Sometimes I teach

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

July 6, 2012 By Leslie M-B

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

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

RBOC, that-time-of-the-semester, highly parenthetical edition

April 17, 2012 By Leslie M-B

Good god—it’s been more than two months since I last blogged.
It’s that time of the semester. Paper deadlines and exams swoop down upon undergraduates. Students cry in my office and, quietly, at the back of my classroom—but not about the course. Even the usually-stoic-in-class veterans are teetering. One student veteran recently pointed out that his classmate, also a veteran, is much more, er, complicated than he is, though the latter student had only been to one war, and the former had been in two. (These are not UC Davis students, I am constantly reminded.)
I, too, have deadlines galore. Maybe I need to have a good cry in my office. I suspect I’m teetering and haven’t yet recognized it. (I look around the unbelievable mess of my home office: yep, definitely teetering.)
I decided, amidst all this deadlining, to give up sugar. (Those of you who have ever had a meal with me know to look out the window for pigs on the wing.)
And then I thought, hell, why not give up dairy and eggs, too?
It’s only day two of those experiments, but I already feel better. And for the hundredth time I cite the Seamus Heaney line: “You are fasted now, lightheaded, dangerous”—a great time to blog.
My kindergartener is so awesome. And so is his dad. In fact, I suspect my kid is awesome in large part due to his dad.
Fang’s fiftieth birthday is on Friday. How the hell am I married to a 50-year-old man? (And why do I look closer in age to 50 than Fang does? I must investigate the attic for a portrait.)
Mostly I’m feeling overwhelmed with the little things at work. So many little things! But summer is coming, and the little things will, because they must, go poof!
Big things, not so much with the poofing. I wrote a proposal to Academic Technologies to make our public history master’s degree the university’s “mobile learning” program, and (to, I think, the great disbelief of my colleagues) our department won that CFP. That project will come home to roost in a big way this summer.
Our interim chair, who is literally counting down the days to the end of his year in that position, yesterday asked me if I was director of our public history program. Um, no. Regardless, he assigned me to speak as the director of said program when our accreditation visitors arrive next week. “Director” comes with more money, yes?
I’m very much in absorption mode, an intellectual sponge. Reading, thinking, reading. Downloading articles. Jotting down notes. And then—miracle of miracles—messing around the edges of articles that need substantial revision. This is usually a sign that Big Writing is on the horizon. That’s good. Big Writing must get done.

How are things with you, dear readers?

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

An undergraduate experiment in digital humanities, part I

February 15, 2012 By Leslie M-B

We’re into week five of my Women in America: The Western Experience course, which means it’s time for students to start to get serious about the final project. Since some Clutter Museum readers showed interest in how the project progresses, I thought I’d provide an update.

To review: my 40 undergraduates will be building an online exhibition about the history of Idaho women’s amateur arts and crafts. I’m leaving the platform open, but I suspect the choice will come down to WordPress or Omeka, and I’m guessing the students will choose WordPress, though who knows? Maybe they’ll surprise me. Because all the students in the course have iPads, I’m encouraging them to optimize the exhibit for that screen size and resolution.

Yesterday, student groups picked their topics from a list of arts and crafts categories, all of which are represented by artifacts in storage at the local museum:

basketry
wedding dresses
lacework
plein air painting
beadwork
taxidermy
ornaments and wreaths made from human hair
quilts
needlework

There are eight groups, but I put nine possible topics on the list so that the final group to select a category still could choose between two of them. I can’t believe no one opted to study the Victorian human hair ornaments. I mean, seriously–one of the artifacts available for study and interpretation is a family tree made from intricately woven hair from each represented family member. What’s not to love?

Taxidermy was the last topic picked. The group seemed a bit disappointed in its topic, so I shared a bit of history with them, and now they’re pretty excited about it. Women + 19th-century U.S. + taxidermy = awesome wackiness. And god only knows what they’re going to find in the equation of women + 20th-century Idaho + taxidermy. I’m hoping for some steampunk.

