How did this absurd situation arise? It's a familiar story of the steady infiltration of market fundamentalism into academe over the past 30 years.
Note to readers
Sunday, June 5, 2011
What's at Stake in the Georgia State Copyright Case - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
What's at Stake in the Georgia State Copyright Case - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Senior Lecturer vs TA With a Clicker? Who Wins the Teaching Award? | HASTAC
Senior Lecturer vs TA With a Clicker? Who Wins the Teaching Award? | HASTAC:
If a student takes such an approach, then they're not ready to learn. Notes from class better be more than how many stars today's lecture received. Lecture is inherently interactive for the engaged student. Worse, those lecturers who are seduced by the explanation that entertainment is the primary goal of lecturing don't deserve the title.
When will we again learn the motivation of letting people fail? When did university professors take the onus of their students' success -- all of their students -- from those students themselves? And how precisely do we measure who "learned a lot more"? Does it necessarily spill over into long-term retention? Is it really a college professor's responsibility to get "real-time graphic feedback on what the students were learning and what they weren't getting"? What's really important isn't what can be solved in 5-15 of directed teaching. It's the questions that, after spending the 3:1 hours outside of class, students still can't shake. Lecture's not about the now, it's about the long term. Get the minds started, expose them to your fundamentals, and let them learn to model that investigation when they return to their dorms, the library, and coffee houses.
Inspired by lecture? Speak up. Join the academic conversation. Start modeling the role of an expert. But if you don't understand something? Study like hell and then ask. Find office hours and show up. Have to be entertained to learn? Watch Blues Clues. Want to have the opportunity to interact with the brightest minds, both your instructor and your peers? Apply to college.
Most importantly, understand that teaching qua teaching happens outside of the classroom, tailored not to the aggregate feedback of 30 students answering multiple choice from the last 10 minutes, but to the personally expressed feedback from one well-prepared, self-motivated mind who has given the content hours of dedicated consideration. Distant and cursory readings of 30 students will never take the place of paying attention to each one as an individual.
Honestly, the amount of the students' homework college lecturers are doing for them at this point is absolutely insane. Where are the brightest minds in the field supposed to go if they don't want to play Simon with their students?
If you're not self-motivated in college, languish on the vine. We need to [re]start recognizing those who intrinsically care about the content, about learning, and about scholars who create scholarship. Set your bar higher, folk, and reward the students who follow.
... but, in general, the hierarchical form of the lecture relieves the hearer of having to do much more than be entertained...
If a student takes such an approach, then they're not ready to learn. Notes from class better be more than how many stars today's lecture received. Lecture is inherently interactive for the engaged student. Worse, those lecturers who are seduced by the explanation that entertainment is the primary goal of lecturing don't deserve the title.
When will we again learn the motivation of letting people fail? When did university professors take the onus of their students' success -- all of their students -- from those students themselves? And how precisely do we measure who "learned a lot more"? Does it necessarily spill over into long-term retention? Is it really a college professor's responsibility to get "real-time graphic feedback on what the students were learning and what they weren't getting"? What's really important isn't what can be solved in 5-15 of directed teaching. It's the questions that, after spending the 3:1 hours outside of class, students still can't shake. Lecture's not about the now, it's about the long term. Get the minds started, expose them to your fundamentals, and let them learn to model that investigation when they return to their dorms, the library, and coffee houses.
Inspired by lecture? Speak up. Join the academic conversation. Start modeling the role of an expert. But if you don't understand something? Study like hell and then ask. Find office hours and show up. Have to be entertained to learn? Watch Blues Clues. Want to have the opportunity to interact with the brightest minds, both your instructor and your peers? Apply to college.
Most importantly, understand that teaching qua teaching happens outside of the classroom, tailored not to the aggregate feedback of 30 students answering multiple choice from the last 10 minutes, but to the personally expressed feedback from one well-prepared, self-motivated mind who has given the content hours of dedicated consideration. Distant and cursory readings of 30 students will never take the place of paying attention to each one as an individual.
Honestly, the amount of the students' homework college lecturers are doing for them at this point is absolutely insane. Where are the brightest minds in the field supposed to go if they don't want to play Simon with their students?
If you're not self-motivated in college, languish on the vine. We need to [re]start recognizing those who intrinsically care about the content, about learning, and about scholars who create scholarship. Set your bar higher, folk, and reward the students who follow.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Iain Banks & Simon Morden on science fiction | Orbit Books | Science Fiction, Fantasy, Urban Fantasy
Iain Banks & Simon Morden on science fiction | Orbit Books | Science Fiction, Fantasy, Urban Fantasy:
Too many very intelligent and otherwise well-educated people seem to have a sort of disdain for technology and – by association – for any literature that deals with it. This may be born of a sort of subtly inculcated fear, or perhaps just intellectually inherited snobbery; hard to be sure. Anyway, I think that attitude is at least unfortunate and arguably – for our whole shared culture – both damaging and dangerous.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
How do you cite a Kindle in MLA?
