07.31.08
Posted in Blogging, Pedagogy and Scholarship at 11:02 am by Lisa Spangenberg
James D. Macdonald, SF author and exceedingly experienced online moderator (remember Yog Sysop? That’s him) offers some rules for moderation under the heading:
Here’s what moderators need to know:
- a) Sure, there’s freedom of speech. Anyone who wants it can go start their own blog. On Yog’s board, Yog’s whim is law.
- b) Yog is an ancient ghod of chaos and evil. And he doesn’t like people very much.
- c) Moderation is a subjective art, and the moderator is always right.
- d) The moderator may have minions. They need to have a private area where they keep the buckets of Thorazine and the cold-frosty bottles of cow snot.
- e) The minions speak with the voice of Yog. Yog backs his minions up.
- f) There is always someone awake, and in charge, when Yog isn’t around in person. The minions know who the Duty Yog is.
- g) If someone starts off as a spammer, troll, or flamer, he is a spammer, troll, or flamer forever and is liable to instant deletion/banning with no recourse and no appeal.
- h) If the moderator ever needs inspiration, he can re-read Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and recall that the posters are sinners and he is Ghod.
- i) Rules? In a knife fight? Yog and his minions have standards, but they don’t need to tell the posters, lest some of them attempt to game the system. Attempting to game the system is, all on its own, a deletable offense.
- j) ALL CAPS posts are deleted on sight, unread. Mostly ALL CAPS POSTS are ALL CAPS.
- k) Anyone who doesn’t space after punctuation marks is insane, and can be deleted/banned on sight.
- l) Personal attacks against Yog and his minions are ignored. Personal attacks against anyone else are deletable on sight.
See the original post at Making Light and be sure to read the comments, too.
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07.21.08
Posted in Pedagogy and Scholarship at 1:16 am by Lisa Spangenberg
I’ve copied the following, with permission, from a post on an online forum. The original poster is a professional educator and adminstrator in a graduate program which relies on online instruction. I think the post asks some good questions.
It will come as no surprise to anyone here that the biggest challenge I face is not in finding excellent teachers who know their subject cold. Rather, it’s (you got it) finding people with all of that going for them who can write in the way that you have to in order to give of yourself, show yourself, online.
My big hiring mistakes have all had the same thing in common — they all glide around classrooms like they’ve spent a lifetime in the theater (i.e., they’re great “performers” and know their stuff so cold that they can hold students spellbound for three hours)… but ask them to commit that to paper, and it’s just no go. We’ve always given our own graduate faculty first crack at writing these courses… usually disastrous, because they’re as bad at writing what they do as they are good at doing it!
Asking for writing samples has been a waste of time… it’s just plain not the same genre, and there’s absolutely nothing to be gained from their last article in The Journal of American YouPickIts.
The same thing happens from time to time with the folks who tend the discussions in the class… they don’t know how to show or give themselves to students in their writing… and that’s what it takes when teaching and learning relationships have to happen and develop in print.
How can I “screen” those applicants with credentials and teaching success for their ability to function online, whose persona in print reflects an appreciation for the very specific art of being able to “talk” in black and white like they do in a classroom? Or am I doomed to a lifetime of having to endlessly edit the stuff of people who know something I need them to share, so that it doesn’t put my students into a coma?
What suggestions can we offer about finding applicants who will excel at online instruction?
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05.23.07
Posted in Pedagogy and Scholarship at 6:45 am by Lisa Spangenberg
According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Google is no longer accepting AdWords ads from mills:
Academic paper-writing services, or “paper mills,” will no longer be able to buy search terms in the Google AdWords program, and thus their ads will no longer pop up in the “sponsored links” sections of a Google search-results page.
You can read the article here, if you’re a subscriber, anyway. They know they’ll have to hand-check sites, but they do seem to have an idea of what a mill is, and does, and how they work, which means they might even spot the more clever ones.
If I see a Google press release, or a more public article about Google’s policy, I’ll link it here.
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04.03.07
Posted in Pedagogy and Scholarship, Copyright at 12:34 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
My friend Dawno alerted me to this story about anti-plagiarism service Turnitin.com being sued for copyright violation by four students. Turnitin is a service contracted by universities and schools. Faculty submit student papers for analysis by Turnitin which compares the text to papers stored in an internal database and to text stored on the Web; Turnitin uses an algorithm based-text-string analysis of the sort an experienced teacher engages in when we use our own skills and Google to spot plagiarism. Turnitin looks for strings that match within a few characters, and then provides a “report” that color codes text and and offers statistics and URLs.
I’ve had problem with the concepts behind Turnitin right from the start; I blogged about my concerns regarding violating student’s rights some time ago. Now, students are suing Turnitin for copyright violation because their papers are databased and used for subsequent comparisons without their permission; I suspect we’ll see a privacy violation, particularly in the context of FERPA soon.
