Monthly Archive for June, 2007

First Take on Ronco

Published on June 25, 2007 in Teaching and Learning and ronco. 2 Comments

I just discovered Patrick’s post on the ronco project, which follows two posts from Martha and Jeff on the topic. I’m not sure why I missed Patrick’s when it came out, but I have a couple comments.

One thing that has struck me about the blog posts on this subject, as well as the conversation in general, is the diversity of views on just what this thing is. I expect that diversity reflects the complexity of this project, the different (but highly complementary) talents of the various participants, and the fact that we’re just getting started on sketching this out.

Martha, Jeff and Patrick all seemed (in their blog posts) to emphasize one face of the ronco. Martha described ronco as “a set of tools/online environments that allow us to make visible the mind of the University.” Jeff calls it “a snapsnot of our intellectual life.” Patrick says, “This thing …is a something for students and faculty to describe and map the relationships and connections between the various pieces of their intellectual life.”

Yes, it is all of these things, but it’s more. It’s not merely a record or description of past events, but it’s also a text for future study and even a sandbox for future creativity. In other words, it’s something that students can use to create new knowledge.

Jeff gets at this when he describes ronco as “A way for students to make connections between their various sources of learning and create a self-aware, reflective course of study.”

I imagine Martha and Patrick had this other face of ronco in mind as well, but for those outside the conversation, I thought it important to mention it explicitly.

What does it mean to make a course “sticky”?

Published on June 23, 2007 in Teaching and Learning. 2 Comments

This is the second post inspired by my reading of Malcolm Gladstone’s The Tipping Point.

According to Gladstone,

The stickiness factor says there are specific ways of making a contagious message sticky; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.

A course is more than information, and making a course sticky is likely more than a question of whether or not to use powerpoint (i.e. how the instructor presents the information). I suspect a sticky course (or class session) is compelling. Students feel compelled to engage with the material. This may involve including playful elements in the course.

Suggesting that a course be compelling is different from the old canard that teaching needs to be entertaining. Attending the Faculty Academy is compelling, but I wouldn’t describe it primarily as entertaining. Calling it “entertaining” is to trivialize powerful teaching.

Compelling, intriguing, enticing, playful, inspiring. These are words I associate with sticky courses.

A sticky course, then, draws the student in, makes the student want to participate and contribute to the learning experience. How does an instructor craft a course to make it this way? There are probably as many ways as instructors. Anyone care to provide some suggestions.

Can one do this for forty-two consecutive class sessions? Not likely, but then I couldn’t attend the Faculty Academy for forty-two consecutive days, either. It would be too much stimulation with not enough time for reflection and assimilation. This suggests to me that while one couldn’t realistically construct a course with every session sticky, one should be able to build a regular rhythm of this into a course.

How would you do this? If you’re a student, what makes a course session compelling to you? If you’re a teacher, what have you found to do this?

Honesty in Academia

Published on June 18, 2007 in Teaching and Learning. 3 Comments

I have been working on an idea with Gardner and Jeff regarding the First Year Seminars we will each be teaching next fall. The topics of the seminars range from ‘Banned and Dangerous Art” to “When Americans Came Marching Home: The Veteran in U.S. History.” The premise of the idea is simple: even though we are all teaching seminars on different topics, the overarching goal of the seminars is the same: to introduce students to the life of the mind; as such it’s not unlikely that, at least at the beginning of the term, we will be discussing similar themes. Why not pool our efforts to develop some notes/text resources for those themes in common, especially since not all of us are experts on them? We could then share them with any FSEM faculty who would like to use them.

I’ve started drafts on three of these themes: ”What Do We Know?” on the nature of and advance of knowledge, “What is Scholarly Writing (and how it may differ from what freshman learned in high school)? and “Why Citing Sources is Not Just a Way to Avoid Getting in Trouble for Plagiarism.”

After discussing the project with Gardner and Jeff and obtaining agreement that this was worth trying, I found myself strangely reluctant to share my drafts with them, afraid they’d think the work was lame or reductive or something. Then I realized that if I couldn’t share with my friends, how could I expect other faculty to do the same?

Last Friday, I discussed this reluctance with Martha who helped me see a way through. The discussion went something like this:

Martha: It’s funny how our own anxieties can take hold even in the spaces and activities we seek to promote. There’s a lesson there.

Steve: A big lesson, but how do we teach our broader colleagues. I’d venture to say that virtually every faculty member feels this way about their work, or at least their lecture notes.

Martha: I’m sure you’re right. And yet, we want students to take these risks.

Steve: Yes. Do as I say, not as I do. Not because I can’t do, but because I’m too important to do it, and after all, I’ve done it before, so I don’t need to do it now.

Martha: Ultimately, this seems to me to be about fear and trust.

