digital digs

intellectual climate revisited

Once again I find myself thinking about this issue of improving the "intellectual climate" on campus--an ongoing mission at Cortland, like many other colleges. Intellectual climate is a curious turn of phrase. It suggests changing certain systemic cultural conditions to enhance intellectual behavior.

But it begs the question of what constitutes an "intellectual" behavior. That is, how would we know when the intellectual climate has improved?

I was thinking about this in the context of the graduate class I taught last night. We had a guest speaker, Shade Gomez, a high school English teacher from Ithaca who his doing some interesting stuff with technology. The class, which addresses the use of technology in secondary English education, was struck by the way in which the technologies helped students to identify their interests and take some ownership over the education.

I realized that this was an important feature for me of what intellectual behavior would be: identifying an interest and taking ownership of one's education. So in that context the classroom becomes both a launching point and a support mechanism for such behaviors, and the professor helps the student to shape his/her goals and strategies for attaining them. For example, a student says she wants to write a novel (a common aspiration among our professional writing majors). OK. That's a goal that can be divided into smaller parts such as learning the various techniques of fiction writing, learning to revise, and so on. It can also be connected with related goals: perhaps the student wants to learn about the publishing industry or working as an editor.

Of course a student doesn't have to have a long-term goal. S/he just needs to articulate his/her education in the context of some interest, and the class needs to facillitate such an articulation. From this approach, the "intellectual climate" of the campus needs to be one that understands teaching and learning in this way, that supports faculty in supporting students, and encourages students to identify goals, take ownership of their education, and to share their work with the community.

Under these terms, if a college has a speaker series it could be understood in terms of the work students do. For example, our theme this year is fundamentalism, not only in the religious sense but in the widest possible sense of different spaces where a fundamentalist approach is possible (e.g. education, art, literature, and so on ). For the aspiring novelist in my earlier example perhaps this is an opportunity to think about the "fundamentals" of writing, of the novel as genre, and consider how these should be understood and dealt with in her own writing and educational goals.

Strange Bedfellows

I have embarked on two, very different service obligations that are quite uncharacteristic of me. I spent this afternoon editing articles for our Union's campus newsletter and soon I will be attending my first meeting of the College's Assessment committee.

I am, admittedly, ambivalent about unions. Like most institutions, they are well-intentioned and good in theory. From a personal perspective, I would have had better pay and better benefits if I had stayed at my previous, non-union position, but that doesn't really mean anything. I came to Cortland for better professional opportunities and that's that. The union newsletter is a combination of informative articles about union activities and benefits and editorializing articles, usually about some campus or university subject. Though any academic or professional could submit articles to the newsletter, overall there is a definite liberal populism to the writing, the kind you would expect to find in a union newsletter. While my politics certainly are not to the right of those in the newsletter, I find myself generally unmoved by its rhetoric.

Not that that really matters. I'm just moving commas around anyway.

I suppose someone might confidently reply to this attitude that I should get involved. I'm editor of the newsletter after all. Who else would be in a better position to make a change? I could write a series of editorials performing some contrary position. The result could be some elaborate theater that would genuinely anger some people. We could have a debate! And in the end we wouldn't every change anyone's minds because there would never be any reason for minds to change, but we would be forced to accept our differences and move on much like we had before, except now we have a history of ill will between us.

Now the assessment committee is a different kind of theater: shadow puppet theater, I think. It is a well-kept secret, only published numerous times on this blog, that I am skeptical about assessment, particularly the large scale assessment of the college-cum-university type. I am not a fan of the discourse of rational efficiency that legitmates assessment tools or the rhetoric of excellence that produces its ideological message.

However, being skeptical is no reason not to serve on the committee, right? I am curious about how this business gets done. I recognize the institutional power of assessment and the potential advantage in understanding how to make it work to achieve specific purposes. To the point, I've never met an assessment tool that told me anything useful about the lived experience of students going to college. You get numbers that you can compare to other numbers and then use as a bludgeon or a scalpel on any variety of targets. 

In other words, assessment is a serviceable weapon once you detatch it from any notion of it representing reality. Instead, it is yet another wonderful example of Baudrillardian simulacra. And like all simulacra, it's power to seduce can be impressive.

So color me cynical if you want for not being a believer. On the flip side I can be the target for criticism by those who interpret my interest in technology as a kind of technoboosterism. However, that's not the case either. For good or bad, belief is not my thing.

Fortunately I appear to be reasonably good at moving commas into the right place. I'm actually somewhat surprised. Perhaps the assessment committee will require a copyeditor.

branded a Cortland rolls on

As mentioned in my earlier post, Cortland has hired a marketing firm to rebrand itself. We are attempting to identify a "promise statement," which is a sentence that expresses our values and our sense of Cortland as a college. So today I received an e-mail asking me to participate in a survey. "They" have honed the list of possible promise statements down to five.