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12.04.06
Posted in Pedagogy and Scholarship at 7:52 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Kathy Sierra, one of the Head First authors, has an extremely useful and thoughtful post on Building a User Community. This is a post from someone who gets community, and the importance of sharing with, rather than feeding from, a community. I’m going to wait until I’ve read the sequel before I post, but you really ought to go read Kathy Sierra right now.
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11.27.06
Posted in Pedagogy and Scholarship, Rant at 7:44 am by Lisa Spangenberg
Way back in January of 2002 I wrote a rationale for this blog. It’s been linked to and quoted a few times, most recently by Shelly McCauley Jugovich and Bruce Reeves in an Educause Quarterly article entitled “IT and Educational Technology: What’s Pedagogy Got to Do with IT?“. They quoted this bit (without the links):
This comment came from Lisa Spangenberg, a self-proclaimed digital medievalist:
Frequently faculty who would like to use technology are bewildered by the jargon and by the unfortunate arrogance of the technical experts they must work with, who, for all their technical expertise are, not surprisingly, sometimes woefully ignorant about pedagogy, and have no interest or understanding of the humanities.
You’ll note, if you looked at the full article via the link, that this is from their section on “Skepticism About IT Staff.”
They counter my quotation with the following paragraph:
We address such skepticism by demonstrating our experience with, knowledge of, and ongoing commitment to pedagogy. UMD and the ITSS department encourage and support the pursuit of coursework, degrees, and professional development in the pedagogical use of technology. Moreover, our work on campus with faculty members from all disciplines provides access to campus best practices on a regular basis. We publicly share with the campus community our credentials and experience in campus publications, meetings, workshops, and so forth, and in our workshops we model effective uses of the technology tools we are teaching others to use. These activities give us the opportunity to establish and maintain credibility with the faculty.
In other words, they missed my point almost entirely.
There’s a repellent but effective expression in commercial software development, one that was generally associated with the dot com frenzy, when executives, marketing folk, and PR departments referred to “eating their own dog food,” meaning that they used the same tools and products that they wanted their customers to buy.
When I talk about IT folk who “for all their technical expertise are, not surprisingly, sometimes woefully ignorant about pedagogy, and have no interest or understanding of the humanities,” I’m essentially saying “they don’t eat their own dog food.”
It’s not enough to know how to use the software and hardware to produce content. It’s not even enough to know how to teach faculty and others how to use them without engaging in technical double-speak. I expect anyone encouraging faculty to teach with technology, digital or other, to be prepared to use that technology to practice what they preach; they have to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. Modeling doesn’t cut it.
I expect someone who is going to discuss pedagogy with faculty to have experience actually teaching academic content with a live class using the same technology they expect teachers to use.
Frankly, I don’t really have a lot of faith in instructional technology professionals’ discussion of pedagogic theory when they don’t use the technology they’re expecting teachers and students to use, and use it in the same environment that the teachers and students use, under the same conditions. If you don’t use technology to teach English literature, or Japanese or medieval history or music, to use examples from the humanities, how much value does your pedagogical advice have? How much credibility do you have?
Oh, and by the way, the “self-proclaimed digital medievalist” was a bit disingenuous. If it was meant as humorous, it fails since it was presented without context, suggesting that I’m a technology-opposed Luddite, which, in fact is the way readers have taken the reference. If it was meant as meiosis, it fails as well; I’ve got solid technical credentials, including seventeen years of experience developing software for higher education, for publishers, and for consumers. I’ve supported users, and supported and evangelized digital technology use with faculty and students. As a medievalist, I have more than six years experience teaching college English literature and compositions classes, where I ate my own dog food, even while working to support faculty using instructional technology.
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05.06.06
Posted in Pedagogy and Scholarship at 10:22 am by Lisa Spangenberg
I’ve been attending the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo. On Thursday I attended a panel on “hybrid teaching,” that is, replacing a fair amount of class room instruction with Internet based instruction. It’s not, frankly, a concept that I’m overly fond of; I think face-to-face live instruction is to be preferred, whenever possible. I also don’t think that “distant education” is always a good alternative.
This panel discussion, however, was great. All three of the teachers were extremely talented and experienced class room teachers, with really super ideas about teaching literature, ideas which they’d found very clever ways to express using digital technology. But each of them apologized for what they saw as a lack of technical skills.
I don’t think there was any sort of failure on their part, at all, but I do think that the technology they were given to use failed them. Most of them used WebCT or its slightly less wretched cousin Blackboard. These are both complicated and poorly designed Learning Management Systems, and they require a fair amount of training, and a heck of a lot of clicking, to produce non-standared Web pages that are exceedingly rigid and don’t meet basic 508 standards for disabled users.
