Results tagged “office” from PEDABLOGUE

This morning I was pointed to an article on "The Five Mental Habits of Innovative People" that I found interesting, because it identifies the skillsets I would want to foster in my students, especially in a course related to creativity (like writing).

Drawing from research by Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen at BYU, called "How Do Innovators Think?" [available at Harvard Business Publishing's neat "Creativity at Work" page, which is worth a look-see], Jessica Stillman isolates (and explains) these five "mental habits":

* Associating * Questioning * Observing * Experimenting * Networking

The researches suggest 'questioning' is really the engine that drives all of the above, yet "questioning on its own doesn’t have a direct effect without the others."

In my classes, I have been a big advocate for question-generation -- it is the trigger behind all "inquiry" -- creative and scholarly -- and it protects the teacher from doing all the thinking for the student (without thinking, no learning!). I run students through an activity I call 'question-storming'; I often give them prompts for writing that encourage them to raise their own questions-at-issue; I'll play devil's advocate to challenge them to question their own assumptions; etc.

When a writer approaches the blank page "questioning" rather than feeling as though they need to be the "authority" they are open to making discoveries through writing...and they never have block.

What would I add to the list? LISTENING.

By which I mean "Active Listening".

Although 'listening' (like 'reading') is related to 'observing', I don't think people think of 'listening' as a skill that leads to innovation and creativity. They think of it as a passive act, which it is not. Part of this assumption of passivity comes from the education system: we sit in desks our whole lives, listening, listening, listening...more than doing, creating, innovating. The invisible work of learning happens in our heads, if we are self-disciplined enough to pay attention and listen actively. But that skill is rarely cultivated or directly taught.

LISTENING is crucial to mastering the art of concentration, but it also factors into creativity. As a creative writer, I could never write dialogue if I didn't listen closely to how people actually speak -- and not just listening to the words, but also to the musicality of it. If I did not listen intensely I could not know what it means to be a reader, who mentally 'listens' to the author's voice as they read. Listening enables emulation and imitative learning, as well: when we listen, we see how others raise questions and discover the pathways available to us in an attempt to answer them. When we listen to an audience, we can test our own answers to questions by getting responses. So listening is a feedback loop into questioning. Listening fuels creativity. Not all creativity springs out from within us; sometimes it pools and settles in, before feeding into the outward flow.

If your teaching is in a rut, or if you want to try to do something innovative in your classroom to solve problems or enable excitement in the room, try listening to your students. You might learn something.

"Buried in Paper" by writer couple Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem was recently posted at Storytellers Unplugged. It uncannily reflects my own recent resolution to declutter a lot of the paperwork that's piling sky high in my home office. I've been meticulously cataloguing and reorganizing my home bookshelves for months, and still haven't gotten it perfect, with stacks of books here and there still on the floors in offbeat categories that don't "fit" on shelves with others in a tidy way (I keep vacuuming around these stacks, secretly hoping the vacuum will suck them up and solve my problem).

I often go through bouts of decluttering in the early summer, right after classes end. It gives me a feeling, quite literally, of a 'clean break.' But whenever I've invested a little time during the (ever so short) winter break to do this, I've had a more enjoyable spring. Wish me luck.

A few related reading to pass along and note for later reading, should I fail to meet my resolution:

• Advice for clearing literary clutter from metafilter
• Pittfalls of Creativity Clutter from the great organization site, unclutterer.com
• Lifehacker: portal to tips and downloads for getting things done
• Zen Habits' Massive GTD (getting things done) Resource List
• Conquering Clutter an article on compulsive hoarding from David Dudley, AARP
• Sharon Crosby's Mind Over Clutter articles

Last year I signed up for LibraryThing -- a social networking site where book lovers share their personal libraries online. They call it the "largest bookclub in the world." It's actually an intriguing bibliography system, tapping into libraries and bookstores around the globe to pull in information about any given book title that you can claim you own on your own virtual shelves. I know librarians and booksellers who love it, but anyone who loves to collect or hoard books should find it a great place to get lost in. If in everyday life you like browsing your friends' bookshelves when you visit them, or if you compulsively scan displayed titles at a bookstore (or, like me, even when you're at a supermarket or convenience store), if you like to know what others are reading so you can know what you should be reading too, or even if you judge people by the literary company they keep (shame on you) then this is the site for you!

[You might want to read "A Cozy Book Club in a Virtual Reading Room" from last year's New York Times, if you haven't heard of LibraryThing before.]

As a fiction writer, I find LT a useful way to stay in touch with some of my readers and I enjoy seeing what books my friends are reading. I am listed as an official "LibraryThing Author." I also actually get some practical use out of keeping a record of my book collection online (albeit a loose one -- I own WAAAAY more books than I've listed in my online catalog, and I still plan to use the barcode scanning luxury of Readerware to compile a database of them all someday, too). There are times when I am in my campus office, and I want to know if I have a particular book at home, or if I'll need to make a trip to the campus library -- so I can easily load up librarything.com on my computer and check. It's practical.

Joining LibraryThing is as easy as logging in once with a username...and it's also free. Enter 200 books into their database at no cost. Once you hit that threshold, if you want to keep entering titles, you'll need to kick in $10 per year -- or do as I did, feeling the cause was worthy paying a paltry $25 for a lifetime membership. That's pretty cheap, in the grand scheme of librarythings. The social networking with other bookhounds is a natural benefit and a no-brainer (you'll quickly get "friends" who share similar interests -- from librarians, to teachers, to students; you can enter conversations about books and genres and more; you can even swap books with people you trust (though I deplore this act because writers don't get their royalties); and so on). You can tag books, to categorize things and find them in clusters later on, or to find other books related to them that you don't own yet. You can incorporate gizmos onto your blog that tell others what you're reading. You can use the site to connect with authors or bookstores. You can get book suggestions (or, cleverly, unsuggestions!). You can enter contests. And as their blog (and their deeper and geekier thingology web) makes clear, they're super-intelligent, constantly growing, and really evolving in relation to how their members utilize the site. It's a pretty cool place for the bookworm to burrow around.

I haven't been considering the pedagogical uses of the site -- or even how I might best utilize it as a teacher -- until recently. Today I dug around in LibraryThing's "suggester" pages and found a way to search for books that use the same tags as I do. Thus, a search for other member's books tagged "pedagogy" turned up a host of titles I hadn't heard of before (96 of them, in fact)...and I learned of other classics I own that have come out in new editions. Just going through this process gave me an incentive to pick up my pedagogical research again -- to seek out unique titles like Donna Duffy's Teaching Within the Rhythms of the Semester or Stephen Brookfield's Discussion as a Way of Teaching.

But the fun didn't stop there. By clicking on the names of members of LibraryThing who already own these books, I discovered the librarything profiles of other educators and even teacher's reading groups and -- coolest of all -- the libraries for college centers for teaching and learning, like Stone Hill College's CTL -- just by surfing the site. I did searches for "teach" in the member list and found more titles than I could ever possibly read, but lots of inspiration. I was pleased to also stumble on the Women's Studies library at University of Oregon, my alma mater...which proves that LibraryThing serves various disciplines and fields, as well. I know that my own campus librarians are aware of it, and that many others are experimenting.

All of this makes for an intriguing form of personal research -- LT is a place I'm turning to more and more when I want to seek out a new book to read. I'm wondering now how it might also be useful for working with students. For example, I found a graduate student who specializes in "Chick Lit" on the site recently; clicking through her own personal library, I learned about new research titles in the field which I promptly ordered for our campus library. It made me wonder if I could use the site as a sort of "graduate research" laboratory. Perhaps I could even ask students to sign up for free accounts, and develop annotated bibliographies on the site.

I've spotted "classroom libraries" on the site (like this one from a Children's lit teacher who wants to build an in-class library better than what her school has). Others, like BlogDay, are mulling over the ways that the info sharing can be used for students online. I'll have to keep thinking of creative uses for this with English majors in collegiate environment. The best tips and advice I've found so far are mentioned on Classroom Learning 2.0, which seems like a great place to start.

