Results tagged “blogging” from PEDABLOGUE

National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo) launched today, sending millions of people "with a book in them" to the keyboard in an attempt to churn out a rough novel-length manuscript (minimum of 50,000 words to 'count') by the end of November. People engaged in this activity all bond on the nano website, encouraging each other and sharing tips, posting and boasting their latest word counts all the way to the end.

I've never done it, but I've always been intrigued by this collective endeavor of binge writing. I've signed up on the site and lurked, just to see what people are up to. It appeals to me, as a writer who works in manic, highly-caffeinated spurts, and as a teacher who believes in the collaborative learning inherent to a writer's workshop community. A number of our more productive Writing Popular Fiction students and even some faculty dare to "nano"...it's awfully difficult for a full-time faculty member to take on such an enormous task during the endgame of a Fall semester, when term papers come pouring in and advising for the next term is afoot, but it can be done.

Maybe college profs need a NaSchoWriMo for writing scholarship? Now is the perfect time to get to work on those conference papers you want to present next Spring, after all.

In any case, I noticed that teachers are actually beginning to use NaNoWriMo in the classroom, and that the site has a Young Writers Program that fosters an educational mission. The site includes some GREAT novel writing workbooks for young adults -- and the program can even lend out NEO word processing hardware to students in need.

It's a great idea. And it can be used creatively. From a class-collaborated story to simply a study of the novel itself, teachers are tapping into NaNoWriMo as a form of learning that reaches outside of the walls of the classroom and participates in the "outside world" even as it focuses the attention needed for cultivating the intimate and interior setting of the imagination.

Daniel Moulthrop shares his experience "Teaching NaNoWriMo" in a google doc, suggesting that the main benefit is "a month of unbridled creativity vs. school as we know it" which leads to increased writing fluency and -- after the initial hurdle of starting to climb what seems to be a very high mountain -- a reduction of fear about writing.

To any teachers out there doing this: GOOD LUCK!

I don't have much to offer, but over on my horror writing website, I have a section called "Instigation" that offers "twisted prompts" for creative writers that you can crib from to get your students working on a dastardly plot point.

You also might get your class involved in twitter.com for this project. There's a lot of activity on that site -- just search for the #nano hashtag or "follow" NaNoWriMo.

Good article by Josh Cohen on the Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook today, called "Teachers Take To Twitter." Along with giving some tips for twitter usage, the key point is that twitter is building a community of teachers. Cohen cites Bill Ferriter, a 6th grade social studies teacher, succinctly:

“Searching Twitter is searching the minds of teachers. It’s collective intelligence. When you can pick the brains of 200 highly accomplished teachers, you’ll get good success.”

I set up a separate account on twitter for my teaching-related work at http://twitter.com/arnzen. I enjoy the connection with that "collective intelligence" that Ferriter mentions. It's half faculty-lounge, half-development conference. The trick is to 'follow' other teachers...do searches for words like 'pedagogy' and connect with the most interesting 'tweeters' by following them. Your network will spread.

Of course, twitter can be used in the classroom, too (though I have yet to try this). Emerging Ed Tech gives six good examples. Academhack gives a great overview of its possible applications in "Twitter for Academia" (which was picked up by The Chronicle). H Songhai gives even more depth and anecdotes about it.

I can imagine setting up a specific account name on twitter for a class, with all students doing the same, and each 'following' each other on the site -- and using these short tweets for chats, or live (if everyon has the technology in a lab, or laptop situation) as something akin to 'clickers' in the classroom, but with many more options and critical thinking applications than simply polling quantitative reactions.

Over on my other blog, The Popular Uncanny, I wrote this evening about a neat Prezi presentation on “Uncanny Digital Literacies” by Sian Bayne, from the ESRC seminar series on Literacies in the Digital University (University of Edinburgh, 16 Oct 2009). She mentions a book called A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty by Ronald Barrett that I want to get my hands on.

For now, I'll just embed Bayne's presentation here -- if you want to read some of my thoughts and light research on it, visit my blog entry entitled "Uncanny Digital Literacies: Defamiliarization in The Classroom" on The Popular Uncanny.

My colleague down the hall, Dennis Jerz has been awarded the John Lovas Memorial Academic Award from the journal, Kairos, for his Literacy Weblog. Visit his site, browse around and drop him a note of congratulations.

He joins a list of other interesting academic weblogs in honor of late blogger John Lovas worth following:

2008: Alex Reid: "Digital Digs"

2007: Elizabeth Losh: "VirtualPolitik"

2006: Clancy Ratliff: "CultureCat: Rhetoric and Feminism"

2005: Collin Brooke: "Collin vs. Blog"

2004: Jenny Edbauer: "Stupid Undergrounds: I Found It on the Street"

Follow me on twitter (user: arnzen). Once I figure out the code, I'm planning to use the site as a sideblog, so I can share links and snippets of thoughts related to teaching and academia that don't quite qualify for full-blown blog entries on Pedablogue.

