digital digs

on-campus reputation system

My cyberspace class has been discussing reputation systems, and we've been considering this idea. They are all familiar with ratemyprofessor of course, and though some say the site may not be fair or accurate, they tend to use it. The initial reaction to the idea of a public on-campus student reputation system made them quite nervous. That's understandable, and I'm not suggesting we need one but rather just speculating on what one might be like and how it might function.

First of all, a reputation system (a la eBay or Slashdot or Amazon) is a seemingly necessary feature of a commons, particularly with group-forming networks. The college campus as it is now constituted is not really a commons. To the contrary it is a collection of privately-held intellectual properties. There are copyrighted textbooks, the professor's teaching materials (privately owned), and the students' individually authored assignments (also privately owned).

I've been going on now for some time about the value of public pedagogy and my own choice to make large segments of my courses public--not only teaching materials but the interactions within the course as it happens.

So I'm going to move past that here and imagine a campus where faculty and students do not hoard private knowledge in exchange for grades, but rather share that knowledge/media in an open network, perhaps something like the "Youniversity" Jenkins imagines as a combination of  MIT's OpenCourseWare and YouTube.

OK, so nearly everything is available in a public space. What do I mean by that?

• all non-copyrighted course readings
• faculty teaching materials (lectures, screencasts, assignments, syllabi, etc.)
• student products (discussion postings, essays, creative writing, podcasted presentations, multimedia projects. etc.)

Without trying to imagine the entire thing, the idea is that the contributions would be rated and that the contributor would accrue a rating this way. I think I'm attracted to something lke slashdot where (as I understand it) reviewers are alotted a certain number of points that they can apply to various posts. With this information, you could be alerted to the best posts and posts by the highest rated contributors. Such ratings might also provide an interesting perspective on how the student community values the material in a given course.

I must confess that the reptuation system is less interesting to me than the idea of the campus becoming a kind of intellectual commons where groups are allowed to form more organnically that they do within current curricular constraints. At some point we might begin to realize that the degree, the certificate, is not worth the rising cost and that instead what we really should value is the learning, learning that we could probably get much more cheaply if we got rid of the bureaucracy of credit, evaluation, accreditation, and so on.

Improving Writing at SUNY Cortland and elsewhere

There has been a recent return on my campus to this ongoing conversation about improving student writing. It is a common mantra among educators, employers, and pundits that "students can't write well." And people have been saying that for 150 years in the context of American higher education, though a broader context would reveal complaints about literacy dating back to Classical Greece.

So first let's try this. Saying students can't write well implies a comparison with someone who does. With whom are we comparing our students? Published, professional writers? Surely not. I mean we can't really imagine that the average college student can be taught to write as well as professional writers. Are we comparing students to faculty? Maybe, but most scholarly writing is incomprehenisble beyond a narrow community. Scholarly writing is more a reflection of a depth of disciplinary knowledge than it is of writerly ability, or so I would content.

I guess we mean that we want more students to write like students who get A's on their papers. I guess, though I don't know if that would satisfy employers, who generally expect a very different kind of writing expertise than the kind one develops writing successful term papers.

In any case, we have a problem defining what "writing well" means. That said, I can still give you two pieces of advice that seem fairly obvious to me.

1. Writing is a practice. Writing well is a lot of practice. Our students take two composition courses and two writing intensive courses. This works out to around 60 pages of revised writing during their 8 semesters. That's 7.5 pages per semester or half a page a week. I'll call that 140 words, which leaves us with 20 words or so a day during the semester. What's that? Two or three sentences? Not much of a regular writing practice, huh? It may actually be worse than this, since the way it really works out is that students take four writing courses, which means that four semesters--half of their college experience--they may do no writing at all.

Now, it's true that students could get more than this requirement. It's also true that even courses that aren't officially "writing intensive" may require writing, and we know students do other kinds of writing (e.g. e-mail, notetaking, etc.). However, I stand by my point that most students don't do much writing in college. Even in our Professional Writing major, students take 11 writing intensive courses plus their composition requirement. They may end up writing 400 pages of revised writing in a variety of genres.  That's a half page a day.

Writing instruction is labor intensive and expensive, so that's a big reason why we don't do it. I would think that if you really want students to improve their writing, they need to practice a lot. They need to be taking at least one writing intensive course every semester, probably more.

