Okay, I think I’ve “gone about as fur as ah c’n go” for this first version of the courseware. I’m ready to call it version 1.0, I guess, with all the caveats that go along with that.
You can see it in action on my fall course site, though I’d respectfully ask that you not post comments related to the courseware itself there—it’s a production class site. This post would be a better place to discuss process.
The templates I used are linked below, but you need to know a bit about how i set the weblog up for those to be useful.
I’m using MT with mySQL, rather than the Berkeley db. That’s important on the first page, where I’m using Brad Choate’s MTSQL plug-in to prevent post-dated items from showing up until their date rolls around. There may be a way to do that without MTSQL, but that’s the approach I used.
I’m using Adam Kalsey’s SimpleComments plug-in, which treats trackbacks as “remote comments” and intersperses them with the comments in chronological order. I’ve also taken out all of the comment and trackback pop-up windows, directing people to the individual entry when they click on the comment or trackback count for the entry. The advantage to this is that it doesn’t break on browsers that aren’t javascript-enabled (like my sidekick, for example), and that it means that comments are always seen in the context of the original entry, which I think is important (an idea I got from Joi). The downside of this is that trackbacks don’t automatically trigger a site rebuild, so new trackbacks are shown on the main page, but not on the individual entry until the entry is rebuilt. This problem is discussed on Phil Ringnalda’s blog, and he provides a solution that I’ve implemented. However, it’s not for the technologically faint-hearted, as it involves modifying the perl code in your MT software. (FWIW, I am not a perl programmer, but still found the instructions easy to follow.)
I’m also using php extensions on all of my files, and using php includes to put the sidebar and the titlebar files into each page. There are definitely other ways to do that, but you’d have to modify the include calls on all of the templates. One of the reasons I’m using includes is that the sidebar has the calendars, which are process-intensive to build—but putting that into a separate file, the MT engine only has to build it once, rather than for every single page. It also makes it a lot easier to change the navigation and design of the site, since all the pages call the same include files.
I turned off notification for weblogs.com and blo.gs during development, but will add it back in during the quarter so students know when I’ve updated the site. I have comments, trackbacks, and trackback autodiscovery all turned on, so as to make the site as interactive as possible.
I’m using individual, daily, and category archives. Here are the additions to the archive file template for each type of archive:
Individual archives: <$MTEntryTitle dirify=”1”$>.php
Daily archives: <$MTArchiveDate format=”%Y/%m/%d/index.php”$>
Category archives: none
Note: You don’t have to use the “dirify” option for the individual entries—it creates individual archive pages with the post title as the file name (e.g. midterm_exam.php) rather than the post number (e.g. 000023.php). I do that out of personal preference, but leaving it out won’t affect functionality.
The following categories have to be set up for the templates to work:
I also added topical categories related to the course, but the current templates don’t use those at all.
I think that’s it for configuration information. Here are the templates I’m using. They’re plain text files, but your browser will probably try to parse them as HTMl, so they’ll look odd. You can either ignore the appearance and use a file—>save command to save the raw code to your own computer, or you can right/ctrl-click on the links and save them directly.
A few of these are standard MT templates, so you can just copy and paste into the existing templates in your weblog. Most are new, however, and will have to be created using the “Create new index template” option at the top of the template listing page.
Index Templates
Archive Templates
All archive templates use the same sidebar and titlebar template that the index templates use.
The things I’m doing with comments, trackbacks, and the simplecomments plug-in are optional in terms of overall functionality…you could certainly modify the templates to use the more standard approach that default MT templates include without changing the functionality of the courseware.
So, that’s it in a nutshell. Nowhere near a plug-and-play implementation, obviously. But enough information that if you’ve got some good MT-savvy, you can implement your own version.
Anyone who’d like make this more elegant by improving on my kludgy code, or adding additional functionality is more than welcome to do so. This documentation and the accompanying templates are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Well, of course, completion is a relative term. It will soon be “done enough,” I think, for use this fall.
Today’s changes:
I’m realizing as I do this that I probably shouldn’t have used the date format for individual archives, since when I create the entry MT automatically saves it for the current day. I can then edit the date and time, and the entry is then saved in the “right” location…but the original “wrong” file is not deleted automatically. And if I’ve got trackback pings being sent (to a weblog reading, for example), readers following the trackback will be directed to either the “wrong” file (thus missing up to date comments), or to a 404 (if I’ve deleted it). I suppose I could leave redirects behind, but that would be a serious pain to do by hand each time. If I’d left the individual archives in their standard non-date-delimited locations, I wouldn’t have had this problem. :( (Another solution would be to have MT let me enter the publication date when I first create the entry, but I don’t know if that’s doable. Is there a plug-in to facilitate that?)
By the weekend I’ll post templates and instructions on how to replicate the structure, as well as some caveats on what doesn’t work smoothly, and where I had to cut corners because I couldn’t wrestle MT into doing what I wanted. (One big one was the fact that I couldn’t specify multiple categories for selection in the calendar, and so had to add an extra category to items that needed to be displayed in the sidebar calendar.)
Update, 9pm
Since the site wasn’t “in production” yet, I decided not to worry about broken permalinks. So I changed the individual entry archives to non-date-delimited structures. Now they’re all stored in the archives directory (archives/file_name.php), rather than in archives/year/mo/day/file_name.php.
Daily and monthly archives are still in the year/mo/day directories, however.
I’m chugging along on the MT as courseware project. It’s forcing me to brush off my rusty SQL skills, learn more about MT plugins, and really think about organization of information. All good things.
I struggled for a while with the calendars, because I wanted them to link not to a specific entry (which is the default in the provided templates), but rather to a daily archive. That way all important entries for a given day—due dates, class topics/readings, in-class exercises—would be displayed together on that date. I finally found the solution on Sillybean’s blog, in a post entitled “Various tricks with archive calendars” (caution to Safari users; I have to reload the pages on that blog several times in Safari to get the right style sheet. not sure why).
My next problem with the calendar was that there’s no way to limit a calendar to a group of categories—you can have it find entries in one category, or in all categories, but that’s it. I wanted the calendar dates to be linked to an archive if anything in the due dates, class topics, class readings, or in-class assignments showed up on that day. The solution I ended up with here was to create an “extra” category of “calendar,” and assign that as a secondary category to anything that fell into the above categories. Kind of a kudge, but it works.
The main page of the course site is now showing only current entries with categories of “news,” “due dates,” “in-class exercises,” or “discussion questions”—the things I want students to see first when they go to the site. This was accomplished using Brad Choate’s MTSQL plug-in, and this SQL query:
SELECT DISTINCT entry_id FROM mt_placement right join mt_entry ON mt_placement.placement_entry_id = mt_entry.entry_id WHERE entry_created_on <= NOW) - TO_DAYS <= 10 AND entry_blog_id = 9 AND (placement_category_id = 64 OR placement_category_id = 65 OR placement_category_id = 61 OR placement_category_id = 50) ORDER BY entry_created_on DESC
What this does is look for all entries from this course blog that have been assigned any of those categories (the blog ID and category IDs would vary based on your implementation, of course), limiting it to entries published in the past ten days, excluding post-dated entries. Duplicate entries (for example, something that somehow shows up in both “news” and “discussion questions”) are removed with the DISTINCT modifier. Don’t ask how long it took me to write that, or how much time I didn’t spend with my family while I puzzled it out.