[That twitter account is for my Jekyll. My Hyde side has a twitter account all its own.]

I also finally updated my bio page here on Pedablogue. Aside from a neat photo (courtesy of Jim Judkis, who did that fantastic photo shoot for the article on me in Pittsburgh Professional magazine), the major change is: I'm being promoted to Full Professor and will be Division Chair of the Humanities this coming August!

Richard Hake has generously shared a super bibliographic resource: Over 200 Education and Science Blogs. He kindly included Pedablogue in the directory. Here's the abstract:

ABSTRACT: This compilation, an expansion of the earlier "Over Sixty Education Blogs," lists over two-hundred education and science blogs, providing for each blog: the author's name and background; the blog title, focus, and URL; and (where available) the Technorati Authority [TA] and the Blogged Rating [BR]. Appendix A discusses the Academic Discussion List Sphere (ADLsphere) and the Blog Sphere (Blogosphere), indicating the strengths and weaknesses of each. Appendix B considers the ADLsphere and the Blogosphere as harbingers of a collective short-term working memory. Appendix C discusses the International Edubloggers Directory, Technorati, Blogged, ScienceBlogs; other blog directories and lists; and other social networking sites. The REFERENCES contain over 100 general citations to open access, internet usage, the ADLsphere and the Blogosphere.

Visit HakesEdStuff to download the file.

The trend for open source online teaching has recently reached a milestone, I think. YouTube EDU has launched, offering a good repository of instructional videos, streaming lectures from universities and elsewhere, to the globe. The Open Culture blog calls it a "robust collection" with over 200 full courses from leading universities, on top of campus tours and other features of that nature.

Unlike YouTube proper, which will accept content from any subscriber, from what I gather, educational sites from MIT to the Culinary Institute of America are providing the content in an "open source" way that gives them a "channel" in the collective, allowing them to not only share information but to some degree expose viewers to their identity as a sort of advertisement. When you click the "apply now" link at the bottom of the page, you get an application for institutional membership, with a stipulation that reads:

We request only one channel per institution that encompasses the entire campus, and you must have authority to open a channel on the institution's behalf. If you are a school, department, or educator within the institution, please coordinate with the proper department on campus - typically Public Affairs or Academic Technology.

Thus, while it is still "open source," there is still the brand identity of the academic institution at work which -- ostensibly -- will filter the content on the user side of the equation. This has pros and cons, and one has to wonder how much production value and censorship comes into play. I think this benefits larger, well-funded colleges who have a procedural apparatus in place for providing such content... ergo, the preponderance of lectures on YouTube EDU currently seem to be Ivy League colleges of high reputation (seeking pertinence in the digital age) and trade colleges the likes of which you might see advertised often on television.

Indeed, with the increasing boundary-loss between streaming online video and the television set -- aided by the rise of devices like the AppleTV, Roku Player, and XBox -- it seems sensible for academia to take seriously the potential of investing in video sharing.

Readers at the Open Culture Blog are recommending academicearth.org -- which LifeHacker compares to Hulu -- as a stronger alternative. I can see why, at first blush: it organizes material by subject right from the front page, seeming to be curriculum-centered rather than institution-centered. The videos seem to be high quality, and often offer transcripts and other material that make the vids seem much more "course" like. Moreover, the rating system is organized by instructor so that you can quickly jump to those who browsers feel are the best at delivering the content, rather than just (as in youtube edu) those videos that are given a generic "star" rating on who know's what criterion.

Another issue on YouTube EDU's format is the "comments" feature, which like any good weblog allows users to provide feedback. As I give a glancing look at various videos, I see comments that are littered with obscenities and smart aleck jokes, as if they were notes passed between virtual slackers and class clowns sitting in the back row. AcademicEarth, on the other hand, allows embedding of videos which would encourage users to post comments on their own sites, instead. (Of course YouTube EDU allows embeds as well).

The value of YouTube EDU, of course, would be greater visibility in google search and youtube search results. This, sadly, is the monolithic aim of far too much online content, but this is the way the cookie crumbles in the attention economy. Since most students would probably tend to search google long before they ever stumbled upon AcademicEarth, the site bears serious consideration for academic institutions.

There are uses I'd like to see sites like these put to: more academic debates, more streams of events that feature students as much as star lecturers, more faculty/research profiles or interviews.... perhaps we will see growth in this kind of material soon.

I stopped at a Half-Priced Books store in Monroeville this past October and found myself burrowing around in their really great section in the back of the store, for "Teaching." In it, I picked up some really great titles cheap, including a book I want to call attention to in this review, called Reflective Practice in Action: 80 Reflection Breaks for Busy Teachers by Thomas S.C. Farrell. But before I get to it, I wanted to first say that spontaneously browsing around in the "Teaching" or "Education" section of a bookstore is a really good idea once in awhile -- especially if you're not a pedagogy specialist or teacher trainer by profession -- and I encourage you to take a moment to do this if you're shopping in a bookstore for the holidays. You might be surprised by what gifts you might find for yourself.

