digital digs

The challenge of information literacy? the faculty

I've been at this blogging thing for a few years now, so I'm bound to revisit issues. It just seems lately I've been returning to old topics. No different today.

There's a lot of talk about students and information literacy. It's all over the web... not surprising, what isn't? We certainly talk about this issue on our campus, and in our department we try to prepare H.S. English teachers to help their students with information literacy (yes the term is problematic but I'll use it as a point of reference).

I continue to be concerned that the real stumbling block on the path to this goal does not have to do with students but rather with faculty. However you're going to characterize information literacy for undergrads and grads, clearly faculty need to be more literate overall than that (again assuming one can talk about "levels" of literacy). Anyway my point is that faculty as a whole are woefully underprepared to teach in this quickly emerging world. They lack basic skills.

So I'm just going to lay out a handful of basic technical and rhetorical skills I think you'd want students to have.

• Make simple audio and video recordings (we're not talking Spielberg here; just cruise around on YouTube for a while and you'll get the idea)
• Make a basic, static website using a simple application like iWeb.
• Do basic photo and image editing in PhotoShop or the equivalent.
• Make a good PowerPoint presentation (I don't think much of PowerPoint myself, but I'll throw it in there)
• Understand and use web 2.0 applications
• Find useful information on the web
• Get some understanding of the challenges of participating in an online community (which they should already know from MySpace and Facebook, though they often don't think through the potential implications of their actions there)

I think it would be generous to say that 10% of any campus faculty have all these skills. I would wonder even what % of faculty can effectively find information on the web using Google or something like that. I mean, what % can find a good sushi restaurant near a motel or research purchasing a new car or find reviews of a new movie or book?  1/3? 1/2? 2/3?

Now I'm not suggesting that you'd need 100% of faculty to have all these skills, but maybe 40%? Think about it the way you think about writing instruction. At Cortland, like many campuses, we have two semesters of composition, followed up by a required two "writing-intensive" courses (which serve a WAC objective). However, writing takes place in many other classes, indeed in most classes, in some form or other. So I think it's reasonable to say that you'd need 40% of the faculty offering curriculum where students are using these skills in some way, with some of those courses being an intense study of this literacy analogous to what we do now with writing in composition. Indeed, perhaps what I'm talking about is an evolution of composition, but only if the faculty can deliver on it.

The task of building this literacy is nearly overwhelming. Colleges will have to make some harsh decisions. There are some top-down things you could do, but I'm not going to suggest that. You need top-down support and reward, but I'd leave it at that. This support and reward could be both individual and on a department level. For example, my College's writing committee gives out $5000 grants to departments to improve writing instruction; something similar could be done in this area.

I would place my emphasis on newly tenured faculty (i.e. faculty tenured in the last five years). Why? Well first, I think it is less likely that senior faculty would be looking to make the kind of change to their career and pedagogy that I'm suggesting here. I certainly would welcome any interested faculty, but my experience at Cortland is that, in general, more senior faculty are less interested in meeting this challenge.

On the other end of the spectrum, junior faculty should certainly be encouraged to acquire these skills and develop pedagogies that integrate technologies. However, they shouldn't be expected to lead this initiative. They need to be able to look to tenured faculty who are doing the same thing, who understand the work involved, and can provide a context for that work when it comes time for tenure review.

Newly-tenured faculty have less pressure on them in personal-professional terms than junior faculty (although sometimes it doesn't feel that way). They are likely to be younger than other tenured faculty and thus are more likely to have some information literacy and comfort in working with technology (though obviously that isn't uniformly the case). They are also likely to be looking for ways to define themselves as full members of the campus community and to begin to put their stamp on their program or department in a way they would not have done before they were tenured. That is, obviously, once-tenured, one is in a position to take a leadership role or at least a stand that one couldn't do before.

Ok, so ideally, I would want to identify a department where I could find at least two newly tenured faculty (it's better to have support next door). I help them write a campus grant that will support some training for them and then buy them some equipment. I'd start with giving them basic training in these skills (making videos, building websites, using web 2.0 applications, etc.). Then we'd move into more of a support phase where they need to figure out how this new literacy would work in their program, and I function as a sounding board. Then the courses are built, and the faculty receive support for their courses through information resources (e.g. library multimedia specialists, computer help desk, etc.).