I'm not going to list the five statements. In truth, I can't remember exactly what they were. They're kinda generic and forgettable. They hit on some predictable themes for Cortland. We're small, affordable, comprehensive, and a "value" (see affordable). Our students come here looking for a career (mostly teaching). Then there are some recognizable generic higher ed themes--things that Cortland and/or its students might be or might wish to be: "engaged," energetic, making a difference, sincere, caring, serious, and so on. One of the statements mentioned athletics.

Anyway, you get the idea.

So the survey asks you to examine the statements from three perspectives. First, do the statements reflect something you think is "important" about the school? Second, do the statemenst say something you think is "believable" about the school? Third, do the statements attribute "distinctiveness" to the school?

I have to go backwards here. No, none of the statements are distinctive. But I'm not sure colleges want to be distinctive. How are we going to be distinctive? In our pursuit of "excellence" in teaching, scholarship, parking and whatever else? In our desire to offer a quality, affordable education? In our attempt to meet the needs of our students? Gee, that sure is unusual, that a college would try to do those things, huh? I mean we are a comprehensive college: are we going to be "distinctive" in our effort to offer a broad range of educational opportunities?

I'm not sure distinctiveness makes sense.

What's believable about Cortland is that it is fairly small (medium-sized really) and affordable. We're big enough that there are plenty of opportunities for students on campus, but we're small enough that undergrads can develop close working relationships with faculty. I think those are two fairly important qualities in a college, especially a public college like ours.

As to what is important to/about Cortland.... well, this is a marketing campaign. To me what's valuable about Cortland is its servicability as a site where students and faculty can form a community that encourages creativity and intellectual growth. Sometimes it does that, and sometimes it does not. And no, I don't think there's anything distinctive about that quality.

In any case, as I said before, despite my skepticism, I do hope something good comes of this rebranding. At least I hope we get a decent home page out of the deal. We've had the same basic home page since I arrived five years ago. Fortunately I am sure that neither my skepticism or any possible enthusiasm I might generate will have any difference in the outcome of this venture.

Cortland's iTunes U era begins in earnest!

I just finished uploading the first pieces to my iTunes U sites. On Tuesday in my next classes, I'll be able to unveil the site to my students. I did encounter one small glitch, which I was able to circumvent, but I figure we'll have that fixed before then.

But here's some of the good news:

1. As I figured, iTunes U is very easy to use. It's easy to edit your course page and add tabs (categories in which you can upload material). It looks like just another iTunes Music Store page.
2. You can set permissions individually for each tab. They can be set so students can download only or upload only (as a drop box for assignments), but there is also a "Shared" permission, which allows student users to upload AND download. This one interests me the most as I want to use iTunes U as a way to distribute media files across the classroom.
3. For Cortland, students and faculty access iTunes U through their Banner accounts. However once you are in and subscribe to a course podcast, you don't need to re-authenticate to update. That makes things a little easier.

I've also volunteered to do course casting, which I'm going to do with the grad course that I am team-teaching with my colleague, Karen Stearns. In thinking about that I've also figured out something else I'd like to do. I'd like to get some screen capture software that I could sync with the audio. I do a fair amount of demonstration in class. It would be great if I could capture my screen movements and my audio, put them together, and include them as well.

I'll see how it goes, but this first step is exciting.

the mood of the flat world: an ulmer-inspired assignment

This semester my students are undertaking an Ulmer-inspired assignment in which they will produce an enhanced podcast that captures "the mood of the flat world." They've read Friedman, so they have an idea of what the flat world might be; their job is to capture a mood they associate with it. The enhanced podcast is an excellent genre for exploring Ulmer's "image reason" in its conductive linking of image and sound. For this assignment, students will use their own photos, other images they can access, music, and other sounds. We've discussed copyright, but since the pieces won't be distributed beyond the classroom, they can use whatever material they want. They are required to produce some original text that they will record as audio.

Here is my version of my own assignment.

the godless recall 9/11

Last weekend professional writing had it's fall trip to Raquette Lake. We had a great time, as usual. We also had our regular Saturday night reading. This time, however, I recorded the reading. Here's my performance, and I hope more will follow (assuming others will give me the OK).

The Godless Recall 9/11

Cortland's iTunes U experiment: week one

Here's my update on Cortland's iTunes U experiment.

Video and the teacher continued

Inside HigherEd has picked up on the YouTube story I mentioned earlier with students videoing teachers and publishing them on the web.

