Via the New York Times “Idea of the Day” blog we discover this pointer to a recent article in The Economist highlighting skeptics of the whole “Digital Native” idea, in short the idea that the generation who came of age surrounded by digital tools are fundamentally different than older generations in the way they think, learn, communicate, and express themselves.

The idea makes sense, of course, given that we recognize the massive cultural and cognitive shift that took place with the advent of widespread alphabetic literacy (which–let’s be honest–didn’t happen that long ago in human history: maybe a few hundred years). However, the available empirical evidence just doesn’t support the notion of a generation of digital natives who all share levels of expertise and proficiency that other generations lack. See, for instance, the following article from last month’s Sociological Inquiry by Eszter Hargittai: “Digital Na(t)ives? Variation in Internet Skills and Uses among Members of the ‘Net Generation’.” Hargittai concludes that “even when controlling for basic Internet access, among a group of young adults, socioeconomic status is an important predictor of how people are incorporating the Web into their everyday lives with those from more privileged backgrounds using it in more informed ways for a larger number of activities.”

My concern is that by embracing the ill-defined notion of “digital natives,” those who teach this generation (and subsequent generations) will assume levels of expertise and experience–among all of their students–that simply don’t exist in such an evenly distributed way. As a result, opportunities for teaching critical skills will be lost. Also, by overlooking the factors that can hinder a young person’s digital proficiency–which are largely the same factors that hinder traditional literacy–we overlook the inequities our students face in their upbringing, their education, their communities. As a result, we overlook opportunities for correcting those inequities. And finally, feeding our students the myth of “digital natives” gives them a false sense of confidence about their use and understanding of their digital environment.

Try a simple experiment. Ask your students these two questions: “1. How does the Google search engine work? 2. Who owns the exclusive rights to the pictures you’ve uploaded to Facebook?” My guess (and I could be wrong) is that a statistically insignificant percentage of your students will know the right answer.

What do you think?

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user Cristóbal Cobo Romaní]

I’ve posted a rough summary of my talk at TEDxNYED on my connectivism site: Collapsing to Connections

In January, I accepted a co-op position at Central Connecticut State University in our campus’ Instructional Technology Design and Resource Center. The plan was simple; figure out a way to inject new technologies into the classroom in a non-obvious way. As Profhacker readers are sure to recognize, lots of really interesting and effective tools are available online, most of them cheap or even free. However, when I asked Professors why they did or didn’t use a particular tool or service, and they all came back with similar answers: they weren’t familiar with the tools, they didn’t know what was out there, they didn’t see the point, and they didn’t trust the price.

The last two were particularly hard for me to grok. The first point I can almost understand: five years ago, Youtube was but a twinkle in the eye of it’s owner, Myspace ruled the Social Networks, and “tweeting” was still something only birds do. The turnover rate in technology (specifically online) is huge, so investing in any one tool when it could be just a passing phase? The second was was a particularly hard pill to swallow, particularly to an undergrad student: “What do you mean Free is Bad?”

I figured the best way to encourage Faculty to use these new tools would be a workshop designed to gently introduce them to the basics of some of the fundamentals of online tech. I had a pretty serviceable list going when I had a conversation with a fellow student about my work, and – to my shock – my classmate showed interest in creating a Podcast! He asked if he could sign up, and I rushed back to my boss with a new plan: hybridized workshops for Students and Faculty. Make students knowledgeable and they’ll eventually request to use their newfound tech in the classroom. Make faculty knowledgeable and students will be using the tech as assigned. It’s a two pronged solution, and it’s worked very well so far!

I am interested in hearing feedback from the Profhacker Community at large on this idea. I’ve run a few so far, and – despite low attendance – it has actually gone great, with lots of really interesting questions flying back and forward. The Workshops – titled the Digital Seminar Series – can be found here. Each one is about 30 minutes long, with a basic one-on-0ne session afterwards. Here’s a list of all the currently run workshops , along with a brief description:

Digital Communication: Why would I want to use Facebook vs. Twitter vs. Email vs. SMS?

Podcasting and Multimedia Creation: What is a Podcast, and why would I want one?

Social Networking: How can Social Media and Social Networking help me work better?