Students will be heading to the museum to photograph artifacts on display there, and to museum storage to photograph and research additional objects. The museum’s curatorial registrar came to talk to the class yesterday about her job, the basics of artifact conservation, guidelines for photographing objects on exhibit, and the rules for viewing the artifacts in storage and using photographs of them online. She emphasized that, because of security concerns, the first rule of Museum Storage Club is that you do not talk about Museum Storage on social media or post photos of it or disclose its location. Students found that secrecy fascinating, I think.

Her talk definitely heightened some students’ sense of adventure in the project. Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone, and certainly not twentysomething undergrad, so excited to go try to photograph scraps of 100-year-old lacework in a dimly lit environment. I’m hoping they maintain this excitement throughout the semester. I’ll keep you posted. . .

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

All manifestoed out, part II: admitting graduate students edition

February 2, 2012 By Leslie M-B

As promised, here’s another mini-rant, or rather series-of-questions-whose-answers-would-likely-lead-me-to-mega-rant. And with this one, I’d really like your assistance.

Because I’m one of only two faculty in my department whose specialty is officially “public history”—mind you, we all practice one form of it or another, but I have been anointed by my position description—pretty much all the applications for admission to our Master’s in Applied Historical Research program come across my desk. Usually I just write a few notes explaining why I’m recommending we admit the candidate, admit hir provisionally, or decline to admit hir, and then that’s the last I see of the application. I also don’t get to see my colleagues’ comments on the application, as that might unduly bias me.

Occasionally, however, an application comes back to me when individual faculty make conflicting recommendations about admission. So, for example, I might say we should admit someone, but two or three of my fellow faculty recommend the opposite. In many departments, a majority “no” vote might be the end of the line for an application, but our graduate program director gives me (or anyone else whose vote differs, I’m assuming) the opportunity to reconsider the application, to change my vote or take a stand or something in between.

At such moments, I get to see the admissions recommendations and, more importantly, the comments of my fellow evaluators. And often I’m in complete agreement with what they’re saying about the application, but I still want to recommend the opposite of what they do.

I’m not sure why, but it took me a year and a half in the department to realize that our occasionally differing visions about who should be admitted to the program stem from our–wait for it–differing visions about the program’s capabilities and mission.

My friends, we lack collective clarity.*

See, we have two programs: a traditional M.A. in history, and the M.A.H.R. The department’s web page describes the programs using almost exactly the same language, differentiating between the two only by saying the M.A. will prepare students for work in academic settings at all levels (by which I assume we mean high school teaching or the occasional adjunct gig) and the M.A.H.R. prepares students for careers outside academic settings. Programmatically, the degree requirements differ very little, with M.A.H.R. students taking one additional seminar in public history—but when I taught that course last spring, there were several M.A. students in it, too. The M.A.H.R. students can substitute “skills” courses (like GIS or video editing) for the foreign language courses required of the M.A. students. The M.A.H.R. students are also allowed, and encouraged, to take more internship credits.

If you’ve been around the history graduate program block lately, maybe you’re reading this as I do: the M.A.H.R. program is about helping students take very specific steps toward getting jobs. The M.A. program. . .maybe not so much. I don’t work with the M.A. students much, so I’m not sure what they want out of the program, but the M.A.H.R. students often have very specific goals: to open a historical consulting firm, to go into museum exhibit development, to make a documentary film, to apprentice themselves in a historic preservation office.

My latest (implied) rant took the form, then, of a memo to the graduate program coordinator in which I asked these questions (and provided my own tentative answers):

Should the students applying to the M.A.H.R. program have the same preparation and/or potential as students applying to the M.A. program?
If not, should we differentiate the application process for the M.A. and M.A.H.R. programs?
If we differentiate the applications, is a 15-20 page, traditional academic essay the best way to gauge preparedness for the M.A.H.R. program? If not, what is?
If we do away with the academic essay requirement for M.A.H.R. students, how will they demonstrate their ability to work with primary and secondary sources?

Here’s the thing: I read a lot of mediocre writing in those applications, from both M.A. and M.A.H.R. applicants. Many of the objections from my colleagues stem from applicants’ bad writing or poor research skills. And in my own classes, I’m a pretty unforgiving taskmaster when it comes to writing. So I’m not suggesting that we lower to the admissions bar for M.A.H.R. applicants. Yet maybe we need to acknowledge that public historians’ work embraces a huge spectrum; some public historians might find themselves addressing K-6 students, while others work primarily with policymakers. On the job, some will rarely write anything longer than an exhibit label. Others will need to write eloquently in grant proposals. Many will need to do both.