We need to do a much better job in terms of the technology we expect teachers and students to use. These teachers had super ideas, and coped superbly with the technology they had to use— but it should have been much easier and less labor intensive. It occurred to me, listening to them, that most of them could have done exactly what they wanted, with either ordinary HTML pages, or a Blogging system, like Blogger or Live Journal.
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02.23.06
Posted in Blogging, Pedagogy and Scholarship, Rant at 8:50 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
New Kid on the Hallway drew my attention to this article in Inside Higher Ed by Jeff Rice.
Rice has two central points, I think, in his initial article. I say “I think” because the argument is less than coherent. Rice begins by referring to the “Ivan Tribble” articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education, asserting that “Too many academic bloggers have taken Tribble and similar commentaries seriously” then makes an initial overture to his central point, his concern regarding “the general seriousness that has immediately encased a fairly novel form of writing.” He defines “seriousness” as “the over-hyped heaviness centered on this one particular type of writing.” This is his first point.
Next Rice segues to a red herring: the issue of anonymous blogging (discussed by Tribble) by academics using pseudonyms like “La Lecturess.” Rice argues that “these names re-enforce the burden of seriousness which has overtaken academic blogging. Writing a blog under a pseudonym is usually an argument that the only safe way for an academic to write publicly is to write anonymously.” He laments that “Lost in this seriousness are a number of quite amazing things blogging has provided writers”—he lists specific aspects of blogging, both those that relate to writing on the Web in general, like linking, that are easier because of blogging software, and those, like automatic archives, that are characteristic of blogs and blogging software. Rice asserts that this “seriousness” will lead to “stagnation.” He points to literary innovators Cervantes and Rousseau as models, and asserts that “finally academia has the opportunity to play with digital form, content, and genre in ways previously denied because of the difficulty of learning hypertext or setting up webspace on university servers.” This is his second point.
Rice closes by giving examples of “provocative and exciting weblogs,” like BoingBoing, or Wonderland, and then points to his own blog, Yellow Dog as a model via a disingenuous occultatio.
Rice seems unaware that blogs aren’t that novel; even the most parsimonious blog historian has to grant them a good six years of life—that’s an age on the Web. Moroever, it’s not like the weblog formats and features he finds novel exist as rhetorical oddities; blogs and blogging correspond with the traditional five divisions of rhetoric. Nor am I the only person to compare blogs and commonplace books or nineteenth century pamphlets.
In his contention that we take Tribble’s warnings too seriously, I wonder if Rice actually read the pieces in question. I’m also not sure who Rice is referring to by “we.” With respect to anonymous blogging, while I am not anonymous, it’s because I know that it’s time consuming and laborious to be truly anonymous on the ‘Net, and I’m too lazy. Familiarity with writing for the Web is part of my professional expertise in any case, and the drive for tenure is not likely to be part of my future. I’m lucky. Many of my blogging peers are less fortunate, and people have been fired for blogging. As Professor Nokes points out, there are anonymous bloggers that aren’t anonymous to me, but I take their decision to remain anonymous very seriously and consider their anonymity a matter of privacy and professional courtesy.
Regarding the “seriousness” of other bloggers, which strikes me as a slightly self-serving assertion on Rice’s part, it’s a little difficult to be sure what, exactly, he means. For instance, he refers to “academic bloggers,” but doesn’t indicate what he means by “academic.” Does he mean any professor, graduate student or faculty member who blogs? Does he mean people who blog about scholarly subjects? The blogs I read in my scholarly field, medieval studies, are often quite serious in tone and topic, but they are just as often humorous. Most of us are medievalists because we fell in love with our field, with the music, the languages, the literatures, the art, and the peoples, and that joy is an important part of our lives, our scholarships, and our blogs. I note that a fair number of medievalist bloggers do blog about our field—but we also blog about our outside interests, and our lives, to varying extents. I know several, anonymous and not, who have decidedly non-academic blogs about their hobbies, or their families. I think too that Rice misses the value of scholarly community in his dismissal of “seriousness.” Take, for example, what began as a semi-frivolous aside about an imaginary sheep DNA project on Professor Drout’s blog. But the response encouraged him to actually explore the project. That’s not anything like stagnation.