Understanding Web Site Construction: How is a web site made? How can I make one cheap and easy?

Wiki’s and Wikipedia : What is a Wiki? What is Wikipedia really good for? Is it the Fifth horseman of the Apocalypse?

How to put your brain online: What is Cloud Computing? Why would I want to use it?

Blogging : What good are blogs, anyway? What’s all the fuss about them?

Understanding Digital Copyrights: If I put something online, is it still mine? What are the Creative Commons?

Managing your Digital Reputation: How do I make sure the “me” online is someone that is hire-able/professional?

What do you think, Profhacker? What would do you think would benefit students and faculty in such a way? Would you like to see more come of this – for example, a screencast of each Workshop, or a podcast on each topic? Let me know in the comments!

TEKRI is hosting a conference on Making Sense of Social Media in Education, Government, and the Enterprise, April 25-26 in Edmonton. Dave Snowden is our keynote speaker.

We are issuing a call for presentations. Deadline is March 21.

The conference will run two days – Sunday is a social media bootcamp: a quick way to get up to speed on various emerging technologies and implications for organizations. Monday is the more typical conference day – keynote, panels, presentations.

One of my favorite WordPress plug-ins is Search Meter, which tracks what visitors to your site are searching for.  What’s handy about it is that you also get a list of things your readers have searched for but haven’t found, which helps you learn what your readers want to know more about.  (Or, at least, what they can’t spell!)  You also find out things that you didn’t know, which gets me to the point of this morning’s post: the “creepy treehouse” phenomenon.

I’d never heard of the phrase, which seems to be a good two years old, and refers to a nexus of problems: the attempts to duplicate social online spaces in an institutionally constrained format (hi, Blackboard!); the requirement, enforced by someone in authority, that others interact socially with them (“follow me on Twitter / friend me on Facebook); and the affect that these practices give off.

Official ProfHacker undergrad Alex Jarvis and I have been talking about this problem today, and he pointed out that “social apps are going to reek of Creepy Treehouse,” and one in particular: If you’re requiring your students interact with you on Facebook, “you aren’t building a creepy treehouse–you are driving a white van into the school parking lot.”

We both think that there are spaces that have less “creepy treehouse” aspects than others: wikis, for example, or certain uses of blogs.  Twitter, as Alex says, “is a weird space,” since people tend not to dabble in it–they either avoid it wholesale, or go all in. One way I’ve tried to minimize the creepy treehouse aspect in some of my social assignments is to encourage class-related personas, and to have assignments be a kind of game.  That way, there’s never a sense that I’m trying to elicit information about their lives and so forth–which does seem creepy.

Alex came up with four best practices for faculty who want to use social media (and we should!) and who want to avoid this problem:

• Be transparent.  Explain why it’s required, what students will be graded on, etc.  Explain the tool’s ownership and logistics.  If you’ve set up a class Twitter account, consider sharing it with at least some students.
• Encourage self-organization.  There’s no need for you to create that Facebook group!  Let them do it.  (In my experience, Facebook groups I’ve created haven’t gotten much participation, but ones students have created about my classes have often gone well.)
• Deputize worthwhile ad-hoc groups.  This encourages the perception–which hopefully is accurate!–that the class’s social media usage is bottom-up, and not top-down.
• Be nimble.  Notice how students are interacting with your course material, and put resources where they feel most comfortable.

In general, Alex and I agree with Melanie McBride, that the creepy treehouse problem is largely one of bad pedagogy.  There’s a problem when faculty assume that the contribution of social media to student engagement is produce through hanging out with students online, rather than in using those media to make possible new kinds of learning.

Have you run into creepy treehouses?  How do you avoid this in your own pedagogy?

Image by Flickr user Max Klingensmith / Creative Commons licensed

[This is a guest post by Ryan Cordell, whose post on Things previously appeared on ProfHacker. In the interval, Ryan's gotten a job (beginning in the fall) at St. Norbert College, in De Pere, WI. -- JBJ]

It seems I’m becoming the Mac software guy on ProfHacker. I’m cool with that.