Steve: Yes. And I took a lot of courses on those in grad school. NOT!

Martha: Trust, risk, fear.

Martha: A required class for all freshmen?

Steve: Or, a required class for all faculty?

Martha: Exactly.

Steve: Yet, I suspect that many faculty would argue that this isn’t part of their job, that their job is to teach (independent) courses and to be left alone to do their research. If they had to take a class (on trust, risk and fear), that would imply or create some intellectual community.

Martha: Funny. I guess research doesn’t need a community?

Steve: Yes, but usually that community is off-campus.

Martha Burtis says: Why?

Steve: Because at least in most schools, departments aren’t big enough to have more than one person in your area of expertise. That’s how I met my friend Steve DeLoach down at Elon with whom I wrote three papers on electronic discussion.

Martha: That presumes that the only colleagues worth collaborating with are in your own area of expertise. How do we promote ideas of interdisciplinarity to students with THAT mentality?

Steve: Well, it’s the reality at least in the social sciences, and I suspect in other disciplines, that we’ve become so specialized that people in other departments either aren’t interested or are perceived as not having the expertise to give intelligent comments.

Martha: Communities need to be able to embrace connections forged through deep specialization as well as diverse expertise.

Steve: Well, yes. But that’s not where most of us are right now.

Martha: How do we get there?

Martha: One answer: Expose the connection-making.

Steve: One colleague at a time… is my answer. Gardner thinks it will take enlightened leadership to make this happen broadly. Probably the answer is all of these things.

Steve: I think it’s regretful that I don’t know what my colleagues in economics are doing in their courses or in their research until we share vitas and faculty activity reports to complete peer reviews at the end of the year. I have more active collaborators outside of my dept than within.

Martha: That’s just crazy. Not surprising, but crazy.

Steve: I also think it’s unproductive for students that I don’t know what my colleagues are doing in their courses. Could we be duplicating effort where it’s not necessary? Shouldn’t my subsequent course build on what was done in the prerequisite? But how can I do that if I don’t know (beyond very broadly) what students do there?

Martha: Exactly! It’s the thing that always strikes me about Faculty Academy — it’s this rare opportunity at UMW to expose the work that faculty are doing across (and within!) departments.

[End of discussion]

I’ve think I’ve found a solution to my reluctance. Since I’m reluctant to share my thinking with my colleagues, instead I’ll share it with the world–or at least the blogosphere. Once I’ve gone public, I’ll also share it more directly with my UMW colleagues. I’ve posted the first document, “How Do We Know?” on a wiki here. If you’d like to revise it or comment on it, let me know and I’ll send you the login information.

Postmortem on my experiments with teaching this year.

Published on June 4, 2007 in BigWiki, Teaching and Learning and The Experiment. 1 Comment

At the end of the school year, about a month ago, I was pretty unhappy with my teaching experiments this year.

In my intro course, the metacognition experiment didn’t seem to go very well this year. Part of it was me–the FSEM was taking so much of my time and energy that I wasn’t able to devote as much to the intro course. But it also seemed as if the students weren’t taking the meta assignments seriously. It made me wonder if trying to teach freshmen and sophomores metacognition was perceived as teaching it out of context. While I explained carefully what I was trying to teach them–that experts learn differently than novices, and that here was a framework they could use to learn economics the way economists see it, they seemed to perceive that explanation as abstract and unrelated to the content of the course. It seemed beyond their ken, at least for most students. Clearly teaching novices to learn like experts is a challenge.

Another part of my discomfort was my insistence on not curving the test grades this year to provide a clear incentive for using the metacognitive framework. The students ended up doing poorly in terms of grades. Unfortunately, when students did badly on the exams, it didn’t seem to make them want to do the meta activities any more. A contributing problem is that the first exam tends to be fairly easy since the material includes a great deal of common knowledge. This provided a false signal for the second exam which was much more difficult as was the final. With only two midterms and a final, students apparently weren’t getting enough timely feedback on their learning.

What I did learn was that providing regular formative feedback, in the form of automated quizzes is a good thing. The challenge is finding quiz questions that adequately represent the ones I test with. Perhaps the answer is to write my own questions, if I can then find a testing platform to put them on.

The whole experience made me think carefully about the best way to teach introductory economics–I ended up wondering if the writing intensive method I used for years was more effective than any of my recent experimental approaches. The reason for that conclusion is the writing assignments I gave required students to do economics, which learning strictly from the text and lectures doesn’t.

As I discussed previously, my experimental approach to intermediate macro was largely a failure in that students didn’t learn as much as they did during my previous approach. At the same time, I learned a great deal that I will be able to apply to courses in the future.

I also learned a lot about social software and learning in the international finance seminar. I’m going to apply some of that to the FSEM next fall–e.g. group research presentations instead of a research paper.