I've decided, though, that I will continue to update my profile on LibraryThing with education-related texts as I acquire or rediscover them. I have also recently joined a very similar, yet decidedly more chatty and interactively social site -- goodreads.com -- where I will try to post entries not based on my home library, per se, but on the books I am currently teaching (tagged "currently-teaching"!) each term, with micro-reviews. I've already begun; drop by, sign up, and waive hello! And if you have ideas for integraing LT or GoodReads into the classroom, let me know by leaving a comment!

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.

This morning I read about an interesting classroom activity called the "Friday Shout-Out" on music professor Coyotebanjo's great edublog series called In the Trenches, which chronicles the reality of his work in the classroom. The Friday Shout-Out technique addresses the student exhaustion over a week of tough classes and their eagerness to get on with the weekend. If I read his description correctly, this is not so much a chance for students to share annoucements. No, instead, the technique seems relatively simple: to let students scream at the top of their lungs at the beginning of class!

Cool idea, if the physical plant can handle it. And Banjo's can (as you'll see below). But what makes this entry so compelling is how Coyotebanjo muses over some interesting psychology regarding why this works so well for his students (and it's not simply because screaming provides a purging catharsis, but because students depend on different teaching approaches from High School as a template for college learning -- this is an artfully written point).

Coyotebanjo's most recent blog entry sports a photograph of the parking lot outside of his office window: it has the hash marks of a football field painted on the tarmac. This is the practice field for the marching band, right below his window. Worse than car engines, it apparently produces a lot of background noise when he's trying to work. Coyoteprof claims to have become desensitized to this noise, but the photo affected me. I tend to have difficulties writing and thinking when there is music playing; hearing a marching band run over the same drills over and over again while I'm trying to write would drive me to madness (should I have said "park me to madness"?).

So I will try to remember this snapshot whenever I feel that the hallway is getting too noisy with student conferencing, whenever I feel like the athletics dept has overstepped its boundaries on our own campus, or whenever I groan about the parking lots being so far away from my office building.

Otherwise, in the mean time I will continue to write my crazy stories -- I've already started, imagining a world where cars played football, and humans are advertised during their Super Bowl. "22MPG, 15MPG...hut, hut...brake!"

Visit Coyotebanjo's weblog for some great edublogging.

Hi Michael,
I found your website by putting the phrase "recommendation letter appreciation gift" into Google. After reading your blog on writing recommendation letters I felt compelled to email you and ask you my question. A former professor of mine wrote a recommendation letter on my behalf for a graduate scholarship application. I want to send a gift of appreciation with my thank you note. We are both members of the same financial association; would their logo on a mug be an appropriate gift? (Incidentally, it is not the organization giving the scholarship.)

Thanks for your help!
Warm regards, Jessica Smith, CFP

Hi Jessica!

Thanks for writing...and posing such an interesting question! I think the truth is that a former professor will be happy to receive almost any gift you send, because they rarely receive such things from their students (it's true!), and because the kindness of the gesture -- along that thank you letter you mentioned -- will often mean more to them than anything else. Teachers are often rewarded simply by teaching and having their students achieve success. But a personal touch in a gift is icing on the cake and you shouldn't hold back. The mug sounds fine; especially if you think it will bring a smile and a memory of you to the prof's face when they drink their morning coffee or while they're sitting in a boring staff meeting. Heck, if you are close with your prof, you could even buy matching mugs -- one for you, one for them -- to signify your newly forged professional bond as colleagues in that financial association you mentioned.

I've received some interesting gifts in my day, for a variety of reasons (graduation, rec letters, end-of-term goodbyes). The typical gift is a book or a pen, because I teach English. But I really treasure the creative gifts the most. I've had students give me paintings or other pieces of art they've made, and I display them proudly in my office. I've received DVDs from films I've mentioned in class, or actual music by the student, like a mix tape, of songs related to a piece of their writing. Office-based gifts are great choices, but they don't have to be so corporate or official as, say, a paperweight or picture frame. A student once got me a Xmas tree ornament that reminded her of a Leonard Trawick poem called "At the Flying School" that I taught in our class together. Another student gave me one of those glass mannequin heads that often display hats, just because they thought I would enjoy the weirdness of it. (I did). I've got lots of Halloween decorations (my favorite, a gargoyled door knocker that screams in pain when you knock it), stuffed animals in the shape of flesh-eating viruses (not joking!), and even action figures from horror movies, like The Thing. A pair of graduate students put their money together and bought me a lamp that realistically looks like a human skull. As a horror writer, I appreciate these offbeat tokens of affection and though you'll never see me playing with an action figure, I do enjoy the fact that the students gave me something personal (and my house is starting to look like an abattoir!)

I'm not big on decorating trees, but I put that Xmas ornament I mentioned on my tree every year and it reminds me that my teaching does matter in the world outside of the hallways of the school. And I use that glass head as a prop for a poetry writing exercise in my writing class ("Write an extended metaphor for this glass head, being as descriptive as possible."). I'm not sure if a corporate-styled mug (even if that logo is for the school itself) will inspire such creative uses, but I appreciated these personal touches a great deal. If a gift inspires me to be more creative in the classroom, or actually provides me with a prop I can use in a future class, I'm overjoyed. But I'm just as happy to just receive a handshake, thank you note, kind word on an evaluation, a recommendation letter for my files, or even just a knowing smile.

-- Mike Arnzen

p.s. for readers of Pedablogue....
Thank you cards are always a good idea when a prof does work for you that they aren't paid to do. Obviously, gifts should never be traded for grades or used to ply a prof for favoritism. They should usually be given only during sanctioned events (like, say a club Xmas party), a holiday, or a goodbye present after grades have been turned in. A good time to exchange gifts is immediately following a thesis defense or somewhere in the auditorium/grounds (or even at a graduation party) immediately following graduation.

1. If you peer through the frosted window, you'll see that I use a stickie note that says "Be Right Back -- Please Wait!" that I keep at the ready, in case I need to step out.

2. Promotional postcard for my novel, Play Dead.

3. A Gary Larson "Far Side" cartoon (cut from a calendar I once had in my office). The caption reads: "Notice all the computations, theoretical scribblings, and lab equipment, Norm...Yes, curiosity killed these cats."

4. A Peanuts comic strip, copied from Snoopy's Guide to the Writer's Life. Lucy is critiquing Snoopy's novel, saying a good book should be witty, beautiful, etc. In the final pane, Snoopy asks, "Sick doesn't count?"

5. A Valentine's Day gift from the SHU Craft Club. A handmade, heart-shaped pin that reads "WRATH" in the center where you would normally see something like, "Be Mine" or whatever.

6. Corporate signage, common in shape and appearance to all faculty doors at Seton Hill University.

7. Self-made signage, including this term's office hours, and full contact information (including this website). I print a new one of these out every term and just tape it to the door.

8. Cover flat from my short story collection, 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories.

9. Redundant card with basic contact info. I need to remove this; it's taking up valuable real estate!

---

I was inspired to do this after reading the tongue-in-cheek study, "Deconstructing Faculty Doors" by Karl M. Petruso. I'm a big fan of examining faculty doors; I think office decor and a faculty doorway can tell you a lot about a teacher's or campus' personality. Mine seems more sparse than I realized; I need to post more comics and quirky things (though the horror stuff is already pushing it). I also notice that it's organized in a very linear and orderly fashion. On a pragmatic side, I see that I should identify myself as the advisor to the campus litmag, as well. I challenge any teacher reading this: post a photo of yours on your weblog, and add a link to it below (using the "Comment" feature)!