2. And I'm about to make it more expensive too. I think it's great that faculty across the campus use writing as a tool for learning in their classes and as a means of evaluation. They can offer their students some insight into writing in their discipline. However we should note that faculty are generally experts in scholarly publication in their fields. Many students will not be scholars, nor will they enter professions where expertise in scholarly discourses will be especially applicable. Instead they need to develop their writing more in the context of  workplace and civic discourses.

Well, to accomplish this, I think you need writing instruction offered by faculty who have scholarly foundations in the teaching of writing, faculty who will do ongoing research to remain current in the field, who can regularly develop curriciulum, especially in this time of shifting communication technologies.

Let me spell this out. You need faculty with PhDs in rhet/comp, professional writing, technical writing or something similar.

See? It's simple. If you want students to improve their writing then you ask them to take more writing courses and hire more faculty who are qualified to teach them.

The "YouNiversity"

From Smart Mobs, I picked up on this talk by Henry Jenkins given earlier this month in Singapore, "From YouTube to the YouNiversity." Much of the talk covers the main issues in Convergence Culture but updates the examples with recent practices from YouTube to Second Life. I was hoping the talk would focus more on the idea of YouNiversity than it did, but there were still some interesting thoughts toward the end on this subject.

Essentially, Jenkins is imaging higher education with barriers that would reflec the kind of participatory engagement one sees in YouTube (and elsewhere) already. I've been talking about this idea of public pedagogy for some time. My courses are publicly available here, here, and here. Not every element of every course is public, nor should it be. But a great deal can be made public, and I believe (and I think Jenkins sees this similarly) that my students education would be greatly enhanced if they saw learning as participating in the broader cultural production of knowledge. We often tout undergraduate research, especially here at Cortland. Well, here it is. An ongoing public undergraduate research project into the rhetoric of media networks and communication. Join in if you care to.

Anyway, earlier in his presentation, Jenkins talks about the difficult decision that media production companies face in dealing with fan use of their copyrighted material. If fans take your copyrighted material and use it as a basis for further creations they are clearly violating copyright. The question is: does this practice increase or decrease the value of the material for the company?

It made me realize that a similar dynamic is at work in higher education mistrust of students. Of course, as we know, one of the most common mantras among faculty is "students can't write." This being the case, putting our precious intellectual commodities into their hands and into the public might be viewed as seriously risking the depreciation of academic capital. In short, if you really believe your students have little that is interesting to say and that they aren't good writers anyway, why would you want to make these facts public?

Obviously I don't agree with those statements. As you might expect, some students write better than others sometimes; sometimes they say things that interest me and sometimes they don't (though they may interest others). It's just like anything else. Sometimes I write a good AND interesting post here.... sometimes.

I don't see my students depreciating the value and reputation of my personal academic standing or that of our college or the discipline of professional writing. To the contrary, like much of the creative labor undertaken by fans, I think their work can help draw positive attention to what we are trying to do. More importantly, as a teacher, I think it offers up an opportunity for engagement. It gives them a chance to see that their writing is more than an exercise or a mode of evaluation. It can actually have value for others.

So welcome to S(yo)UNY.

General mis-Education

Want to cut the cost of higher education nearly in half? That's easy. Eliminate the boondoggle known as General Education. Don't worry, I know nearly everyone will scoff at the idea and defend it as dearly as they defend tenure. And tenure is certainly more threatened than General Education, because GE is where colleges make their money: big classes often taught by poorly paid adjuncts or graduate students. Cortland's GE program is basically the same as every SUNY school and many other schools. It takes up 50-60 credits or so depending on AP credit and other factors, at least three semesters.

While some of the particular subject matter and the teaching methods may differ, the goals of GE are basically the same as those of high school: learn to read, write and speak; learn math at the pre-calc, maybe calc level; US and World history; a little philosophy and literature; art or art history; a lab science; and foreign languge.  Add in gym and study hall, and it sounds like my high school curriculum.

And like HS, the underlying values here are nebulous: be "well-rounded;" develop moral/ethical "character;" be a "good citizen." Are any of these things ever really accomplished by listening to lectures, reading textbooks, and taking blue book/multiple choice exams? Does anyone really remember the knowledge from their GE classes? Do remember how to graph functions or find tangents? Do you remember how to balance a chemical equation or figure out the speed a ball rolled down a ramp? What do you recall about the Teapot Dome scandal? If I gave you a line from a Shakespeare play could you tell me which one it was from? Can you scan a poem? How much of that foreign language you took do you remember? Etc, etc.