Rice exhorts us to “play” with the opportunities blogging gives us— yet he seems unaware that that’s exactly one reason many bloggers are anonymous— the anonymity gives them a safer place to engage in serio ludere. Rice even more surprisingly doesn’t seem to realize that the content and the presentation of a blog are two very different things, and that the presentation is ultimately controlled by the reader’s Web browser (Hint: if you have a blog with a style sheet that uses tiny type, or oddly colored text against a text-hostile background, I’m subverting your style sheet). Indeed, after his paragraph in praise of the features of blogs and blog software, the examples of innovative blogging Rice gives are all innovative in terms of content, not form. I also suspect he’s completely unaware of the often forgotten bastard child of blogging—the journal, perhaps best exemplified by LiveJournal; a fair number of “serious” and “academic” bloggers have a LiveJournal account for their less scholarly musings. In short, it seems to me that Rice is really saying not, “don’t take blogging so seriously,” but “why aren’t you all more like me?”
In his follow up post, Rice renders his argument even more confusing. He asks, via hypophora, if anonymity is an issue with respect to academic writing, and then answers “no.” I’d argue that he’s answering too quickly; sometimes anonymity may be an academic writing issue, especially for the non-tenured and the graduate student (both exceedingly common statuses for bloggers). Rice then asserts that anonymity isn’t so much an issue as “access” is. Rice says that “Because academic writing is just not as accessible as blogging. Google changed the interface of interaction in ways other search engines failed.” Rice argues that in order for him to “access” a fellow academic’s work he has to pay expensive journal subscription fees, or be at a school where a library has a current subscription and back issues, and possibly actually go to the library in question.
He’s introduced yet another red herring. “Access” has always been a problem, it’s part of the history of writing (you try toting all the tablets that make up Gilgamesh), a history that includes chained libraries, unwieldy manuscripts that weigh twenty pounds, and closed stacks. It’s not a matter of access (though I note that Rice would do well to explore the issue of access in terms of his own blog). But it might be an issue of Rice attempting to label bloggers, to pigeon-hole them as “academic” or “innovative,” or exhorting them to be more like him.
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06.26.05
Posted in CMS/LMS, Pedagogy and Scholarship at 8:21 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
I freely confess that numbers and I do not get along as well as, say, letters and I get along. I started using a spreadsheet for grading calculations very early on in my teaching. In a graduate pedagogy class I noticed a lot of concern about the numeric and mathematical aspects of grading. For instance, how one converts a series of letter-grades for papers, raw scores for quizzes, exams, all of which are weighted with various percentages, to a final letter grade. No one ever actually explained it to us—not in any of three different graduate level pedagogy classes.
I like spreadsheets, though I admit that I did give some thought to how I would calculate grades when I set up my assignments and syllabus at the start of the quarter. I wish I’d had this very useful tutorial by John Selvia on using the Appleworks spreadsheet for grades when I started.
I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about the “Grading Tool” that LMS or Learning Management Systems like Web-CT and Blackboard and Sakai all seem to have. I’ve looked at lots and lots of such tools. Most of them do the job quite nicely, but they’re difficult to set up and frequently so confusing to the teacher attempting to use them that teachers don’t use them. That’s true of me as well; I looked at the LMS tools for grading available to me, and decided it made more sense to just use the spreadsheet. Part of the problem in the Humanities especially, I think, for many of us, especially grad students, is that we have at best a dim understanding of the math, or really, arithmetic, we need to calculate grades with true facility. We know quite well how to assign a letter grade to a paper; it’s integrating the quizzes, the exams and other grades that’s difficult. Another problem is that grading tools seem to be designed by and for people doing grading in the sciences, where they tend to have raw scores, or numeric grades rather than letter grades. That means we have to have a numeric scale for the letters, and then convert them to numbers, possibly even weighted numbers.
There’s no simple solution; yes, better design of grading tools would be good, better Help systems too, but also I think there’s a need for user training that goes beyond what button to click and which options to select. We need to do a better job of teaching grad students, like me, how to do grading, how to do assessment, if you want the jargon, and not just by sitting in a class room chatting about it. We need practical, mentored experience in creating the grading structure, the assessment tools (quizzes, or exams, for instance), experience that goes beyond norming to actually using the numbers. I had a discussion a few years ago with a Psychology faculty member who said Humanities faculty engaged in “fuzzy grading.” Maybe so. I’m not sure that’s a fault, though. I learned a great deal from teachers I worked for, but I’m fairly sure that they weren’t intentionally teaching me how to grade; it was more that I deliberately observed how they did what they did. I wish they had been part of those pedagogy classes, though as I write this I realize none of them use the grading tools either.
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04.04.05
Posted in Pedagogy and Scholarship at 8:58 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, editor extraordinaire and the creator of Making Light, one of the best blogs I’ve ever seen, is not only the author of many fine posts, she has a thriving, active, intelligent and interesting group of readers who actively comment on the entries and on each others’ comments. A lot of that community involvement is because of Teresa’s interaction with her readers as a moderator. She offers excellent advice that is right on target for those desiring to use blogs or discussion boards for teaching and student interaction.
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