The Kindle doesn't give page numbers, but it does give "location" which is, ultimately, a more precise means of locating a quote. I believe one should give a location in a numerator and a "page divisor" in a quote, which would get you very close. How do determine your divisor? Funny you should ask...
EduKindle � Page Number Versus Position on Kindle:
Others have said to include which chapter, but there's no real reason not to be more specific rather than less. How to get the MLA's blessing, I don't know, even if I am a member.
EduKindle � Page Number Versus Position on Kindle:
This is a much bruited topic and one that creates a little bit of anxiety for us bibliophiles who have made the conversion to the Kindle. How can I tell what page I am on??? I mean, I have only spent my whole life using page numbers as the reference point for a) how far along in the book I am, and b) any references to the text that I want to make in a post, article, or other scholarly writing.
...
I got closest to a useful formula when I took the first actual numbered page of the book (not including the introduction)–that is, a page with “1″ on it, and looked up the corresponding “position” on my Kindle. As it turns out, Page 1 appears at position “95″ on the Kindle. Then, I went to the last full page of the text, page 239 (not the notes, index, or other “last” page) and checked the position: 4035. So, I had 3940 positions spread over 236 pages (the first page of text was actually page 3). 3940 divided by 236 yields 16.69 positions per page.
Using this formula I could pretty much find the page in book if I knew the position. In all my test cases, I landed within one page of the text I was searching for if I divided the position number by 16.69.
Others have said to include which chapter, but there's no real reason not to be more specific rather than less. How to get the MLA's blessing, I don't know, even if I am a member.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Sustained Silent Viewing is not Scholarship, nor Instruction
As I walk through the halls on campus, I'm surprised how many classes, ostensibly covering any number of disparate subjects, are watching videos. Perhaps this has something to do with the percentage of lecturer positions in the sorts of classes taught here (often service based classes, like first year writing and public speaking), but time watching seems to me to be time away from expert interaction. As an undergraduate student, I paid not to watch a video in class, no matter how expertly selected, but to hear or interact with a recognized expert in a field of study.
How often do we read aloud in class? In literature courses, quoting is common. We want to, *ahem*, get onto the same page as a class in order to lean more forcefully onto a section of words, which allows us to see what readings those words will support. But we don't typically read something for the first time in class, beyond perhaps a few poems or quick portions of related readings we tracked down during our time alone. Reading aloud in class usually serve as quick refreshers before we attack something that's already, now freshly, in context.
Watching sustained videos in class reminds me, ultimately, of Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) in grammar school. I vaguely recall SSR was a new concept when I was in school, but have it on very good authority it's still in vogue today. But when I only have three hours to spend with a teacher instead of thirty, that time should probably not be filled with modeling and practicing good behaviors for when I'm outside of those classroom doors.
I show YouTube in class, but do so, as a rule, only for spur of the moment clarifications. SSV (Sustained Silent Viewing) is not a skill that must be taught. Find videos, assign them as any other "reading", and be prepared to discuss with your class in class. Supplement if you'd like, but if you're finding you must teach by using videos made by someone else, you should ask yourself if you're the expert that the class pays you (with their time, attention, and, yes, cash that'll be repaid with 7% interest over the next 30 years of their life) to be.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Fish: The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives - NYTimes.com
The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives - NYTimes.com:
It's hard not to enjoy some of what Fish writes, but he also often seems primed to provoke more than evoke. I may have to go read more Eco to clean the Fish from my palate.
(Honestly, I didn't plan the pun. I swearz.)
And indeed, if your criteria are productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction, it makes perfect sense to withdraw funds and material support from the humanities — which do not earn their keep and often draw the ire of a public suspicious of what humanities teachers do in the classroom — and leave standing programs that have a more obvious relationship to a state’s economic prosperity and produce results the man or woman in the street can recognize and appreciate. (What can you say to the tax-payer who asks, “What good does a program in Byzantine art do me?” Nothing.)
It's hard not to enjoy some of what Fish writes, but he also often seems primed to provoke more than evoke. I may have to go read more Eco to clean the Fish from my palate.
(Honestly, I didn't plan the pun. I swearz.)
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
One advantage scholars of [historical] literature [versus literature from sources that are still producing, ie, from authors that are still alive] have over some of their brethren in the social sciences is the luxury of finitude. One might want to transcribe all of an author's journals, or find all of the extant printings of a particular version of a book or pamphlet. The goal is to track down every artifact that remains about a work or author, catalog it, and then contextualize.
Contextualization has a tendency to be "reduce" finitude through its critical fads. Most any time someone from the continent has an epiphany -- my line runs me from Spinoza through Emerson and Nietzsche, up through Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, et friends, just to name the seismic shifts; the larger fads are more obvious, like moves gender and identity studies, labels for new periods (are we post-post-non-modern yet?) -- everyone scrambles to wring every last bit of nuance from using that new epiphany as a filter for approaching what was seemingly becoming more and more fini.
