Monthly Archive for May, 2005

In response to my earlier attempt to define blogs, Ernie referred me to Amy Gahran’s very helpful posting, which states:

Weblogs are a kind of web site. They represent an easy and versatile way to publish all kinds of content: news and journalism, education, analysis, humor, personal observation and opinion, and more. … They may be very rigorous and formal, or extremely informal and haphazard. … Quality, credibility, and tone vary widely.

Amy then goes on to discuss the mechanical details of a blog–very useful for someone new to blogging.

Recently, Gardner directed attention to John Udell’s reflections on blogs as a way to ‘narate your work’.

From my perspective, blogs aren’t optional extras that “some reporters” should be “allowed to craft.” They’re essential tools — and not just for journalists, but for every professional person. Collectively we’ll use the blog network to document, discover, and validate expertise.

On your blog, you can document your public agenda better than anyone else can. If you’ve ever been interviewed by a newspaper reporter, you know the drill. An hour of careful explanation may be reduced to a quote that makes you cringe. What hasn’t occurred to most people yet is that you can publish that careful explanation yourself. Or that, when you do, the web’s aggregation engines will surface your words in appropriate contexts, and will help people measure their impact.

What particularly excites me about the potential of blogs is E.W.Dijkstra’s commentary on ‘narrating Your Work’:

If there is one “scientific” discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind. I experience it as a liberating habit: without it, doing the work becomes one thing and writing it down another one, which is often viewed as an unpleasant burden. When working and writing have merged, that burden has been taken away.

If this is true, if we can get students to regularly write about their studies–notes, comments and questions about what they are reading, connections between a text and the lecture, one text and another text, one course and another course–then, we will be helping students take a major step towards genuine education.

(Note to Self: Is this something the First Year Seminar Committee should be thinking about?)

Diana Oblinger’s thought-provoking presentation, Educating the Net Generation, based on her book of the same title, asked how can we (better) engage the net generation in (academic)learning.

According to Diana, the net generation is focused on grades and performance. Moreover, they process information differently than earlier generations. They are:
� Digital (though not necessarily digitally literate)
� Connected
� Experiential � they like to learn by doing
� Immediate
� Social

Additionally, net geners have different learning preferences:
� Teams, peer-to-peer (Peer learning/ peer tutoring; Students teach other students; High ability students actually gain the most!)
� Engagement and experience (If you don’t engage them, they will tune out.)
� Visual and kinesthetic (They don’t read texts, but they do pay attention to images and video. Get the students to move around every 10 minutes)
� Things that matter (e.g. Service learning, use real data)

This raises a question for me: How does Diana’s argument mesh with the literature on how different people, even within a given age group, have different learning styles?

Several people in the audience had a larger concern for what seemed to be an underlying assumption of Diana’s remarks: that it is our responsibility as educators to adjust our teaching to best fit our students’ learning styles. The concern might be expressed in several ways: How much can we expect to change our students’ expectations, learning styles, etc, and how much do we need to change to reach them? In other words, how can we/should we synch with our students?

Chip German really went to the heart of the matter when he asked: what is the core content of a liberal education and what is delivery method? It may be that faculty are confusing the latter with the former. If instructional technology can suggest a better delivery method for the same content, I think we should pursue that. So the key question is really where to draw the line between content and presentation?

Students don’t seem to read texts anymore; the treat them as pure substitutes rather than complements to the class meetings. When they do read they don’t seem to read carefully, missing stuff which is clearly stated in the text.

Last year I asked a senior focus group of about a dozen students how many of them read the texts for their courses. One student indicated that he read them all, but qualified his statement by noting that he was not a native English speaker and so he felt he needed to do the readings to make sure he understood the material. A couple of the better students said they read the texts when they needed a better grasp of the material than they got from their class notes. Another student piped up that he only bought the books when he determined that he needed them. I asked how he made that determination and he said it was based on how he did on the mid term exam. At this point, most of the rest of the group nodded in agreement.

I am sympathetic to the argument that the high price of textbooks may force students to make hard choices about what they can afford. But my sense is that for the majority of my students, that is not the primary motivation. For example, they don’t seem to use on-line resources which are free to them any more frequently.

How do students hope to learn if they don’t study what’s on the reading list and merely count on the point of view of the instructor?

This may be related to another impression that more students seem to be trying to game the system instead of taking advantage of their opportunity to obtain the best education they can.