At one level, my understanding of the best ways to teach my courses seems to be right back where I started several years ago. But then it occurred to me that I may have experienced what Jerome Bruner calls “the spiral of learning.” I may be back to the approaches I originally used, but my understanding of what makes them effective is much greater than it was when I started. Additionally, some of the details are quite different.

I guess that’s progress.

End of Term: Artificial School?

Published on June 4, 2007 in Teaching and Learning. 0 Comments


The end of an academic term makes students and faculty alike crazy with stress. While a little stress tends to motivate us, too much makes us shut down. Does learning actually take place this time of the year? I’d say less than you might think. Rather, students are pretending to learn and we’re pretending to grade. I really think that we’re wasting this opportunity for learning and meaning making. Part of the problem is that too many projects/papers/exams come due at the same time.

This isn’t the way I work. Yes, I get motivated as deadlines approach, but as a professional I don’t end up faking it. Worst case scenario, I miss the deadline but finish the project well.

How might we make this work in terms of a university semester? One way would be for me to unilaterally schedule my deadlines at times other than the end of the semester. What about the final exam? While I’m a believer in the value of a final tally of what is learned, especially in my discipline where learning tends to occur non-linearly, more and more I’m coming to believe that a final examination may not be the best way to go for some courses. Introductory or intermediate theory courses might need a final exam, but first year or senior seminars, no. Instead, I’m moving towards reflective assessments. In my international finance seminar this past semester, the last three weeks were devoted to student presentations, in the last week a blog portfolio was due, and in lieu of the final exam, a shortish paper was assigned asking what students learned from the presentations. This seemed to take some of the pressure off early and turned the end of the semester into more of a reflective time than a test of facts. I’d be curious to know what my students thought of this.

My Blogging Practices

Published on June 4, 2007 in Blogging as a Teaching and Research Tool. 0 Comments

Martha’s last post raised some very interesting questions about blogging practice. Here are my responses (in italics):

Generally, are you an impetuous blogger? Or do you mull over an idea or post for hours, days, weeks before hand? Do you draft a post and then let it sit until you’ve had a chance to revise it multiple times, perfecting your language and point?

What I wanted to say is I write my posts in multiple drafts and think them thru before I post them. But more often than not, when I do that, they don’t get published for a long time if at all. I guess I have three kinds of posts:

• Those I collect in draft usually because I’m tied up with school work and don’t have the time to finish them until after the semester. Many of these are still worth posting.
• Those I may think about for a few days, but then draft and post within 24 hours. Most of my best posts are in this category.
• Those short ones that I write and post impetuously.

Do you “collect” the references in your posts before you write them (if so, describe your system)? Or do you blog with 15 windows open, copying and pasting quotes and URLs, as needed?

I track down the references from memory as I write, opening windows as needed.

Do you blog in the admin panel of your blog? Or do you use some third-party tool? If you use a tool, what features does it have that hooked you?

The admin panel works fine for me. I’m not really aware of any third-party tools.

Do you automatically consider placing images in your posts? Or does this not even occur to you, usually?

This is something I wish I did more of. I think images enhance the look of a post, but honestly I rarely think about that when I’m blogging. Once and a while I’ll see an image that moves me to blog about it.

Do you write posts and then delete them before clicking “Publish?”

Only when they’re old and stale.

Or, by extension, do you have draft posts that have languished for days, weeks, months waiting for you to pull the trigger?

Yes, see above.

Do you feel compelled to blog on a schedule? Do you feel guilty when you don’t?

Nope and nope. I blog primarily for me. If I don’t feel like it, I don’t blog. That said, I do feel bad when I have things to blog about during the school year, but I can’t find the time.

Do you “craft” the experience of your blog, adding sidebar widgets and custom graphics to lure readers into your space?

I’ve occasionally thought about it when I’ve seen cool widgets on other folks blogs, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

What’s the point? … Not only does it make us potentially more thoughtful about our own blogging, I think it might change the way we talk about blogging to others — particularly students? How often do we talk about blogging in the context of a class but not talk about the practice. It’s easy to assume that blogging should come naturally — after all, it’s just “writing online.” But, I don’t think it’s that simple. Blogging often represents a presentation of oneself (sometimes personal, sometimes intellectual, sometimes both) that doesn’t come naturally to everyone. And it occurs within a networked context.

This point deserves more thought. It may be a response to my previous post. I’d love to be able to include a discussion of these issues, especially that there are a diversity of blogging styles, when students get introduced to the mechanics of blogging in my courses. Martha, would you care to summarize what you’ve learned from the responses you’ve received?

Is this what (some) students feel about blogging?