It's also the case that those bookstore sections for Teaching and Education are rarely well-organized and become a catch-all for any title that smacks of school. Thus, you often find exercises for kindergarteners and home-schooler workbooks placed side by side with philosophical books and guitar instructional manuals. It's a mess. That's both good and bad (and perhaps says something about the coherency of our industry): you'll have to dig to find what you need, but you might find a hidden treasure.

Of course, that's true of all bookstore shelves to some degree. And the ENTIRE bookstore is really about learning, is it not?

In any case, one of those hidden treasures I recently found was Reflective Practice in Action by Thomas S.C. Farrell (Corwin Press, 2004). It seems like just the sort of book any teacher who blogs or keeps a journal would find of interest, because it is filled with questions, worksheets and discussions intended to prompt thinking and writing about one's mission and career as an instructor. Through reflective teaching, Farrell claims, "teachers can begin to locate themselves within their profession and start to take more responsibility for shaping their practice" (6).

I know a lot of teachers who struggle over writing their annual self-reports, development plans, and teaching portfolios. Sometimes this struggle is located in one's relationship to writing itself. At other times, these documents that we have to write in the name of development sometimes are seen as empty exercises in paper shuffling, bureaucratical nonsense, and just one more thing to do on top of a million others. One sometimes wonders what the point of it all is, when only one person or committee often reads it closely before it's filed away in some infinitely-receding drawer of bureaucratic paperwork, never to be seen again.

But I have always refused to see any project that involves writing as a waste of time. It makes me a better writer and often my writing leads me to new ways of seeing a topic, inspiring me to change my relationship to it. So rather than treating those "official" forms of reflection as dehumanizing forms of busy work, I have tried to use those documents as moments to write reflectively about my career (sometimes to the consternation of those who have to read them, because I write a lot). This book reminds me that reflection -- taking stock about where one has gone and where one is going -- is entirely the point of those documents to begin with.

Moreover, this slim, 100 page book makes reflecting on one's work easier, more pleasurable and, ultimately, more significant. Grounded in the principles of reflective practice, it aims at helping teachers see their work in a less technical and more organic fashion. While not every "guided reflection break" offered in the book is equally of value, the book does an excellent job identifying the diverse areas where one might direct their attention in thinking reflectively, and it utilizes research in a refreshingly clear and practical manner, by emphasizing activity and application of the principles it outlines in a systematic (but not overly formal) way.

The book opens by exploring the theories behind "reflective practice" by immediately engaging the reader in thinking that reexamines one's assumptions about teaching and how they have played out in our practical work. It is a transformative process founded on heightened self-awareness. "...Reflective practice is a systematic and structured process in which we look at concrete aspects of teaching and learning with the overall goal of personal change and more effective practice...we change as a result of the awareness brought about by engaging in reflection." (27).

Farrell seems to draw the bulk of his research from the work of Kenneth Zeichner and Daniel Liston, authors of Reflective Teaching: An Introduction, which delves into the pedagogical theory behind reflective practice in depth. The book brings more critics into the picture -- like Daniel Schon and Max Van Manen -- and the bibliography covers all the primary sources in this field of pedagogy. I think Farrell's book can be seen as a sort of practical workbook to go along with Zeichner and Liston's title, so the two could work hand in hand if assigned in a teacher development course. Some of Farrell's "prompts" would occur naturally to a reader of Reflective Teaching: An Introduction, but what makes Farrell's book useful is the systematic and proactive way in which he guides the application of its concepts.

The first four chapters of the book provide an array of models for reflective practice and explore methods for any teacher or group to put theory into action. It's a great concise overview, while being inspirational (covering the first 24 prompts of the 80 in the book). In the book's fifth chapter, the author outlines the "Farrell Model of Reflective Practice," which identifies a wide range of different ways in which the prompts in the book can be utilized, whether in isolation or in groups, while covering the principle modalities of reflection (37). This section opens up the numerous arenas in which reflection can occur -- from journals to teacher development workshops -- and readers might be surprised by the number of reflective practices happening all around us on campus all the time, and the myriad ways one can approach reflective thinking.

The latter chapters of Farrell's book are focused on specific means toward enhancing one's reflective practice. These processes are: group discussions, classroom observations, journal writing, and the teaching portfolio. The book ends by encouraging one to be a "reflective practitioner" and is the most involved and personal chapter for helping teachers come up with their own prompts for reflection. Here he draws upon and expands Zeichner and Liston's five principle elements of the reflective practitioner in a way worthy of citing fully:

A reflective teacher:

• Examines, frames, and attempts to solve dilemmas in classroom practice.
• Is aware of and questions the assumptions and values he or she brings to teaching
• Is attentive to the institutional and cultural contexts in which he or she teaches
• Takes part in curriculum development and is involved in school change efforts
• Takes responsibility for his or her own professional development

Farrell's book is a great assistant in making one a more reflective teacher, in general. But there are other things he brings to the table that got my interest. For example, he talks about using a method called the SCORE (Seating Chart Observation Record) to analyze how teachers interact with groups that seems very useful for, say, analyzing a videotape of one's class or observing a colleague's class. This would involve drawing a seating chart,and drawing lines between teacher and students when questions are asked or addressed, which I imagine could be revelatory of unconscious habits like favoring one side of the room or calling on the same set of students over and over again.