I suspect that many of the applicants who can’t write a good enough academic essay to be admitted to a traditional academic programs can still engage in critical and creative thought–it’s just that the essay isn’t the best way for them to exhibit these skills. Someone who is a good fit for our M.A. program might not be a good fit for the M.A.H.R. program, and vice versa. I suspect we faculty have been treating applicants as if they’re applying to the same program.

The grad program coordinator told me to bring my questions and concerns to the faculty at a department meeting. Our faculty meetings are relatively fleet things, thank goodness, but it also means I need to find a way to encourage people to either (a) coalesce around a unified vision in, oh, 10-15 minutes or (b) reflect on what they think the difference between the two programs should be and share their individual visions with me before the next meeting.

Of course, before I do that, I’d like some information from other programs. I’ll be scouring departmental web pages and perhaps contacting some folks, but in the meantime, here’s what I’d like from you, dear readers:

If you teach in, or pursued a degree within, a humanities or social science department that offers to graduate students an “academic” track and a “practical” or “non-academic career” track, how do you differentiate between applicants to the two programs? Do you require essays or something else? Do you require interviews? Do you expect applicants to propose specific projects? Do you ask recommenders to comment on the applicants’ career potential instead of just their academic performance? How can you tell which applicants might be a better fit for one degree track over another?

Please share your experiences in the comments. I know many of you maintain your anonymity on the interwebz, so you can either obfuscate a few details, comment anonymously, or you can e-mail me privately at trillwing -at- gmail -dot- com.

Many thanks!

* . . .in an academic department. A stunning revelation, I know.

Photo by vlasta2, and used under a Creative Commons license.

Filed Under: Administrivia, Putting the "Public" in Public History, Sometimes I teach, Whining Exhortation and Angst

All manifestoed out, part I

January 25, 2012 By Leslie M-B

I was just reading about how young Assistant Professor Newt Gingrich was booted from his History department and dumped unceremoniously on Geography because he was thinking too much about the future for a professor of history. I fear I may be coming across as a bit Gingrinchy this week, as I just realized it’s only Wednesday and I’ve already written three mini-rants about the future directions of the department and university.*

I’m going to share versions of them here, as each really raises more questions than it answers, and I know my wise and worldly readers may have some wisdom to share in the comments.

Rant the first: On teaching and learning with technology

A senior colleague said The Powers That Be were looking to completely remake the university’s ways of teaching undergraduates within six years, and that this revolution would be brought to us by online courses delivered (I suspect) through Everyone’s Favorite Learning Management System. Online courses, it was suggested, would automagically improve the university’s ridiculously dismal graduation rates.

I couldn’t help but put on my Critical Thinking Cap** and ask these questions:

1. Does the data show whether taking online courses makes it easier for the demographic of students who enroll at Our Fair University to graduate in 4 to 6 years?

2. What are the completion rates of online courses vs. face-to-face courses vs. hybrid courses?

3. Is there a tipping point at which online courses become detrimental to a student’s ability to graduate? So, for example, I know there are students who have overwhelmingly taken face-to-face courses, but who pursue their last course or two online in order to graduate. The availability of such courses, I imagine, increases the graduation rate for some students. There are also students who would prefer to enroll in a course of study that is predominantly online. Are students who take two courses online more or less likely to graduate than students who take eight or ten courses online? How do the statistics at Our Fair University stack up against other Idaho institutions and against peer institutions outside our state? How does Our Fair University plan to identify those students who would genuinely benefit from online learning–and separate them from students who would likely abandon their courses and force the university’s graduation rate to decline further?

4. Are employers more or less likely to hire graduates of online or predominantly online programs? Does willingness or hesitation to hire such graduates vary by discipline, geographical region, and/or the institution issuing the degree?