Today I’m writing about Scrivener, an enhanced word processor from the folks at Literature and Latte. If Things is an important part of my daily workflow, Scrivener is essential. In fact, more than any other program Scrivener ensures my loyalty to the Mac platform and helps me quash my desire for a netbook (I’ve yet to find a comparable composition tool for Windows or Linux, but please let me know in the comments if I’ve missed one). I don’t remember how I wrote before discovering it, and I can’t imagine writing without it.

So that’s high praise—perhaps a bit overblown—but this software changed the the way I think through, organize, and perform my professional writing. As with Things, I won’t aim to give a complete tutorial: Literature and Latte hosts a series of video tutorials on their website that will walk you through most of Scrivener’s features. Instead, I’ll try and detail why I find Scrivener valuable for academic writing and teaching.

(Note: Click on any of the images to view a larger version.)

1. Writing as project

In Scrivener you don’t create a document, you create a project. That project, in turn, has a binder divided into two big categories: “Draft” and “Research.” You can also create additional categories.

The drafts category can only contain two things: folders and documents. This is the place for your writing. What I love about Scrivener’s binder metaphor is that I can compose each chapter not as one huge file, but as a series of shorter documents grouped under a folder or master document.

As the texts required of me have grown longer, it’s become harder and harder to keep them mentally organized. Remembering how the sub-sections of a chapter fit together, and then how those chapters fit together into a book, is difficult to do when looking at one continuous stream of pages.

Scrivener fixes that problem. By allowing me to compose in short sections, rather than 40-50 pages at a time, Scrivener allows me to better visualize the arc of of a long piece. Scrivener’s “Corkboard” view (shown above), displays for visual thinkers the synopses (more on that shortly) of each document in a given folder or folders as index cards on a corkboard. The outline view—

presents the shape of a folder or folders for more linear thinkers. In either view I can click-and-drag elements to reorganize my project, as I can in the binder itself.

Most importantly, the binder approach allows me to write in bits and pieces, stops and starts. When I have an idea, however small, I create a new document in the relevant chapter and write it down. That snippet won’t sit in the middle of a longer document, taunting me, but I also won’t forget it. I can return to it when I have time to flesh it out.

I also have a folder in my binder called “Fragments” in which I collect ideas, ranging from a single sentence to a few paragraphs, that I have yet to find a home for in the larger project. Many of these never find their way into the main document, but Scrivener’s ability to collect and organize all of my thoughts about each project has proved invaluable. When I get stuck in a chapter I immediately browse through my fragments, and often I find just the right prompt to break my writer’s block.

2. Research at hand

The second main category in Scrivener’s binder is “Research.” Here you can collect folders and documents, but also images, webpages (which can be retained as web archives or converted to text), PDFs, Office documents, and even audio and video files. I could list more file types here; I’ve not encountered many source files Scrivener won’t import. For my dissertation, I mainly collect PDFs of articles I’m working, notes on print sources, and scans of primary sources, which are for me mainly images of 19th Century religious periodicals.

A Scrivener project file is really a folder, and the formatting of items you import is preserved. These files can be viewed/watched/listen to within Scrivener, or opened in an external editor using Scrivener’s contextual menu. What’s more, any changes you make in the external editor will appear in Scrivener if you save the file (so, if I add notes to a PDF in Preview, after I save the file those notes will appear when I view the PDF in Scrivener’s viewer). If I want to export a file from my Scrivener project—if I want to send an article I’m working from to a colleague, for instance—that’s also easy. I can either open the file in an external editor and use the “Save As…” command to save a copy elsewhere on my harddrive, or I can use the “Export file” command in Scrivener’s File menu.

What makes this collected research especially valuable is Scrivener’s split-pane view. By clicking the button in the toolbar,

I can display two items from my binder simultaneously (Option + click will alternate between a horizontal and a vertical split pane):

When working from sources, then, I don’t have to flip constantly between the document and my screen. Instead, I can transcribe directly from the source within Scrivener. When working from my notes—

—I can copy and paste directly from the notes document into my draft.

The split-pane view is the most valuable feature of Scrivener to my daily work. In fact, Scrivener is rarely open in single-pane mode on my machines. There are many uses for Scrivener’s split-pane mode beyond those I use. One of the tutorials on Literature and Latte’s site, for example, discusses using the split-pane mode to transcribe from audio files.