Overall, I'm glad I stumbled upon this book and I recommend it to anyone who is looking for something to prompt their writing about teaching (like bloggers) or help in writing their own self-assessments. I think administrators and faculty development coordinators who are looking for practical ways to help faculty energize their growth in an autonomous-yet-connected fashion would benefit greatly from this title.

See ItsLife's coverage of more issues in reflective practice.

In "Avoiding the 5 Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students" (Campus Technology, Oct 2008), Dr. Ruth Reynard talks about the mistakes she's made using weblogs with her grad students. It's a fantastic, enlightening essay, revealing how to not only avoid errors but how to utilize weblog technology well. In a nutshell, here are the problems Reynard outlines:

• Ineffective Contextualization


• Unclear Learning Outcomes


• Misuse of the environment


• Illusive grading practices


• Inadequate time allocation

I don't use blogs as a teaching tool nearly as much as my English colleague at SHU, Dennis Jerz, does (see our campus blog portal for a peek at all that he administers). But I do routinely ask my student authors in the Writing Popular Fiction graduate program to keep a blog as a reading journal. Reading Reynard's article, I feel that "illusive grading practices" may be something I still need to work on: often, I just append evaluative comments on a student's blog entries without giving much thought into the >kind< of entries I'm evaluating. Reynard recommends making a rubric that outlines various "statement types" that students can bring to their blogging, such as: "Reflection statements (self positioning within the course concepts); Commentary statements (effective use of the course content in discussion and analysis); New idea statements (synthesis of ideas to a higher level); and Application statements (direct use of the new ideas in a real life setting)." I may borrow from this idea and design a handout for students that asks them to approach their journal entries -- which essentially are reading responses -- as different "types" of statements -- possibly asking them to do one of each. Another good idea, naturally, is to request students to tag entries along these lines, as warranted.

I also like Dennis Jerz' structured RRRR sequence -- a method for routinizing student blogging assignments in his Writing for the Internet course. It encourages students to interact with each other and class alike, and functions to support his challenging "Just in Time" teaching method.

The look is new, but the content is the same.

Pedablogue is evolving to accomodate an upgrade to our system blogging software. Apologies for any errors you encounter along the way. Permalinks may change, so if you may need to run a search to find a page you were seeking.

I have stopped running a newsletter I used to keep for my journalism/writing students (and also freelance writers), called The Handy Job Hunter for Writers. This newsletter once offered me a place to write articles about some the issues I was teaching, as well as to connect with others in the writing profession, but mostly it was a huge dumping ground for weblinks I felt any graduating writing student or freelance writer -- including myself -- could ever need to begin the hunt. It was a collection of weblinks clustered by categories like "jobs for writers" and "writer's guidelines" and "calls for papers" and "internships" and so forth. Most of the articles I wrote for that newsletter went on to be reprinted in trade magazines or taught in some of my classes. It was a good newsletter.

I started that newsletter because I wanted an easy way to advise my students who might be thinking about careers in freelancing, or looking for markets to publish their work. I had them simply subscribe to it -- and that way I'd feel confident they'd continue to get that information even after they graduated. But there came a point about a year ago when I realized that the newsletter didn't have enough "new" material to justify sending out a new issue, and that my articles were more valuable if I didn't just give them away online like I was doing. The whole point of the newsletter was to find paying markets for writing -- yet I was giving my own specialized writing assignments away free in the process -- and slaving under my own deadlines, too, no less!

The links were really what mattered. So I began copying and pasting those links into our Course Management System at SHU -- called jweb (a jenzabar system akin to Blackboard...which we will soon affectionately call "Griffingate" at SHU). I copied them slowly and awkwardly, hoping my writing students would find the links useful. However, the links have to be copied from class to class in another slow and awkward fashion, involving a hidden copy-and-paste system they call a "bank" (but which I call a "pain"). I mean, why not offer faculty a central hub for repositing weblinks to share across the board with all the classes they teach? Why hide their links from other classes? Why use their laborious interface at all? I thought about going back to my newsletter...

But there's no need. There are plenty of other ways to centralize a page of links -- from building your own teaching website to using one of an array of bookmark-sharing ("social bookmarking" or "social networking") services. I chose the latter (and I already feel years behind the curve). I have moved those links to del.icio.us -- an ugly but useful site that is a little confusing at first in its architecture, but one that I have found more and more useful for sharing (and learning about new, related) weblinks. Here's my page:

Arnzen on del.icio.us

It has the added benefit of allowing TAGS to organize the links in intricate cross-referential ways (see Best Tagging Practices by Tagamac's Ian Beck for more information). I've informed the students in my current Publication Workshop class about my new page, but now that I've launched it, I need to start thinking about ways that I could -- possibly -- use the site in different and creative ways while integrating it more deeply into my teaching. (My reluctance is founded in the sloppy aesthetic weirdness of some of Web2.0).