5. As a new faculty member, I’m also confused about the differing narratives about teaching and learning I’m hearing from various offices at Our Fair U. On the one hand, we’re told by Office 1 and Office 2 that we should be “guides on the side” rather than “sages on the stage.” On the other hand, I’m encouraged by Office 3 to take advantage of lecture capture technologies. Such audio capture technologies can’t record the discussions generated by students when I’m being a “guide on the side.” (Nor, by the way, can the videos generated by Echo360 be easily captioned or transcribed for deaf students or described for blind students.) Similarly, I’m hearing how easy and beneficial it is to place “content” into learning “management” systems like Blackboard. A “guide on the side,” however, wouldn’t view students as vessels into whom content should be poured/downloaded, nor would she see student learning as something that should be “managed” with technology. I’ve been involved in teaching with technology, as well as teaching faculty to use technology in their teaching of undergraduates, for many years, so I want to emphasize that this issue isn’t merely rhetorical dissonance between campus offices. There seems to be a deep and profound divide between what we’re told are best pedagogical practices and the technology we’re being provided to help students learn. The university needs to figure this out before we advance further.

Honestly, I’m agnostic about online learning. I think online learning can be done well, but that it is too often (usually?) done poorly. If Our Fair University provided instructors with software like MediaWiki, WordPress, VoiceThread, and game development platforms rather than Blackboard and Echo360, I might be tempted to develop online courses. As it is, I don’t feel the university is currently providing me with the tools I’d need to meet the university’s own set of best practices in undergraduate pedagogy.

Academic readers, how are your institutions addressing these issues? Is anyone actually crunching the data to determine the relationship between online learning and graduation rates at regional public universities (or elsewhere, for that matter)?

*To be fair, all three were solicited, rather than imposed in a fit of manic delusion.

**Yes, humanists–even those of us with cultural studies degrees–do have access to such things.

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

One junior historian’s to-do list

January 6, 2012 By Leslie M-B

Thanks in part to the Modern Language Association and American Historical Association conferences, there’s a lot of talk in the blogosphere and on Twitter right now about what university faculty work should look like, public perceptions of faculty work, and how humanists and historians might think more broadly about how their research and careers intersect with public life.

I have more to say about these topics in a broad, waxing-philosophical sort of way, but for now I thought I’d just share a list of my current projects. Consider it one more data point in describing the workload and work life of a faculty member in history, in my case a junior, tenure-track one at a regional public university.

Please do share your own work. I’d love to hear what’s keeping you occupied, and I suspect I’m not the only one who would appreciate the opportunity to compare and contrast workloads and projects.

Here’s what I’m doing for the next couple weeks:

Collaborating with a colleague on a proposal for an NEH summer institute
Collaborating with an interdisciplinary team on an NSF grant proposal to produce a monologue-based play about historical women in science
Writing a couple short articles for an informal science wiki designed to inform applicants for NSF grants in informal science education. Topics: “In what ways have citizen science programs advanced the public understanding of science and influenced public attitudes about scientific issues?” and “To what extent have humanities content, theory, and methods been incorporated successfully into informal science education, why, and to what end?”
Revising a chapter on the myth of Black Confederate soldiers for the book Writing History in a Digital Age
Planning for my ambitious spring course
Filling out IRB forms so I can later publish research about my spring course
Peeking at two journal articles that need extensive revision before resubmission
Continuing to shepherd The Boise Wiki I founded last spring, at this moment by applying for a small grant
Recruiting history majors to present papers at the regional Phi Alpha Theta conference (I’m the faculty adviser for our local chapter)
Mentoring my graduate students, two of whom are presenting their museum exhibits—one on Prohibition in Idaho and one on the Idaho boxcar of the Merci Train—this spring
Planning two trips to archives, funded by a research fellowship from my college
Preparing a proposal for the Western Museums Association conference
Playing matchmaker for history interns and organizations
Planning for my one-credit spring workshop “Rethinking Museums”

When I look at this list, it’s kind of crazy-making, especially since it comes on the heels of an exceptionally busy December. I have a mentoring committee that meets infrequently, and the folks on it do know about these activities. At our last meeting, their biggest suggestion for improvement in my progress toward tenure was “publish book reviews.” While I understand the utility of book reviews as a form of service to the profession, I didn’t know whether to roll my eyes or giggle, as I think I really have enough other stuff on my plate that might trump book reviews in my tenure case a few years hence. (Full disclosure: I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a book review in an academic journal.) So I suppose I should add to my list:

Contacting journal editors re: book reviews

What’s keeping you busy at the beginning of 2012?