In short, I think it is highly dubious to claim that any of these grand "citizen-oriented" goals are accomplished through GE. Even if it did, I would be more inclined to see such work as ideological indoctrination: not something I would want to subject myself or my kids to. Furthermore, I don't believe the specific knowledge of these courses sticks in any systematic way. And what we do remember is not particularly vital, at least it's not worth the $50G you're paying for it!

I'd be happy if we eliminated GE, but that's not my suggestion. Nor in fact do I suggest that we cut the cost of education in half and eliminate 3-4 semesters of the undergrad degree. I'd rather you just got something better for your money. So I suggest this. Most GE programs ar 50-60 credits; most traditional undergraduate degrees are 36 credits.  Flip this ratio. 36 credits of GE and 50-60 credits in your major.

Just to give an example with my own degree, Professional Writing. Most students take a creative writing course or two (in different genres). They get a taste of technical or business writing. They get a course in writing for new media. They get a course in editing. And they get a course or two in rhetoric. Then we have our intro course, an internship, and a senior seminar.  That's it. In my forumulation, they'd have another six courses or so. That means they could do all they are currently doing AND go really in-depth into preparing for a career as an editor or technical writer or journalist or whatever.

It's not that I think the faculty in GE courses are bad. As it happens, all the courses I'm teaching this semester are GE. This is not about the faculty. It's about the curricular structure. We can do better than this.

much ambivalence, a few certainties

A few remarks coming out of our opening college meeting... no, wait, hold on, I promise that it won't be as boring as that sounds. Charles Dziuban, longtime researcher on online and blended pedagogies, was our keynote, and I noted a couple of interesting points coming out of his presentation.

First was his sense of the tremendous ambivalence students feel about online education. For the most part, they desire the convenience of learning online. Then they have mixed feelings about the education they receive, and they worry about their self-identified lack of techno-literacy and the loss of face time with faculty. About those feelings I have a couple of observations:

• Students, in my experience, are ambivalent about the education they receive, period. Regardless of platform. Some classes are good; some are bad. And all that is fairly subjective, although there may be consensus about good and bad professors. However, even then, professors that are popular with students are not necessarily always the best professors from the perspective of other faculty or administration. In short, it's not surprising that students are ambivalent about the education they receive online. Did we think that technology would cure these feelings of ambivalence?
• I recognize their literacy concerns: what better way to deal with them than learning online? How did they become print literate? At least in part from reading books in classrooms.
• The face-time thing is, in my view, a romanticized fantasy of college education anyway. Perhaps in a small class you might develop a personal relationship with a professor, especially in your major if you took multiple courses with the same professor.

More interesting was the generational differences in response to online education. The baby boomers were the most positive: they were learning something new (working online) and were enthusiastic about their progress. Then came the Gen Xers. For them perhaps taking a class on Web CT or something similar meets their expectations of what an online course should be like. The least positive were the Millenials. From their perspective, CMS's are an outdated technologies.

I would suspect that for Millenials their notion of online communication woiuld be shaped by the likes of YouTube and MySpace, as well as the functionality of mobile phones and iPods. I imagine that Blackboard and others will try to keep up, but they're in a difficult situation because their first customers are colleges and college faculty. Offering up a product that faculty can understand and use probably means offering up a product that won't connect with MIllenial students. Tough situation.

We may get a message of ambivalence about many of the things we're doing, but there are a few certainties, and they indicate that our dated practices from lecturing to cms will no longer serve us. I'm also certain that we are in difficult spot. The vast majority of faculty (everyone with more than five years of experience) were educated and learned to teach without computer networks. Some of them have made the difficult transition to begin to teach using a CMS. Undertaking this change has meant putting a level of labor into teaching never expected of college faculty before. For teachers of the previous generation the classroom hardly changed for 50 years.

Now faculty are presented with the reality that their migration to a CMS will become a techno-nomadism, an ongoing journey. This is why Prensky's metaphor of the digital immigrant is not quite right. There is no language or set of customs to learn in the digital world. It's ongoing development.

Anyway, what I got from the day is that we are really as sea. Some faculty are clearly making an effort to try to innovate and take advantage of technology in pedagogically sound ways. But we're really nowhere toward developing a cohesive curriculum that fits into contemporary communication/media networks.

promise of podcasting

On Thursday I'll be presenting with my colleagues, Chuck and Paul, about our experience with iTunes University last semester. It's part of the opening college meeting for this semester. We have 15 minutes, so it will be brief (thankfully). I'm taking the last leg of the presentation, and I'll be talking about how what we've done might translate for others and also about the direction for iTunes and networked media.