So I've started looking around to see how other sites are using this weirdly-punctuated site in a productive manner for their classes, and I thought I'd share what I've found so far in case you're seeking info on this, too. In his blog post, "Del.icio.us and teaching", English professor Bradley Dilger gives a clear and articulate narrative about how he employs his del.icio.us page in his writing courses. He tags the links he wants to share with his students with the course number, which students are asked to browse. The other tags that are connected to links (by theme) give the student reader a pivot point that can spin them into further research on Dilger's course page or across the whole del.icio.us site. Neat.

One of the elements of del.icio.us that appeals to me is the ability for people to subscribe to specific tags in your profile, meaning that they will be alerted whenever you post a new link and mark it with that tag/keyword. Thus, del.icio.us could be used to assign weekly readings and alert students to updates (one educator's site I read calls this "Homeworkcasting" and invokes rss feeds to send new posts to a secondary del.icio.us page dedicated to a class). Kaye Sweester also recommends finding teachers in your same field and adding their profiles to your del.icio.us "network" in order to be alerted of what your colleagues are doing. One could easily, I think, also work in reverse and have the del.icio.us site be a repository for class research generated by the students themselves, building a network of profiles that interconnect between individual student profiles.

Quentin D’Souza -- who runs the great educational resource website Teaching Hacks -- has a good del.icio.us page for me to turn back to later, as I try to learn more about creative ways of using social bookmarking in my classes.

This afternoon I attended a great Teaching & Learning Forum on our campus on the topic of teaching with technology. Mary Spataro -- our campus technology-enhanced learning guru and Instructional Design pro -- ran a healthy discussion on implementing technology in a way that supports the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education outlined by Chickering and Gamson for the American Assn for Higher Ed. This work was done in 1987, and though I have heard these principles in various guises throughout the years, the citation was new to me, so I thought I'd briefly blog about it.

In a nutshell, Chickering and Gamson argue that it is good practice for a teacher to employ these seven principles in their courses...

1. encourages contact between students and faculty,


2. develops reciprocity and cooperation among students,


3. encourages active learning,


4. gives prompt feedback,


5. emphasizes time on task,


6. communicates high expectations, and


7. respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

In our development session, Spataro broke the faculty into small groups, assigning one principle to each group to unearth ways that they are using technology in their courses to support such practices. My group discussed "gives prompt feedback" -- such as using e-mail to respond to student theses or topic proposals before they actually write their papers, or having some stock "comments" to copy and paste into a response to student writing. Spataro also added that recording oral notes is another way that is gaining popularity (though, as I have argued with my SHU colleague in New Media, Dennis Jerz, there are instances where too much play with this may not be fair to the student writer because it does not, for example, teach direct editing skills by example... on the other hand, such text-to-speech technology can be liberating as Norman Coombs has explained).

In their 1996 article, "Technology as a Lever," Chickering and Ehrmann similarly illustrated how these principles can be achieved with technology (and the website that this article appears on -- hosted by the Teaching Learning and Technology Group -- gives a host of good sources on the topic). They mention Coombs (again) and his use of e-mail as an example of how online discussions can get quiet students to raise issues in a more equalizing and honest setting (in this case, Coombs reports that he had taught for many years, but it wasn't until he began to use e-mail to teach his course that a student finally had the gumption to ask, “What’s a white guy doing teaching black history?” -- see Ehrmann's "Grand Challenges" for more on using e-mail as an educational tool). The article is a great I like how they conclude with the argument that "technology is not enough" and that students need to take action to learn on their own (or to make the instructor aware when they are not "respecting" the diverse ways that students learn).

If it isn't self-evident from this weblog, I am in favor of technology-enhanced learning and I do try to follow the above principles, though I am always skeptical of pedagogical AND technological dogma. I use technology in many of my courses and in advising, but I would add that there are times when technology can actually get in the way of achieving these principles. Sometimes there are simply "technical difficulties" but at other times there are "faculty difficulties" with the technology, or it is utilized in unconsciously (or even fetishistically) poor ways. If a teacher is not modulating their employment of technology in the classroom with other methods, and aren't engaging with the course technology to the same degree their students are, then, for example, these tools can only get in the way, lead to passive learning, or discourage other forms of student-faculty contact. Being receptive to student feedback on the medium for communication is crucial.

Simply put, sometimes we use the wrong tools for the job without knowing it; this does not necessarily mean one has to throw out the tool if it isn't working, but instead try another guage (swap an inch-based wrench for a metric-sized one). As Spataro urged us today, it's best to start small...you'll find the right amount of technology to use along the way.