One note about collecting research items in Scrivener: it’s not designed to serve as a large-scale database, and it can be overloaded. When I first started my dissertation I collected everything in Scrivener, and as the project file grew above 1 GB the program started to crawl. I’ve since ported my comprehensive database to DEVONthink, and bring into Scrivener the most relevant images and PDFs to what I’m currently working on.

3. Document Metadata

You’ve already seen Scrivener’s synopses in the above screenshots of the outline and notecard views. Synopses for each document or research item are edited in the info pane that can be opened along the right side of the window.

Here you can also label items. Labels change the color of the item’s index card and (if you set this as a preference for the application) the items icon in the binder. Label names are also customizable. Again, for visual thinkers labels can help distinguish what’s in your writing cue from what’s finished or what’s set aside.

Below the label you can set the item’s status: to-do, first draft, revised draft, etc.

At the bottom of the info pane you can do three things: add notes to an item (the notepad icon), compile references for an item (the bookmark icon), or assign keywords to the item (the key icon). I honestly rarely use the notes feature here, as there are so many other spots to take notes in Scrivener. I don’t use keywords much either; they’re essentially a tagging system within Scrivener that I’ve not found much use for, though I know others rely on them for finding things.

I do use the reference pane, though. Here you can compile references internal to the project, either by clicking and dragging them from the binder or by clicking the “+” and navigating to them. You can also include external links, which can be files elsewhere on your harddrive or websites. Clicking any of an items references will open that item, in Scrivener for internal links and in the appropriate program or browser for external links. By building my reference list as I work on a given section, I can quickly return to cited works.

4. Full-project search

Following on metadata, by compiling all of my writing and current research on a project, Scrivener allows me to search my drafts, notes, and PDFs. Searches pick up on terms in documents, synopses, notes, and keywords.

5. Distraction-free writing

Many folks swear by Writeroom as a solution to the distractions of writing on a computer. Scrivener’s full-screen mode offers a similar solution. When I click the full screen button the rest of my desktop (and even the rest of Scrivener’s interface) fades to black, highlighting only the document I’m working on:

Full-screen mode can be styled, so if you prefer green-on-black hacker text you can make that happen.

6. In-line footnotes and annotations

You no doubt noticed the strangely highlighted text in the above example. While composing in Scrivener, text can be tagged as “Annotation” or “Footnote.” When exporting a draft into Word or another format, I can choose what to do with each kind. I can treat annotations and footnotes differently, ignoring one and exporting the other. Annotations can be exported as comments within Word, and footnotes can be exported as either footnotes or endnotes.

Some writers might find this distracting, but I’ve found that I prefer the in-text notes during composition. I don’t have to page from my spot in an argument to the end of the document in order to check a reference or annotation, and so I’m not distracted from my writing by the mechanics of its presentation.

7. Tracking variations and other riffs on a project

Scrivener makes it very easy to track my revision process. I can duplicate a document or folder before revising, and save the old version in my “Old Drafts” folder. I can use the split-pane feature to keep my old draft side-by-side with a new revision. Scrivener also has a “Snapshot” feature, so I can take a snapshot of a document at one point in my revision and then, if the revision goes horribly wrong, restore to that snapshot.

I also keep any riffs on a project in its binder: paper or panel proposals, conference papers, or lectures that grow directly from that project go in a separate folder for easy reference. Again, this allows me to refer directly to the text as I write, say, a paper proposal.

8. Robust options for composing and exporting

Scrivener allows me to compose a number of different document types. I tend to write rich text documents that I export to Word to send to my readers, but Scrivener supports other kinds of writing projects that should resonate with the Prof. Hacker crowd. Documents can be created and then exported in plain text, rich text, .doc, .docx, HTML, and even Multimarkdown formats. As I said above, individual files can be exported using File–>Export, but longer drafts (which may include many documents from the binder), can be prepared using File–>Compile Draft:

Here I can choose which documents from the binder I want to include in the draft, what metadata I want exported, and the file format of the draft (I didn’t mention all the possible formats because, honestly, I’ve not experimented with many of them).

