construct and test hypotheses; and make arguments in oral and written presentations.
Students understand past events and issues within the context of the past.

These standards emphasize critical and creative thinking. They ask students to consider more than just documents, including maps and landscapes; draw on primary and secondary sources; investigate the validity of historians’ arguments; and even to question whether we can determine cause and effect. (Contrast these standards with the latest suggestion by Texas Republicans that the state ought to ban the teaching of critical thinking that “challenges [a] student’s fixed beliefs” in schools.)

We could have students develop many of these skills using pedagogy-as-usual: listening to lectures and reading textbooks, looking at a few primary sources, and writing essays. A few students will indeed develop the skills delineated in the California standards through this method. Many more will, if they go on to college, come to me as undergraduates to confess they have always hated history class because it is so boring.

Alternatively, we could have students engage with artifacts, historic sites, landscapes, photographs, memorials, paintings, political cartoons, and actual people, as well as with more traditional documents. We could have them select a topic or theme to research as a class, and then create an online exhibition featuring these objects, places, documents, and more.

It’s time to do away with content standards in favor of thinking standards

The California historical thinking standards I praised above are only a small part of the history and social science content standards. The state—like many—expects students to graduate from high school with a particular body of knowledge. California’s standards document, which encompasses social studies and history from grades K through 12, weighs in at 61 pages, most of which outline specific events, legislation, political figures, and political or economy theories students must “describe,” “enumerate” (list!), “understand,” “analyze,” and “evaluate”—though in the standards the meaning of “analyze” and “evaluate” isn’t clear, as they’re used to describe a broad spectrum of tasks. Here’s a single eighth-grade standard from California:

8.2 Students analyze the political principles underlying the U.S. Constitution and compare the enumerated and implied powers of the federal government.

1. Discuss the significance of the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and the Mayflower Compact.

2. Analyze the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution and the success of each in implementing the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

3. Evaluate the major debates that occurred during the development of the Constitution and their ultimate resolutions in such areas as shared power among institutions, divided state-federal power, slavery, the rights of individuals and states (later addressed by the addition of the Bill of Rights), and the status of American Indian nations under the commerce clause.

4. Describe the political philosophy underpinning the Constitution as specified in the Federalist Papers (authored by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay) and the role of such leaders as Madison, George Washington, Roger Sherman, Gouverneur Morris, and James Wilson in the writing and ratification of the Constitution.

5. Understand the significance of Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom as a forerunner of the First Amendment and the origins, purpose, and differing views of the founding fathers on the issue of the separation of church and state.

6. Enumerate the powers of government set forth in the Constitution and the fundamental liberties ensured by the Bill of Rights.

7. Describe the principles of federalism, dual sovereignty, separation of powers, checks and balances, the nature and purpose of majority rule, and the ways in which the American idea of constitutionalism preserves individual rights. (33-34)

As we learned (again) in 2010 when Texas revised its content standards, the construction of state standards can be, and often is, a highly politicized process informed less by sound pedagogy and expert testimony than by parents’ and community leaders’ desires to have their students learn and share their views. (Though once again I’m singling out Texas, both ends of the political spectrum are guilty of this practice throughout the country.) Note, for example, that California’s State Board of Education nominates as founding fathers Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, Sherman, Morris, and Wilson. Texas’s state board enumerates as founders “Benjamin Rush, John Hancock, John Jay, John Witherspoon, John Peter Muhlenberg, Charles Carroll, and Jonathan Trumbull Sr.,” and asks students to “explain their contributions” (§113.41.c.1.C).

I suspect most readers of this essay could make their own list of favored founders whose political theories should be on any student’s must-know list—and could make a reasonable argument for their inclusion. Yet even if we could agree on which founders students should know about, we wouldn’t come to any consensus on how they should be represented. (Sally Hemings and Oney Judge, anyone?) Furthermore, the depth and breadth of content knowledge called for by some states is astounding; as A Report on the State of History Education points out, state standards documents range from 3 to 580 pages (12). (I’m rolling my eyes at you, Virginia.)

For grown-ups, the kerfuffle over founders is yet another object lesson in how history—and particularly history as it’s taught to K-12 students—is constructed by humans motivated by all kinds of passions and agendas. Yes, in the case of teaching about the early Republic, Americans might agree that students should study the debates surrounding the nation’s founding documents. Beyond that, we’re not going to get much consensus, and it makes sense not just to “study the controversy” over standards, but also to have students craft their own understanding of the past through engagement with a wide range of primary sources and with each other.

State boards of education need to acknowledge both the advantages and liabilities of establishing or subscribing to a canonical narrative of U.S. history or, worse, a pantheon of historical figures. Standards should call on students to develop skills more than to master specific content.