I’ve also created a syllabus category, and a separate syllabus page. That template lists items in ascending rather than descending order, and strips out all of the date and related posting information.
I’ve not yet worked on the individual entry pages, but I plan on using the same basic template as I’ve got on the main and syllabus pages. I may use an include for the sidebar material. The advantages of an include would be not having to modify three different index templates when I change it, and less load on MT in terms of generating index pages with complex calendars. The disadvantage is that pages will load more slowly (as they do with this blog, which uses includes for the banner and sidebar). May try some usability testing this summer to see how much the lag time in loading with includes bothers my target audience.
I’m having to give a lot of thought to the categories to use. Right now I have topical categories for each of the main areas we cover in the class, as well as structural catgories (like syllabus, due dates, in-class exercises, etc). Once I’ve settled on categories, I’ll build some hand-coded archive menus to allow students to see all the posts on a specific topic. (If I have the archive menus auto-generated, it will mix the topical and structural categories, which would be confusing.) The topical archives will point to archive pages that have a standard date/title heading format with comments and trackbacks enabled. The structural pages, like the syllabus, will vary in their layout and presentation based on the content being presented (some will be ascending date order, some descending, some with comments and trackbacks, some without, etc).
This won’t be a “plug and play” solution when it’s done—anyone who wants to use it will have to a) add in their own categories, b) figure out the id #s for blog and categories for the sql query on the main page, and c) install the MTSQL plug-in as well as d) changing content, look and feel, etc for their course. But I will provide all of my templates when I’m done, which should save you a good bit of the work.
Onward…
(That’s one of my favorite Pogo quotes of all time. So glad I’ve found a way to use it as a post title.)
Sam Ruby points to a wonderful post by Phil Ringnalda entitled “There is No They.”
What Phil describes—the “small town” feel of weblogging where change is effected by “us” rather than “them”—is a big part of why I like using weblogs in classes. I’m often asked by colleagues why I don’t just use the conferencing tools already available to me—the Prometheus-based courseware, the FirstClass conferencing system, etc. The reason is that when I use weblogs in a class, we become a part of the big small town that is the technical weblogging world. The example I like to use is how Shelley Powers, author of the new O’Reilly book Practical RDF, stopped by our XML class weblog to comment on students’ posts when we talked about RDF and metadata.
When you know that the author of the book you’re discussing may be reading your posts, and may stop by to debate with you, it has a significant impact on the tone and content of the discussion—and that influence is primarily positive.
(As I was writing this post, Anil Dash [of Six Apart] commented on my last post about TypePad. An excellent example of exactly what I’m talking about! Knowing that Anil and others in the technical development community read this blog keeps me honest in my comments and criticisms, because I know I’ll be called on it if I’m out of line!)
It really is back-to-school season. I’ve spent the weekend working on course materials, and my older son just cleaned out his backpack. (“Mom! Look! The missing SandwichKeeper!”) I told him to toss any papers that he didn’t want to save, and he pulled out one and nonchalantly said “I don’t really care about this, but you might want it.”
It’s just a short “research report” on the rainforest, typed on the computer and then printed out. But I have to say, it’s pretty sophisticated writing for an 8-year-old. (He’s 9 now.)
We need to save the rainforest for many reasons. One is that there will be less runoff. The trees will hold the soil so the rain does not wash away.Another reason is that we will lose oxygen. The trees will take in less carbon dioxide, and they will breathe out less oxygen.
Another reason we should save the rainforest is that there will be more droughts if we do not. The humidity will stop and the dry wastelands will contribute to the global warming so there will be more droughts.
The final reason that we should save the rainforest is that we will not find all the new species. There may even be a plant that can cure cancer, but it will probably be destroyed before we discover it.
This is why we should save the rainforest.
I read it, then say to him “Wow. This is really good. Where’d you find all this stuff out?” “We did research.” “So, did you mostly just copy the stuff you found?” “No. That would be cheating. I did the research, then wrote it in my own words.”
I just wish that more of my 18-year-old freshman students at RIT (a) wrote this clearly, and (b) had such a clear grasp of academic ethics.
One of the most active entries I've posted this year was my wish for a good open-source courseware package. I ended up looking at a few of the suggestions, but to get what I wanted, all would have required too steep a learning curve and customization process.
So, today I decided to see if I could leverage my existing knowledge of MovableType to generate something that met my basic needs for courseware. I plan on keeping the grades in our Prometheus-based courseware (saves me the hassle of dealing with password-protected stuff, and importing class lists), but putting everything else into a customized course blog. That allows me to make the course content easily accessible to students, colleagues, and other interested parties--and to allow comments and ideas from people outside of the class to become part of the
The beginnings of the course site can be found at http://www.it.rit.edu/~ell/320/320-031/. I've done nothing yet with aesthetics, obviously, because I wanted to first think through functionality.
I put in a fake due date for a paper, and post-dated it to September 25th. Unfortunately, that pushed the post-dated entry to the first page, which I didn't want.
I could have limited the categories on the first page, but MT doesn't support category exclusion. I thought about installing the ExcludeCategories plug-in, but decided that was too limiting in terms of functionality.
Instead, I installed Brad Choate's MTSQL plug-in, which is far more flexible in what it will allow me to do. I then replaced the <MTEntries> with a SQL-based tag to select only entries published today or within the past 15 days. There's probably a much more elegant way to do it than what I came up with, but it works:
<MTSQLEntries query="select entry_id from mt_entry where entry_created_on <= NOW() AND TO_DAYS(NOW()) - TO_DAYS(entry_created_on) <= 10 AND entry_blog_id = 9">
That fixed the problem of post-dated entries showing up "before their time."
Next, I added a bunch of categories, falling into two groups. The first group was structural categories--like "due dates," "assignments," and "readings." The second group was topical categories--like "HTML," "Unix," and "History."
Then I tweaked the calendar, so that all three months of the quarter would be displayed in calendar form, and only "due dates" would appear. (Though I'll probably change that to include a new category of "class topics" as well.) That allows students to click on a highlighted date to see what's due that day.
The main page will show all current entries, probably with the exception of due dates. It will include news, suggestions, discussion topics, resources, etc. Then there will be two category menus--one for each of the two sets of categories. Students can either see everything posted related to a topic (like HTML), or everything of a particular type (like assignments).
I'll start with comments turned for all entries by default, so that students can ask questions about specific posts. I'll also set MT up to email me with new comments, so that I know when there are questions.
There have been a few interesting posts lately about collaborative learning. Many of them spout the relentlessly cheerful “we tried it and it was amazing and I wish more teachers would shift their paradigms because the students love it so much” line. (Hmmm. Perhaps my frustrations are already leaking through, eh?)
Happily, Seb Paquet pointed me to Martin Blanche’s post on “Obstacles to collaborative learning.” (Permalinks are broken, alas, so go to his main page for now.) I’ll take the liberty of quoting them here:
* Students and lecturers are more familiar with a knowledge-transmission model of education and don’t always understand what is expected of us in a more constructionist environment.