Under “Text Options”—

I can tweak even finer settings, such as how my footnotes will be represented in the exported document.

9. Keeping a class together

So far I’ve written only about how I use Scrivener for research projects, but it’s also become a valuable part of my teaching. Whenever I begin teaching a new class, I create a new project for it:

In these project I collect all the documents I create or gather for that class over the semester: class outlines, quizzes, final exam questions, sometimes even student papers (remember that Word files can be viewed and edited within Scrivener). I find this a much better solution than a Finder folder packed with documents. By collecting the class in a Scrivener project all of its materials are organized and searchable.

Conclusion

I’ve not covered everything Scrivener can do in this article, but I hope I’ve given you an idea of why I think it’s such valuable scholarly tool. I was fortunate to discover Scrivener early in the dissertation-writing process, and to pass it on to a number of my colleagues. Literature and Latte offers a free 30-day demo, and once you decide to buy it charges an astoundingly-low $39.95.

I know there are some other Scrivener users in the ProfHacker audience. Please use the comments to offer your own tips and tricks.

10. Bonus Tip

This bonus tip, like my last, depends on Dropbox. If you use this magical folder-syncing software, then you can keep your Scrivener projects in your Dropbox and access them across multiple machines. I love using Scrivener’s split-panes view on my home iMac (on the large screen both panes are as large as my entire laptop screen), but when I’m on campus I write on my laptop. Using Dropbox, my Scrivener files for both research projects and classes are always at hand.

To doubly repeat myself—Make sure that you close your Scrivener project on one machine before opening it on another. Because of the incremental way Dropbox syncs files, keeping the same project open in two places risks losing changes made in one place or the other. Unlike Things, though, Scrivener will actually alert you if you try and open a project that is already open elsewhere, so you have to work hard to make this mistake in Scrivener.

Image by Flickr user Markus Rödder / Creative Commons licensed

See larger versions of all Ryan’s screenshots here.

A few weeks ago, I had an odd pedagogical moment.  I was at a media event for Hasbro, where they were rolling out their upcoming Star Wars, Marvel, Transformers, and GI Joe toys collectibles. The event was divided into 3 parts: there were 2 hours of PowerPoint-style lectures about the toys.  (“Here’s what’s coming; here’s how it’s different; here’s what we think about X.”)  Then, there was a period of about an hour or 75 minutes, when we could photograph the toys and put questions to the designers, but we couldn’t play with them. (It was an event pitched at collectors–that is, adults who buy the toys. Um, not that I am one, but I do write for GeekDad.)  And then, immediately after the event was over, they gave us all access to an FTP area with–what else?–the PowerPoint decks, and publication-quality images of every single toy we’d just spent an hour photographing.  (I’ve been uploading these slowly. Here are some pics I took.)

To recap, then: They lectured to us; gave us a brief period of pseudo-interactivity; and then e-mailed us the entire contents of the lecture, making our presence at the afternoon somewhat redundant.  In other words, it was exactly like a certain style of class, with a lecture, the slides or notes of which are then made available.

I was a little appalled at first.  There’s a Friends episode in which a highly jealous Ross agrees to go with Rachel to a lecture about fashion, only to fall asleep and embarrass her.  And as the lectures started, the situation seemed quite similar.  Like most ProfHacker readers, probably, I don’t really think of myself as a lecturer, nor do I think they’re effective in the classroom.  And since we were being given all the information online anyway, there wasn’t any real information to be gleaned from ‘em.

But as the lectures wore on, it became clear that they weren’t really about dispensing information at all.  The lectures were designed, instead, to signal that Hasbro understood the interests of collectors, and to perform a kind of collective identification: “we’re geeks like you.  You can trust us not to screw up the mythology or the continuity.”  (Would that were true!)  Plus, there was a little frisson of authenticity and insider knowledge–”turn your cameras off, please–the next section is embargoed.”  All of which was highly effective in its way: Several people before the lectures who had been bitterly denouncing this or that production decision, got increasingly interested over the course of the lectures.  And so when the FTP archive went live, we were motivated to download the information and to study it.