What if we shifted the standards’ primary emphasis from content, and not to just the development of traditional skills—basic knowledge recall, document interpretation, research, and essay-writing—but to the cultivation of skills that challenge students to make unconventional connections, skills that are essential for thriving in the 21^st century? Such skills, according to the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills, include, but aren’t limited to:

Learn and collaborate in multicultural and multilingual contexts
Practice thoughtful and effective civic engagement
Understand humans’ complex relationship with the natural world
Create, refine, analyze, evaluate, and share new and worthwhile ideas—while understanding the real-world limits on their widespread adoption
Demonstrate originality and inventiveness in work
View failure as an opportunity to learn
Analyze and understand complex systems
Identify and ask significant questions that lead to better solutions
Exercise flexibility; compromise
Assume shared responsibility for collaborative work
Evaluate information critically and competently
Manage the flow of information from a wide variety of sources
Understand the ethical and legal issues surrounding the access and use of information and technology
Examine how and why values and points of view are included or excluded
Understand and utilize the most appropriate media creation tools, characteristics, and conventions
Use digital technologies (computers, PDAs, media players, GPS, etc.)
Work effectively in a climate of ambiguity and changing priorities
Expand one’s own learning and opportunities to gain expertise and demonstrate initiative to advance skills toward a professional level
Reflect critically on past experiences in order to inform future progress
Set and meet goals, even in the face of obstacles and competing pressures
Leverage strengths of others to accomplish a common goal
Act responsibly with the interests of the local and global community in mind

Curation—again, old school curation—allows for these skills to emerge. Because of declining museum funding, small and mid-sized history museums seem to be hiring fewer curators, instead collapsing curation into the functions of two very different departments: collections management (registration and conservation) and education (programming and exhibition development). By learning the processes that constitute contemporary curation, then, students will need to consider how and why artifacts and ephemera are valued and preserved as well as how best to interpret such objects for audiences ranging from kindergarteners through senior citizens. They’ll learn how museums prioritize collections, conservation, exhibition, and educational programming in an age of extremely limited budgets. They’ll have to consider the perpetual triage of artifact conservation in the worlds of underfunded nonprofits and state agencies charged with cultural resource management. They’ll have to reflect on how to contextualize sometimes controversial objects for diverse stakeholders and communities.

Again, I want to emphasize that curation—despite its popularity as a term among internet marketers and the digerati—is so much more than selection and sharing. That doesn’t mean, however, that the digital sphere doesn’t offer marvelous opportunities for research, collaborative writing and editing, publication, and engagement. There isn’t space here to enumerate all the tools available to students—suffice it to say they are legion and ever-changing. Some examples include digital audio and video recorders, smartphones, tablet computers, laptops, blog platforms, database management software, spreadsheets, image and video editing suites, word processing software, digitized document repositories like the Footnote.com and Ancestry.com, document sharing solutions like Dropbox, social networks that students can use to find and contact experts in any topic, and project management sites.

What specifically might students learn from crafting an online exhibit? Let’s say, for example—as did my students this past semester*—they draw on the collections of a local museum and build an online exhibition in WordPress.

organizing a large research project
figuring out what questions they should ask
finding, analyzing, and evaluating sources—primary and secondary—on a subject that perhaps has not yet been adequately addressed by scholars or curators (or anyone else)
photography, perhaps in the limited light of a collections storage facility, and photo editing
ownership of objects and images of them, and securing permission to use them
the basics of artifact handling, treatment, research, and care
interviewing historians or oral history informants
interpreting a large and complex subject for a general audience
website planning and deployment
collaboration—editing, divvying up work, compromising, and more
evaluating the utility of mobile devices for group work and public history applications (Each of my students was loaned an iPad 2 for personal and class use for the semester.)

Training teachers for this new paradigm means new priorities within the history major

Just as teachers-in-training need to learn the best methods to teach content, they need to be taught how to encourage critical and creative thinking in their students. Of necessity, then, I’ve been approaching my own teaching of the survey courses—required for future history teachers—with a lesser emphasis on dates, events, and individuals (about whom I remember and know very little from my own limited history education) and a greater emphasis on larger trends and the skills used by historians. My students are learning some content—instead of a textbook, I use a primary-source reader in which the sources are accompanied by commentary by historians—but they’re learning it as they perform analysis and synthesis, not before.

So, for example, I don’t have them read them about Puritan conceptions of salvation and then give them photos of headstones and ask them to explain how the headstones reinforce Puritan ideas. I have them undertake Prownian analysis (description, deduction, speculation, research, and interpretive analysis) of children’s headstones and furniture (e.g,. a walking stool); perform close readings of children’s literature and Puritan poetry, letters, and sermons; and build an argument concerning Puritans’ beliefs about children’s salvation. As they craft this argument, they must evaluate the usefulness of, as well as synthesize their findings from, these sources, along with earlier ones from the course. The whole exercise is done in small groups, followed by discussion among the entire class.

In short, if we’re talking about Bloom’s taxonomy, I’m dragging my lower-division students immediately to analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, skipping over basic knowledge acquisition, comprehension, and application. Furthermore, I’m modeling what I see as best practice in secondary teaching, even though I’m working with first- and second-year undergraduates.