* We have too little information about lecturers’ and students’ backgrounds, networks and skills - so often we don’t realise that there is somebody in the group who could teach the rest of us a lot about some aspect of what we’re studying.
* No or very limited mechanisms for students to talk back to the lecturer and (especially) to talk to one another.
* Inadequate ‘course memory’. Lecturers often are the only bridge for this year’s students to the knowledge created by last year’s group - students don’t get to see what last year’s group did. There is no mechanism for students who want to stay in the group after the course is officially over (and who could be a useful resource for next year’s students) to do so.
One of his readers, Antje, added a few more:
* Knowledge level of participants (if they come from different educational backgrounds and models they may have different experiences with education, different subject knowledge and different attitudes towards learning)
* Motivation (collaborative learning needs a great deal of personal motivation, a quality not very much present in a goal-oriented (degree hunting), immediate-satisfaction-seeking (fast-food …) society which we are more and more becoming. Motivation pre-supposes the need or urge to WANT to know and to WANT to make an effort … found, unfortunately, in a small percentage of humans)
* Personal characteristics (inrovert / extrovert / confidence levels). many students may want to contribute but are afraid of making mistakes or afraid of being patronised. others are unsure how exactly to contribute (collaborative learning does not instruct on how to use collaborative learning skills and can easily end up being an unstructured, anxiety-provoking lassez faire situation)
* Integration (integration of new and traditional learning approaches should be the aim rather than collaborative learning ‘in place of’ traditional teaching style models (and I guess Martin sees it that like I do). A combination will allow the student to weigh both aspects and become over time more accustomed to the s(often more frightening) approach of collaborative learning at his / her own speed.”
As I read through these, nodding my head in recognition, it occurred to me that there are probably significant variations in student (and faculty) receptiveness to these new paradigms across both academic disciplines, and academic institutions. At RIT, I‘ve encountered a great deal of resistance—from students, not colleagues or administrators—when trying to move to more participatory, collaborative learning. I suspect that this is a function of both the technical nature of the field, and the institutional culture (which is fed by the $21K/yr tuition rate). Students are often resentful and critical when they feel they “aren’t getting their money’s worth” out of a class. Many of them feel entitled to lectures, whether or not they facilitate learning outcomes.
Perhaps I need to find more innovative ways to convince them of the value of a paradigm shift, but with 3 courses per quarter, 3 quarters per year, and an average of 30 students in each class, I’ve been hard pressed to innovate at that level. This year may be better. We’ll see.
Well, that’s a grandiose title. Sorry. I am not going to try to provide a complete courseware critique here. I’m just thinking about one thing that bothers me about the courseware we use at RIT (and which is true of most courseware systems)—it’s closed. Nobody but the students can see it.
Makes sense for grades, of course. But not for anything else. For years, I’ve kept syllabi online for my classes—which has helped not just my students, but also professors and students from other classes and schools, and people not affiliated with schools at all. It was “open source” information.
Now, RIT wants me to put all my course information into the proprietary courseware system that they’ve invested significant funds into. The problem is, it locks it all away. Not only does that not provide any benefits to my students, it has a negative impact on the overall identity of RIT by hiding what we do best—teaching.
MIT has the right idea, I think, with its Open Courseware project. Because it’s not the syllabus that’s the real value in your educational experience. It’s the guidance and support and encouragement and feedback that a good teacher provides. It’s the realization that maybe you don’t know everything already, and that constructive criticism from your professor might be more valuable than angry criticism from your boss or your client. It’s the opportunity to watch how others around you tackle a project, and learn from their successes and failures. It’s the social components, not the information components, that provide the most important lessons. (Which loops right back around to Joi Ito’s recent post about the primacy of context over content.)
So I’m not going to use the courseware this fall for my freshman multimedia class. I’m going back to my old(er) method of standard web-based distribution. (Yes, I know there are some broken queries in there. I’m working on it.) But I’m adding to that a class blog. And maybe…just maybe…a wiki, as well. We’ll see.
Via Loren Webster, this wonderful poem by Taylor Mali:
What Teachers Make, or
You can always go to law school if things don’t work outHe says the problem with teachers is, “What’s a kid going to learn
from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?”
He reminds the other dinner guests that it’s true what they say about
teachers:
Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.I decide to bite my tongue instead of his
and resist the temptation to remind the dinner guests
that it’s also true what they say about lawyers.Because we’re eating, after all, and this is polite company.
“I mean, you¹re a teacher, Taylor,” he says.
“Be honest. What do you make?”And I wish he hadn’t done that
(asked me to be honest)
because, you see, I have a policy
about honesty and ass-kicking:
if you ask for it, I have to let you have it.You want to know what I make?
I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could.
I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional medal of honor
and an A- feel like a slap in the face.
How dare you waste my time with anything less than your very best.I make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall
in absolute silence. No, you may not work in groups.
No, you may not ask a question.
Why won’t I let you get a drink of water?
Because you’re not thirsty, you’re bored, that’s why.I make parents tremble in fear when I call home:
I hope I haven’t called at a bad time,
I just wanted to talk to you about something Billy said today.
Billy said, “Leave the kid alone. I still cry sometimes, don’t you?”
And it was the noblest act of courage I have ever seen.I make parents see their children for who they are
and what they can be.You want to know what I make?
I make kids wonder,
I make them question.
I make them criticize.
I make them apologize and mean it.
I make them write.
I make them read, read, read.
I make them spell definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful, definitely
beautiful
over and over and over again until they will never misspell
either one of those words again.
I make them show all their work in math.
And hide it on their final drafts in English.
I make them understand that if you got this (brains)
then you follow this (heart) and if someone ever tries to judge you
by what you make, you give them this (the finger).Let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true:
I make a goddamn difference! What about you?
Classes are over, grades are submitted, only a few more days of meetings next week. I can feel myself unwinding—it’s almost tangible. Physical tension melting away along with the mental. During the school year, there’s a constant monkey on my back—the feeling that there’s always a little bit more I ought to be doing. More student (or committee, or colleague) mail I should read and respond to. More attention paid to the grading of projects. More effort in the preparation for classes. More time spent answering questions. Falling asleep becomes a nightly battle to banish those “do more” demons.
The June following my first year as a professor, I remember sitting out on my back deck with my husband. As we sat there looking at the newly-planted garden, and the kids on the swingset, I realized that this job bears a strong resemblance to a very, very old joke: “Why are you banging your head against the wall? Because it feels so good when I stop.”
Yes, academia is filled with petty politics and outrageous stresses. But there are many joys associated with this job—some of which were reaffirmed yesterday during commencement. Shaking the hand of each student (hundreds of them) after they crossed the stage and received their diploma (well, their diploma case) is a wonderful feeling. Hugging the many of them whose lives I know I’ve touched—and who have in turn enriched mine—is even better. All my resentment of academia’s ills fades away when a student comes up to me during the line-up for the commencement processional and says “I want you to know that your class had the most impact on me here—it made me realize what I wanted to do, and that I could do it.” Or when a parent says “He’s told me so much about you, and I’m so grateful for all the support you’ve given him while he was here.”