Awesome image by Chris Scott, and used under a Creative Commons license

Filed Under: Putting the "Public" in Public History, Sometimes I teach, Tall tales and true

Trying not to freak out: spring course edition

January 4, 2012 By Leslie M-B

What do you get when you mix iPads, old taxidermy, hair ornaments, and a near-complete disregard for one’s own pedagogical tradition?

My spring course, History 346: Women in the American West.

It’s the first time I’ve taught the course, and I’ve decided to throw caution to the wind.

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40 students, upper-division History, cross-listed with Gender Studies. Books by and about women.

In

Squatters on Mexican land grants in California. Women Zoot suiters. Manzanar. Dorothea Lange. A hundred years of Chinese Americans. Native American activism. Museum artifacts, some made from human hair. Also probably some taxidermy. Plus: an iPad2 on loan to each student. Several one-page reflection papers. One giant group project.

Out

Covered wagons, bonneted pioneers, Sacajawea, Oregon Trail, Donner party. Individually authored, end-of-course research essays.

The project I suspect makes some of my colleagues think I’m not playing with a full deck

My students are going to construct an online experience (I’m looking for a better word–exhibit doesn’t quite do it for me) about the history of Idaho women’s amateur arts and crafts. They’ll be drawing on frequently uninterpreted objects from the collection of the state historical society: needlework, ornaments made from human hair, quilting, beading, plein air painting, taxidermy, sewing (clothing), and whatever else we find in storage or on exhibit. They’ll have to research and document these artifacts, take and edit photos, correspond with experts, write essays about women’s participation in each kind of arts and craft practice, determine on what platform they’d like to build this project (I’m guessing WordPress or Omeka, but maybe they’ll surprise me), break down the work across several smaller groups of students, create a timeline to ensure the exhibit is complete, build the damn thing, and put in place quality assurance protocols.

Each student is being loaned an iPad2 for the semester by the university’s academic technologies office, under the auspices of its Mobile Learning Scholars program. This is my second year as an m-learning scholar.

But basically, yeah, I’m giving the students shiny new devices and asking them to engage in a 40-person, high-stakes group project.

Hey look—I have research questions

1. In what ways does the student practice and presentation of western U.S. women’s history—often represented in its raw form through sometimes difficult-to-interpret everyday objects and letters rather than through political and business documents—benefit from an approach that emphasizes collaborative research and interpretation; technology that allows for a media-rich interpretive experience (including, for example, a closer, relatively three-dimensional examination of artifacts than is afforded by a museum exhibit); and an engagement with potential audience members through social media from the moment of a project’s conception?

2. How does the use of tablet computers influence the depth and breadth of student collaborations and the quality of the work resulting from these collaborations?

Inspirations

Frustration with how I’ve evaluated student work in the past (so much grading, and What Really Matters gets thrown into question)—and solutions brought to me in part by thinking about the fox in the video game.
Martha Burtis and Jim Groom of ds106 fame. This project is far less ambitious and considerably less wacky than their grand and highly successful experiments, but it has its creative roots and insistence on student responsibility and ownership of learning technologies in the experiments going on at the University of Mary Washington these last several years.
Also: Alan Levine‘s insistence on constantly creating, iterating, and sharing.

Anticipated challenges

Persuading students not to jump ship or panic when I tell them a good deal of their grade is based on the Mother Of All Group Work.
Convincing students, once and for all, not to form their smaller groups with the people who happen to be sitting next to them that day. (Will they never learn, despite my repeated warnings?)
Showing students that there are indeed connections between the readings and the Mother Of All Group Work.
Getting students to be reflective about women’s history, public history, and their anxieties about creating stuff with technology—without sounding all touchy-feely. (“Get in touch with your inner PHP learner. . . What is she afraid of? What can you do to help her?”)
Not overwhelming the museum’s fabulous curatorial registrar, who is also one of my grad students, and who is also trying to mount her own exhibit and graduate this spring.
Getting IRB approval to study my students’ collaborations and publish the results. (In progress. . . The paperwork is a headache and a half, as it forces me to be all social-sciencey in a way with which I’m not comfortable.)

