Monthly Archive for February, 2007

My Bad

Published on February 12, 2007 in Teaching and Learning. 2 Comments

I’m supervising a number of independent studies this semester. In fact, I lost track of how many students talked to me at the end of last semester about my supervising their research. At the end of the “add period”, I checked my records to see how many students I had. When I did so, I discovered that one of my better students, who had been meeting regularly with me and was further along in her research than all but one of my students, was not registered.

The next time I saw her I confronted her and she told me, “Oh, I didn’t need the credits so I’m just doing the research without them. I hope that’s okay.”

The Point of Social Bookmarking?

Published on February 12, 2007 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

I’ve been hearing about DIGG for the last year or so. For example, when I spoke with a colleague about my FSEM project, she said, “that’s cool, but you didn’t use DIGG?” Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about Digg and “similar social bookmarking tools.” I don’t know enough about Digg to say whether they did it justice, but I think they missed the whole point of the long tail. The article seems to focus on how Digg and similar services identify and even create “what’s hot.”

I have used furl and now I’ve moved to del.icio.us. In my usage, I really don’t care what the most popular tags are. Rather, I use delicious as a sort of annotated bibliography to keep track of documents and websites that I’ve found and tagged, and to find out what others have found using the same tags. It’s not at all a competition of the sort described in the Journal article. Quite the contrary, it’s a collaboration.

Am I missing the point?

A Purer Version of Just-in-Time Teaching

Published on February 10, 2007 in BigWiki, Economics and Teaching and Learning. 0 Comments

Yesterday I set my alarm a little early to have enough time first thing in the morning to collect and sort the questions for Chapter 6. This was the first chapter that was beyond introductory material, so I wanted to do a good job and I expected the students to have different sorts of questions.

While there was the usual variety of questions asked, there were also a few issues flagged by many students. Eleven groups raised questions about the Cobb-Douglas production function which was used by the author to make the issues more concrete in the chapter. Five groups asked for clarification about the difference between returns to a variable factor of production and returns to scale. Five groups asked about scaled output, and four groups asked about factor-augmenting technical progress.

As I drove the hour to school, I found myself thinking about how to organize the material raised by the students’ questions. I ended up drafting a rough lecture on that material. Then in class, unlike in previous sessions where I simply went through and answered the questions they raised from the chapter, this time I gave a more organized presentation, essentially a stand-alone subset of the material covered in the chapter.

At one point, a student spoke out, “Hey, that point wasn’t in the chapter, was it?” I thought amusedly that I’d never had to defend bringing “outside” material into the class before.

More Than Eye Candy?

Published on February 8, 2007 in Teaching and Learning. 0 Comments

I’m a visual learner. Alan made a post today that really caught my eye. I’ve been aware of this technology since some years ago when a friend referred me to the visual thesaurus. Since then I thought this was really cool, but couldn’t figure out a way to use it in a teaching/learning context. In his post, Alan suggests this might be useful as a research tool, “offer[ing] people ways to navigate connected content that they would actually use and discover.”

I wonder if it could be used as a way of viewing and re-viewing a body of content, like text for a course. Anyone out there have any ideas how?

Textbooks 2.0: A new model for the publishing industry?

Published on February 7, 2007 in University 2.0. 1 Comment

An interesting article in a recent Wall Street Journal reminded me of some thoughts I’ve had about possible directions for texts in U2.0. The article made some observations about how certain traditional products were based on making customers purchase things they didn’t really want and how digital technologies have made these products obsolete:

Photo companies made customers pay for 24 shots in a roll of film to get a handful of good pictures. Music publishers made customers buy full CDs to get a single hit song.

To me this sounds a great deal like the traditional textbook industry, where the standard texts include coverage of all possible topics, far more than could be covered in a single course.

The textbook industry is in trouble. Students are increasingly questioning the utility of purchasing texts, large parts of which the class will not use. On top of that, text prices are rising faster than the general rate of inflation.