Ideally the faculty have a positive experience and serve to encourage others in their department, junior faculty in particular, to join in. Even more ideally, their success is acknowledged and rewarded by the college in some material way. Furthermore, once these faculty have had this experience, you then need to find a way to keep them going, keep them current. Clearly this will have to be founded on their personal motivation, but some mechanism--an online community, faculty development opportunities, grants for new equipment, retreats--will have to be put in place to make it happen.

So my notion is that on our campus you'd need to identify 15-25 faculty every year to work with. We have something like 500 faculty, though most are part-time and there are other workload issues there I'm not addressing in this post. So I'd like to imagine 100 faculty able to do this kind of work five years down the road.

Hopefully by that time we'll be hiring faculty who have these skills and perspectives coming in the door (graduate schools...this means you!).

the network and the brain

Trying to get some distance from mainstream notions of the network. It's clear in ANT, I think, that the "network" there bears an isomorphic relation with the concept of "distributed cognition" discussed by Hayles, Haraway, and others of that ilk, along with folks in robotics, AI/AL, and elsewhere. However, I think it is easy to fall into thinking of distributed congnition as a technological phenomenon (which it is), but by which we mean sophisticated (i.e. contemporary) technology rather than technology as a general principal (i.e., one that  might include the most rudimentary, paleolithic writing tools).

Go back into the archeological record, and one uncovers a shift in the networks of social relations maintained by Neanderthals. As I understand it, archeologists can determine how far various paleolithic stone tools travelled from the original sites where the stone was obtained. In doing so they can track the expansion of trading networks. Furthermore, there is a relationship between the expansion of networks and sophistication in tools--not only in the sense of better made tools but in the sense of tools that expand/alter human behavior. For example, a club or axe might be an extension of the existing activity of the human arm compared with the needle which requires the development of a new kind of dexterity and cognitive work.

Anyway, that's an overly brief summary but I think you get the idea. One argument that is made in this context is that these expanding networks combine with the emergence of language as we generally experience it. Obviously earlier humans had means for communication, but the argument goes (again briefly and as I understand it) that earlier communication was severly limited to an immediate context and kinship group. As tools become more complex and trading networks expand, a kind of informational results that demands new modes of cognition and communication. In essence it becomes necessary to understand the world in discrete, symbolic terms: the physical world is overlaid with an informational space.

So what does this mean for us and networks now? It means that though we might experience our situation within networks as a dehumanizing experience, as a threat to our "humanity," in fact, modern human consciousness has always been networked. This concept is well-embedded in ANT and related theories, so it's nothing new there, but I do think it's an important element that's missing from our more broadly understood notion of the network.

In writing/composition it means recognizing that the emergence of new media/information networks is not transforming the role of the individual writer/author but rather that the concept of the writer/author was always a misapprehension of the role of the subject in the composition process. This critique of the author also is not anything new. However in the past I think we've treated this issue as an ideological critique or a philosophical/deconstructive critique, as something that could be ignored as either a political maneuver or some kind of postmodern mind game. Setting aside whatever we might think of such issues of theory, here we are looking at material, technological, and cognitive practices, which puts this in a different frame (even though ANT and related theories are clearly building on the philosophical critiques of the 60s-80s).

in opposition to lecturing

In the past in this space, and even recently, I have been open-minded about the practice of lecturing, to each his/her own or something like that I suppose. Today I am going to say abandon lecturing. There's no precipitating event leading me to this. That's just the way it's going to be in these parts from here on.

Let me be specific, by lecture here I mean the practice of going in front of a group of students and offering them a prepared speech of 30 minutes or more. There are plenty of good reasons for teachers to speak in the classroom, but this practice is no longer defensible.

Honestly, record it and put it up on the web, in your course manage system, or podcast or whatever. Of if you like, type up your lecture and ask me to read it. If need be, make a little enhanced podcast or video to show me the slides. Hey, make a video of your lecture if you like.