Chickering and Gamson actually mention something similar to this final point in their original article, when they discuss the classroom as an environment that a teacher develops. Here's how they see the ideal environment for teaching the principles:

• A strong sense of shared purposes.


• Concrete support from administrators and faculty leaders for those purposes.


• Adequate funding appropriate for the purposes.


• Policies and procedures consistent with the purposes.


• Continuing examination of how well the purposes are being achieved.

All of this, I would say, obviously pertains to teaching with technology, as well. Technology is not just a tool; it is an element of a learning environment that needs just as much planning, planting, grooming, and trimming as a tree in a backyard.

...one question we might ask is: "Do we always know when we are teaching?" I do not think we do. The single most important thing I learned as an undergraduate may have been that I was capable of graduate study. I learned this from a professor who had no idea he taught it to me. Brief remarks that seem innocuous to us may have a lasting impact on our students. Hopefully, the influence is positive. I do not mean to give us more importance or power as teachers than we actually possess. However, a different but equally significant error may be to ignore the potential impact we can have at moments when we are least aware of what we are saying. -- Peter J. Giordano, Teaching and Learning When We Least Expect It

I had a similar experience, when an American Literature teacher named Beth Ann Bassein answered one of my annoying questions by saying, "Oh, you'll learn all about that when you get your Masters." It floored me. She just continued on in her lectures, not missing a beat. I barely even knew what graduate school was, let alone felt I'd be able to get into one, and here this professor was, assuming I would get my master's degree...heck, she didn't even bother trying to talk me into it! Beth Ann Bassein taught me many things when I took her classes, especially her poetry writing courses (because she's a knockout poet herself), but she was one of the toughest teachers on campus and that one passing comment -- with all its unexpected acceptance and faith in my ability -- alone gave me courage to try. (I had another moment like this when, during my Masters, a Medieval lit professor wrote in the margins of a critical essay: "Oh, shut up and go get your PhD already!") These little para-educational things mean nothing -- and yet they mean everything.

So what a wonderful essay Giordano's "Teaching and Learning When We Least Expect It" is. He reminds us that we are not always in control, that learning often happens between the cracks of the syllabus, and that what we say and do informally with (or around) our students can often teach them far more than we realize.

In his essay, he raises a very pithy question: "Do we always know when we are teaching?" And the answer is, of course not. All we really have is faith and speculation and a whole lot of intuition. Sure, good teaching is mentored, learned, and practiced, grounded in deep, lifelong study and professional development. It's based in what people call "best practices"...but I think we often draw on our unconscious well when we are teaching -- modeling our strategies and challenges off of how we ourselves learned best, and refining our techniques and personal style in a series of never-ending encores of successful teaching strategies we've employed in the past. New teachers really do make it up as they go along -- and might be surprised to learn that older teachers (usually the ones who are still engaged and excited about teaching) are making it up even still.

One of the joys of teaching, for me, is coming up with a really good discussion question off the cuff, or dreaming up an impromptu writing prompt, and watching what happens when students get inspired by it. It's magic. I'll sometimes run back to my office and make sure I write down what I did, so I'll remember to do it again in the future. But sometimes we'll run a really great exercise or discussion prompt one year and it'll come as a surprise to us just how good it can be, but when we repeat it the following year, it doesn't click and we wonder what we did wrong. The idea is only half of it; it's the fuel -- but the classroom dynamic provide the fire.

Giordano mulls over metaphors for teaching, and how none of them are quite right, though "midwife" comes closest. I like his idea that teachers need to be "good company" to students. We have to let go of control fantasies for that to happen. Giordano's essay reminded me of the basic principle of learning: it can happen any time. The best thing a teacher can do is try to create an environment where there's lots of flint that might spark fire. But it's up to the student -- and an infinite number of variables beyond anyone's control -- to strike it.

I think it's crucially important to remember these lessons during times of (what Carolyn Segal has termed) Assessmentdelirium.

***
I found this article on a site I often mention here on Pedablogue: the Tomorrow's Professor mailing list run by Rick Reis out of the Standford CTL program. Their mailing list is worth subscribing to. I'm currently researching "Transormation Theory" for a pedagogy paper I'm delivering next weekend at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, and I found Giordano's essay very useful.

Just learned about Edublogs magazine -- a new online journal that promises to be useful for teachers who blog or who use blogs in the classroom. It's tied in with edublogs.org and looks to be a good network for this kind of thing, based on the experience people who are running the show. [Thanks, incorporated subversion, for the link!]

I like their list of the "Top Edubloggers" -- lots to chew on by clicking through their links.

I saw myself reflected in the frustrations posted by high school math tacher Amber Arizpe in a recent 43Folders post: "Teacher's Productivity Hampered by Technology.". Arizpe (aka salindger) describes an interesting process:

During class, I write out notes on the Elmo. Plain ol’ paper and pen on a notepad. I can then cart it home and scan it into Acrobat, into a pdf, use planbook to upload a copy to the day of the lesson and yay! print it out when a student needs notes. I’m a nice math teacher, I provide online copies.