To move beyond the era of content standards, we need to acknowledge—and convey to our teacher candidates—that one need not be an expert in a content area in order to teach it. We already see this attitude in English classes, where the literary canon has been in flux for some time. As an English teacher, I wouldn’t need to be an acknowledged expert on, or even a specialist in, Huckleberry Finn to teach it to junior high school students. Instead, I’d need to know how a novel works; I’d need to know how plot, characters, conflict, and other literary devices combine. Knowing the history is necessary, too, but information about what was going on in the U.S. at the time Twain wrote his novel is only an internet search away. I need not have learned it at some fixed point way back in tenth grade and filed it away until I required it in my own classroom teaching.

Similarly, as a history teacher, I don’t need to have committed to memory all the players in the nullification crisis of the late 1820s; instead, I need to have a basic grasp of the concept of states’ rights, access to primary sources, and the ability to ask thoughtful questions that connect the primary sources with states’ rights and related concepts. I hand the primary sources (including artifacts, of course) and questions to my students, and if I have taught the students well to examine primary sources, a lively conversation ensues. If students have questions I can’t answer, I ask them where they might research the answers to those questions themselves.

Training teacher candidates how to be curators of digital exhibits on any number of subjects reprioritizes investigation, close reading, analysis, interpretation, and engagement as key skills for a historian—and, I’d argue, for active twenty-first century citizenship.

We must proceed thoughtfully toward digital curation

We have digital tools at hand to effect these changes—and the tools are affordable and multitudinous. That doesn’t mean, however, I’m a cheerleader for the rapid deployment of ed tech-as-usual. As Audrey Watters has highlighted, educational technology is too often perceived by administrators and entrepreneurs as an efficient and low-cost means of content delivery. I’ve been profoundly disappointed in how digital learning has been conceptualized in both higher and K-12 education in my home state of Idaho and beyond, as I suspect it will contribute to declines in cultural literacy and critical thinking and deprofessionalize K-16 faculty in ways that will prove dangerous to civic life.

Teaching both teacher candidates and students the skills essential to curating an excellent digital exhibition—one that provokes as well as explains, and that invites feedback and interaction instead of being unidirectional—might help to reverse the trend toward McEdTech content delivery.

What are the next steps, then?

Teachers can consider whether they’ve put the content cart before the critical-thinking horse. Do their lessons go beyond knowledge acquisition and basic application, instead moving students quickly to higher-order thinking? Are the lessons, assignments, and activities challenging? Do they leave room for the teacher to learn something from the students, so that students can see the value of the knowledge they are creating?

Teachers also can work to overcome their own anxieties about not being an expert in whatever technology students will be using. Some teachers believe we need to be experts on any such technology; others of us believe we need to show students how to research their options, pick a software platform, and figure out how to complete their project using it. I fall squarely into the latter camp. While middle school students’ digital curation projects might need to be kickstarted with a list of appropriate technologies, high school students and undergraduates should be expected to research, evaluate, and deploy relevant technologies for their historical investigation and interpretation.

Museums can reach out to schools to let them know what artifact collections might be researched and photographed by students. Museum folks, this is a great way to get some of your artifacts interpreted for a much broader audience—particularly those objects that will likely never go on exhibit.

Ed tech entrepreneurs can work with teachers and students to design platforms that allow for critical and creative thinking to emerge from investigations of a broad spectrum of primary sources: architecture, landscape, artifacts, ephemera, audio and video recordings, photos, maps, art, and more. Such software is going to be much more widely appealing and broadly adopted than publishers’ packages keyed to content standards that remain inconsistent from state to state.

Tech journalists can ask harder questions of anyone responsible for designing or adopting ed tech software platforms. How is the software allowing for the development of twenty-first-century skills? How is it inspiring lifelong learning? In what ways does it allow investigation to proceed from a student’s personal interests, and to what extent does it allow students to reach dynamic conclusions based on a synthesis of new material and a student’s existing knowledge?

When, for their book The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen interviewed 1,500 Americans about their connections to the past and their uses of history, they found that Americans were not particularly interested in consuming traditional historical narratives. Instead, Rosenzweig and Thelen write,

They preferred to make their own histories. When they confronted historical accounts constructed by others, they sought to examine them critically and connect them to their own experiences or those of people close to them. At the same time, they pointed out, historical presentations that did not give them credit for their critical abilities—commercialized histories on television or textbook-driven high school classes—failed to engage or influence them. (179)

And, in the end, isn’t that what Americans at all points on the political spectrum ought to want—citizens who are curious and willing to engage with each other over the meaning of the past and its interpretation in the present, rather than those who can list the accomplishments of Benjamin Rush, John Peter Muhlenberg, and Jonathan Trumbull Sr.? Curatorial skills allow for critical thinking, creative thought, and civic discourse to emerge.

* At the time of posting this essay on my blog, the exhibition site my students built is still under construction because I continue to work with students on additional content. I expect it to be complete by the end of summer 2012.

Filed Under: Putting the "Public" in Public History, Sometimes I teach, Technobabble

Playground slides? Scary.

July 16, 2012 By Leslie M-B

A precipice on a windy day? No sweat.