And then bring your students to the classroom when you actually want them to do something besides play the role of dutiful audience. If you like, make your class a hybrid and just schedule class time for discussion or group work or lab or workshop or whatever. Let's say you had a class with 100 students. Instead of lecturing to a crowd for 150 minutes a week. You could podcast your lectures and meet with 25 students at a time to have a discussion. Assign a group each time to be responsible for leading discussion. You record the meeting, and everyone is responsible for listening to that as well.

I know it's not easy. Plenty of times I've planned course discussions that ended up with me talking far too much. Students have such a heavy expectation of playing the role of dutiful audience that they struggle to do other things. They are so used to intricately detailed instructions that they often feel lost when given the task of genuine invention.

Lecture is not about learning. It's about control. Abandon both.

The network and English Studies

Jeff has a great piece, soon to appear in College English, on the network. I say to it, yes and yes. I see it as a rhetorically-effective piece that has the opportunity to challenge its audience without missing the mark. Good work. I am interested to see responses and how it will relate to its sister pieces in this special issue.

My thoughts are the typical, I suppose, drifting, mutating, proliferating, etc. Latour's own critique of "his" network concept is familiar: the network in ANT came about before the popularization of network as in internet, before networking as the careerist, yuppiefied activity, and certainly before the social networking of MySpace, etc.  Such notions reterritorialize the network in ways that are make the term less interesting for ANT, I guess you could say.

When one inverts the network, one potentially uncovers the holey space, the n-dimensional space between, and the Nietzschean force of free action (as alternative to the recursive resentiment-like force of "work"). The intellectual danger is to mistake these as competing, dialectical concepts: network vs holey space. It's a similar misdiagnosis to the one that lies, readymade, in Actor-Network. It is tempting to see the network as a force of striation or reterritorialization. However, as Jeff points out, networks might be understood more generally as connectivity.

I see here two virtuals: the virtual-topological space from which materiality unfolds and the virtual-technological space of media and networks. It is within the context of the former that one can investigate multiplicities as non-deterministic "networks;" here is the potential for connectivity. In short the metaphor of the network is apt and accessible, but it falls short if it becomes solidified in our familiar notions of connection.

Jeff writes

English studies maintains a fixed point of view through a singular  notion of writing as static, fixed, and individually composed (typically via the essay or the exam), taking place in a unified realm of thought deemed “English.” The definitions of “writing” produced in this economy of thought (response essay, analytical paper, personal essay) no longer serve the media society of networks and connections contemporary culture generates as these definitions of writing are now performed. The time has come to rethink the metaphor of writing because its image is too structured around fixity.

I couldn't agree more, and the network is a good place to begin dislodging this fixed position, as a site for further growth, connection, and proliferation.

Planning composition: some logistical-programmatic challenges

1987, that's when I took composition. I failed the final paper and got a C+ as I recall.  I remember that final paper was about some novel I didn't read. One pointless literary based writing assignment in what would be a long string  of researchless, "new critical-esque" writing assignments  on books I didn't read as an English major. Obviously I got better at pulling off such writing tasks. Meanwhile I was out in the "real world" making a living writing technical documentation, business proposals, designing brochures and catalogs, building databases--you know, learning how to write.

Anyway, in 1987 you could go through my dorm. I don't remember anyone having a computer on my floor. CD players were the "new" technology; most people still had the majority of their music collections on cassette or LP. No cell phones of course but plenty of Sony Walkmans. You had to use a typewriter to write your papers. I had an electronic typewrite with a tiny LCD screen where you could see about half of a sentence at a time. There was enough memory that you could probably write your whole paper into storage. Amazing.

Yeah, a lot of things have changed since then... No kidding. But one thing has remained largely the same...

Yes, it's first-year composition. (Well, maybe the average English curriculum too, but that's for another day.) But I'm thinking that things have got to change, and change quickly. The last time I taught comp was in 2002 I believe. There were things that seemed outdated to me then. I felt our composition program was outdated in terms of scholarship, but that's a different matter. It still felt to me like teaching students to produce print documents was the right course of action. At that point I didn't even have a lab where I could teach web design. But that was four years ago.