Dennis Jerz' great Literacy Weblog alerted me to a new article up at Inside Higher Ed by Shari Wilson about the problems attached to night classes that meet for three hours, once a week, called "Once a Week is Not Enough". Wilson laments the lack of learning that happens in these longer, less-frequently-meeting classes. The crux of her argument is that there are "not enough practice-and-feedback loops to help students absorb, retain and apply information" in a class that meets once a week. Conversely, in more traditional courses, "students have a chance to replay the information in their heads and practice. With the guiding hand of the instructor, they can get even more direction and be assured that they are 'getting it.'"

At Seton Hill, we offer a large number of these courses, and our facilities often seem to be running at full steam 24 hours a day. Part of the need for these one-shot classes stems from scheduling conflicts that I would call "displacement effects": art students, for example, take studios that last all afternoon long, displacing their available time for "traditional" courses to the morning and evening slots. Other displacing effects would include athletics and activities held in the afternoon, nine-to-five jobs held by more and more of our traditional-aged students (in addition to the returning adults), and certification program conflicts (almost half our students at Seton Hill, for example, are enrolled in an Education Certification program, which functions like a double-major, forcing students to take overloads and pack those classes into their schedule whenever they can if they hope to graduate in four years). On top of the displacement effects that give rise to a need for these courses are some of the other motives Wilson mentions, such as acquiring adjuncts who can only teach at night, or adopting a consumerist model of accessibility, that markets a quick and easy education to the workforce by hosting classes during what is ostensibly their "time off."

It's also a way to maximize the use of the physical plant, since classes would otherwise lie dormant in the evening. Once night courses populate a calendar, only an extremely radical revision of the schedule could change the system, and it would require adding a lot more full-time faculty to a campus' roster and perhaps even building new classrooms -- an expensive proposition. So I think most campuses that have these systems are stuck with them, to some degree.

I inevitably teach one of these three hour long night courses a term. I acknowledge that the difficulties that Wilson points to are very real -- and that it takes a certain stamina from student and teacher alike to succeed in them -- but there are also many benefits to teaching these classes and a host of strategies a teacher can adopt to make them work as best as possible.

The primary benefit of teaching a once-a-week, three-hour course is mostly evident in the amount of time you are given to work with. Having three hours allows both more flexibility and greater focus. Obviously, you have more flexibility in a class with three hours, rather than fifty minutes; if a class discussion is going well and you want to extend it, you can do so. You can commit larger blocks of time to group work, writing exercises, than you normally would, and even screen films or enact skits, and still have time for discussion afterward. It's great for writer's workshops or seminars where entire books are being discussed. I find having all that time quite useful; nothing frustrates me more in a traditional class than having to cut something productive off because of the (virtual) "bell."

As a writer, I find that teaching a once-per-week class benefits me by opening up my schedule so I have more time to write early in the day all week. I'm a morning writer -- using the first few hours of the day to focus on my own writing (the secret to my success in this regard was the realization that developing my own writing is just as important as my students', and so I try to spend as much time working on my scholarship as I do grading student papers -- and I find it easier to write in the morning (and who wants to start their day grading papers, anyway?)). Luckily, my campus usually allows me the freedom to not have any classes until 11am for this purpose. I also can spend those three extra "workday" hours on errands or class prep. Jerz and Wilson rightly note that teaching a night class often means that you get students who can't attend normal office hours, and demand extra "night" time from a teacher, since they work during the week. But I find that office hours can be adjusted tactically: hosting one office hour a week in the late afternoon (circa 4:30 or 5) can often accommodate these students as well as other traditional students who have classes during the "banking hours" when most faculty hold their usual office hours. The only drawback, really, is that fewer colleagues, staff and campus services are available at that time. But I have "regular" office hours for those needs, too. Teachers can also host "virtual" office hours and help these 9-to-5ers via e-mail or online chats.

When you first design a once-a-week class, one problem immediately arises in regards to organizing the content. Because the class meets once a week, it seems like you will have to cram what would normally be three meetings worth of material into one session. Some teachers even rotely divvy the three hours up into three lockstep units. Inevitably, as Wilson notes, teachers wind up dropping readings and assignments along the way and "shortchanging" the class, compared to what students in a thrice-per-week classroom are getting. Teaching a process-based course can suffer, if, say, drafting and revision happens in class -- if you only have 10 to 15 meetings a term, it's hard to plan serial learning. But if one adjusts by trying to teach depth rather than breadth, these problems fade away. When I teach a night class once a week, I shape it so that a lot of the reading, screening, peer-editing, and information-gathering/-digesting happens outside of class. I've used mandatory discussion board work outside of class to keep students interacting during the week (though this doesn't always work). I might set up "study groups" that encourage the students to do group work on their own combined schedules. Students come to the meeting prepared to discuss, with questions written down or a reading journal and an already-read book in their packs. When I teach film, I often assign screenings outside of the class and schedule a time slot outside of class where work study students can show the films. The idea is to "displace" as much as you can into homework without compromising the course. That means making the night class less focused on information and in-class application and more focused on process and reflection. I design the class so that individuals are doing stuff outside of class that they can't wait to share with others when we meet to pow-wow about it weekly. This approach also might mean retooling some of the course content so that it can be applied to the world outside the classroom, where students might be asked to do more homework "out in the world" rather than book learning. I might assign a paper that has students write about an observation they make in their workplace, rather than write about an article I have them read about work.

And I adjust my own work schedule accordingly, too: I often have paper deadlines later in the week, so that I can collect them and comment or grade them before the following class session. I might e-mail a handout or reading to the entire class in one batch. And I make heavy use of the reserve room, for distributing reading material I might otherwise pass out in the classroom. Sometimes, if students need more hands-on direction, I might cancel a regular class session and instead host individual or "study group" conferences spread out at different times across the week.

Teaching a three hour session can be "exhausting" for teacher and student alike, but it's important to schedule breaks (one at the midpoint, minimum) during these classes. Aside from providing intellectual and physical relief, I find these breaks helpful to mentally shift gears and move to a new topic, and I usually plan my courses around the break. Even so, sometimes it's difficult. After a full day of classes and faculty meetings and office hours, it can be almost surreal when you leave campus at ten at night, under the moonshine and the sound of crickets. I try to schedule my day so I'm not in from 8am till 10pm, but when those days have to happen, I'm sure to take it as easy as I can the following day. It's often more difficult to teach a morning class the day after a night class than it is to teach the night classes themselves. I make sure my weekly grading is done with as much discipline as I can muster, so that I'm not madly prepping or racing to grade papers to return the next morning. As with all teaching tasks, time management is crucial to organizing your life around a night class. That's something that students, too, need to learn and I do spend class time talking about study strategies for taking a night class, particularly if I have freshman taking one for the first time. I also make sure that I remain just as demanding and challenging of students in my night classes as I am in the "traditional" daily classroom. Sometimes it's not the neophyte freshman, but the student who has had a number of night classes in the past that were mismanaged (often, unfortunately, by new adjuncts that come and go in the dead of night) or treated as "education light" who are the ones that carry the wrong expectations when they enter the room, and it takes a little work to get them to respect our time together as a meaningful educational experience. If a student is having problems staying alert for three hours, or keeping up with homework, I take pains to conference with them privately early in the term to try to coach them a little in the skills it takes to succeed in a once-a-week course. I might compare it to going to church, or other rituals that often only happen once a week, but which can also be life-altering.

I'm the sort of person who likes to learn new tips and tricks for using my word processor. As both a writer and a teacher, I spend a lot of time in front of the computer, so I find macros, shortcuts, and templates an invaluable resource for saving time and increasing efficiency. As a writing teacher, I like to pass along word processing strategies to students (like, for example, how to turn off the "smart quotes" or turning off those annoying auto-underlined hyperlinks in Word) so they can create professionally formatted manuscripts.

So I frequently visit webpages like Office's download page or the wonderful resources at Word Tips. I read books on MS Office (like Word Hacks or Windows XP Annoyances and I surf any number of Office-related weblogs (see The Office Zealot or The Office Weblog for good ones) and I even subscribe to newsletters (like The Office Letter and The Editorium). I install add-in programs like the wonderful WordToys macro set. All of these things help improve my efficiency, make me more comfortable using Office, working on edits, and helping others with the software. And some of these things are even fun.