(at the Oregon Trail Reserve, just outside Boise)

Filed Under: Mamablogging, Tall tales and true

A Classic Case of Misplaced Belief in Market-Driven Educational “Solutions”

July 6, 2012 By Leslie M-B

(Source; h/t Audrey Watters)

Last time I checked, Boise State’s 4-year graduation rate was 8 percent.*

No, that’s not a typo. And its 6-year graduation rate hovers at 26 percent, with an overall graduation rate of 27 percent. One could quibble and point out that transfer students aren’t traditionally included in the university’s graduation rate calculations, but even if we’re only counting students who begin their college careers at Boise State, 8 and 26 percent graduation rates are pretty damn astounding, and not in a good way.

Not surprisingly, the university is feeling a good deal of pressure from the State Board of Education and the legislature to improve these graduation rates. In fact, the State Board has set an ambitious goal: 60 percent of Idahoans should have a college degree or some kind of post-secondary certificate by 2020. (Note the language of the bullet points on the State Board’s College Completion Idaho page–it’s very much about improving efficiency and quantity of post-secondary completion rates, not about quality of education.)

I’m told** by folks allegedly in the know about such things that the completion rate for online courses at Boise State is lower than the completion rate for face-to-face courses.

I’m no mathematician, but it seems to me that’s a pretty simple equation:

already low graduation rates + low completion rates for online courses ≠
improved graduation rates.

(Yes, I have written about this before.)

A digression that is not, you shall see, truly a digression

Image by Shane Lin, and used under a Creative Commons license

I haven’t commented here on the Teresa Sullivan resignation-and-reappointment scandal at UVA, and I wasn’t planning on it. But plans change, yes?

In case you didn’t watch the whole ugly mess unfold, that link to the Washington Post provides a play-by-play of what the newspaper terms “18 days of leadership crisis.” In brief, it appears the UVA president was pressured to resign because the university’s Board of Visitors believed she wasn’t leading the university down the right path to online education. Specifically, their e-mail exchanges show they referred to an article in the Wall Street Journal about the coming changes in higher ed. That op-ed enthusiastically states:

Moreover, colleges and universities, whatever their status, do not need to put a professor in every classroom. One Nobel laureate can literally teach a million students, and for a very reasonable tuition price. Online education will lead to the substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive)—as has happened in every other industry—making schools much more productive.

While that may seem like a utopian future to the WSJ contributors–and I think they and I have very different definitions of “productive”–it sounds more dirge-like to those of us who work in actual classrooms with non-hypothetical students.

The e-mails sent among the Board of Visitors folks make for enlightening and disheartening reading. UVA professor Siva Vaidhyanathan captures their essence when he writes, “In the 21^st century, robber barons try to usurp control of established public universities to impose their will via comical management jargon and massive application of ego and hubris.” You should click through to read his entire post at Slate, but this passage bears highlighting:

The biggest challenge facing higher education is market-based myopia. Wealthy board members, echoing the politicians who appointed them (after massive campaign donations) too often believe that universities should be run like businesses, despite the poor record of most actual businesses in human history.

Universities do not have “business models.” They have complementary missions of teaching, research, and public service. Yet such leaders think of universities as a collection of market transactions, instead of a dynamic (I said it) tapestry of creativity, experimentation, rigorous thought, preservation, recreation, vision, critical debate, contemplative spaces, powerful information sources, invention, and immeasurable human capital.

In a follow-up post, Vaidhyanathan writes, “Dragas demanded top-down control and a rapid transition to a consumer model of diploma generation and online content distribution. She wished to pare down the subjects of inquiry to those that demonstrate clear undergraduate demand and yield marketable skills.”

As many faculty at UVA and elsewhere have pointed out, UVA is actually a leader in integrating digital tools and techniques into teaching and research. Elijah Meeks, a digital humanities specialist at Stanford, praises UVA’s at once measured and innovative approach to the deployment of digital technologies in the humanities, and Vaidhyanathan details some of the successes. UVA professor Daniel Willingham wonders if Dragas et. al. are even slightly familiar with UVA’s leadership in this area.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch. . .

Because I recently had a conversation with my university’s president that suggested he’s committed to getting this whole online education thing right at Boise State, I was surprised to see him publish a post on the UVA debacle titled “A Classic Case of Public Higher Education up against the Changing Educational Marketplace.” I’m taking the liberty of quoting the entire post:

Here’s the latest example of a public university’s governing board struggling with how to offer educational programming that meets the needs of students in our 21st century cyber world. Historically, the faculty have control of the curriculum, but it is becoming increasingly clear that new mechanisms of shared governance must be invented to assure that decisions are made in a timely fashion that respond to changing student demands and needs. Apparently, the University of Virginia President spent too much time justifying the status quo decision-making apparatus of the University and the Board sought new leadership with an urgency about how the University responds to its environment. Makes sense to me.

That sound you heard? My jaw unhinging.

I had also somehow missed President Kustra’s post on a similar theme from earlier in June. An excerpt:

Here we have a veteran faculty member in the UT College of Education going over to the “dark side” with the usual and predictable mention of the inability of UT to respond to moves like this given the cutbacks in higher education budgets in Texas. Could it be that the “dark side” is the “enlightened side”, unencumbered by traditions of faculty and department control of curriculum that has been known to slow things up when universities are responding to rapid changes in the marketplace and community of ideas?