Just think about YouTube. 18 months ago YouTube was little more than an idea. The site didn't go active until November 2005. Ten months later its a billion dollar property. The world of video is just exploding. Combine it with all the other Web 2.0 developments and suddenly teaching students to write inside one inch margins feels a little like teaching them how to shoe on a horse.

The only saving grace is faith in the notion that print literacy is somehow foundational to other literacy practices, but that seems harder and harder to believe. I mean, if that's the case, then how come all these super-literate folks in English departments struggle so mightily with new media?

But then I start thinking about the logistics of this, even just on my campus. Already we can start to see the creep of media production into the curriculum. Courses across the disciplines are starting to do it. At some point we will say our students need to learn to compose video much like we teach them to compose text now--video as a staple in first-year composition. How far out is this turning point? Five years? Look how quickly the YouTube phenomenon took off.

So on our campus we have around 30 video cameras that circulate from the library. What happens when 1200 composition students need to make videos every semester? Plus you have to take into account demand from other courses. We probably need at least 300 video cameras to circulate. It means we better be buying 50 video cameras (plus other equipment) every year and plan to do that as a minimum for the foreseeable future (b/c these cameras are going to need to be replaced). That probably works out to $40-50K/yr. Then you need to hire staff to service them and staff to support faculty and students using them.

We also need to think about training faculty.

Or do we think that the day when video and audio production are an integral part of workplace communication, of learning, of cultural-social interaction will never come?

It can't stay 1987 forever.

Education in any color you want... as long as it's black

Yes, I suppose the initial reaction is to say that there are plenty of choices in a college education. There are dozens of majors and minors, elective courses, and so on. Yet it never seems to work out that way.

Here's a scenario common to my advisees. A English major certifying to teach HS in NYS. Her program has about 72 credits, nearly all of them are specifically required courses. Add on to that 37 credits or so of General Education and 13 credits of foreign language. That's 122 credits. I think 124 are what you need to graduate. Now you might say that there are some choices in GE, and technically you'd be correct. However, once you factor in the scheduling element (i.e. courses in our program she must take, limited time selections for foreign language, having to work, etc). Usually there are few if any REAL choices. It's pretty much take what you can get.

No one is exactly to blame for this situation. The state has strict standards for teacher certification that result in many requirements, etc., etc. At a school our size we can only offere so many sections of courses. Many times we offer only one section of a course. That really can limit other choices.

But all that is only the tip of the iceberg. My real complaint is directed at a more structural level. There is a notion that, despite the fact that students have specific majors, the overall experience of undergraduate education is the same. At Cortland if you get a BA, you end up taking 50+ credits in essentially General Education courses. That's about half your degree. And I'd say that's fairly standard of most 4-year programs. Furthermore, for the most part, most courses provide the same general experience: you show up for class 150 minutes a week over 14 weeks; the professor lectures and sometimes there's class discussion; you take a couple tests and/or write a paper or two--maybe a presentation. Yes there are science labs and other exceptions, but mostly it's about sitting in seats, taking notes, reading assignments, doing homework, and getting graded in some way.

It's very difficult to break out of this structure. Students don't know how to act. Institutions have policy fits. And teachers have to redefine their roles too. In a sense there's nothing easier than assigning a reading, leading a classroom conversation abou it, and then assigning and grading an assignment based on the reading. I mean performing this teacherly role well takes knowledge and experience, but it is something with which we are all familiar. I taught this way for years, still do in some respect. It is what we all experienced as students. It is what administrators experienced; it is what our students have experienced.

It's the Model T of education.

In a sense an online course might break with this but in many respects an online course can be designed to mimic salient aspects of the classroom: read and discuss, repeat as needed. Produce a document by which you will be evaluated.