Today The Office Letter included a neat link that I felt other teachers might benefit from: Internet4Classrooms. This site has an informative page on "Using Excel in the Classroom" -- something that's always been a weakness of mine, because I always opt to use Word whenever I can. Sure, most teachers are familiar with using Excel to track grades, but unless they're teachers of math or accounting, they probably don't use it for anything else. The Internet4Classrooms page on Excel has an EXCELLENT guide on how to make "concept maps" and flow charts in Excel (along with samples you can download and edit), something that has always baffled me in Word. If you ever use diagrams in your handouts, it's worth a look-see.

There's plenty of software for teachers available on the internet, but I like to find programs that enhance what I already use...for free.

I just received the local tax forms in the mail -- something that always gives me an unwelcome wake-up call -- an uncomfortable reminder that there's extra work to be done. And math's involved!

I'm a little ahead of the game this year, if only because I got TaxCut for Xmas (only slightly more fun than wool socks) and my copy of the brand new AIS Tax & Financial Guide for College Teachers arrived in the mail. The latter is a highly recommended book that covers the entire tax law and it has lots of case studies for what is and isn't deductable (especially good on research, grants, and home office information).

Other books and information on teachers and taxes that are worth browsing (see last year's entry for more):

• 2005 Teacher's Pocket Tax Guide
  
• Teacher's Tax Service
  
• NEA page on the Teacher's Tax Breaks
  
• Jackson Hewitt's overview on teachers' tax returns
  

Winter classes begin on Monday at SHU.

I love beginnings. But like most teachers, I'm feeling a little sluggish about returning, because I've hardly had what would qualify as a "break." Some of the work-related activities I've been doing during the month we get off for Winter Break include: teaching a weeklong writer's residency, prepping two courses, serving on a hiring committee, advising incoming new students, meeting with new adjuncts and tutors, prepping for the upcoming term's duties as interim division chair... and fitting in my own creative writing in-between it all, playing "catch-up" with a number of writing committments. Anyone who thinks teachers live the life of luxury because they seem to get so much time off are fooling themselves. The gaps in the school calendar always fill, and many of us are like work-at-home freelancers: we do just as much work as everyone else, if not more sometimes, but when we're not in the classroom, we're managing the workload on our own.

Still, it's time to get back to Work -- work with a capital double-yuh -- or, in other words, back on the institutional calendar, hosting office hours and stepping into the classroom on a scheduled basis.

I just read one of the best online articles I've seen on this issue, "Getting Back to Work: A Personal Productivity Toolkit" by Mark T.A.W.. Not only does it offer some fantastic pointers to getting "back in the groove" after a prolonged absence from work, but it also includes some great links to time management and motivational work sites online.

At the top of his article, Mark talks about Pavlov's dogs and how when the routine of the bell-rings-now-you-must-drool experiment was interrupted, some of the dogs had a hard time getting back into the routine. Although I hate to think of work as some sort of Pavlovian conditioning, I can empathize with those out-of-sync dogs, sometimes, when I return from a vacation and have a hard time readjusting. Or worse: if I stop writing for any extended period, it's more difficult to pick up the pen and getting the ink to flow. (Blogging helps in this regard!).

Although breaks are healthy and completely warranted given the stress of our teaching lives, sometimes we need to ring our own bells to keep the workflow going. Mark T.A.W. designed a really neat tool: the Get Back To Work website, that you can set as your home page in a web browser if you're the sort who uses the internet to procrastinate.

I think time management books and personal productivity websites are often thick-headed and needlessly dogmatic, but because a great deal of teaching is organizing ideas and managing others, it's useful to look into this genre for strategies for the surviving the teacher's life. I do try to adopt David Allen's Getting Things Done approach and there are a number of blogs about this that are worth tapping into if you'd like to come to grips with your own workload. I like the blog collective at the Getting Things Done Zone, for example. The Innovation Weblog is another one I've been browsing pretty regularly, which combines productivity with creativity advice. I not only find good tools and techniques for managing my work as a teacher and a freelance writer at such places, but also pick up ideas that I can pass along to my students on studying and writing.

"E-mail," business writer Mark Suskino has written, "is the cholesterol of modern management."

Teachers have to be managers, too, to some degree, and not just in the classroom. We collect and comment on so many documents that our lives are riddled with as much paperwork as a tax attorney's desk. The massive growth in reliance on e-mail invisibly adds to our workload, as student and administrative messages are delivered to our inboxes in lieu of face-to-face communication more and more.

Anyone returning from holiday break to open their e-mail knows what I'm talking about: hundreds of messages awaiting response, student queries about grades and required books, administration briefings, alerts from the registrar, and junk mail awaiting deletion...even junk mail filter bins awaiting review to see if anything important got put in the same folder as so many ads for Rolex watches.

Many teachers only deal with e-mail when they're in their faculty office, at appointed times. That's good advice for some, but I'm personally processing constantly at my home office, as well. For me, there is no "vacation" from e-mail, except, perhaps when I travel sans modem...and even then, I feel the need to find a terminal somewhere and check it over the web. Because I submit a lot of writing to editors, I need to check constantly for their replies, and I also don't like to keep others waiting for my responses. You have to keep your in-box in shape. Like blood, it's a constant stream, and if e-mail is like cholesterol, I fear blockage.

Some cholesterol is good and much is bad. What can faculty do to better manage e-mail? And how can we more effectively use it when interacting with students? I liberally invite my students to e-mail me and I actually enjoy working that way, but sometimes the number of messages can get high or students send inappropriate questions or materials. [I'll never forget when I hosted an e-mail discussion list for a Literary Criticism course, and one student sent an obscene e-mail to everyone, assuming it was pertinent to our discussion of Freud. I got a lot of complaints about that and had to institute a policy (and I've since used private discussion boards instead).] As I've written here before, some students treat a professor's inbox as a complaint box while others use it as a genuine enhancement of learning. Research from the PEW institute tells us that 82-90% of students contact with their profs via e-mail and around half of those students report that e-mail has enhanced their relationship with their professors. (That research also suggests that students only complain 4% of the time). Those numbers are only escalating...so how to best process it all?

There's lots of advice out there -- and the topic is too broad to adequately cover here. In "Student E-mail: Issues and Solutions," the Teaching Effectiveness program at my alma mater, University of Oregon, offers some fantastic tips from the faculty trenches on handling mail and integrating it into a course. Investing some time reading all the advice out there on e-mail management can help, too, from reading the help file in your e-mail software, to surfing google for advice. Microsoft Outlook is the dominant system on our campus, and Microsoft Office Online offers all sorts of good information about E-mail Management. Their "Crabby Office Lady" column has an article on "Pestering Students with E-mail" which might have some good advice for using e-mail to manage students (but I think most of us need the opposite -- to reduce the amount of e-mail we get). Perhaps a lecture or even an assignment on e-mail nettiquette can work.

Overall, the best trick is to keep your own messages low in cholesterol -- write brief messages and divert the "next action" to a face-to-face conversation or send the writer to a more appropriate source. Some things I've done with student e-mail that you might try:

• If you are as open to e-mail correspondence as I am, put your e-mail address on your syllabus or even on any directions/guidelines you distribute in handouts. I even post my e-mail address on my office door, right next to office hours.
  
• If a student raises a juicy class-related issue, usually a response to a reading, I'll print out a copy (usually with permission) and distribute it to class for open discussion rather than get pulled into an e-mail conversation.
  
• If a student writes almost daily, with "reactions" to virtually each class meeting, I won't ignore it but I'll respond in short, almost terse, messages, usually steering the student somewhere else: the library, the textbook, or to the next class discussion.
  
• If students write with simple questions about class policies, I'll e-mail them a copy of the syllabus and ask them to come to my office hours if they've still got questions. If they are valid questions that others might have, or oversights and errors I've made (say, mismatching paper deadlines on my syllabus and guideline sheets), I'll ask them to remind me to discuss it in the next class meeting -- OR -- I'll forward my answer in a distribution to the entire class.
  