Published on June 4, 2007 in Blogging as a Teaching and Research Tool. 1 Comment

I had an another insight at the faculty academy last month. In courses where I ask students to blog, I always set up a class blog for myself. I feel like it’s the right thing to do to model what I’m asking them to do. But, in marked contrast to my real blog here, I’ve found my class blogs to be artificial or contrived. I have to remind myself to post to them.

Is this how students feel when I assign them to blog? Is this why some of them fail to engage with it? How can I help them make a course blog a real blog? If they have a real blog, allowing them to post class assignments there might work better, but what about someone who’s never blogged before.

Questions about blogging pedagogy

Published on June 3, 2007 in Blogging as a Teaching and Research Tool and FA07. 0 Comments

One of the things I noticed at this year’s faculty academy was number of thoughtful questions about blogging as pedagogy that came up. Here is a list of the ones I remember:

* How can we catalyze the process of blogging in our courses? Are there ways to jumpstart the process? (Sue)

* How can we structure the use of blogs in a course-context so that students genuinely engage with blogging?

* How can we engage more than just the vocal few in blogging substantively? (Barbara).

* How can we produce ownership in a class blog? (Laura)

* How can we get students to link reflectively with other students’ posts?

* How do we get students to comment on each others’ blogs in substantive ways?

*How can an instructor fairly evaluate blog posts?

*How can a teacher create a design for the class blog to support the intent of the course? (Barbara)

Anyone care to postulate answers?

Reaction to Alan’s Keynote at the Recent Faculty Academy

Published on June 3, 2007 in FA07. 0 Comments

Alan Levine’s keynote address provided a very intriguing introduction to a range of recent technologies, most of which I’d heard of but none of which I was really familiar with. His conception of the art of teaching as Mashup/remix/reinterpretation of existing material really struck a chord with me. Still, I have to agree with Laura that the best quote of the presentation was when Alan said “You can’t figure this stuff out from the outside.” Perhaps it’s my particular learning style, but more often than not my attention doesn’t get captured by hearing or reading about some new tech tool. I have to see it in action.

Gardner had tried to talk me into trying twitter, but it was only when I saw the tweets (i.e. twitter posts) popping up on Alan’s screen during the presentation that I decided I had to give it a try.

What is twitter, you ask? It’s been described as micro-blogging, participating in a sort of on-line conversation with a network of friends where the posts are limited to 140 characters. The basic protocol is to briefly describe what you’re doing. As I write this, lblanken just tweeted, “playing with splashr,” and shauser said, “Just watched the history mashup [that Jim had referred to earlier in the twitterstream]. Not only did I laugh but, I learned stuff too haha.”

Twitter requires much less effort than blogging. If blogging is informal writing, twitter is informal thinking. The beauty of it for me is that following the twitterstream it’s possible to feel connected with your colleagues, even with a minimum of attention. It’s oddly compelling.

It’s also proven to be a great way to maintain the rush I felt from the Faculty Academy.

The Power of Context

Published on June 1, 2007 in Blogging as a Teaching and Research Tool and Teaching and Learning. 3 Comments

Last week, I finally got around to reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, a fascinating argument for how institutional change comes about (or not). Gladwell identifies three rules for effective change: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and The Power of Context. I found myself wondering how Gladwell’s argument applies to teaching and learning.

The Power of Context suggests that if you surround a person who cares about their learning with people who don’t, pretty soon the first person won’t care much either. If a person doesn’t care much but is surrounded by people who do, they may begin to care more. Suppose there’s a spectrum of caring. Probably there are people who care so much in the first instance (or care so little in the second) that their context won’t change that substantially. If the power of context is true, though, shouldn’t we try then to create enclaves of people in education who care.

I’ve always opposed “honors programs,” which may be seen as such an enclave. Part of the reason was probably because my grades were never good enough to get into such a program, or at least so I thought. Part of it was the view that not all serious students get good grades, and not all those with good grades are serious students; that some students probably participate in honors programs for the credential, not because they offer a better education. Part of it was the liberal notion that we shouldn’t discriminate, that if a program was better for honor students, it should be better for all. Maybe I’m getting conservative in old age, or pessimistic about the education system and human nature, but increasingly it seems to me that not all students want to participate in the life of the mind. (There’s a “duh” moment for you.)

What I’m seeking is a collaboration among students (to include those of us who get paid for teaching and learning) who genuinely want to learn. I hesitate to call this a “program” for fear that some will try to game it. The blogosphere seems to provide one avenue for developing such a collaboration, but at present that collaboration is pretty loose and the connections between faculty and students pretty weak and artificial (excepting of course the readers of this blog). I think we should attempt a more structured educational collaboration by inviting participation among our colleagues (to include those who pay us for learning). Wouldn’t it be extraordinary if we could develop participation in this blog-driven caravan of learning by students from multiple universities in the same way that participation currently exists among faculty/staff?

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