So the school year ends—as it always does for me—on a note of gratitude and hope, and the summer stretches out in front of me…three months of relaxed schedules, time with my family and friends, and intellectual energy freed up to devote to my upcoming grant research (more on that later this weekend). Oh…and blogging, of course.
Okay, so it’s not quite “dinner with Larry Lessig,” but today I spent some time with the US Public Printer, Bruce James. In addition to overseeing the US Government Printing Office (GPO), he’s the president of RIT’s Board of Trustees. He brought about a dozen members of his management team along, as well. Our department was their last stop on the tour, so I didn’t expect they’d be paying a lot of attention after a long day of touring.
I was in for a surprise. I talked about our new XML course sequence, which got approved today by our grad curriculum committee. (Well, the first three courses; I still have to write the fourth.) It includes an Intro to XML course that focuses on DTDs, schemas, metadatas, and general XML concepts, an XML Transformation & Presentation course that covers XSLT, XSL-FO, XPath, XPointer, and XLink, and an XML Programming course including tools for parsing XML, and web services approaches. The last course will be a “Semantic Web Seminar” where students will tackle a real-world information problem and develop an XML-based solution.
They really got it. They were scheduled for a half hour with us, but stayed at least an hour, asking questions, making suggestions, and appearing genuinely supportive and enthusiastic about the curriculum. I think we’ll be talking more about partnerships—which is really exciting. I think there will be some great co-op opportunities for our students, as well.
On a side note, I was the only woman in the room. Me, three male colleagues, and (at least) a dozen male GPO executives. Hmmm.
My colleague Steve Jacobs is having his students in the “Writing for Interactive Multimedia” course use blogs this quarter. Several of them seem to be struggling with trackback, so I’m using this post to (a) point them to Ben & Mena’s new trackback tutorial, and (b) link to their posts so that they see a trackback in action.
So, Lauree, Kunal, Keith—here’s a ping in your direction. If you’ve got “allow pings” turned on in your blog preferences, this should result in a trackback to your entries.
If you want to test the process in reverse, you’ve got two options. First, you can make sure autodiscovery is turned on in your blog config, and simply link to the permalink for this post (http://www.it.rit.edu/~ell/mamamusings/archives/000406.html). MT should automatically determine the trackback URL. Alternatively, if you didn’t want to link to the post, but did want it to register a trackback, you could put the trackback URL (http://www.it.rit.edu/~ell/mt/mt-tb.cgi/395) into the “URLs to ping” box at the bottom of your entry screen.
From today’s dive into mark:
In the future, there will be so much open source software available, programmers will be judged by how much they know about it and how well they can glue it together to build solutions.
Yes!! That’s exactly what I want us to be teaching our students—undergrad and grad. We’re well on our way already with the courses we already offer, but we’ve still got room to grow in this regard.
Today I had two different graduate students come to me with ideas for blog-related graduate capstone projects (an alternative to theses for our students). How cool is that?
It looks like the first one is going to work on multiple authoring issues associated with Movable Type. Ideally, I’d like a way to create an MT blog that has almost Wiki-like “add yourself as an author” capability. I’d also like a way to easily select among “simple” and “advanced” editing/authoring interfaces. Anybody know of things already happening in this arena?
The second is going to work on a kids’ interface to MT blogging. My 8yo, Lane, has expressed interest in blogging—but the standard MT entry environment is not particularly kid-friendly. I’d like a kid-focused interface that keeps things really simple, preferably integrating some of the functionality that plug-ins like MT-Textile offer, but also giving a UI that’s really kid-friendly (and kid-tested).
After too many years of supervising yet-another-ecommerce-project, it is incredibly exciting to have students who want to work on the things I really care about. And because our students take classes in everything from programming to database to HCI, we have an incredible opportunity to turn them loose on the LazyWeb and have what they do help the larger social software community.
I’ve waited a long, long time to get to a point where my personal and professional interests intersected so well, and in a way that has long-term professional potential. I have to keep pinching myself these days. :-)
On the not-quite-such-good-news front, my cholesterol test results came back, and it looks like it’s a very good thing that I’ve made myself publicly accountable on the exercise front. Need to change the diet, too, it seems. <sigh>
I have spent most of this weekend wrestling my course materials into the proprietary courseware framework that our university has invested in. The system, called Prometheus, boasts what may be the all-time worst user interface I’ve had the displeasure of working with in many years.
I’m taking the time to do this because, in my experience, criticism of a bad system is only taken seriously when the person doing the criticisim has made a good-faith effort to learn and use the system. So I’m using our Prometheus-based “myCourses” system to support both of my classes this quarter—one on-campus, one distance-learning.
So far, we’re off to a bad start. Simple things that I ought to be able to do aren’t possible at all—from moving a reading from one course meeting slot to another, to creating custom dropboxes for file submissions. The labels for sections and tasks are counter-intuitive, and the entire system seems to have been designed without regard for the user’s needs (at least the faculty user…we’ll have to see what my students say). While some of the Prometheus system is apparently customizable by “IT Administrators” at a given school, none of it appears to be customizable by the actual people who have to use it. I can’t make it less ugly. I can’t fix the UI problems. I have almost no control over the look-and-feel, which is a very large part of the overall “online classroom” experience.
It’s the equivalent of being asked to teach all my classes in a dark, dingy basement classroom, with no control over lights, desk locations, etc. Sure, the “institution” has the ability to change it. But as the instructor, I don’t. Blech.
What’s worse, however, is that I realized after I was done that there’s no way for me to make any of the course information publicly accessible—something I’ve always done with my syllabi. While there are some aspects of the courseware—like the testing and grading functions—that should be private, those are the exceptions. I resent using a system that won’t let me share the basic information about the class with anyone who’s interested.
Last year, I started building a PHP/mySQL system to generate my syllabi. You can see it in action with my web database, xml, and web design syllabi from earlier this year. But I can’t show you this quarter’s thesis prep or intro to multimedia courses, because they’re hidden inside our proprietary system.
Why isn’t there an open-source courseware package that’s as easy to use and customizable as something like Movable Type??? Is that so very much to ask? I did some poking around tonight, and didn’t find anything that really excited me. This is not rocket science…it’s a customized content management system (CMS) application. People make them all the time.
(Interestingly, Prometheus started out as home-grown “community source” software at GWU, but was purchased by Blackboard, a commercial competitor.)
Is there something great out there that I don’t know about? If so, I’d love a pointer. And if not, I guess I need to start fleshing out my little homegrown system, and looking for people to work with me on it to make it more robust and usable in multiple contexts.
Have enforced a cooling-off period for myself on this topic…will respond this weekend to some of the comments, but I’m not sure there’s much that’s new to say at this point.
However, for those who have been following the discussion, here’s a link to an interesting relevant article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “Opting Out of Academic Science.” Stories. I like stories. They show us a more multifaceted world—one where broad labels for entire groups of people (“academics,” “politicians,” “bloggers”) just don’t work.
Actually, the whole “Career Network” section of the The Chronicle is full of stuff related to this recent debate. Another one is “The Two-Year Attraction,” about the growing number of people choosing to work in community colleges rather than 4-year institutions.