I know it’s hard to recover when the wind is knocked out of you so thoroughly. Fellow faculty, I’ll give you a moment to catch your breath.

Educators go all Hans Christian Andersen on the ed tech marketplace

We’re fortunate, I think, to have faculty like Vaidhyanathan and Willingham willing to speak out about these issues, as well as folks like Jim Groom, Martha Burtis, Alan Levine, Audrey Watters, Bryan Alexander, George Siemens, Laura Blankenship, Barbara Ganley, Barbara Sawhill, D’Arcy Norman, Mills Kelly, Amanda French, Dave Cormier, Patrick Murray-John, and Gardner Campbell,*** all of whom have, over the past several years, written thoughtfully and passionately about the truly necessary revolutions in digital learning. Another champion for logic in online education is Colorado State University professor Jonathan Rees of More or Less Bunk, who has for many months been pointing out that the Emperor of Online Education has no clothes. Here’s an excerpt from a recent jeremiad:

How much experience in the classroom does Bill Gates have? How much experience in the classroom does Helen Dragas have? Come to think of it, how much experience in the classroom do most edtech entrepreneurs have? While I know a few computer science professors have gotten involved in these startups, what boggles my mind is the number of people basically fresh off the street who seem to think they’re education experts.

(Be sure to also check out Rees’s recent posts “Frankenstein’s Monster,” “Why Stay in College?,” and “Are College Professors Working Class?”)

There are so many naked emperors in education technology–and far too many college presidents, trustees, and politicians willing to compliment ed tech marketplace “leaders” on their fine new robes.

Why I won’t be teaching online courses at Boise State anytime soon

Although I rarely act on it these days because I’m too busy pursuing tenure****, I have a deep entrepreneurial streak–something that President Kustra and others seem to celebrate in faculty–and an abiding curiosity in how we can best use digital tools to help students develop as learners and citizens. Yet I’m loath to develop any kind of online course for Boise State in part because its intellectual property policy offers a major disincentive to doing so. The policy, published on the eCampus website, states that faculty don’t retain IP rights to their own courses:

A course (as a designed collection of assembled and authored material) produced under University sponsorship, where the University provides the specific authorization or supervision for the preparation of the course, is a work made for hire (as defined by law and Boise State policy). A course specially ordered or commissioned by the University and for which the University has agreed to specially compensate or provide other support (such as release time) to the creator(s) is a commissioned work, (as defined by Boise State policy). In either case, the copyright to the course will be held and exercised by the university.

Furthermore, faculty members must get permission to re-use their course material at other institutions:

The faculty author/developer retains the right to request permission from the university to use parts of the course or the course in its entirety at another institution or setting. Granting of permission will be at the exclusive and sole prerogative of the university.

It’s funny–I didn’t realize faculty duties added up to “work for hire” (neither does the AAUP) or “commissioned work.”

Still, it’s a bit simple to boil down my objections to online-education-as-usual to intellectual property concerns. In fact, I’m frustrated that faculty control of e-course IP has been the most-vocalized theme among my Boise State colleagues. Even if I found myself in a different institutional context, my primary objections to online courses would be more in line with Rees’s than with those whose misgivings about online ed are primarily related to copyright and remuneration.

See, the tools the university and ed tech entrepreneurs expect me to use—course management systems, lecture capture, and publishers’ digital “textbook” packages–are so ridiculously sub-par that I don’t know whether to laugh or scream. I’ve had several conversations with publishers’ reps where they insist on walking me through their online environments and showing me their extensive quiz interfaces even though I tell them that I don’t quiz students or expect them to know any of the “content” that’s covered in the publishers’ sample quizzes.

They just don’t get it.

One bright spot: The Academic Technologies folks at my institution do get it, as evidenced by the terrific mobile learning summer institute they hosted at the end of May. Still, mobile learning here is in limited release, and too many of the participants were more curious about the BlackBoard app than they were about what they could have their students create or discover with the slick new iPads we all were issued.

I haven’t been present

I’ve been fairly AWOL on this blog of late, and I certainly haven’t been writing as much about educational technology as I did in the old space, circa 2006 to 2010, when the bulk of my job description involved the intersection of pedagogy and technology and when I was presenting at conferences with the Fear 2.0 posse. Mostly I’ve been too disgusted to write about the “reforms” to Idaho education. I know I am sick of hearing “reformers” claim that we should fire teachers so we can provide students with more technology–as Audrey Watters points out happened at the Davos-esque Education Innovation Summit.

That said, it’s past time for me to heed Watters’s call for educators to call the bluff of entrepreneurs and uninformed, wealthy folks who want to reform the educational sandbox by melting it down for silicon. Writing of her absence from that summit, Watters says it most eloquently:

What I learned from the Education Innovation Summit is mostly something that I learned about myself (partly because I’ve learned already about a lot of this corporate ed-tech nastiness, sadly). I learned I have to maintain my presence at these events, even when the attendees make me angry or uncomfortable. I have to continue to “speak truth to power” when it comes to education and its future. I have to be a witness. I have to provide a record. I have to speak up and speak out. I can’t let my fury stop me from writing. I can’t worry about compromising myself by being at the places where the rich and powerful are at play with our collective future, because the greater compromise is to walk away and be silent. I think that’s probably what they want, after all.