• If the e-mail is one of those popular "forwards" (usually jokes or pictures or even pyramid schemes that people pass along) I'll just delete it. If it continues, I'll ask them to take me off their distribution lists and possibly send them to a copy of campus policies regarding e-mail.
  

Well, I've only scratched a very broad surface here...just sharing some random thoughts. Please post your own advice by commenting on this message.

Sometimes the simplest concepts are the most problematic. Take, for example, the notion of the "credit hour." It seems like a self-evident term: one earns a college "credit" for an "hour" of academic work. But quantifying work is a very complicated affair and one "hour" of work is often a misnomer.

I've been thinking about this problem a lot recently, not only because I've hit that time of year when the grading stack avalanches down on me and I wonder whether or not I'm assigning too much. As I peruse student developmental portfolios, browse student course weblogs, and chat with faculty about the amount of reading and homework they're assigning, I really start to wonder how much is "just right" for three credit hours worth of work. Some colleagues in literature assign two or three short stories per week of reading; others assign a whole novel. When I see how much "work" students are putting into their other classes, I can't help but compare it to my own, and sometimes I end up feeling like I'm either a fascist slave driver or a dribbling softie, depending on the comparison. Perhaps that's a sign that I'm somewhere in-between and getting it just right, but since faculty seem to have such wildly disparate concepts of student workload, it's impossible to know for sure.

Although it's the gold standard for determining faculty workload and student progress toward a diploma, The "credit hour" is a slippery a concept because college students and teachers put far more "work" into a course than the typical three hours-per-week, student-in-seat interfacing. Homework, preparatory readings, office consultations...the whole gambit of learning tasks complicates matters. I try to use what I think is the "classic formula" for estimating student work: 1 hour of in-class time + 2 hours of study outside of class = one credit hour. But as Peter Ewell (from the PEW Forum on Undergraduate Learning) notes in his excellent inquiry, "Notes on the Credit Hour", there are too many inconsistencies among class approaches and that the credit hour system might be an inappropriate measurement standard for learning. Even if we set aside the impossibility of accounting for student labor outside of the classroom (though research suggests they aren't working very hard), the standards of measurement aren't "standard" at all. Different campuses design different measures of a "credit." Heck, just defining "in class" activity is slippery: some labs, internships, stage rehearsals, independent studies and other non-standard instructional activities are incongruous with the typical credit hour system.

At bottom the problem is the assumption that an hour spent in class equates with an hour of learning. But the "credit hour" could be an anachronism, given the various asynchronous methods of learning (as in online courses), and other changes that electronic media and new approaches to teaching have on the notion of "time" spent learning. Jane Wellman and Thomas Ehrlich have put a lot of work into investigating the shifts in the time and space of learning. In a Chronicle article related to their book, How the Student Credit Hour Shapes Higher Education, they recommend radical alternatives, predominantly because so much rides on the credit hour -- from faculty salaries to government funding. They smartly advocate replacing the term "hours" with "units" and suggest that emphasis on a "competency-based" system of learning assessment might be more meaningful. I haven't read this book yet, but the publisher's online excerpt from the introduction (.pdf format) suggests the following rationales for revising the system:

• The credit hour is a barrier to innovation in teaching and learning.
  
• The credit hour is a basic element of state budgets, and the measure gets in the way of budget reform.
  
• The credit hour is more often enforced as a regulatory measure in public institutions than in private institutions and within the public sector in two-year institutions more often than in four-year institutions.
  
• Innovative institutions work with and around the credit hour as a measure of student learning, but relatively few alternatives to the credit hour have occurred with respect to faculty workload.
  
• Credit hours are awarded inconsistently, with little internal policy guidance or external review about the basis for awarding them.
  

These are big institutional issues, and so much red tape has been secured to the "credit hour" that reform will be slow to come. Institutional funding and faculty workload issues are one thing, but what about student learning? Since financial aid and other forms of support require students to be enrolled "full time," at our college (which is typical of most, I think) students take 12-16 credit hours, or roughly four courses a term. This, in effect, makes sure they process out with their diplomas in four years. But some students leap for overloads because they aren't challenged, while others crumble under the weight of four when when they might more easily juggle three courses instead. At issue isn't so much the "in class" time, but the ambiguous amount of out of class work attached to any given course. While researching this topic, I found a newspaper article ("How Much Homework is Too Much?") that suggests that students can only do so much homework before their learning "plateaus" -- that is, there comes a point where doing extra homework won't do you any good. They loosely cite one study (my research suggests that it's this report from the Nat'l Center for Education Statistics), in which kids who worked on schoolwork for more than three hours a night scored lower overall than kids who had studied just 1 to 3 hours per night. I'm not sure if this holds water, because the stats tell me that the older kids get, the more extra studying pays off, but it does support the notion that maybe two hours of studying for each one hour class meeting might be "just right" for maximizing learning. Even so, time is always relative. So is learning. A "credit hour" can only operationally be defined.

As far as determining the amount of material that I put into my class assignments, I'll just have to keep trusting my gut. And keeping my ear to the ground. Talking about these things with students and faculty and administration -- and measuring them comparatively in such interdisciplinary assessment tools as developmental portfolios -- is the only way I know how to gauge whether my three credits are the same as anyone else's.

Take, for example, the student who wants to use the office hour as a time to unpack all kinds of excuses for missed classes and/or late work. Most of these melodramatic performances are as boring as they are, well, dubious. So, I tell such students that I'm willing to listen to their sad tales, but only after they sign a release form giving me all rights to the material for stage, screen, and television. I mean it as a joke, although when one student laid out the story of how his ex-girlfriend let herself into his apartment (she still had a key) and took a meat cleaver to his water bed -- all this by way of explaining how his paper "drowned" -- I am now glad that I have possession of the signed form.-- Sanford Pinsker, The Irascible Professor

Ingenious thinking! I love Pinsker's idea in the article cited above, about putting a model "A" paper from the class assignment in the departmental office (or if I were doing it, online or on reserve), and demanding that students read it before they come to his office to argue for a higher grade. It turns the experience into a learning moment, even if it doesn't entirely dissuade the angry student from complaining.

I seem to get a lot of traffic during office hours, and I prefer that to the solitude that I might otherwise garner if I, say, held them at 8am or put a "do not disturb" sign on my door. Here's some random thoughts about how I approach them:

• Scheduling: I try to stagger my hours in my weekly schedule, if possible. What that means is I might hold them at 2pm on Mon/Wed and on 4pm on Tues/Thurs. Making myself available on even and odd days (e.g Mondays and Tuesdays, not just Mon Wed Fri) ensures that students will be less likely to have classes blocked out during my hours. I also recognize that students are more likely to come visit during afternoons or early evenings than early mornings. I always try to have at least one hour in the very late afternoon, for commuters or adult students: usually this is a 5-6pm block of time, scheduled right before a night class.

  
  

• Course Management: Obviously, you can get a lot of grading done during office hours, especially if no one drops by. I usually put my office hours in time slots before I have to teach, in order that I might get any last minute prepping/copying/reading done before a particular class. For classes that meet two days a week or less -- like my night classes -- I often make my office hours a paper collection deadline, asking students to drop off papers during my office hours. That often also invites some of them to drop by and talk about class issues...though many act like they have a train to catch.

  
  

• One Mandatory Meeting: In my writing classes, I typically have one mandatory meeting in my office with the student, to talk about a paper I've recently commented on. I ask them to bring their various drafts, and the readings they're responding to (or the research they've acquired, if any). I try to do this early in the term; especially with freshmen, it "humanizes" the process of learning for them, and opens many new students' eyes to the fact that office hours really are for them. After the "mandatory" meeting, which students usually find liberating in some way, I typically get a number of "returning" visits. In the very least, I know that they will be more willing to talk during class discussions. They suddenly feel a personal investment in the class they hadn't felt before.