So here are the major points I want to get across.

1. The faculty should get the sense that iTunes U is easy to use (which it is) and that producing audio, video, screencasts and/or enhanced podcasts is something they and their students can accomplish in technical terms. True, professional grade media is still difficult and expensive to produce, but YouTube and everyday podcasts demonstrate that college faculty and students should be able to produce usable media. In the end it's not any more difficult than learning Web CT.
2. The real challenge lies in determining what the content of such media might be and how it will function in the classroom. The answer to the challenge will differ from discipline to discipline, and it will change as technologies continue to develop. However in general terms one can consider material conditions of the network and the media. Network-wise you have the obvious one-to-many (coursecast) and many-to-one (students turn in media project); then you have many-to-many. You've got some idea of how this might work from course blogs or web ct discussions and so on. Then you have to consider how audio and/or video media offer you something different from text. Again this will be something discipline specific but I can offer a few general examples of many-to-many communication that would work in a number of disciplines:
   --online presentations: have students do enhanced podcasts rather than give powerpoint in class. The obvious advantage is that you don't take up in-class time with presentations. Students are also left with a product that they can include in a portfolio.
   --record group discussions: have students meet in small groups and discuss a series of questions about a reading. This could serve in lieu of small group work in class or provide some starting points for further class discussion.
   --personal podcast: this might work especially well for interns or student teachers. They could offer reflections of their practice and/or possibly video recordings of classroom practice (iTunes U is secure). Either might offer a more intimate understanding of what is going on during such experiences than a more formalized report. These might then be shared among students interning or student teaching during a given semester; it's nice to know you aren't alone sometimes.
   --making student work public: a video of students at work or a student podcast would likely capture an audience that would not choose to read student texts offered online, an audience like members of the campus community or prospective students.
3. Finally though we need to talk about why we need to do this. Clearly as faculty we each need to determine how a technology like iTunes U might function in our teaching. We need to consider how or if iTunes U will help us reach our curricular objectives. That said, we must also recognize that our students will enter a workplace where an increasing number of companies have already made this same determination and have decided that social media will be an important part of the way they do business. In a recent study of the 500 fastest growing private companies, two-thirds noted that social media were very or somewhat important to their business. We already know from the 120 million MySpace users and 12 million American bloggers and 70 million videos watched daily on YouTube that social media constitute a sizable cultural space. In short, as individual faculty or programs we might choose not to integrate networked media into our curriculum--and we may very well have viable intellectual reasons for doing so--but those choices are not without consequence, particularly when they are made in the context of a society that professional and culturally is expanding rapidly into these areas.

In the end, I hope that my audience can leave with the sense that networked media like iTunes U presents significant challenges, but the challenges are not technological, they are disciplinary and pedagogical. In the other words, the challenges exist precisely in the spaces where they have been best trained. Furthermore I hope that they recognize that while they may choose individually to not rise to this challenge, in doing so they only put that burden on the rest of us b/c this is not a challenge that we can choose to ignore as an institution.

Anyway, that's the gist of it. We'll see how it goes.

iPhone, iTunes University, and Higher Education

No doubt you've already seen all the news surrounding the announcement of Apple's iPhone.
As is to be expected, there are varying opinions over what impact iPhone will have, as well as its relative merits as piece of new technology. I'm thinking particularly about implications in education, especially for iTunes U.

Clearly the immediate impact of iPhone is small. After all, it's hard to imagine a singificant portion of students or faculty will have an iPhone in the next year. However, iPhone does give us a glimpse into a new era of networked media. Educause's 2006 Horizon report idenitified developing cell phones as a technology that would break into education in 2008-09. iPhone provides us with some sense of how that might work. Whether or not iPhone itself proves to be the next iPod is not the point. iPhone does give us a sense of how it might be possible to have a workable desktop on a phone. If you can have fully functional web access, then it is not hard to imagine fully-functional web-based appplications. While you might not be editing web-based Photoshop documents on your cell phone, it's not hard to imagine blogging, for example, from a phone (though the tiny keyboard might be the one thing gets me to write shorter posts). It's not hard to imagine creating audio files, editing them with a web-based audio editor, and uploading and/or downloading suche files from iTunes U or any other such site.