As I’ve mentioned here a couple of times, I’ve been experimenting in my history classes with mobile technologies in particular, and I plan to write more about those experiments soon. I’m just now making sense of all the data I collected from my spring-semester students on their experiences with educational technology in my class and outside of it, and I will be applying to the IRB to expand this study to my other classes. I’m looking at how we can get students using these devices to “do history”–to investigate primary sources, compile data, document people and places, create platforms to disseminate their work, and engage with the public.

Yes, of course I believe technology can be used thoughtfully with undergraduates. I continue to approach new technologies with curiosity and a good deal of eagerness.

But ed tech entrepreneurs (and others) without classroom experience who are trying to reshape my students’ learning environments in ways that make absolutely no sense? I’m ready to go all Hans Christian Andersen on their asses.

—–

* And oh look, this site suggests it’s 6 percent.

** I’d love to have some more specific figures for you, but apparently my “supervisor” (whomever that may be) needs to submit a request for me to have access to reports in the university’s data warehouse. Unfortunately, since all my computers are Macs and I don’t use Internet Explorer or run a virtual PC, I can’t access that data anyway.

*** Major oversight on my part: I’m not reading enough on this subject written by people of color. Who do you recommend I read?

**** Which you’d never know from the tenor and content of this blog post, eh?

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach, Tall tales and true, Technobabble, Wait. . . I moved to where?, Whining Exhortation and Angst

On Father’s Day

June 16, 2012 By Leslie M-B

When Fang and I decided to become parents, I remember being excited and enthusiastic about the whole affair. At the same time, I must admit I was apprehensive on two Fang-related fronts:

Dude needed a lot of alone time for creative projects and to maintain general mental wellness. As he was working from home most days, for the previous few years I had been spending a lot of time on campus, going to class, teaching, and doing research. Although we didn’t really know much about baby-rearing, I knew that the baby would complicate this arrangement.
The genetic lottery. Fang is adopted and has never met a blood relative, so in our informal research into the Bastardson gene pool, n=1. (One of my homework assignments in 10th grade required me to survey about 30 of my parents’ and grandparents’ traits, and I had apparently inherited the recessive alleles for 29 of these, so I figured my genes might not play a huge role in the child’s genetic makeup. Then again, one of my cousins has described our shared genetic heritage as “the ‘no diving’ end of the gene pool,” so I suppose that’s for the best.)

Lucas was born healthy and thankfully remains so. Sure, there may be some ticking genetic time bombs further down the line—hello, thyroid disease and orthodontia of the damned!—but for the most part I’m satisfied with our winnings in the biological lottery. As I suspected would be the case, Lucas is in many ways much more like Fang than I am, and I’m happy with that outcome.

I was much more worried about the ways baby Lucas would impinge on Fang’s need for dedicated creative time, and the coping mechanisms Fang might or might not have developed for that contingency. How much of the parental responsibilities would I have to bear? (I was pregnant and ABD. Would I ever finish my dissertation?) How much would a baby complicate our relationship with one another?

Those worries? Totally unfounded.

Even though I bear a good deal of affection and love for my own father, I must award Fang the honor of wearing the “World’s Greatest Dad” t-shirt this Father’s Day. With Lucas, he strikes the most amazing balance of love, logic, empathy, guidance, encouragement, and critique. In contrast to my prenatal worry that I would be bearing the most parental responsibilities, I now feel guilty that I haven’t contributed as much to Lucas’s recent major developmental milestones as Fang has.

Fang has been involved in Lucas’s school activities, volunteering in the classroom and getting to know which kids would be good candidates for playdates.

Fang was the one who finally pushed Lucas over the last hurdle from foiled-by-phonics to reading and writing words and sentences.

Fang has coached the boy to new physical prowess and enthusiasm for athleticism through Taekwondo, taking him to lessons two or three times each week.

Fang is chiefly responsible for the boy’s confidence in swimming.

Fang has allowed the boy to use his office as a gymnasium, which has dramatically increased Lucas’s confidence and bravery.

Fang has been the chief documentarian of the boy’s activities.

He is also responsible for the boy’s ~~impeccable table manners~~ sense of physical humor.

Fang has encouraged the boy’s creativity, providing him with the inspiration, tools, and–yes–a predisposition for weird experimentation.

Through all of this, Fang hasn’t let his success go to his head; he has remained self-deprecating. His caption for the following portrait taken by Lucas? “Eminem isn’t aging well.”

I’m so very grateful to have Fang in my life and, more importantly, in Lucas’s.

Thanks so much for everything you do, Sweetie. Happy Father’s Day. Rock on!