  
  

• Consulting Hours: Maybe office hours should be "consulting hours" instead. "Office" is too officious. I find it odd that students pay thousands of dollars to consult with us in class, but rarely take advantage of the office hours. I think one of the reasons that students avoid office hours is out of fear: territorial studies would tell us that the office is the professor's "turf" whereas a classroom is more of an open field, in comparison. It's good to hold "office hours" outside of the office -- whether they're through "virtual office hours" (where you sit in a chatroom or promise to answer e-mail questions rapidly) or simply by arranging in advance to hold hours in the student union building, or a talk-friendly section of the library, or even out on the lawn. Bring a book or some papers to grade, and wait. I sometimes put post-it notes on my office door that say something like: "I'm downstairs in the cafeteria today: come join me."

  
  

• Furniture Talk: The way that desks and chairs are arranged in a professor's office send subtle signals. If you use your desk to block your doorway with a confrontational barrier like they do at, say, a police station, well then you're not only being uninviting, you're also responsible for all those nervous tics the students make when they do come talk to you. Think of the angles of the furniture: are they more "open" than "closed"? Do they invite conversation and informality, or do they put too many barriers between you and the student. While it's true that you may not want to be completely open and intimite with your students -- like, say, sitting beside them on a big puffy couch -- you might find that rearranging the furniture liberates some of the angst students have when they come to your office. So will little details like having family pictures on the desk, putting art on the walls that reflects your personality, having knick nacks or other things that students can look at when they want to avoid eye contact, or conversation pieces to get the shy ones talking...etc., etc. Be professional, yet open. [By the way, always be on the look-out for opportunities to trade office furnishings: sometimes you can get a chair or table from another building on campus, if they're refurnishing or throwing old materials out.]

  
  

• Order: This is probably my biggest weakness. And I'm not alone. Most of the professors I know are a little disorderly. We've all got too much on our mind to be troubled with filing all that paperwork on our tabletop or straightening out our bookshelves. It's tough to keep everything organized and in its place. I'm terrible with my inbox: it's still overflowing with last year's flyers and invitations. I've also still got a poster/calendar from 2002 on the wall. But I know I can do better. I'm not anal retentive about keeping my office clean and organized, but I do believe that the messier it is, the less respect I get from students (though I'm sure most of their dorm rooms are probably condemnable). Students expect their leaders to be more organized than they are; some go so far as to assume that a disorderly office is a reflection of a disorderly mind. You don't want to deck out the office with chiffon and make it look like a setpiece from The Stepford Wives, but you don't want it to smell like a locker room, either. At the bare minimum, I try to give my office the once-over at least once during winter and summer breaks -- even going so far as to clean things that the cleaning staff misses (like the windows). I've also made use of work study students before, asking them to help me reorder my bookshelves or sort through paperwork.

  
  

• Student Management: I always enjoy meeting with students and discussing course material, their lives, and even just shooting the breeze. But sometimes students wear out their welcome or haunt my doorstep. And you can always reposition the furniture or change your hours if you find yourself being pulled into a quagmire of endless student meetings that spill over beyond your regular hours and so forth. There are ways of managing students during office hours without resorting to offensive tactics or pleading cries of overwork. The best way, of course, is to use appointment scheduling effectively. Make appointments that have time limits in advance. Sometimes, you can line up these appointments, too, so that the student feels the weight of the people lining up outside the door. Another strategy is to end the consultation just as one would end a committee meeting when the hour is up: wind up the conversation by summarizing the key issues, and then breaking out the calendar and asking the student to schedule a follow-up to discuss them. Give them an "out" if they don't want to continue talking. You can also just start using phrases like "Next time we meet, we'll discuss X" or "Journal about that topic and let me read your thoughts when I grade it later on." Highlight the larger context of the conversation, as part of a larger process of learning. Sometimes you have to be firm. Set ground rules for any follow-up meeting: "Next time we talk, bring your textbook with specific questions about the reading."
  

Not every "tip" above will work for you and perhaps some would totally backfire and make more work. I know that there's a trade-off we make when we open ourselves up to extra office visits. It's more work, for one thing. And there often comes a point where students begin to treat their teachers like personal therapists, father/mother figures, or best buddies -- blurring the boundaries of professionalism and confusing the student's role as learner with some other role.

But sometimes the openness can pay off in other ways. Some students work harder to get an "A"; students write better evaluations; students are more openly engaged in class discussions. Some have been kind enough to bring me coffee or other treats, though I typically don't invite that. I've had students come to me to discuss --- gasp! -- independent research in literary theory and to talk about readings we didn't get to discuss openly in class. And when I'm sitting in my office, talking with a student about issues for their own sake, or to help the student with something they want to learn just because they want to learn it -- rather than just for the sake of a grade -- then that's when I know I'm doing office hours right.

Hmm.... I might develop this into an article some day. Post your own tips here, by clicking on "comments" below, if you like!

I guess I can brag a little: last weekend, I won the Bram Stoker award for my newsletter, The Goreletter, at the Horror Writers Association conference in NYC. Although my newsletter has very little to do with teaching -- besides, perhaps, the creative writing prompts I include in each issue -- the HWA conference hosted a lecture by Tim Waggoner on "Teaching Creative Writing" which was very well attended.

[update: here's a copy of Waggoner's handout for the lecture in Word format]

A lot of writers are looking for teaching gigs (it helps to have a higher degree, of course, but as Waggoner rightly pointed out, writing is a skill and there are lots of people eager to learn it from someone who is skilled at it -- whether they have a PhD/Masters or just a few publications under their belt). I picked up a few new tricks of the trade which I thought I'd share here.

As perhaps the only other full-time teacher in attendance, I was nodding and affirming a lot of what Waggoner had to say. When asked how bad teaching cuts into his writing time, he admitted that it can really cut into productivity, but he also said that "paying bills alleviates financial stress you'd have otherwise" that would impinge on your writing. Very true. I would add that having a secure job allows me to pursue the sorts of writing I want to pursue. It gives me extra focus when I get to teach something related to my writing. I also write in the mornings, before classes. Waggoner does the same: "I write in the morning before the day to come steals it all away from me." One tip he had that I hadn't thought much about is doing snippets of writing during "between time": office hours, during student exercises, on the bus, etc.

Speaking of student exercises, Waggnoner had a lot of examples. One that I particularly liked was his notion of "being mean to a character." When young writers describe characters, they almost universally make them flat goodie-goodies who might have problems, but little psychological depth. Or they don't have enough conflict at all. Waggoner has students first write a character description, then pass that description to a neighbor. The neighbor is told to "do something mean to the character." Then they pass it back and the writer must work with the problem that's given -- often a violent one.

In another lesson, he teaches brevity. Although they're always picky about page count in essay writing, students often don't understand the need for writing tight, and sometimes roam aimlessly through a plot without thinking about what's significant and necessary -- and what's not. Waggoner brings a CD to class with the most long-winded, overtly "literary" fiction he can find and plays it to them, without any explanation. He purposely chooses the sort of stuff that would put most people to sleep. Afterwards, the lesson is self-evident: readers are impatient.

Another technique I liked: he has them write a newspaper story about "what happened" in the plot of their stories, after they've written them. This helps them to see the crux of their plots and "what's important."

Waggoner also integrates a lot of writing from personal experience into his classes, as do most creative writing teachers. He has them write about "the examined life" where they describe their earliest memories, their favorite places, and then pontificate bout what they would change. One exercise -- "write about a personal horror" -- led to his worst workshop ever, in which people began confessing all sorts of experiences and traumas...one almost drove him to the point of getting the student psychological help. I've had this experience myself, teaching "Memoir Writing" -- and yet, courses and exercises like these often do get students to tap into some meaningful vein, where the writing is as easy to mine as found gold.

If you teach writing, or if you're a writer, you might want to browse Tim Waggoner's essays online.