Problem? I have to do all this at home. Let’s face it, the last thing I want to do when I get home is to immediately go back to work on paperwork that can be done in the classroom. I would rather be able to do it in my classroom the moment after class is done. Scan, pdf, post, done.

I love the idea of using the Elmo (document camera) as a sort of virtual blackboard, then scanning the results into a .pdf file for archiving and/or sharing with students. But I empathize with Azirpe: I, too, have a Mac for work and a PC at home and no scanner at all to work with. I did buy DevonThink Pro in a special deal on something they call an "infoworker's bundle" -- and I recommend it highly to people who have Macs. Devon's system seems to promise a way to go "paperless" (armed with their very expensive "pro office" version and a pricey SnapScan scanner) in the way that Azirpe seems to fantasize about. But getting there is not easy, especially given conflicts between home PC and work Mac, let alone the expense. Her larger thesis -- that it is difficult for teachers to keep up with all this, and for IT to really facilitate it -- is really at the root.

One of the issues I've personally been struggling with is making the calandering system on my work machine jibe with my cell phone pda, and home pc (uncannily, another issue I just spotted on 43Folders!). It seems like an impossible hurdle to me right now. I've had to recheck the calendar weekly and I keep finding mistakes (like this week, for example, I neglected to note on one machine that a class is canceled for an MLK-related event, even though I have that noted on another... leading to confusion...and erasure and redundancy when I cross-sync the systems). Frustrating! Ah well. Technology is a tool. So is paper, and that might be the best way to keep things clear. Still, I'll sort it out soon enough. The answer lies -- as it almost always does -- in decluttering, simplifying, and staying consistent in a new routine.

Happy news. I received tenure in my position as Associate Professor of English at Seton Hill University this week.

I'm grateful. To mark the occasion, soon I'll be writing letters to the important teachers I've had in my life, just to share the good news and to let them know how much they really made a difference. I'm joyful, but also almost too busy to celebrate. I have to finish up a conference paper I'll be delivering next week at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, in addition to grading papers so I can submit midterm grades to the registrar before I leave. Oh, and there's the search committee dossiers I have to read before I can go to that conference. And the campus litzine editorial meetings I need to attend, as well, so the magazine will be out on time. And then more papers to collect. And then....

Ah, tenure.

I'm no less busy than I've always been. But it's an exciting achievement. There are a lot of myths attached to tenure -- mostly that it provides "lifetime job guarantee" (which it doesn't -- nationally, 2% of all tenured faculty are dismissed each year) -- or that it means a faculty member can kick back and rest on his laurels (which they don't, and can't since there are future reviews, evaluations for promotion to "full" professor, and more ... stats say that tenured faculty work an average of 52 hours a week!). But one thing that it signifies, which I hope is not a myth, is the security of academic freedom. As a creative writer, one who works in the taboo-breaking realms of horror fiction, that means a lot to me. (Not that I intend to suddenly start writing satanic bible study manuals featuring nude torture illustrations or anything like that -- I realize, naturally, that with tenure comes the responsibility for representing my college, my field, my colleagues, my home, my students, my future... -- but when I see articles reporting how professors are being fired for inane things like using the "f-word" in class, I cherish the academic freedom of tenure all the more.)

I don't have a lot to say here about achieving tenure (other than "whew!" and "now what?" and "hey, is there any more champagne in the fridge?"). But I am trying to take the time to think deeply about what tenure really means, to both myself and to others, because I have never really thought of tenure as the "brass ring" of my academic life (and, frankly, I rarely trust anyone who does... the autonomy granted by tenure is simply a tool enabling one to achieve higher aims). So I'm reading a lot. Here are some excellent sources I've come across.

• "The Truth about Tenure in Higher Education" from the NEA
  
• The Tenure Trek from Continuum Magazine
  
• The AAUP on Academic Freedom and Tenure
  
• The Economics of the Tenure System by Jeffrey A. Miron
  
• Michael Berube's analysis of the politics behind attacks on academic freedom
  
• Wikipedia entry on "Academic Freedom"
  
• The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship
  
• Protecting College Freedom
  
• Humbly, older pedablogue entries on tenure
  

Whew. Now what? Ah yes, to the fridge!

The Christmas issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran an excellent, front-page feature story on educational blogging, called "Freedom of Speech Redefined by Blogs". Featured prominently is our college's New Media Journalism program, led by my colleague, Dennis Jerz. It's really a great -- and quite accurate -- piece.

TV TurnOff Week (April 25-May 1, 2005) has officially begun. Do you have the guts to turn your television off for an entire week? Can you and the people you live with stand to miss an episode of your favorite show? Are you able to shun the television news and opt for the printed paper or an internet site instead? What would you do without your Simpsons fix?