Filed Under: Mamablogging

Submitted without (much) comment

June 6, 2012 By Leslie M-B

I’m under way too many deadlines this week, so all I have for the blog is a few camera-phone snapshots from my day with the boy:

First, he was a total rockstar at the dentist.

The dentist took x-rays. See those giant incisors (at left) trying to push out the baby teeth? Yeah, he gets those from me. “There may be some crowding,” the dentist said. (May be? I wore braces for eight years and I had a quarter of my adult teeth removed. The boy is in for an orthodontic roller coaster ride of epic proportions.)

The boy has become enamored of late with a pedestrian overpass at the edge of our neighborhood. We’ve taken the dog over it before, but on those excursions we used the ramp on both ends. This time we thought we’d try the stairs.

Ends up the dog doesn’t do stairs. We often talk about how dumb and uncoordinated he is, and this was a classic Jake moment:

He muddled his way up to the landing, but there was no way in hell he was going to lift his hind feet onto the second set of stairs. Did I mention he weighs 100 pounds? So yeah, we coaxed and coached him back down the half-flight of stairs and walked around to the ramp. He’s a sweet dog, but he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Filed Under: Mamablogging

On the 75th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge

May 28, 2012 By Leslie M-B

Estelle (l) and Dorothy (r) Dannheim, 1937

My grandmother (at right) walked across the Golden Gate Bridge on the day it opened. She regretted wearing those too-small boots so much that she mentioned their discomfort 70 years later.

My great-grandfather joined the day’s action, also dressing in the family’s chosen theme:

Sidney Dannheim, 1937

I would have liked to walk across the bridge with you today, Grandma. I’m thinking of you.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, you can see what my ancestors’ San Francisco world looked like on that day.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Tall tales and true

Well, that was easy

May 4, 2012 By Leslie M-B

This calls for an illustration:

As I’ve mentioned, nearly three weeks ago I decided to go sugar-free and vegan. As you can see from the “before” and “after” photos, the new diet is really working for me. I feel awesome.

I posted this image on Facebook and received several questions in the comments and via private messages about what I’m eating and how I’m negotiating this with family meals, and I thought I’d explain here.

First, Fang and Lucas aren’t vegan, nor are they vegetarian or sugar-free. They’re continuing to eat in their own ways. Fang lost a lot of weight over the last year by moving to eating more raw, whole foods–mostly fruits–and Lucas likes his milk, meat, fruits, veggies, and carbs. I’m not going to mess with what works for them.

We eat meals together as a family, but even before I went vegan and sugar-free, none of us was eating exactly the same meal–and Fang doesn’t really do dinner anyway; he prefers to have a piece of fruit. I’m already used to fixing Lucas and me slightly different entrées, so the switch wasn’t that big a deal in terms of meal prep. As a 21-year vegetarian, I also was accustomed to eating around the edges when we have guests, so when we recently had folks over for dinner, I fixed chicken parmesan, breaded eggplant, a vegan green salad, asparagus, and bread. I ate everything but the chicken and still had a nutritious meal.

While I enjoy cooking occasionally for guests, for the most part I prepare very simple meals. Most of our meals were, and continue to be, cooked on the stovetop: simple stir-fry dishes, pasta, and steamed veggies are the norm. Instead of preparing cheese ravioli and asparagus for a simple typical dinner, I now fix whole-wheat pasta (or, on special occasions, the pricey vegan butternut squash ravioli from the fancy natural market that recently opened in town). I make sure the pasta doesn’t have any egg in it, and I don’t add parmesan; if I use marinara from a jar, I make sure to get a variety without added sugar. Otherwise, everything is pretty much the same.

The switch has also meant that I take my lunch to work more often than I was before. I’ll take a couple pieces of fruit, some carrots or bell pepper slices, maybe some nuts, and water. If I’m still hungry after eating fruits and veggies, I go buy a bagel, and sometimes I bring from home a chunk of very whole-grain bread (the kind with pumpkin seeds–yum!). This means I’m eating dramatically less fat, as the things I was buying on campus tended to be pretty loaded with cheese.

Lots of folks have asked me about calcium and protein. I’m taking a calcium supplement, just to be safe, but many of the foods I eat have calcium or are calcium-fortified, so I’m not worried about it too much. Similarly, I can get all the protein I need from my diet. If you’re curious, here’s a chart showing where a vegan’s protein might come from on any given day, and here’s an article listing various sources of vitamins and minerals in a vegan diet. I’ve been taking a multivitamin each day for years, so I don’t worry too much about getting the exactly appropriate nutrients each and every day, as long as everything averages out over the week.

Giving up refined sugar also means I’m not eating any treats. If I want a treat, I eat a few vegan blue corn or sweet potato chips. Now that I haven’t had sugar or a lot of fat for weeks, my palate works differently, and I’m finding simple foods such as fruits and veggies–even the mediocre ones found here in the country’s most isolated city of its size–to be more flavorful and enjoyable.