However we know that none of these things, none of them, are necessary for learning. We know this because we learn things everyday in the absence of these structures. As I'm planning these online courses for next semester, I'm trying to think about what I can throw away, what is the unnecessary baggage of outmoded pedagogy, and how learning might happen otherwise. Obviously whatever happens in one class will have no impact on the larger problems I started this post with, but on the other hand I think there is a kind of fractal relationship here, where structural suppositions echo from one institutional level to the next.

At some point there will be a change.

classrooms and the public blog

The WPA list has been having a discussion on the well-travelled (to me) topic of the appropriateness of the public blog in the classroom. Needless to say, this has come up here before, but here are a few twists on the subject.

First though, let me say that I don't believe that every classroom discussion should be public. Obviously there are private exchanges between faculty and students. I think workshops where students are discussing unfinished works need not be public.

I also do not think it is necessary for students to identify themselves by name on a blog. That is, as long as I know who they are, if they want to use an nickname or nom de plume that's fine with me. These are choices all writers must make.

I should also note from a technical side that blogs don't have to be public, so this is not so much about blogging per se as it is about the role of public discourse in writing education.

The issue on the WPA list I want to address is the concern that it is unethical/inappropriate to require students to write into a public space. Why? Well I could deduce a couple reasons from my reading of the thread:

• students may not want their work to be available to the public
• students may write things they later regret, but they have now said in public
• the quality of the student work may cast a poor public light on that individual

So I have a couple thoughts. First, we require students to do may things they don't want to do. Is that ever ethical or appropriate? If I require students to do an in-class presentation, is that ethical? They may embarrass themselves in the classroom before their peers (the most important "public"). If a program requires students to do an internship or student teaching does this not present the same ethical questions?

I say we require students to do many things they don't want to do or wouldn't at least choose to do on their own initiative. We do these things as part of the learning experience. If there is a strong pedagogical foundation for a requirement, I don't see how it is unethical or inappropriate.

The real irony though emerges when this conversation is put into the context of rhet/comp discourse. How many times have we heard that the purpose of composition is to prepare students as citizens, as participants in a public dialogue about our culture and nation? How much time is spent in FYC hand-wringing over the goals of a liberatory or critical pedagogy? How many of these folks would decry the values of academic freedom if someone came along to say what they could or couldn't do in the classroom?

And yet, when blogging comes along and actually gives students the chance to write in a real world context to a real audience, to participate in a public discourse and actually learn what that means, these same academics start quoting institutional policy?

Nothing like showing your true colors, eh?

The funny thing is that all these students already have public, online identities. They're posting photos of themselves half-naked in a druken stupor on their mySpace accounts and writing god-knows-what. And we're worried because they might say what in a course blog?

And what if they said/wrote something inappropriate in the classroom? Is that somehow confidential information? Are there no consequences for that? Is there really a difference in consequence between an obscenity-laden racist diatribe in a blog comment (which you might quickly delete) and the same diatribe made in class?

Sure, go ahead and ask students if they want to do a public blog.... While you're at it, ask them if they want to write any papers or come to class. 'Cause I'd hate to require students to do anything.

catching up with the beginning

I'm teaching first semester students right now for the first time in a while. Like most of us, I spent my grad school years teaching first-year classes. My post-doc and my first tenure-track job where much the same way. So from 1992-2001 I'd say 80%+ of the courses I taught were of this variety. Since then, though, I've taught mostly courses in our major and some grad classes.

I don't want to generalize from a small group of students, and this is really about me and my teaching than anything about them anyway, but here are my perceptions. There is a heavily built-in expectation that I am going to orchestrate every event in the classroom. That I am going to provide specific directions that students can carry out. That I am the source of expert information and that their job is to injest this information. Yes, all this is quite familiar. I had just forgotten the intensity of this expectation. It's as if I am supposed to care whether they learn or not, but they don't have to.

This course and learning community are really heavily invested in creativity. The students are learning video production, audio production, digital imaging, drawing, and non-academic writing. They are investigating the world as it becomes shaped by the digital. In essence, the students have cameras, microphones, blogs, computers, network space, ipods, and so on, and they've been asked to go out and make something: to create a networked identity for themselves through blogs and podcasts; to experiment with the broad variety of tools available to them; to explore their creative process through composition in a variety of media; and to consider how the network and the tools play a role in their creativity.