It now occurs to me that this makes room for a slightly different conversation about lectures in the classroom: Not one about whether they “teach,” or whether they’re great at transferring information, but one about whether a lecture, done well, can elicit ongoing attention and interest from students.  That aspect of what Dan Cohen calls academic theater is, I think, underrated–and is something that can probably be improved with practice.

 

Image by me, of Hasbro’s forthcoming AT-AT walker.  (Stop drooling.)

Secretary Arne Duncan visited Selma, Alabama, where he announced plans for a reinvigorated Office of Civil Rights to ensure equal educational opportunities for all children.

The grant application and final priorities for the $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) are now available.

Secretary Arne Duncan visited Selma, Alabama, where he announced plans for a reinvigorated Office of Civil Rights to ensure equal educational opportunities for all children.

Who doesn’t hate phone calls?  I’m not talking about calling your Beloved Parent, or your old roommate, or whatever–people you’d like to catch up with, but can’t because of distance.  Those phone calls are often ok.  I’m talking about the other sorts of calls: Calls to organize meetings.  Calls to ask for favors.  Calls to do favors.  They’re all bad.

(We’ll pause here to reflect ruefully on the fact that I now spend all day on the phone: Union stuff often goes better on the phone, and then, now that it’s once again youth sports season, I call people I don’t know all night long.  “Don’t you want to register your kid? Coach?” Then there’s the parents on my team: “Don’t forget, practice is . . .”  If it weren’t for Phonevite, I’d be lost.  I thought that the iPhone would help, in that a device that’s fun to use would make me like phone calls better, but no.  Love the phone, but still hate the calls.)

But there are times when a phone call really is useful.  Last week, we hosted a breakfast with state legislators about budget issues and higher education.  Public higher education–already in a precarious situation–is about to get a lot worse, once the federal stimulus money runs out. (This is because the stimulus money came with strings that prevented states from cutting certain items.)  And so this is a very good time for faculty members to engage productively with their state’s political discourse.  (Following their students’ lead!)

I was *not* surprised to hear that higher education, like all government spending, is facing an organized attack.  I *was* surprised to hear the legislators say that one of the best things to do is to call.  Not e-mail or write a letter, but call. Often writing is good–but the anti-government/anti-public spending mood right now is so strong that calling is more direct. (One state rep even recommended calling people at home!)  Reminding your legislators that you are a constituent, and not just someone cashing your state’s checks, can be a helpful thing.

Some resources on talking with politicians:

• The EFF’s factsheet on contacting US policymakers
• Congress.org has a handy search tool that will get you contact information for every state and national politician who represents you
• The AAUP’s lobbying tools do a good job of introducing academics to practical politics.

(Update: Edited to add link to depressing Chronicle story about salaries.)

Image by Flickr user Fibonacci Blue / Creative Commons Licensed

Here’s what you might’ve missed last week:

• Jeff showed how his students develop contracts for digital projects.  Guest author Abby Knoblauch pointed out that one rarely learns how to teach a graduate class. Nels discussed how one might prepare for letting a colleague substitute in your classes. Guest author Derek Bruff explained how multiple choice questions can address conceptual learning.  I called for experiences with advice that seemed both sincere and evil.
• For those in need of relaxation, Billie suggested green tea as a ritual.  Natalie asserted that it is in fact possible to exercise at conferences!  In lieu of such sage practices as these, I talked about napping.
• Speaking of travel, Erin strategized about the on-campus interview.
• Julie pointed out “A Few Ways to Back Up your Website.” George offered “5 Easy Speech-to-Text Solutions,” and wondered about “The Ethics of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.”
• In standing posts: Billie asked “What’s for Lunch?,” and suggested bean salad.  In Open Thread Wednesday, discussions emerged about re-organizing tagged files/pictures, and more follow-up to the Facebook suspension at East Stroudsburg.  In Weekend Reading, I linked to a manifesto on teaching writing, speculations on the social contract of academic publishing, and more.

I already won the in-house Oscars pool (one category: animated feature.  The 6-yr-old picked Coraline . . . sucker.)!  It’s all gravy from here.

Image by Flickr user Ben+Sam / Creative Commons licensed

The crazy hedonism of the weekends: Apparently I signed up to spend two hours tonight receiving last-minute Little League registrations.  There’s a ProfHacker pro tip for you: Don’t go to Little League board meetings if you’re susceptible to guilt!