[Speaking of my e-newsletter: writing teachers might find my other newsletter, The Handy Job Hunter for Writers, more useful than The Goreletter. It can help with advising journalism/creative writing majors into careers.]

Yesterday, each of our graduating English majors presented their "showcase" portfolios to a pair of English faculty, giving a ten minute speech followed by a question & answer period. Instead of an exit exam, we ask students to reflect on how they have met the objectives of the English major in a 6-10 page paper and to talk about where they're going and where they've been, using the portfolio to illustrate and support their claims about their own learning.

We've only been doing this for two or three years now, but I've found it a rewarding process for both student and teacher. Some students get stressed about having to "defend" their work, but the students with the best attitudes approach it as a sort of celebration of their learning. It's thrilling for me to see how far the students have come over four years -- I'm always awe-struck on some level by how quickly they mature and it's renewing to see that I've made a positive impact -- no matter how small -- on the student's thinking. In fact, I think of these moments as not only a way for the student to reflect positively on their development, but also as a means by which we can gauge the effectiveness of our English program.

I've always been a proponent of the "electronic portfolio" option, which allows students to assemble their work online in the form of a webpage, rather than a binder brimming with papers. Only a few students have taken us up on this option. Donna Hibbs was the first, and her's was a great model for others to follow. This year we had only three e-portfolios and the remainder of our graduating English majors chose to submit their portfolio on paper. I only worked with Julie Young's portfolio, which I thought was outstanding -- she did a great job and I admire her skill in web design and data organization, on top of all her talents as an English major.

Nevertheless, I was thinking about some of the cons of electronic portfolios as assessment tools or educational technologies, even as I was grading them side-by-side with paper portfolios. I thought I'd write about these problems here.

Revision
Young entitled her portfolio "Revision" -- and I know from working with her just how much energy she pours into rewriting. And though I didn't mention this to her (and didn't hold it against her), I found her title very ironic, because it called my attention to the fact that e-portfolios give no sense of the process of revision. They rarely contain work that includes commentary from teachers or peer reviewers; there's no sense of process attached to the writing; in fact, there's no way, really, to tell if the papers in an online portfolio are the same ones that produced the grade in the course or whether or not the student revised the paper before putting it online. Does it matter? Maybe not. But I think the feedback that writers get from others (students, teachers, editors) can and should be part of the reflective process as the student uses the portfolio to assess their own growth. Often it's the commentary that "teaches" and so if a student reflects on their learning, they would want to reflect on that material.

I think students harbor the belief that 'clean' copy is good copy, so uploading the MS Word file that they printed their paper from only serves to erase the comments that otherwise were intended to help the student revise or re-see their work from another perspective. Thus, the e-portfolio serves -- in an odd way -- to privilege product over process. Granted, a 'showcase' portfolio at the end of a student's career at a college inherently does this. But the idea of the portfolio -- and of most writing courses -- is to help students see writing (and learning) as a process...and a portfolio, ultimately, should be that: a work-in-process rather than a closed book. Even our Q&A sessions often felt more like advising sessions than exercises in probing into what a student did or did not learn.

One solution for this might be to ask students to include links to earlier drafts or scans of commented papers in .pdf format or some sort of reflection essay on their revision process.

Document Issues
E-portfolios are somewhat clumsy when students upload (at best) .rtf files or Word documents or huge scans of images or .pdf files. Even when they put their work into hypertext, often there's so much of it that students don't recode everything but simply "save as" .html in their word processor, causing innumerable changes in format. If I were working on an e-portfolio, I'd probably 'save as" html and then re-edit -- by hand -- every paper, to make it look something like the work I've done on the sample essays from Paradoxa. It takes a lot of time and a little know-how that not every student has. And unless they're blogging everything or writing every paper in html from scratch, the juggling of different document formats is a lot of trouble for the student and his or her audience online.

Perhaps this issue could be solved by distributing standardizing guidelines for format, but then this risks streamlining out the creativity and personality that an e-portfolio could harbor.

Permanence
If a school provides web space for e-portfolios, then they're doing themselves a favor because the option most students would take otherwise would be to upload their files to some "free" website service which not only forces pop-up and banner advertising, but also might have some questionable terms of service that would -- in effect -- hand all publishing rights over to the web provider. But by the same token, how long is a school required to host a student's portfolio online? Should the student be allowed to showcase their work to future employers...and will they have rights to edit those files long after graduation? I'd think they should, since I see these portfolios as works-in-progress that don't magically "end" just because a student has received a diploma. But there are economic and spatial issues that might prevent this from occurring in an ideal fashion. Just as students who use their school e-mail accounts encounter issues with staying in contact once they graduate, there are similar problems that could occur post-graduation.

There are potential problems, moreover, for both the institution and the student, because of the very nature of publication. What if a paper in the portfolio is plagiarized by a student (after all, uploaded files in .rtf format make this a snap!)? While a great portfolio makes our institution look good, what does a poor portfolio do? What if the student adds a very personal paper written in freshman composition that embarrasses the student five years later? Because essays that are written for teachers often are written in a sort of "safe harbor" (which publication on the web is not), then what happens when a student uploads documents they wrote under the assumption that they were private? Virtually all the potential problems that are associated with student writing online threaten the portfolio process.

Perhaps CDs are a better way to go.

Shifting the Burden of Office Supplies
Okay, so this is a minor point, but over the past five years I have seen a dramatic increase in the number of pages I've had to print on behalf of my students. With an electronic portfolio, it increases tenfold. I have to ask myself: do I want to strain my eyes for another few hours reading on screen, or do I want to print these pages out to refer to later or even bring with me to the portfolio defence. Naturally, I'll read on screen. But you can bet that I'm going to skim more quickly and "surf" rather than "read" in some cases. I'm not convinced yet that that's the best way to assess a student's career.

Students could be asked to provide hard copy of any new paper (like the introductory essay we ask them to write).

Complicating the Presentation
Although students can utilize our smart classrooms at Seton Hill and project their e-portfolio onto a wall, few actually click through different pages, showing and telling. Instead, they present a talk. And frankly, I think I prefer it that way. If a student went page by page through their bound portfolio, I'd be tempted not to pass them because they would seem under-prepared or disorganized. Similarly, a student could hide behind their e-portfolio as a sort of shield from public speaking, the way some people poorly use PowerPoint. The portfolio is something the group can turn to during the presentation/defense, but doesn't necessarily need to.

Well, I'm sure there are more problems -- and MANY more benefits that I've bracketed off for now for the sake of focusing on this issue. Hopefully, I'll take these ideas back to my colleagues and talk about ways that we can improve the system. Naturally, if a student wants to work in the electronic media, such as students in our New Media Journalism program, then an e-portfolio makes a lot of sense. But for now, the students who do use electronic portfolios are paving the way to standards and realizing the pros and cons of this method through the risks they take. So far, I've been very pleased with the work they've done.

Demonstrating Good Teaching by David G. Brown -- recently published in Syllabus magazine -- is a good reminder that teachers who integrate lots of technology in their courses may have to take special steps to show its value to their administrators and colleagues. Especially those who are up for tenure and promotion. Brown briefly lists ten strategies for helping others to see that computer mediated instruction can be good instruction.

Brown's tips range from utilizing a website or Powerpoint presentation in a final exam (and archiving that to disk or publishing it online in an electronic teaching portfolio) to publicly soliciting and archiving comments about course materials (as a blog like this one might do). It's all good advice. Brown emphasizes generating empiric evidence to make your teaching process self-evident so that the strengths of your use of technology will be obvious. It can sometimes be difficult for those who don't use technology to understand it's use if you only talk about it or describe it from afar...it's far better to have it speak for itself. That is, if you can get folks to look at the web site or CD in the first place...sometimes that's the hurdle. Brown recommends having colleagues visit classes or soliciting their opinions about specific course strategies you're employing.