A couple of interesting points to pick up on, mostly from the comments that follow the article. The article notes

Among the issues being raised [on my Blog and Yellow Dog] are whether this form of expression — however upsetting to faculty members — is an example of students acting on their feelings and expressing themselves, something composition instructors in particular tend to encourage.

Hmm... well, OK, though that doesn't quite come out the way I meant it. That would tend to suggest that composition instructors are somehow encouraging this type of behavior. I don't think that's the case. What I meant, anyway, is that in teaching writing and literacy (which is more than just the responsibility of composition, btw), we tell our students that communication is power, the ability to put forward an argument and share it with others is at the heart of intellectual life and democratic society. So here are students doing just that, putting forward an argument.

Now, we may not like the argument they are making. We may also respond to their argument by questioning its ethos. In short, we think they could make a better argument. However, how do we respond to the following questions:

• Should students be able to question the practices and content of the courses they take?
• Should they be able to engage in this questioning in a public forum?
• Should they be able to offer video evidence in support of their argument?

These are all troubling questions, though I think most teachers would say "yes" to the first. The second was never really an issue until now. I remember student protests as an undergrad at Rutgers. I remember protesting the English department's decision not to tenure Amiri Baraka, but that was as public as you could get: a local, student protest. Now local issues can be globalized (think locally, act globally), and the university is no longer the sequestered space it once was. Activity in the classroom can be captured on a cell phone videocam and published on the web before the class ends.

Certainly part of the student response is ideologically-motivated, mostly conservative students and their perception of "liberal bias." But much of the talk on Inside Higher Ed and elsewhere is about representations of teacher outbursts or student boredom and other attempts to represent teachers as foolish: to disempower teachers in one way or another. And even the best teacher can be made to look foolish if captured at the right/wrong moment and edited.

There is a question as to whether such secretive videotaping is criminal and/or a violation of intellectual property. This is also discussed among the commenters on Inside Higher Ed. Of course we've long allowed students to tape our lectures. Now we have iTunes University to update that practice. Any student in a course will be able to download a course cast, edit the sound file, and post the result. I suppose we are saying this last step is a violation, the making public of teaching.

I think it comes down to this. If a student posts a video of his/her teacher as a "good teacher," that teacher is unlikely to complain, even though the act must be as much a crime or copyright infringement as it would be if it were a "bad teacher" video. As it turns out, there are plenty of videos that come up on searchs for "good teacher," at least as many as "bad teacher." What we are opposed to is the way we are represented (not the act of representation itself). As I suggested in my earlier post, perhaps we might see this student practice, in turn, as an expression of their own opposition to the way they are interpolated as students.

It is objectionable to be made a student, to be the subject of pedagogic scrutiny, to be made a captive audience, and so on. Students are always subject to our heroic pedagogic narratives. Here they claim a different narrative, a different representation. It is perhaps no more fair or accurate than our own versions. Certainly it can be disheartening as teachers to see these representations.

The challenge, I think, is not to find ways to shut down this practice, to tighten the panopticon. Instead the challenge is to enter into this discursive space, to address it with students, to confront the institutional relationships that produce this condition.

my kids begin school tomorrow...

Tomorrow my five-year son enters kindergarten, and my seven-year old daughter goes into second grade. For both, it will their first year at the local, public elementary school. Thankfully, my wife is both amiable and optimistic person, so she likes to take the lead on schooling matters. It doesn't hurt that elementary schools seem more comfortable with mothers to begin with.

I have my concerns, of course. It is unfortunate but my daughter has been moved around a lot. She had kindergarten down in Cortland. They had few resources but they did what they could, sending her to first and later second grade for math and reading. They had decided to skip her into second, but we moved and put her in a Montessori school. We thought that would work out really well and since we ended up moving in October it helped that she didn't have to switch schools in mid-year. There were good things about the school, but it wasn't the "solution" we hoped it would be. That, plus the cost and the hour-long bus trip, both ways, helped us decide to give the local school a try.

So now they have put her in second grade, where she would have been a year ago if we had stayed in Cortland. It's age-appropriate and I'm not sure that skipping is a great solution either, but I know she isn't going to learn anything in that class, at least not in terms of math or reading or other basic class material.

But my concerns stem from more than that, and I think I can best communicate this with an example. The school sent home the list of supplies she needs to bring to school. On the list, it says bring an empty cake frosting container to use as a pencil holder.  Well, ok. I guess I can go to the store, buy some frosting, dump the frosting into the trash, clean the container, and give it to my daughter. But why not buy a pencil cup at Staples when they cost basically the same as the frosting to begin with? I have to think that the assumption is that of course I've got frosting in my pantry.