Update:
Oh, one more, specifically addressing the explotation of adjuncts, something that Invisible Adjunct raised in his/her comments here. “All Right Already, We’re Exploited.”
I’ve avoided responding to Dorothea’s continuing self-described “rampage” against academia, because I suspect that nothing I write will change her well-entrenched negative view of academia. Clearly, Dorothea’s got some “issues” on this topic—not just her grad school experience, but her experiences with her father, as well.
But hey, I’m an extrovert. I think out loud. So I’ll respond, but not in a point-by-point attempt to rebut each of her assertions. You see, I don’t disagree that her view is in some ways accurate. I just don’t think it’s complete. Academia, like every other human-constructed environment I’ve ever seen (from the nuclear family to the nation-state) can be ugly or beautiful, depending on your own context and experience.
I feel particularly compelled to counter Dorothea’s assertion that “survivorship bias” is tainting my view. In fact, she might want to consider reading my dissertation. The topic? A qualitative (“Sense-Making”) inquiry into attrition in doctoral programs in my field. (And what field might that be? Library & Information Science—the same field in which Dorothea has recently been accepted into a graduate program. Which makes me wonder how she can say things like “Deeply sick and sad system. I’m so glad I’m out of it for good I couldn’t begin to tell you,” with a straight face…).
I went into the project fully expecting to hear angst-ridden tales of woe from those who’d left their doctoral programs. In fact, that was the exception rather than the rule. Most of the people I interviewed had few regrets about their departure from doctoral work. They’d tried it, found it not to be what they wanted, and moved on.
It was necessary for me to do a great deal of related reading and research into graduate and doctoral attrition, and one of things that really became clear during this process was how very different the environments were from field to field. The experiences of a doctoral student (or a professor) in biophysics are extremely different from those of a sociologist, or a library scientist, or a literary theorist. And beyond that, the experiences of a student in any of those fields will vary significantly based on the country in which they study.
All of which by way of saying, it’s not the specifics of Dorothea’s complaints that I question. It’s the broad brush she uses to paint an entire world of teachers, students, and scholars—based solely on personal anecdotal experience.
I shouldn’t post anything when I’m in the throes of grading because it’s sure to be misunderstood. :-)
But I feel I must respond when Dorothea posts about what she sees as the horrible effects of academia on my otherwise right-thinking brain: ” And yet the system has warped them such that they both get a twinge when somebody else comes out with a perfectly good idea, just because they didn’t come out with it first.”
I’m pretty sure that’s not what I said in my post. What I did say was that I found myself “torn between excitement and envy,” and that I wished I’d had more time over the past few years to explore the topics that I had been so interested in as a grad student. The twinge isn’t that somebody else came up with the idea first—it’s that I want to be able to contribute more to the body of knowledge on the subject than I’ve been able to do.
All my bitching and moaning about academic politics aside, I wouldn’t trade my job for any other. Academia has its warts, sure…and those are what get most of the attention. What gets left out are all the reasons that so many of us work so hard to get here…and to stay once we’re here. So, let me list some of those.
I know Dorothea had a terrible experience her last time through graduate school. But I guess I take umbrage at the characterization of academia as such a wicked, evil place. It’s not. It’s full of people like me, Alex, Jill, Larry Lessig, and a host of others (many still sans blog). And it has no more of the evil, backstabbing, wrong-thinking type of person than any other work environment I’ve been in—from corporate to non-profit.
Just discovered Flemming Flunch's weblog ("Ming the Mechanic"). He's got a great post this week discussing the problems with education generally, and technology education specifically. Here's a sample, but read the whole thingc.
I realized some horrible things about education some years ago when it was part of my job to hire computer programmers. I hired a dozen or so programmers over several years. To do that, I had to look through the stacks of thousands of applications we'd gotten, and I needed to interview hundreds of people and pick the ones to hire. And a disturbing picture quickly started forming. Very often, the more advanced a degree the person had in Computer Science, the more hopeless it was to expect them to program anything real. Well, generalizing is dangerous, so let me point out that I'm talking about those who didn't have real jobs as programmers while they were studying, and who didn't spend all their sparetime programming video games. And, don't get me wrong, there are some really useful things on the curriculum in Computer Science, which all programmers really ought to know. What I'm talking about is the people who just went through the college courses and exercises and exams, hoping to be great computer scientists, hoping they'd have a career once they were done. If it were just a Bacherlor's degree, there might be some hope that they could actually program, and that they might apply some of what they learned. If it was a Master's degree, it was probably too late. And the clerk in the store where we bought our computers, he had a Ph.D. in Computer Science, the poor fellow.The point is that here we have some people who've worked hard for years, and they've learned to get things *mostly* right, who've learned that if they get 80% of the questions right, they're doing well. If they can regurgitate what the textbook says, and make their answers look about right, they do well in school. They've been thoroughly trained and validated into doing things that look sort of right, but which aren't.
Last year, RIT established a new "College of Computing and Information Sciences," taking three departments that had previously been part of a large and heterogeneous college ("Applied Science & Technology") and putting them together under one roof (courtesy of funding from Paychex founder and perpetual gubernatorial candidate Tom Golisano).
One of the things that is happening as a result of the new college formation is growing battles over the valule of various curricular aspects within the departments, and the value of the departments themselves.
Ever the historian (A.B. in History from Michigan, '84), and the librarian (M.L.I.S. from UM, '87), I decided tonight to poke around a bit on the subject of academic politics, disciplinary boundaries, and other related topics. Too often at RIT we seem to think that we are unique in the world, and fail to look outside our boundaries for examples of how others might have handled similar problems.
Didn't take long to find something relevant. Seb Pacquet pointed to the work of Brian Martin on higher education. Martin's book "Tied Knowledge: Power in Education," which is available in full-text on his site, had the following gem in chapter 4:
At the Australian National University, I witnessed long battles between pure and applied mathematicians for control of departmental prerogatives. This included denigration of the other side's talents and activities, appointment of supporters, encroachment on course content to steal the middle ground, and inability to agree on allocation of resources to proposed common courses. Claims about the definition of a 'mathematician' were used to exclude appointments or promotions to those too far from the conception of the key power-brokers. In this struggle, the ideological resource of the pure mathematicians is the autonomy of their knowledge from other departments and thus the prestige of pure mathematics as a 'higher knowledge' than other disciplines. Applied mathematics, to the extent that neighbouring disciplines overlap with it, is harder to establish as a separate knowledge base. Hence in a struggle with pure mathematics, applied mathematicians instead can form alliances with neighbouring disciplines such as theoretical physics and computer science. The outcome of battles between pure and applied mathematicians will depend on the balance between the advantages to pure mathematicians given by greater internal control over knowledge in the discipline and advantages to applied mathematicians given by the interests and demands of related disciplines. The intrinsic political advantages to pure mathematics are such that in many universities applied mathematics does not exist as a separate department, and the subject matter of applied mathematics is taught in the departments of physics, biology, psychology and other areas where mathematics is applied.
Amazing how well this fits the current conflicts occurring between my department of information technology (an "applied" area), and our sister departments of Computer Science and Software Engineering.