One tip that Brown mentions gives me pause. He suggests that technology savvy teachers "Ask students, about every three weeks, to e-mail you comments about how the course is going, its strengths and weaknesses, and how it can be improved." He's probably advocating this because you're likely to get good supportive letters from students who sing your praises that you can put in your promotion file. But even better, you can adjust your approach to a specific class along the way, "tuning in" to the students needs along the way as the course progresses. Of course, this can also lead to troubles: students might see your inbox as a complaint box. And if what research from the PEW Internet and American Life Project suggests is correct, students already e-mail professors so often that such course corrections already occur. In fact, 82-90% of students are already contacted by their profs via e-mail and around half of those students report that e-mail has enhanced their relationship with their professors. (That research also suggests that students only complain 4% of the time, by the way...which, as is often the case in course evaluations, too, is probably a case of one bad apple spoiling the bunch.)

In any case, I agree that professors need to be receptive to student e-mail, but the degree to which it is solicited is up to the teacher. Many of my colleagues report being flooded with e-mail correspondence to answer, from not only students but administrators, publishers, communications officers, and even e-mail worms. E-mail can become a workload problem if it isn't managed well. I personally ask students to contact me via e-mail if there are problems they're having in the course, but more often than not my replies ask the student to come by my office hours for a conversation. At the beginning of the semester, I tell students that I'm addicted to e-mail and love to get it from them -- and I am very receptive to their messages. But sometimes e-mail is a false solution to problems. I've had students e-mail me about problems finding materials on reserve, for example, when the obvious solution to that problem is to first ask the librarian for assistance (in my Literary Criticism class recently, I learned that an article was placed in the reserve file folder for a different class -- there's no way I could have solved that problem by e-mail...it took someone asking the librarian about it for them to dig around and discover the error). There's a tendency for people, not just students, to defer work by sending off e-mails to others and hoping they'll do the work for them. Like when students conduct e-mail interviews, whipping out five questions and sending them off without really inter-viewing at all. I've also had students write e-mail to me to "defend" their writing from editorial feedback I'd written to help them revise...which means my inbox became a place for them to vent rather than to critically rethink their writing (of course, again, I invited them to come see me with the subtle reminder that writing must always speak for itself).

But I'm beginning to digress. Like I said above, e-mail is a boon for teaching but it needs to be managed effectively. The same is true of all classroom activities, especially technology, which is usually intended to help organize material. I recommend you read Brown's article and see which tips are applicable to your courses. If you're coming up for promotion or tenure review, you need to start thinking in the ways that Brown advises. Regardless, you might even e-mail David Brown to let him know how you feel about it; his article practices what he preaches and solicits tips. You also might want to review the long list of practical and useful articles he's written for Syllabus magazine. I'm going to let him know about this entry.

As I was messing around with my newly installed edition of Microsoft Word 2003, I discovered a link on the MS website to an article that I found very eye-opening: "Teaching Research and Composition with Microsoft Office Word 2003". This downloadable Word document explains how teachers can use the software to teach a process-oriented model of writing. I expected to hate it, but found myself impressed and relatively surprised by its savviness about composition teaching. I can't tell if I'm happy to see this sort of instructional paradigm integrated into word processing -- which is such an important (but frequently overlooked) teaching tool -- or whether I'm horrified to see one of my disciplines assimilated into the Matrix for profit.

Still: the ideas in Microsoft's document are quite practical. I already integrate many of them into my practice (like using electronic commenting). Reading this guide reminded me that I should try to have my students more actively master their word processors for more than just composing and saving text. There are so many revision and critique and proofing elements built into programs like MS Word that it makes sense to ask students to utilize them in ancillary homework tasks or to even practice them live in the computer-enhanced classroom.

But as heartened as I am to see a megacorporation "talking the talk" of composition theory, I am skeptical of their vested interest in getting me to use their program to teach my students. Clearly, some elements in the document (such as the latent sales pitch for using Microsoft Sharepoint -- a collaborative Office-based intranet server) should be taken with a large granule of salt. Many of the collaborative features of Word can be utilized just as well via e-mail and/or other course management programs (like the threaded discussions on Jweb). While it's true that our graduate program in Writing Popular Fiction actually uses Sharepoint to faciliate a bulletin board and more, but the students have yet to utilize the other elements of the program for collaborative critique. Exchanging via e-mail seems to work just fine for now.

Browse the other Instructional Resources for Teachers and Technology on the Microsoft home page. Or do a search in the Pedablogue for "commenting" to read previous discussions of electronic annotation.

As a writer and teacher, I've been living a double life. Well, with my computer, anyway. For the longest time I have used Lotus software -- first Works, then AmiPro, then WordPro -- for my writing and Microsoft Word 97 for my school work. This means I have wasted much time over the past five years or so "saving as .rtf" so I can work on my campus computer or swap files with just about everyone else in the world. Aside from formatting, I have mostly used Microsoft Word for its "commenting" feature, which allows me to add marginal notes in student writing that I receive electronically (predominantly for the Writing Popular Fiction graduate program).

I used to think I was resisting the dominant paradigm and boycotting the hegemony of Microsoft, to some degree. But I also recently realized that I have been spending more and more time converting files and wasting time adjusting to the Word interface and back again than I should be. And I began to wonder if I could actually improve my productivity with a new (albeit boggy) program. In my research, I noticed cool new "commenting" features that actually put the comments right in the margin of the page. So I gave up. I decided to convert myself. I'm going Word 2003 (which hot off the CD burner), all the way.

Why put this in the Pedablogue? Because I discovered that teachers and students can get a really sweet/suite deal on Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2003. I had originally found the cheapest way to upgrade Word to the 2003 version at pcnation.com. But I went to my local staples store just to compare, and ended up paying about $50 more and got the full Office version..and not only got a $50 gift check rebate from Staples but also enrolled in their new "Teacher Rewards" program which will rebate you 10% on every $100 you spend there. So I essentially got the whole Office suite for the price of upgrading Word alone and -- with the Teacher Rewards -- will ultimately get it cheaper than I would have at pcnation.

You are given THREE licenses of the Student-Teacher Edition, as well, allowing you to install the program on multiple machines.

I know that not everyone reading this cares about petty savings in software deals -- and even more will tell me that I should have resisted the Microsoft lure for ideological reasons. But I think I made the right choice and I thought I'd pass along the news here. I'm not sure how long that staples Office rebate will last, folks.

There are other benefits I hope to explore. Having MS Office on my home machine will help me interface with the software that is already installed in the "smart classrooms" on my campus and in all campus labs. This new Office package comes with PowerPoint, which I >might< try to use to lecture more often, and also Excel, which might help me better keep my gradebook. There are lots of educational uses for the Office suite. In fact, Microsoft at least tries to support education and educators in multiple ways, not just in giving us discounts on software. I think I've been resisting them for too long and for no good reason. They've won the office wars. It's what we do with the tools that matter... and so far, I'm loving them.

It's fall break at Seton Hill U, which means that students are given an extended weekend to recharge their batteries and teachers are given a little extra time to finish marking papers so they can turn in midterm grades. I find that if I have a little time leftover, I often declutter my office, which is usually littered with the traces of my whirling dervish of activity getting ready for the first month or two of classes. I apply a few "rules of two" that help me get organized, which I thought I'd post here:

• Two Year Rule: if you haven't read that magazine or article you were saving for a future class for two years of teaching the class, then -- like a suit you haven't worn for two years -- it's clutter and you probably should get rid of it. (Marlynn K. Clayton with Mary Beth Forton, Classroom Spaces that Work)
  
• Two Inch Rule: if a stack of paper on your desk is taller than two inches, it's time to sort, file, defer to someone else, or toss in the trash. (Clayton and Forton)
  
• Two minute Rule: when you go through items in your inbox, ask yourself if you can finish each item in two minutes or less. If the answer is yes, then do it immediately. If not, schedule it for later, defer it to someone else, or throw it away. (David Allen, Getting Things Done)
  

Now if I could only get through that four inch tall stack of student papers and exams....