It has been difficult to find some things without added sugar, so I have had to compromise a bit. For example, I’ve been using soy milk for years, and I’ve tried different kinds of it in my cereal, and the unsweetened varieties just don’t do it for me, so the one I use contains evaporated cane juice. I like almond milk, but it doesn’t have as much protein as soy milk, so I’m sticking with soy for the most part. I like raspberries in my cereal, but fresh raspberries aren’t available year-round and they tend to be pricey here, so I use frozen raspberries, and I can’t find any locally that are sugar-free. As you might imagine, breakfast is the sweetest part of my day. I have switched from cereal with sugar to a couple different kinds of shredded wheat cereals that have only one ingredient—wheat—plus a preservative.

I craved sugar for the first two weeks, but now I’m fine. I don’t miss the dairy at all.

Although I’m committed to this diet for now–I have so much more energy, my skin feels both softer and more elastic, and I’ve lost a significant (for me) amount of weight (as well as two pants sizes)–I’d be depressed if I said I will never have another slice of cheesecake, cake, or fruit crisp. Accordingly, I’m taking things one day at a time.

Now that the semester is winding down and I should have a little more leisure time, I’m also recommitting to an exercise regimen. Trying to tame an out-of-control garden and yard is already helping me to feel more fit.

If you have any other questions, feel free to leave ’em in the comments. I’m still feeling my way around this new diet, but I’m happy to share what’s working for me because I really do feel great.

Filed Under: Tall tales and true, What passes for science around here

Ennui

May 3, 2012 By Leslie M-B

I adore this video.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill

Random bullets of OMFG you’ve got to be kidding me

April 26, 2012 By Leslie M-B

It’s almost the end of the semester here. I’m knee-deep, soon to be hip-deep, in grading. Wheeeeeeeee!

I’m collaborating on a grant proposal. I recently took the lead on a small but significant part of the project. An organization with whom I thought it would make sense to collaborate just quoted me a price tag for their participation that is, oh, 9 to 15 times what I expected it to be. And these are people with whom I genuinely wanted to collaborate, in part to establish a long-term relationship that would be beneficial to us all. FML.
Fortunately, I’ve found similar organizations that are willing to step into that breach, and for 1/3 the cost of what I expected to pay. Yay!
My students are finishing up their 40-person group project, and I’m concluding this semester’s students-with-iPads experiment. I’ll have more to say about that, I’m sure, when I see the final product.
The final product is going to require a bunch of technical work from me. It will test the limits of my WordPress knowledge, I suspect, but the PHP and CSS that don’t kill me my site only make me ~~stronger~~ more likely not to mess it all up in exactly the same way next time.
I also had an honest-to-goodness research question, with human subjects approval and everything, related to the mobile learning experiment this semester. More on that this summer, once I tally students’ responses to the surveys and card sorts.
I remember there was a time when I was desperate for journal article ideas. Now I have more than I can write. It’s not a bad problem to have.
I had two digital history interns this semester, and the work they’ve done has been really helpful to me and fun and useful for them. I have a little bit of summer money to throw their way, too, so they can continue with the project.
I learned today from a reputable source that a key administrator thinks my plan to fully integrate digital humanities training into our public history M.A. program is solely a ploy to put “toys” (iPads) into faculty hands. Methinks a conversation is in order.
I just had a really nice invitation extended to me from another key administrator. It’s nice to know my work with technology is being recognized around here.
I’ve also had lots of warm fuzzies from students lately, in that way that only students can give compliments–you know, along the lines of “I fucking hate my other classes this semester. I wish I had you for all my classes because I enjoy our readings and discussions so much!”
Today I signed off on an art student’s senior exhibition pieces. She did an awesome job, and she even referenced taxidermy. (She put me on her committee because we bonded over our fascination with human hair ornaments and taxidermy on the first day of my Women in the American West class this semester.) It was fun, too, to be on a committee with three art professors.
In other news: sugar cravings are hard. I think I’ll be happier when the summer fruit arrives.
That said, 11.5 days into my veganism, I’m not really missing dairy. I suspect I’ll go 30 days without refined sugar or artificial sugar substitutes, and then let myself have one treat each week. The vegan thing will likely last longer, though I may be a fair-weather vegan; I have a soft spot, for example, for parmesan cheese on pasta, and for buttercream cake frosting. (If you’re a vegan who has a fabulous substitute for such things, let me know.)
I was doing this vegan and sugar thing to see how it would make me feel. A nice side effect? I’ve lost 9 pounds over the past week and a half.
Tonight I had a pretty damn brilliant idea for an infographic/stunning visual image. It’s good that I’m married to a graphic artist. I hope we can bring the idea to fruition.
I’m looking forward to summer. I have too many projects, and I need to try to remember to relax and enjoy my time with the boy.

So, more good than bad. Yay.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach, Tall tales and true, Technobabble, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Fifty

April 20, 2012 By Leslie M-B

Today Fang turns fifty. Honestly, the way he lived his first quarter-century and part of his second, we’re all kind of shocked he’s made it this far.

That said, I’m incredibly grateful that I’ve been able to spend the last 13 or so years with him. Thanks, Sweetheart, for your love, generosity, creativity, laughter, and all that music.

Rock on, Fang. Rock on.

Filed Under: Tall tales and true