I can still recall being 18. My friends and I had made a couple videos/films on Super-8 and VHS, but you couldn't do anything like what you can now. Anyway, my real interest was in writing and music (Sad to say, I actually wrote a musical...sigh). I am trying to imagine what I would do if I were 18 now. If I could make videos and music and distribute them to the world. Well, I guess I'd be doing what thousands of others already do on YouTube and MySpace and elsewhere.

That's what I want to see these students doing. They're all majors in Professional Writing or New Communications Media or New Media Design. It seems to me they should be naturally inclined to creating media and getting it out there. And the thing is, I'm sure they are. But something happens when they step into the classroom, and I just haven't been able to break them of it yet.

proliferating educational technologies

I'm in the midst of planning for a hybrid composition course for next semester. My colleague Vicki Boynton and I will both be teaching hybrid sections, and our plan is to teach roughly the same course. We are working within the constraints of our CPN program, which is not terribly limiting but is a pain nonetheless. I can't say that I abide by its governing logics.

But anyway, right now I feel a little at sea in our various technological options.

• Web CT: note my recent objections (along with many, many others) to Blackboard, now owners of Web CT. However, this is the CMS I have to work with, and I need a secure way to accept assignments and grade online. So I will use it for these purposes, and these purposes only.
• Movable Type: a course blog, which will be public. Students can set their screen names so they are not identifiable to the public if they choose. The blog will be for informal time-sensitive conversation, for questions, and course announcements.
• Wiki: here is where the majority of informal writing will take place. Since the idea of the wiki is collective authorship, the idea here will be to explore revision and editing as a communal practice. The wiki thing is still new to me, so it's a work in progress as far as I'm concerned.
• iTunes U: as I've discussed, the idea is to share media files and make the easily accessible for download to iPods. Vicki and I plan to do some instructional audio and video (to dispense with any need to spend FTF time lecturing).

To create a seamless feel to all this business, I hate to say it, but Web CT is probably the place I'll start. For one reason, the students use it in other classes, so it gives them a kind of "official space" feel that might make them more comfortable. Second, because Web CT is frames driven, I can load anything into the lower frame. As such, I can link to the blog or the wiki or the wiki login page within the frame of Web CT. This will make things more cohesive I hope. iTunes U then will be the only thing that is outside, since it uses the iTunes application.

As for assignments, the constraints of the program mean that I have to do at least two formal text-based assignments, with at least one assignment including outside research. So that's what I'm doing. In addition, I'm doing a number of informal assignments, which will get turned in on Web CT but also probably put up on the wiki.

Here I'm thinking of asking students to do some audio responses and some visual responses. We might do a simple Garage Band enhanced podcast. We have Comic Life, so the students could take digital pictures and make a little cartoon. I don't think we'll go so far as to do video this semester.

I don't want to overload on too much tech, right? Yeah, right.

Online learning and the academic union

Michael Feldstein has an interesting post about the Common Cartridge practice recommended at Educause. Basically the idea of the Common Cartridge is to develop a standards-based learning management system practice. That is, let's say you're a professor who moves from one job to another, or more pointedly, you're an adjunct who teaches at three different institutions in the same semester. Wouldn't it make sense if you could move the course you developed at one institution to another? After all, it is supposed to be your intellectual property, right?

Feldstein suggests, and I agree, that unions should get involved in protecting their members' intellectual property and help them make it more portable by encouraging institutions to work with learning management systems that support standards-based online learning.

Furthermore, this practice is also in the interest of the institutions if they do not wish to find themselves beholden to a particular vendor. It should be clear by now that walled gardens are not the way to go. This doesn't mean that you have to go open source, but it's a step toward recognizing that the future of higher education lies in collaboration.

While they're at it, unions might have a thing to say about Blackboard as well. From my perspective, it seems that Blackboard threatens the integrity of higher education, engages in business practices that run counter to academic ethics, and perhaps even undermine academic freedom.