I’m at once excited about the course possibilities and dreading finding out the multiple small ways in which it will inevitably go off the rails. Wheeeeeee!

Assuming the semester doesn’t get too busy and stressful (ha!), I’ll blog about the course here at The Clutter Museum.

What are you looking forward to (or dreading) about your projects or classes over the next several months?

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

Random bullets of updates

December 20, 2011 By Leslie M-B

. . . aaaaaand scene! I’ve turned in my grades for the semester, so now I can focus on grant proposals that are due waaaay too soon. (Someday I’m gonna get me some of that big humanities money, folks.)

So. . .where have I been lately?

I’ve been serving hard time in solitary in Grading Jail, with occasional time off to work as a plagiarism prosecutor. For the first time ever, I had a student plagiarize an in-class, handwritten final exam. That’s dedication, my friends. Tip for future undergraduates: if we don’t discuss Montesquieu in class, it’s probably best to leave him out of your final. BWOOP! BWOOP! <—-the sound of my plagiarism alarm being triggered.

I went to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History to check out a couple new-to-me exhibits. Unfortunately, after 10 years of trying to photograph museum exhibits, I’m still crappy at it, but here’s a glimpse of the newish ocean hall:

There’s also a good new human evolution exhibit, as well as a thoughtful one about race in America. But many other exhibits are in need of updating; for example, 1965 called, and it wants its diorama dinosaurs back:

As my crappy museum photos suggest, I took a lightning trip during finals week to D.C. Tip for D.C. travelers: Don’t stay in a hotel on a traffic circle, and especially not this one. I had forgotten how much drivers in D.C. like to honk. Side note: my room had an exterior door to a shared, hotel-long walkway. It didn’t have a lock on it, and it could be opened from the outside wide enough for someone to peek into the room and possibly throw the improperly installed swing-bar “door guard.” Look, I took a crappy picture of it with my phone one night:

After Christmas, much of my energy will go into planning for my spring course, Women in the American West. Every student in the 40-person course will be loaned an iPad2, and we’ll be building an online exhibit? presence? experience? about the history of Idaho women’s arts and crafts. I’m talking plein air painting, needlework, Victorian ornaments made of human hair, and taxidermy. Yes–taxidermy! I’m tossing aside the traditional, individually authored research paper for this class in favor of one enormous final digital humanities project co-authored by 40 undergrads. It could be a total nightmare, but I think my nefarious plans will work.

Intellectually, the end of the summer and first part of the fall was tough, but in the past week I received two invitations to revise and resubmit, one of them relatively simple. Yay for that. I also have fellowship funding to travel to archives during both spring and summer breaks, and my teaching schedule in the spring is only two days a week. This fall it was four days a week, and it ends up such a schedule makes it hard to find time to write. Who knew?

In family news:

I’m watching my child grow like a weed. At his last doctor’s visit, he was in the 97th percentile for height, and today we measured him: 4 feet, 3 inches at 6 years, 3 months. He’s enjoying kindergarten and is becoming totally obsessed with birds and crafting objects out of recycled materials. Today I taught him how to do running and whip stitches, and he was all about the sewing. He also seems to be finally catching on to this whole “literacy” thing. Thank you, Dr. Seuss!

Fang normally does not look forward to the holidays–too much travel, too many obligations–but has been surprisingly chipper this week.

Our 100-pound Lab/Golden Retriever mix–he’ll be 2 years old in February–remains hilariously dumb and blocks our paths through the house most of the time, but is exceptionally sweet and enthusiastic. His head is so large and cinderblock-esque that he has taken to resting it awkwardly on horizontal surfaces around the house. He keeps us laughing. Here he is next to the boy, for scale:

What’s going on in your neck of the woods?

Filed Under: Mamablogging, Sometimes I teach, Tall tales and true, What passes for science around here

An experiment in online course evaluation

December 5, 2011 By Leslie M-B

Back when I was in the cube farm of academic technology, we tried an experiment within our then-new course management system: we had a large class (hundreds upon hundreds of students) pilot a mid-semester evaluation. The instructor emphasized the importance of the evaluation and reminded students to take it, but our return rate was still only 8 percent. It pretty much soured me on online evaluations, as such a low return rate renders the evals useless. (At UC Davis at the time, veterinary students did get an invitation to chat with the dean personally if they didn’t fill out their course evals. Otherwise, there wasn’t any institutional effort to “incentivize”* students–that is, the registrar wouldn’t withhold a student’s grades until she had filled out her course evals.)