• Matthew J. Newcomb and Amy Nimon have written an article about choose-your-own-adventure stories as an analogue for wiki interfaces . . . in the form of a CYOA story: The CYOA emphasizes issues of addressing the audience and audience’s choices, and it allows students to become more conscious of their rhetorical and narrative decisions, precisely because they have to think like readers who will directing the narrative within the writer’s scheme. Unlike traditional CYOA stories, in this assignment, choices given to readers do not have to be entirely plot-driven; students can branch into different voices, viewpoints, or styles in their documents to give multiple options to readers.
• Dan Cohen reflects on “the social contract of scholarly publishing“: The demand side, however, has languished. Far fewer efforts have been made to influence the mental state of the scholarly audience. The unspoken assumption is that the reader is more or less unchangeable in this respect, only able to respond to, and validate, works that have the traditional marks of the social contract: having survived a strong filtering process, near-perfect copyediting, the imprimatur of a press.
• April 3 is iPad day, which makes this account of iPad Application Design more than usually interesting.  It’s mostly a post about interface design, but that already hints at what the device could do: The essence of the new opportunities on iPad is that this class of device is a natural home not just for the viewers and small utilities we’ve seen on our phones, but also for creators and editors as we see on desktop platforms. Productivity applications, and sophisticated workflows. There are entire genres of applications which haven’t been truly feasible on an iPhone OS device until now; this is an opportunity to literally pioneer a high-profile touch-screen version of those applications.
• I’m sure that this story about Mark Zuckerberg “hacking” into reporters’ e-mail addresses while an undergrad doesn’t tell us anything at all about Facebook’s cavalier attitudes toward privacy.  Isn’t it nice to think so?: Mark used his site, TheFacebook.com, to look up members of the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson.  Then he examined a log of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com.  If the cases in which they had entered failed logins, Mark tried to use them to access the Crimson members’ Harvard email accounts.  He successfully accessed two of them.
• Al Filreis, the great scholar of modernist poetry and the faculty director of the Kelly Writers House at Penn, reflects on teaching writing in new media: 1) Writing isn’t the only thing that is changing or needs to change. 2) The other kinds of changes might demand an attention very different in kind from our usual. 3) Deep down, most of us do not really want these other changes to come. 4) The ideal site might be where things happen rather than get presented or taught.

Finally, this week’s video is about code:

Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools from Stephen Ramsay on Vimeo.

(Bonus link: The video that brings Twitter to life.)

Image by Flickr user R. Stanek / Creative Commons licensed

The White House and ED announced the Race to the Top High School Commencement Challenge, inviting public schools to compete to have President Obama speak at their graduation this spring.

More than 250 community leaders, educators, parents, and students gathered to discuss turning around the Detroit area's lowest-achieving schools.

Secretary Arne Duncan participated in the Celebration of Teaching and Learning in New York City, where over 8,500 educators across the nation took part in discussions about the future of our schools.

Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey will receive additional funding under the Recovery Act, ED announced earlier this month.

This morning a colleague asked for advice on a grant proposal, which I was of course happy to give.  His question: if you loan everyone a mobile device, how do make sure you get ‘em back in decent working order.  I explained that we’d assigned a number to each iPod, and the students and I had countersigned receipts when I distributed them.  (For those keeping score at home, this worked reasonably well.)

What I didn’t tell my colleague, because I didn’t do it, is that a friend had encouraged taking an additional step: Telling the students that the university had installed a keystroke logger on each iPod, to track whether they were using the device for pedagogical purposes.  That seemed like a terrible idea, both because the practice would be evil, and because telling students that it was true would imply that I went along with it.

I’ve talked before about the most Machiavellian advice I’ve received: To cover being late with papers, tell students you’ve found some plagiarists.  Not only will students stop asking about the papers, but a couple of people will usually out themselves as plagiarists.  I’ve never done this, but I will tell students the story as a cover for being late.