Even so, the fads don't make the fields less exhaustible, ironically enough. Instead, aside from situational shifts in the canon, literature largely stays literature. It would be impossible to talk about the American intellectual without going through Boston and Concord, even if one was just to say that there is too much emphasis wasted by scholars on New England thinkers and thought. And there's still plenty to say about reader response that won't be said solely b/c reader response is passe. For now.
For all the turns, the study is fixed. There is a flexible canon.
Elsewhere, I'm finding an increasing number of scholars scrambling after research, and research whose worth is measured by the bottom line. I get the feeling (though not having experienced the period from behind the curtain, I wouldn't know) that the distance between academic work for learning's sake and the financial forces that make the first possible has quickly grown much smaller. Before, research was useful to the commercial sector not because of intent, but because enough squirrels, acting as if they were functionally blind from business' perspective, eventually dug up something interesting enough for business to appropriate. Now, research often isn't funded unless its proposal includes ideas that explicitly talks about how that work will be useful, with "monetarily" only slightly under erasure.
A symptom: Inside of an institute of higher learning being able to make an aggregate case for its usefulness and then having a similarly aggregated bucket of resources (read: dollars) from its benefactor (read: state governments), individual researchers are being told to make the same argument at the micro level. "Find external funds to supplement our primary funding sources." When you aggregate, you can hide. The office of maize production is going to find out something that'll help agriculture, and can be used to argue for the funding of the institution as a whole. An individual researcher asking for money for their specific project cannot as easily or completely hide their personal political biases, even if those amount to no more than "learning for learning's sake." This also seems to make students a secondary priority, not so much because they come after research in the professors' minds (which is expected in a research institution), but because it becomes less about exposing students to great thinkers than proving the worth (and thereby receiving the funding for) of the exposure that they do get. Less about privilege, more about finding mules for money.
This is one of the reasons I particularly enjoy studying fossils like long dead authors. There's enough momentum attached to the worth of these studies, a place where it was and, to a degree, still is accepted to learn for learning's sake, that they can continue to provide something of an alternative to the sorts of zero blind capitalistic influences that have permeated so many other areas of the public university.
(Though that said, I wonder if the folks learning strings at Cambridge and Oxford in the 16th and 17th centuries were just mules to pay for the "research" of those instructors, too. The more things change, perhaps? At least then the -- at worst -- dupes were students, not the taxpayers and, now, professors themselves.)
Contextualization has a tendency to be "reduce" finitude through its critical fads. Most any time someone from the continent has an epiphany -- my line runs me from Spinoza through Emerson and Nietzsche, up through Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, et friends, just to name the seismic shifts; the larger fads are more obvious, like moves gender and identity studies, labels for new periods (are we post-post-non-modern yet?) -- everyone scrambles to wring every last bit of nuance from using that new epiphany as a filter for approaching what was seemingly becoming more and more fini.
Even so, the fads don't make the fields less exhaustible, ironically enough. Instead, aside from situational shifts in the canon, literature largely stays literature. It would be impossible to talk about the American intellectual without going through Boston and Concord, even if one was just to say that there is too much emphasis wasted by scholars on New England thinkers and thought. And there's still plenty to say about reader response that won't be said solely b/c reader response is passe. For now.
For all the turns, the study is fixed. There is a flexible canon.
Elsewhere, I'm finding an increasing number of scholars scrambling after research, and research whose worth is measured by the bottom line. I get the feeling (though not having experienced the period from behind the curtain, I wouldn't know) that the distance between academic work for learning's sake and the financial forces that make the first possible has quickly grown much smaller. Before, research was useful to the commercial sector not because of intent, but because enough squirrels, acting as if they were functionally blind from business' perspective, eventually dug up something interesting enough for business to appropriate. Now, research often isn't funded unless its proposal includes ideas that explicitly talks about how that work will be useful, with "monetarily" only slightly under erasure.
A symptom: Inside of an institute of higher learning being able to make an aggregate case for its usefulness and then having a similarly aggregated bucket of resources (read: dollars) from its benefactor (read: state governments), individual researchers are being told to make the same argument at the micro level. "Find external funds to supplement our primary funding sources." When you aggregate, you can hide. The office of maize production is going to find out something that'll help agriculture, and can be used to argue for the funding of the institution as a whole. An individual researcher asking for money for their specific project cannot as easily or completely hide their personal political biases, even if those amount to no more than "learning for learning's sake." This also seems to make students a secondary priority, not so much because they come after research in the professors' minds (which is expected in a research institution), but because it becomes less about exposing students to great thinkers than proving the worth (and thereby receiving the funding for) of the exposure that they do get. Less about privilege, more about finding mules for money.
This is one of the reasons I particularly enjoy studying fossils like long dead authors. There's enough momentum attached to the worth of these studies, a place where it was and, to a degree, still is accepted to learn for learning's sake, that they can continue to provide something of an alternative to the sorts of zero blind capitalistic influences that have permeated so many other areas of the public university.
(Though that said, I wonder if the folks learning strings at Cambridge and Oxford in the 16th and 17th centuries were just mules to pay for the "research" of those instructors, too. The more things change, perhaps? At least then the -- at worst -- dupes were students, not the taxpayers and, now, professors themselves.)
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