From another student:
I started blogging because my class for Web Design required us to create individual blogs, modify them using CSS, and post in them. Then I discovered I like tweaking the blog, adding new features - sort of like upgrading a toy that will not stop improving. My desire to write has expanded to new heights. I used to write in diaries, short stories, about interesting things occassionally.
Funny...the quality is really spotty in this year's work. Half are really bad, the other half are really good. Not much middle ground. Either they took it seriously and really got into it, or they blew it off completely. <sigh>
Grading is not an enjoyable aspect of teaching. Am gutting my way through the last of the web pages I need to finish grading for tomorrow, and came across one students post on web standards:
[...] at the same time they must know the rules to break the rules.
That's really the point, but so many of my students seem to miss it. It's gratifying to see it appear on a student blog.
Dave Winer pointed to a NY Times article from Sunday entitled "Where the Girls Aren't," and chose the opening line as his quote:
Anyone who has ever tried to pry a girl offline knows that girls like computers. They just don't understand how they work.
Ack! Okay, I'm as aware as anyone of the shortage of women in the profession, especially after years of fewer than 10% women in my classes, and writing a grant proposal this year to try to understand and address the problem. But still--that quote sticks in my craw.
So I read the rest of the article, and felt better. For example, they talked to a woman who's been teaching math in high schools for 30 years:
''When I started in 1972,'' she said, ''there were three girls in calculus out of a senior class of about 50. Now there are three sections of Advanced Placement calculus, in a class about the same size -- in other words, about 75 percent of the senior class. This would not have happened if we had bought into the reigning mantra of the time, which was, 'Boys are naturally interested in mathematics; let them do it. Girls are more talented in literature and history; why ask them to change?' ''
I remember taking AP Calculus in 1979. I had been in advanced math classes every year in high school, and since at the time the school systems wouldn't let you take calculus 'til senior year, during junior year I took the two half-year courses offered to advanced students--Abstract Algebra in the fall, and Matrix Algebra in the spring. They were both taught by a teacher who managed to systematically weed out most of the girls in the class by the end of the year. He would humiliate girls in the class, ridicule them when they answered questions wrong, ignore them when they were right, and regularly tell us that we really weren't cut out for studying math. (Years later, I heard that same teacher was fired after his affairs with male students were discovered. No big surprise there--plenty of us had seen him taking students on "dates" to hockey games. As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.)
I stuck it out through junior year, and enrolled in his AP Calculus class senior year. I lasted half the year. When I got my early acceptance letter from Michigan, I realized that I could live with the automatic "F" I'd get from withdrawing from the class more easily than I could live with the class. So I quit. It was only the second time my parents had to go to the school on my behalf (the first time is worth another blog entry at another time).
That wasn't really the end of it, though. The experience left me thoroughly convinced that I wasn't good at math. And that became a self-fulfilling prophecy--I barely made it through the required calc class in college, and avoided anything that looked like math or science. (This from someone who in her junior year of high school was convinced she was going to be an industrial engineer.) It wasn't until after my master's program, when I started thinking about a PhD, that I finally faced up to my math fears and conquered them. Turns out I'm pretty good at math after all. But it took fifteen years to undo the damage that one teacher caused.
So how much damage is done every time we assume that "girls aren't interested" in how computers work? How much of that comes from the early conditioning, the toys we give our children, the activities we encourage them to get involved in? Cub scouts build pinewood derby cars to race, learning physics and geometry in the process. (My kids are racing theirs on Saturday.) But do Brownies? Probably not.
Uh-oh. I'm starting to rant. Time to sleep.
I'm part of a group of people in our department who are beginning to rethink our graduate program, and where it could/should go. It began as a "career-changers" program, because there were no undergraduate programs in IT for it to build upon. But as we--and the field--have matured, there's a growing need for in-depth, graduate level study in more focused areas than what our current program offers.
So the question becomes what, exactly, we want to be teaching. And along with that, what are we best at? And what students do we want? And who will their employers be? And what will those employers expect? Lots of questions, really. But lots of enthusiasm about exploring them.
We've got a number of areas that we're particularly enthusiastic about exploring, many of them related (directly or indirectly) to what many people seem to be calling "social software." We've got lots of strength in HCI, information architecture, XML, web development, game programming, VRML, multi-user media spaces, etc. So how can we knit that into a coherent graduate program?
So, faithful readers, what do you think? What kinds of graduate programs are missing right now? What niches need to be filled? What kind of program would you want to hire someone out of? What kind would you want to attend yourself if you could? I'd love to leverage the expertise of the blogosphere on this question, especially right now during the formative stages of this discussion...
updated 4:40pm
Dorothea asks in her comment for a pointer to our current program. Should have thought to include that to begin with. We've got a "purpose and goals" page, as well as a list of courses in the program. Also, fwiw, here's one to our faculty "research interests."
My lecture tomorrow morning on Information Architecture will begin with a recitation of Juliet's speech from Romeo and Juliet. I learned it in high school (didn't everybody have to commit a Shakespearean soliloquy to memory at some point in their education?), and can still rattle it off at will.
What's the connection? Naming, of course. Do names matter? If so, how? That will be the primary topic of discussion. We'll also discuss product categories on the Lego site, which always stirs up some interesting conversations.
I always look forward to this class--more than any other lecture I give, it brings together my library and web backgrounds, and lets me push my students into thinking a bit more than I usually require them to do.
One of my students writes in her blog:
I'm really surprised how much I've figured out with CSS just today trying to make this blog look cool.
This is exactly the kind of enthusiastic exploration of the technology that I had hoped would happen if I used blogs as the centerpiece for teaching web technologies.
Meanwhile, on other fronts, people like Shelley Powers and Simon St. Laurent have been reading and commenting on my XML class's blog. What a nice note on which to start my winter break...
So today Aaron Swartz has a post in his weblog on "How to Run a Good Conference." Once again, I find myself thinking about what happens when you substitute "classroom" for "conference," "students" for "audience," and "teachers" for "speakers"...
1. Speech is a bad medium for communicating information. (This one is due to Tufte.) Speech can't be stopped and rewound, it can't be carefully examined, it can't be slowed down, it can't be paused, it can't present complex concepts, and it's really very low bandwidth. Just use paper. Tufte suggested giving the audience a bunch of paper that communicated the important information and have them read through it before hand.2. Speech is a good medium for dialog. (Also due to Tufte.) Speech is best used for interaction. Are you sure that's correct? Have you seen this? Why didn't you go this way? Smart people love discussing things with other smart people, especially when the others are informed (see point 1). Let them!
Every conference I can think of gets these two things backwards. They use valuable face-to-face time for worthless presentations by people who are not particularly entertaining and even if they were are saying things you already know, and then try and stifle discussion (one question per person, sir!) and shunt it off towards lunch or something (we don't have time for questions now). Hello? What did all these people come out here for? I can watch infomercials at home just fine, thanks.
3. Get smart people and encourage them to talk. Now this one is a bit difficult. Most conferences seem to use a large mass of "normal" people (the "audience" to subsidize the "special" people (the "speakers"). Since I tend to be in the latter group and don't have much money, I sort of like this. But the annoying side-effects are that "special" people don't get to discuss things with each other and "normal" people waste everybody's time by asking stupid questions. I'm not sure how to solve this. Maybe only let "special" people ask questions? I suspect this would seriously hurt the feel of the event.