It's just one of many class-based, culturally-specific ideological assumptions that are wholly unexamined. To me, a can of frosting is emblematic of middle America and a whole range of values. Our community is incredibly white and almost uniformly Christian (even more specifically Catholic). There is a sense, understandable in any community, that everyone is the same, that "we" all share the same values. And I'm white, and my mother is Catholic, so it isn't hard to understand why someone might see those qualities in me. What other assumptions are made about what goes on in my house? About my values? About the way I would want my children to be educated?

I'm less worried about my son. Kindergarten here is half-day, which actually amounts to 2 1/2 hours. I think in the winter that means take off your snow clothes, stand in line to go to the bathroom, color in one picture, and put your snow clothes back on. He's resistant to any kind of direct instruction. He was always well-behaved at day care but I think it was because he didn't want to become an object of attention. He would never let anyone know if he knew an answer to a question, and he rarely takes a risk. On the other hand, he always makes friends easily. I just hope that nothing happens to turn him off from school.

Undoubtedly, my attitudes toward school are shaped by my own experience, which, thankfully, I won't detail. They weren't traumatic by any stretch of the imagination, just dull, tedious, repetitive, and occassionally cruel. Right now, both of my kids have positive associations with school, so I just try to not share my thoughts with them.

We'll see what happens.

the video and the teacher

Jeff and Spencer both write about this phenomena of students posting videos of their teachers/professors on YouTube. Here's one example titled "screaming teacher." I'll go as far as to provide a link but I don't want to reproduce it here. As much as I find this scene unfortunate, anyone can have a bad moment; this guy's bad moment happens to be on YouTube.  The point is though that we have all been students in scenes like this (I would imagine), and I know at least I have had teachers where such scenes and other similar behaviors were not uncommon. If you look at the comments for the video, they say things like "this is why I hate teachers," and "I don't care how much they get paid, this is why I don't respect teachers."

Now to be fair, there are some videos that represent teachers positively or at least in a benign fashion. Even still, it's an uncomfortable feeling thinking that your actions as a teacher might be serreptitiously recorded and made public. True, most people don't want to be secretly recorded under any circumstance, but there are some special considerations to understanding the videoing of teachers. This YouTube practice, along with those or ratemyteacher or ratemyprofessor and MySpace or Facebook pages dedicated to the dislike/hatred of a teacher, does not represent a change in the way that students feel about teachers, but rather a change in the available means of expression.

I can't imagine many people want to be high school students. Not only does one face the personal psychological and physiological crises of adolescence, but also the social trials of negotiating peer communities. And that's without school. School adds this massive institutional force, where nearly one's every move is surveilled and judged (by peers or by teachers or staff). Even though teachers may think of themselves as caring or sympathetic, they regularly act of out of their institutional identity to control or discipline. Playing out this role is likely unavoidable, even if one didn't believe it was his/her job to do so. The social do-gooder grates as much as the touchy-feely teacher or the tyrranical teacher or the burned out teacher. It's not so much what kind of teacher one is as the fact that one is a teacher at all, forcing others to occupy the role of students. No matter how one defines oneself as a teacher, students will inevitably push their teachers to call upon their institutional authority, and it is at that point that the students believe they see their teachers "true colors," regardless of how those teachers see themselves.

Now here's the interesting twist. As teachers, particularly in English, we encourage our students to write, to express themselves. We often discuss how effective writing can have power in a community. Well.... here you go. We got what we asked for. Now the students turn the panopticon back on their teachers somewhat. I'm sure there have been students over the past decade in my classes who have been sitting there thinking "this guy is boring" or "he's an idiot" or "I hate this teacher!" Why not? I've had those thoughts as a student. Now they have a way to express those thoughts, besides talking to their roommates.

I don't think there's much teachers can do about it. Perhaps the YouTube phenomena will pass lke a fad, but I really doubt it, even if YouTube itself doesn't last. Perhaps teachers will be more reflective about their behavior, but I doubt it, and I don't know that that's really the problem anyway. Even the entertaining teacher can be cast as a fool in a video (in fact, that's a common trope on YouTube). I suppose you can heighten the panopticon to try to catch these secrete video recorders. I'm sure that's the response you'll get if this really increases. No cell phones or at least no cell phones with camera/video function in the classroom.

Yes, that will surely make things better...

The bottom line, I guess, is this. Yes, there is some bad teaching out there. Yes, this videoing practice and related online attacks on teachers can be unfair and unethical. The institutional relationship between students and teachers ensures that we will continue to see this dynamic play out. Even if the relationship in the classroom were entirely voluntary, there would still be some of this conflict (though it would be diminished, I believe).