I believe that television media should be studied, not blindly consumed or, alternately, snobishly scoffed at by scholars. But I love the idea behind TV Turn Off Week. One of its many aims is to try to get people off the couch and more active in their communities, their families, and their own lives. It also aims at raising literacy by showing kids the alternatives to the so-called "idiot box" or "boob tube."

I taught a course in Media & Society a few years ago, and integrated TV Turn-Off Week into the curriculum. I distributed the scary "tv facts and figures" handouts from the Turn-off Network's home page to students on the first day of class, had them read a book on Culture Jamming and later had students make posters (like those at Adbusters) and spread the word on campus, under the auspices of "service learning" and literacy activism. They did a good job. I think my favorite poster was a photoshop trick one of the students used, pointing a smoking pistol at a smashed up television screen. The campaign was only moderately successful, however, because the students could find no way to measure its effectiveness, and many of them put up the posters too late in the term. If I did this again, I'd launch the class with a more agressive campaign.

[Adbusters really takes the campaign into radical territory. Check out their advocacy campaign for TV Turnoff and be sure to check out their "TVBeGone" remote control zapper!]

TV Turnoff had mixed results, but a related and more-successful experiment we performed in that Media & Society course was a "Media Deprivation Assignment" (guidelines in Word format) which asked students to consciously "unplug" from all the technological media they use for an entire day, keeping a log about their "media fasting" and writing a reflection on the experience. I got the idea for of this assignment from a course listing I found online by Karen Cristiano which sounded like a thrilling thing to try.

They all HATED it, but learned just how saturated they are with media and how reliant they have habitually become on it. Students wrote about the sheer terror of actually hearing their car engines while they drove, or the frustrating horrors of not being able to play with their X-Boxes or the haunting sounds of other people's media that they couldn't escape from. Several admitted failure and gobbling up as much IM'ing and CD playing as they could after going half a day without them, like a smoker caving in to the cravings of a nicotine fix. I wouldn't say it changed their lives, but it really opened their eyes.

Most of the edublogs I’ve come across are engaging, insightful, and… down-right horrifying. While the blogs maintained by professors and teachers who disclose their identity can deliver a harsh dose of teaching reality, the write-ups by anonymous professors are far more honest. And scathing. And entirely intimidating. --Kate Cielinski

I'm Kate's English advisor and she's getting ready to graduate from Seton Hill. She's one of those great students who is so far ahead of the game she finished up all her requirements early and has been taking independent studies with me on film criticism and cultural studies as she prepares to head off to a Master's program in theory (already accepted by Carnegie-Mellon; still waiting to hear from others). Kate's been tutoring in our writing center for several years and, naturally, she's eager to get settled into a college-level teaching job.

As part of her independent studies, she maintains a reading blog with some pretty sophisticated work in literary criticism -- but her most recent post makes a fascinating observation about the level of skepticism and negativity about the teaching profession in the pedablogosphere. I'm posting this because I think it's a great point, and I want to encourage you to read her full post and drop her a warm comment, share a personal experience, or give her some hardnosed advice. Hearing from other teachers might show her (and other students in her shoes) one of the more positive elements of the blogosphere and the profession.

"Academics are notoriously cynical," I told her in reply. It's certainly true that not everything about our profession is roses, and future teachers need to be aware of that. There is a pragmatic side to the teacher's life that some primary and secondary education students (not Kate) haven't seen yet through their rosy optimism and big dreams about being a teacher. Bubbles will always be burst by the Truth. But we have to be careful, I think, in the way we frame the profession to the incoming professoriate. I think the pros, ultimately, outweigh the cons -- but sometimes in the daily grind we get pessimistic. But one thing to remember is that we are always teaching -- even when we're not in the classroom -- and our influence on the future is sometimes greatest when we're talking "off stage". Cynicism is contagious. And when the pessmism leaks out in public, it educates other new educators in the process, often when we're unaware of it.

I'm certain that once Kate engages in the scholarship of teaching as a practicing teacher, she'll encounter the optimism that rages when a bunch of teachers are in a seminar talking about a new teaching strategy or collaborating for a team-taught course. The excitement sparks among graduate students in teacher training sessions and the joys of teaching have to be experienced to be understood. But as an outsider perched on the edge of a diving board way up high from the professional pool, ready to jump into the fray, it must look pretty dark down here sometimes to the future educators.

Just passing along some enlightening reflections on change I've spotted on the web recently:

• John Spurlock reflects on how one can't escape the problem of race when teaching American history, even when far away in the classrooms of Montenegro. (He also just posted a good article on European Educational Reform).

• Barbara Feinberg reacts to the trend toward assigning "problem books" to children, and the idea that "A good book should make you cry."

• Dennis Jerz describes his struggle to introduce his home-schooled, overactive child to the Apollonian demands of his first chess tournament.

• Dr. Crazy realizes that the authority of a Ph.D. still doesn't manage to change the entrenched gender dynamics in the classroom.