From the conference blog for SUPERNOVA, this post on "Decentralizing the Conference" had some resonance for me in thinking about the classroom experience. What happens when we substitute "classroom" for "conference" in this paragraph? (This is the same thought I kept having at Pop!Tech this year...)
I'm convinced, though, that distributed online communications can enhance physical events. Many conferences ban blogging, or refuse to provide any live coverage on the Web. The theory is that any public exposure will make people less likely to pay the registration fee. I think that's short-sighted. If prospective attendees aren't convinced of the value of the conference, no amount of hiding the content will help.
We'll see if the class blogs I've set up for my Web Design and XML classes add value by decentralizing content...
My husband and I spend a lot of time telling our sons to "stay focused." On breakfast, on finding their shoes, on finishing their homework...they're forever being distracted from the task at hand.
While it drives them nuts, the alternative can be worse--as I'm finding out today. Nobody told me to stay focused during this appallingly short break I've been on. So tonight I find myself frantically building syllabi in anticipation of tomorrow's classes.
It's not that I haven't taught these classes before. But as I've noted earlier, I'm revising my teaching approach pretty significantly, including the use of blogs as a teaching tool. Not only will the students be blogging their readings and interesting site finds, but we'll be installing and customizing Movable Type so that they learn CSS, SSI, .htaccess, etc in a concrete context.
The concept is fine, but it requires a shuffling of topics and presentation. Which then invalidates my previous schedule of assignments. Which then requires a rethinking of the assessment process. The more time I spend on this, the more time I realize it's taking. But I really do feel I should have a relatively accurate syllabus when I walk in the door of the lab tomorrow at 8am--it's a contract between me and the students, and the basis for their decision as to whether or not to stay in an early morning class during a Rochester winter.
Meanwhile, the XML class looms at 4pm tomorrow. But I think I can get through the first meeting of that with less trouble. (Famous last words...?)
So blog entries and blog reading have dropped to the bottom of the priority pile for the short term. I'm missing it already!
My online syllabi are serviceable, but far from stunning. A tad embarassing, really, since I supposedly teach aesthetic as well as information design, and I should be paying more attention to the "user experience" of my students.
There are plenty of business web sites for me to look at for design ideas, but very few well-designed academic sites that I've been able to locate. Anybody out there with suggestions for good examples of online syllabi? Not training classes, but academic classes...with course outlines/schedules, readings, assignments, grading criteria, links to student work, blah blah blah.
I've hit designer's block on this, and need to be pointed towards academic eye-candy to get unstuck. [geez, does that sound like an oxymoron, or what?] I'm not looking for school or department sites, or for professor's personal sites. Just syllabi.
Thanks in advance for any links you can provide.
(suggestions as to functionality, content, and/or bells-and-whistles that you've seen and liked on syllabi are solicited as well)
E-mail today from a favorite student. (Names removed to protect the innocent...and the irretrievably stupid. 'Xxxx' is the student; Yyy is the boss.)
You'll never guess what one of the boss' told me the other day... I wrote them a proposal for something that they asked for and he came back to me at my desk and said, "Xxxx, as Yyy and I's net-worth goes up you need to use smaller words and simpler sentences. This is too hard to read. Make this paper into a bulleted list." No joke. Isn't that insane?
<sigh> Makes me wonder if there's really any validity to the things I tell my students about communication skills and grokking the big picture. Maybe I have become too cloistered in my ivory tower to understand the world they have to work in. Maybe while I sit in my office, the entire outside world has remade itself using Dilbert as a blueprint.
Blech.
Halley Suitt has been blogging about Harvard's "digital identity/branding" conference the past two days. I particularly like this post, which gets to the key issues that trouble many faculty about the whole distance learning push on campus.
The president of Harvard, Larry Summers dropped by to open this conference. I was particularly intriqued by one issue he brought up. He described all the benefits of watching a football game in your living room -- good seat at the 40 yard line, instant replay, comfortable couch, 72 degree temperature, clean bathroom easily available, etc. and then the unfavorable conditions in a stadium -- usually poor, distant seating, no instant reply, hard bench, freezing conditions at time, dirty bathroom at the end of a long concrete ramp. He asked, "What is the nature of an attractive experience?"In other words, why the heck would anyone attend a football game? What attracts people to a group experience? What is it that makes a shared classroom experience better? Is there something irreducible about an in-person classroom experience? (Most of us believe there is.) What is it about distance learning that just doesn't cut it? Where do the digital and the in-person experiences compliment one another? Do they conflict?
It's not just what attracts people to a group experience...you can have a "group experience" where a whole bunch of folks watch that same football game together in your living room, and still you can wish to be there in the cold, in the end zone, part of that experience.
I thought about this a lot after PopTech. After all, why go to PopTech? Everything's streamed after the fact. You can watch it at your leisure, replay the bits that went too fast, even project it on the wall and invite your colleagues over.
The easy answer is the interactions before/after/between speakers, the 'networking.' But that's not it for me. I enjoy meeting folks there, but what I really love is somewhere in that opera house shared experience. The whispered conversations with the people sitting around me. The conversations that carry over from the opera house to the hotel to the dinner table. It's the total immersion in the experience, unencumbered by the other aspects of my life at the periphery.
That last bit may be the crux of it. When I was finishing my dissertation, I found I only got real writing done when I removed myself physically from the environment where other work needed to be done. The total immersion was necessary, critical, vital to the process. Perhaps the best experiences have to be.
As this quarter winds down, I'm thinking about how to fold my rekindled enthusiasm for web-related technologies into the two courses I'm teaching next quarter--Web Design & Implementation for undergrads, and a seminar in XML for the Web (undergrads and grads).
Group and individual blogs seemed like a no-brainer concept, but I've had a hard time finding them used effectively in higher ed contexts.
Then today, I saw a mention on grumpygirl's blog that led me to a blog that was clearly written by a student whose professor was talking about web design. The problem? As grumpygirl notes, the student provides no contact info, and no link back to a class site.
Not to be deterred, I change into my alter-ego, the technolibrarian. (Cue music. "Ain't no info lost enough, ain't no details obscured enough, ain't no meta tags bad enough, to keep me from finding more about you..."). A search in Google on Jessica's user ID and her teacher's last name (which she's helpfully mentioned in a post) yields quick results. She's apparently a student in in Charles Lowe's Writing About Digital Culture class at Florida State.
My first assumption was that it would be a technology course, but it's not. It's a freshman comp class! How cool is that? Geez, my freshmen would love a class like this. I need to find a way to open a channel of communication with the Language and Lit department at RIT about this. (Luckily, my mom teaches there. How convenient. :-)
From the syllabus:
First-Year Writing courses at FSU teach writing as a recursive and frequently collaborative process of invention, drafting, and revising. Writing is both personal and social, and students should learn how to write for a variety of purposes and audiences. Since writing is a process of making meaning as well as communicating, FYW teachers respond to the content of students' writing as well as to surface errors.[ . . . ]
In this class, we will be exploring many aspects of digital culture, including virtual communities, the history of the internet, creating hypertext, open source, artificial intelligence, blogging, etc. We will read Snow Crash, a cyberpunk sci-fi novel, and use the novel as a jumping off point for exploring directions that technology will take us in the future, as well as how these changes will impact society. We also will read many articles from the web which discuss some of the subjects listed above. And you'll be encouraged to expand your research to explore aspects of digital culture not covered in this class. Since this is a writing class and because learning about digital culture also means being an active participant, we will make heavy use of the class web site and every student will keep an individual weblog, or "blog."