So now I'll be harping on a recognizable theme. Let's go back 5-6 years to 2001. iPod's didn't exist. Blogging was around but few people did it. Wikipedia had just begun. So, let's imagine that  the kind of technology we're talking about takes five years to become as widly adopted as iPods, blogs, and wikipedia (twice as long as the Horizon report predicts). That would seem to suggest that over the next five years successful colleges will be ones that have moved to a fully mobile, networked curriculum and pedagogy.

I wonder what that would mean? I don't think it means the end of FTF pedagogy, though I do think it will mean a shift in the role and practice of FTF teaching. I do think it means that colleges and faculty will both need to be more responsive to the broader changing informational environment. That is, we will be less sequestered than we have been. We will need to offer information within the formats, networks, communication practices, and workflow (or playflow?) in which our students operate. Doing so will allow us to build upon their existing literacies and engagement with media.

Really you could almost think about it through the following analogy. The traditional model of the university is based on proprietary information: you can only get the information we have if you come to us, adopt our formats, and meet our requirements. It's questionable whether or not this walled garden approach to education will work into the future.

moving toward blended learning

I'm back after a long hiatus. We spent a couple weeks visiting the kids' grandparents in New Mexico. No Internet to speak of out there. Something they call "dial up" or something like that... it may be Spanglish, I'm not sure.

Anyway, back in central NY, where the weather is surprisingly warmer than what we got in NM, I'm back on task. First order of business is preparing for a brief presentation I'm giving with some colleagues at our pre-semester, all-college meeting in two weeks. Usually these meetings are organized around various vice-presidents giving PowerPoint presentations. This time though, we have a theme; we're focusing on learning environments, specifically the integration of technology. We even have a guest speaker, Charles Dzuiban, whose work on blended learning I have encountered before.

I'm interested to see where this will go. As I've mentioned here before, there are several faculty at Cortland who have been teaching unofficial blended/hybrid courses for some time. Last semester a couple colleagues and I met with the dean about making these courses visible on the schedule. Lo and behold, a well-known scholar in blended learning is now speaking to the faculty. It is a coincidence but it perhaps indicates that there is a more general push in the direction of blended courses going on at Cortland, among both faculty and administrators.

This has me thinking about the following questions:

What can we say about blended learning courses? In general? Not all that much I would think. What can we say, in general, about FTF courses? We can state the definition of blended courses (courses with a network-media component and reduced seat time). We can say students in blended learning courses fare as well as their FTF counterparts in terms of grades and student satisfaction. The significant point though is that there are as many different possible varieties of blended courses as there are varieties of FTF courses, perhaps more since blended courses combine all the permutations of FTF instruction with all the permutations of media networks. In short, I don't think there is anything that could be said or uncovered about blended courses in general that would allow anyone to make much of an informed decision. You really need to look at the specifics of what is being done.

Should blended learning courses be offered? Might as well ask, should FTF courses be offered? On what basis can the question be answered? Is it a question of assessment statistics? Is it an ethical question? Is it a question of academic capitalism? In terms of assessment, I know of no study that would dissuade against blended learning (again, see the first point). In ethical terms, I would think academic freedom might apply here: I wouldn't force faculty to teach blended courses, but equally I don't think one would prevent them. As to the financial issues, I'm not sure. Will it be crucial in the near future for purposes of admissions to offer a fair percentage of blended and online courses as an option for students? Will blended courses be cheaper? I don't know the answers to these questions, but my guess is if we don't move forward now we will be playing catch up in the near future.

How do we move forward? The question of the day, really. I think the answer begins with recognizing that the differing needs of disciplines and institutions, as well as the continual development of technology, does not allow for a significant, wide-scope solution. This has always been the error of CMS's in my view. I could see the need for a certain level of common course management and interface across a college, but we are moving increasingly into a era of tight vertical markets. Institutional flexibility (something colleges are not famous for) will be key.

All the work going on in my field with ANT and related modes of material-cultural-technological investigations seems quite adaptable to studying the learning networks/environments that will emerge across blended courses. Obviously, this is where my primary interest lies, in studying how the techno-material conditions of blended courses will mutate the teaching of rhetoric and composition, particularly in the space of what is now "professional writing," though either the activity of "writing" in that term will need to be understood broadly or that word will need to be replaced (perhaps with a return to the more generic "composition"?).

In any case, it's back to work for me.