I think we’re likely to see the textbook industry move to an i-Tunes model, where faculty (and perhaps students) can chose which pieces from a large collection of materials they want to use as the text for their course. These custom texts can be printed to order in an inexpensive format. We’re already seeing some limited moves in this direction with the custom texts of the major publishing firms, in which instructors can omit chapters they don’t plan to use, in return for a discount on the price. Open source text projects, like Connexions, are also examples of this trend.

But why stop there? Why not consider alternative formats like audio texts (a la “books on tape”) with graphics provided in a separate digital format (on CD or downloadable from a website). Why pay the expense of print if students don’t need it?

There would be some hurdles to overcome, of course. For audio books, we’d have to figure out a format for queuing up the recording where ever a student wishes.

Some years ago I tried an alternative text from DotLearn. The text was provided online with lots of interesting computer animations built in–features that simply couldn’t be provided in a print medium. The company offered an inexpensive spiral-bound printed version for people who didn’t want to read from the screen. Students didn’t like the text. They all wanted the printed text, but then many were disappointed when they couldn’t resell it. They forgot that they received the resale price and more upfront.

If we had a true digital text, we could allow multiple formats to support different learning styles and preferences.

Be Careful What You Ask For

Published on February 7, 2007 in BigWiki, Economics and Teaching and Learning. 2 Comments

The dynamics of my macroeconomics course are quite different than in past years. I’ve alluded to this in previous posts. For one thing, I’m reading the text just slightly ahead of the students. I’m doing it that way to try to get a feel for what the students are experiencing as they confront the material for the first time. The book is really quite good. It reads, to me at least, less like a standard text and more like a practitioner’s guide, something I would assign a research assistant to study prior to starting a research project in macroeconomics. I am learning more than a few things, things I have never noticed in an intermediate text before.

The other day one of my students raised a complaint about the text. He said, “why doesn’t the author just define things clearly?” In the chapter we were working on, he said he had struggled to determine the exact meaning of several terms, that nowhere had he been able to find the type of focussed definition one would find in a glossary. “Why doesn’t the author just tell us what he means,” he asked? The student wasn’t out of line since I had asked the class to provide feedback on the text.

At the time, I was sympathetic, but I found myself thinking about the question for the next few days. Perhaps part of the reason is that these terms are complex concepts that are difficult to explicate concisely? It occurred to me that perhaps the student was looking for a cookbook-type text, where everything is clearly spelled out (but to get there the content has been reduced to the lowest common denominator) and easy to memorize and parrot back on exams. I don’t say this to criticize the student, but I wonder if that’s what he was looking for.

By exploring complex, real ideas, this book requires readers to wrestle with the text, which is no doubt more difficult than memorizing definitions, but also leads to deeper learning in which students have to make meaning. Not easy, but real learning often isn’t.

In any case, the punch line of the story turned out to be “Be careful what you ask for.” The next chapter included a very concise definition:

The Business Cycle is the alternation in the state of the economy of a roughly consistent periodiity and with rough coherence between different measures of the economy.

It took me a few minutes of work to figure out exactly what that meant.

Stray thoughts

Published on February 7, 2007 in Blogging as a Teaching and Research Tool and Teaching and Learning. 1 Comment

What does it mean when students read and even comment on faculty blogs? Doesn’t that show a different, even higher level of engagement when students essentially participate in a faculty discussion?

Vetting the Product

Published on February 1, 2007 in BigWiki and University 2.0. 0 Comments

Last week I observed that in my U2.0 teaching I haven’t been doing enough quality control. I’ve been changing the process of teaching/learning in my classes, but haven’t been vetting the product enough.

I’ve been working to improve that recently. Today I’ve been reviewing the wiki postings done by the students in my macro course. These are attempts to clean the wiki up, to answer the questions I didn’t get to in class, but which were raised by students, and to generally clarify the text. I made the effort to learn how to compare subsequent versions of the wiki so that now I can easily assess the contributions of the students. It makes sense to do this on a regular basis rather than waiting until the end of the semester. Two students are “responsible” for each chapter on the wiki, but all the students can contribute as they like. You can see one version of what it looks like here.