Excellent. Must e-mail him asap to find out how the blogging is going in that class.
Yes, it's true. Nobody else in the technology world is saying that these days, but we do have a position open in our department here at RIT.
PhD not required, MS (or MA, or MFA...) is. Ability to see IT holistically ("computing in context") important. High tolerance for chaotic environment, eccentric colleagues, and cold winters necessary. Take a look at our courses to get a broad sense of what we teach; take a look at our faculty to see the range of people and backgrounds who teach here. (And no comments about the piss-poor web site, please; I had no hand in its design.)
It is, in fact, an excellent place to work. Rochester is a surprisingly livable city, particularly good if you've got kids--schools are excellent, cost of living is outrageously low (you SoCal types would cry if you knew what I paid for my house), art and culture are pervasive. Excellent wine is within an hour's drive.
And just think how cool it would be to have people introduce you as "the professor."
If you're interested, send me mail. (If you can't find my address without my linking it here, you probably aren't the right person for the job, anyhow.)
--------
ps one more particularly nice perk for those with kids; faculty--and their immediate family members--get free tuition at RIT.
Why does it seem so difficult to convince teachers that research has a role in informing their daily practice? This has always been an issue in librarianship, too. A frequent topic of discussion (and frustration) in the hallowed halls of academia. Never a good answer or a solution. We talk past each other instead of to each other. We need to find common ground for communicating ideas. Theory and practice have to inform each other, on an ongoing basis, for progress to be made.
<sigh>
Doc Searls has a great post today, entitled "Cause your own effects," in which he discusses giving advice to someone with career woes. What does he say they should do? Start a blog, of course.
Anyway, I was responding to this guy's request by email when I decided to cut the last line and paste it over here. You can be the pinball or you can be the pinball machine. With a blog you can create your own machine.
Yes, yes, yes! That's exactly why I want to change the way I (we?) teach web design. I want to stop teaching them how to be pinballs in the corporate web machine, and start teaching them how to create their own machines.
The only good thing about being sick is that it gives me carte blanche to lie on the couch and blogsurf.
Was playing around on Allconsuming, which led me to Jill Walker's blog. She's working on her doctorate at the University of Bergen (Norway), and has some great papers on her site related to blogging. Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool is good. Even better is a paper she presented at the June 2002 ACM Hypertext conference, called Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web. The abstract for the latter is short and sweet:
Search engines like Google interpret links to a web page as objective, peer-endorsed and machine-readable signs of value. Links have become the currency of the Web. With this economic value they also have power, affecting accessibility and knowledge on the Web.
Jill also has a link to a post on "nomadic writing" written by her friend (and "blog cluster" neighbor) Adrian Miles.
My blogroll is taking over my life.
I've been asked by a group of senior colleagues in our department to participate in a discussion group to help define the nature of our emerging academic discipline.
IT is the perpetual "Rodney Dangerfield" of the academy, generally dismissed as "applied computing." But those of us involved in it know that it's far more than that. We grew out of CS--and HCI, and Instructional Design, and Information Science, and Communication, and MIS--but we're not just "applied" versions of any of them. We go deeper into mechanics than many of the more theoretical fields we draw on, but we focus more on the context of computing than the applied fields.
Our faculty come from a wide range of backgrounds (from Computer Science to Library Science to Chemistry to Philosophy to Education and beyond), and teach in a wide range of areas. We have concentrations in networking & systems admin, learning and performance technologies, web application development, multimedia development, database design & administration, application programming, and more. Our students learn both the how and the why, and not just in a business context.
So, what are we? Right now, the process of defining that is a bit like the blind men and the elephant. We're each focused on our own piece, and while we know that they must be connected, we don't really understand the whole. That's what this discussion group is going to try to do. Can we come up with an effective description of what we do (beyond "contextual computing," which is what I usually call it, for lack of a better term)? Can we develop formalisms to describe the underpinnings of our field?
Or will it turn out that there's "no there there," that we're not in fact a discipline, but rather a collection of teachers and classes that can't coalesce around a meaningful core?
In our first discussion, we all seemed to agree that just as bioinformatics can be traced to a signficiant event/discovery (the human genome project), IT can probably be traced to the point where internetworking reached the desktop, and the graphical web was born. We're not just the study of the Internet, but almost everything we do revolves around the 'net in some way. But what does that mean in terms of defining our underpinnings?
I'm looking for good readings for our group to use as think pieces--things that talk about the changes in technology (and perhaps the study of technology) since the early 1990s. Suggestions welcome.
My kids are out trick-or-treating tonight. They left filled with that same sense of wonder that I remember from my childhood..."you mean all I have to do is ring someone's doorbell and they'll give me candy???" I love seeing them so happy, enthusiastic, optimistic. It gives me hope.
And it makes me realize how very, very lucky I am to live somewhere where my children can safely go door-to-door, where I know my neighbors and trust them, where someone down the street can take my kids out into the night without causing even a flicker of fear in me. Important to remember that, especially when I get caught up in the frustrations of daily life and academic politics.
I value the online communities that I'm involved with, but I'm not nearly as dependent on them for my (and my family's) well-being as I am on my physical community. I don't see that as being likely to change in the foreseeable future. Nor do I want it to.
I was thinking about that as I was post-processing this year's Pop!Tech (more on that this weekend, after I get this $%^& NSF grant proposal done). Every year they put streaming video of the conference up on the net after the conference is over. Between that and the real-time blogging, why do I need to go? Because the real connections and energy that happen in the opera house during and between presentations is every bit as important as the content being presented. They feed back on each other.
That's what makes me so certain that "distance education" will never completely replace what we do now on campus. The ability to deliver information will improve, and the quality of virtual campus communities will improve, as well. But that won't replace the environment that a good teacher--and a responsive class--can build in a brick-and-mortar classroom. I know there are DL proponents who would argue with me about that...but much as I love and thrive in virtual communities, I simply can't see them replacing the physical classroom in entirety.
oooooooo.....
Followed a link from Scott Andrew's blog to Meryl's list of over 900 blogsites that are laid out with CSS and no tables (except for tabular data, natch). Woohoo! This is what I loved about MT when I first looked at it, and it's going to be a wonderful way to teach the power of CSS to my students next quarter.
Have been thinking a lot about how we teach technology, especially programming. University of British Columbia built a very cool "Virtual Family" game-like program for teaching Java to undergrads, which seems like it's exactly the way we need to go. Then one of my students showed me Terrarium, a really cool tool for learning .NET.
We need to do more of this. We need release time so that we can do more of this. We need to care about doing this. We need to tell people when we do this.
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