What struck me about those examples is that the people giving the advice were completely serious.  The ideas on offer struck them as entirely good and reasonable.  (Evil ideas that are self-evidently outrageous are a different issue: Everyone’s heard jokes about secretly rescheduling committee meetings to exclude unusually cranky members, and so forth.)  And they’re not just impractical, or at odds with reality in some way–they’re ideas that are morally wrong.  (For an example of an idea that might’ve been a mistake, but isn’t really evil in this sense, see the backstory to the John Roberts rumor.)

This struck me as an interesting topic for discussion: What is the most evil, but seriously intended, advice you’ve ever gotten?

 

 

 

Image by Flickr user Gagilas / Creative Commons licensed

How can low-performing schools be turned around? These videos tell the stories of three turnaround schools.

[This is a guest post by Derek Bruff, an assistant director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, where he is also a senior lecturer in Mathematics.  His book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments, about the technology known as clickers, was published in February, 2009 by Jossey-Bass.  On Twitter, he is @derekbruff. -- JBJ]

A couple of years ago, I was teaching a statistics course for the second time.  The first time I had taught the course, I only had 36 students.  This time I had 56.  Thinking ahead to how long it would take me to grade their exams, which had consisted entirely of free-response questions the year before, I started wondering if I should include some multiple-choice questions on the exams this time around.  I felt a little ashamed.  After all, instructors only gave multiple-choice exams in those really big classes where free-response exams weren’t possible, right?  It’s not like they want to give multiple-choice exams—they’re forced to by the size of their classes.

Then it hit me—putting multiple-choice questions on my exams was exactly what I wanted to do.

Let me rewind a little.  A few years prior to teaching this statistics course, I had started teaching with classroom response systems, often called “clickers.” When using a classroom response system, I can pose a multiple-choice question to my students during class and expect each and every one of my students to respond to the question—independently, in fact—by submitting their answers using handheld radio-frequency devices (“clickers”).  A receiver attached to my computer collects their response, and the clicker software displays a bar chart showing the distribution of results.

Over the years, I had gotten pretty good at writing multiple-choice clicker questions.  I find that the multiple-choice format is particularly useful for engaging and assessing students around the more conceptual material in my math courses.  For instance, here’s a question about confidence intervals I’ve used:

Suppose you construct a 95% confidence interval from a random sample of size n=20 with sample mean 100 taken from a population with unknown mean μ and known standard deviation σ= 10, and the interval is fairly wide.  Which of the following conditions would NOT lead to a narrower confidence interval?

A. If you decreased your confidence level

B. If you increased your sample size

C. If the sample mean was smaller [Correct]

D. If the population standard deviation was smaller

What makes this question useful is that it asks students to respond using their intuition about how confidence intervals work.  Although there are a few numbers in the question to make the situation somewhat more concrete for the students, this is not a computational question.  Instead, the question asks students about the relationship between the width of a confidence interval and several other variables.

I feel confident that my students, mostly engineering majors, could answer a computational question on this topic.  I’m typically less confident that they have internalized the associated concepts.  Asking this clicker question allows me to assess their conceptual understanding and, if the results show that students don’t understand the situation as well as I would like, I can help them think through the topic right then and there during class.

Now, back to the statistics exam.  My students and I spent at least a third of every class period working through conceptually-oriented, multiple-choice clicker questions.  If I thought this was such a good use of class time, then why didn’t I include similar questions on my exams?  More to the point, if I wanted my students to develop conceptual understanding of the statistics in my course, why wasn’t I assessing that?  Particularly since I knew exactly how to do so, by asking the same kinds of multiple-choice questions I had gotten good at writing over the years teaching with clickers!

Starting that semester, I started writing my exams so that multiple-choice, conceptual questions contribute about 40 percent of my students’ grades on those exams.  Free-response, computational questions contribute the rest of their scores. Often the multiple-choice exam questions are refined or enhanced versions of clicker questions asked earlier in the semester.  Writing these questions doesn’t take much longer than writing free-response questions, and, of course, they help me look forward to grading a little bit more!

Have you found that the multiple-choice format is sometimes exactly what you need to assess particular aspects of your students’ learning?  How have you used multiple-choice questions to assess more than mere factual recall?  Share your experiences in the comments.

 

Image by Flickr user Mars Hill Church Seattle / Creative Commons Licensed