Fast forward to today. Boise State is offering online course evaluations, but recently the university announced that whether or not a course participates is not up to the instructor; each department either has to stick with in-class, paper-based evaluations or go all in with the online evals. In the department meeting where we discussed the issue, we were leaning toward paper, and then one colleague said he had piloted online evals and was getting response rates of 90 percent. I’d like to see the evidence of that, but whatever. . . it was persuasive enough that the sense of the meeting shifted toward a semester trial of online evaluations.

We’ve been told we should “incentivize” student participation in online evaluations, for example by offering perks (e.g. students could bring a 3″ x 5″ note card with them to the final exam or we’d drop the lowest quiz grade) if the class return rate reached, say, 80 percent. And yes–those are the actual suggestions from the administration. Never mind that I don’t give quizzes, and my students already can bring essay outlines on notecards to the final–I’m not going to reward students for doing something that I see as part of fulfilling the social and intellectual contract for the course.

So instead of offering to bribe my survey students, I spent an entire class talking (as I often do, but this time more frankly and comprehensively) about why I’ve taught History 111–U.S. history to 1877–the way I have.

Topics covered, and student reactions to each one:

memories of high school history, what they learned, and what they’ve used since then: mostly not good, dates and events, and not much, respectively.
experiences with, and feelings about, lectures in college, regardless of discipline: mostly bad, crappy PowerPoint presentations; suspicions that a professor or two is bullshitting them full-time.
political versus social and cultural history: prior to college, students haven’t been exposed, by and large, to social and cultural histories, except in very small amounts; they find it refreshing, particularly if we’re doing “history from below.”
students as vessels to be filled with “content”** and the relation of this approach to online courses and pedagogies of scale: resentment, boredom, disbelief.
survey textbooks***: expensive, unreadable, useless–pretty much unadulterated loathing.

Our conversation lasted 45 minutes, and at the end I made another pitch for them to fill out course evaluations, saying that their feedback is not only valuable to me individually, but it also allows instructors to make a case to deans and provosts and beyond that ~~customers~~ students do think about learning in ways that should matter to us. I then reiterated to them that I really do make changes in my course structure and teaching style based on student feedback, and that since I may have 30 more years (!!!!) in the classroom, they have the opportunity to make a big impact on future students’ learning experiences. I encouraged them to take ten minutes or so to fill out the evaluation as soon as possible.

This class’s online response rate thus far, more than halfway through the response window? Twenty-one percent. Anyone care to guess how little that number will rise, even with repeated urgings, by the time the survey closes on Friday evening? Leave your bets in the comments.

* Worst word ever? Possibly.

** Remember when we used to say “knowledge” instead of “content”?

*** For the record, I used Major Problems in American History, Volume I by Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman et. al.; Abraham in Arms by Ann Little; Mongrel Nation by Clarence Walker; and They Saw the Elephant by Joann Levy. Each book takes a very different approach to history, with Little’s being the most traditional (yet also very readable!), Walker’s serving as a witty and searing examination of why different American demographic groups view the Jefferson-Hemings liaison in divergent ways, Levy’s book offering thematic chapters but not footnotes or endnotes, and Major Problems bringing together eight to ten primary sources in each chapter with two essays usually excerpted from books by academic historians. My students found Little’s book challenging at first but conceded they enjoyed each chapter more than the previous ones. Walker’s book was puzzling but made for the best class discussion because it was the most explicitly provocative. Levy’s book was the most accessible, and my Idaho students seemed to appreciate its focus on western women’s history, as their exposure to regional women’s history (or, actually, any women’s history) previously was via pioneer wives and Sacajawea. I suspect most students stopped reading the essays in Major Problems as early as a third of the way into the semester, and many students needed a great deal of guidance in interpreting primary sources.

Whiteboard image by Skye Christensen, and used under a Creative Commons license.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach, Uncategorized, What passes for science around here