A friend is stage managing a series of one-act plays on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights here in New York. If you have time, check them out. If the descriptions are any indicator they should be interesting! Flier: pdf.
O Happy Three 2008
Student team-teaching
Howard Rheingold has posted the syllabus for his upcoming class for comment. It has a great selection of texts. It’s a class I’d have loved to have been able to take as a grad student–heck, I’d love to take it now–and I’ll point my students in the Media & Society class there for some ideas. One of the things he is doing is having students take on a week to teach.
Now, this was such a mainstay of my own grad career that I expected every seminar was that way. While many of the grad (and some undergrad) seminars I lead do this, many do not. I am a big fan of the assignment, because I think you learn more by teaching than you do in the traditional “student” role. A year ago, I had a colleague come into one of my classes (522 again) to assess my teaching. She asked what I was teaching that day, and I told her I wasn’t–the students taught this course. She thought I was kidding and said she’d come back next week. I asked permission from the presenters that week to do a little lecture, and they agreed, though they thought is was pretty funny that I would actually lecture or lead discussion in a class. They were nice and didn’t give me too hard a time.
Anyway, having students responsible for the class can be a great experience for everyone, but it can also lead to disaster. Students naturally bring what they have learned from other classes to bear on a given task, and they will default to the tag-team Powerpoint talk. Some of them do this very well–some do it very poorly. There is something to be said for a provocative talk to open up discussion, but the process is often reduced to a five minute meeting among the students a week before they teach, in which they haphazardly divide the topic and then present consecutive, relatively unrelated, heavily text-laden Powerpoint decks.
Some of the most creative presenters, on the other hand, have had students engage in simulations and games, have come in costume, and have had folks put together videos on the fly. These super-classes put my own class planning to shame, and everyone–the presenters, the other students, and me–got a lot out of them.
So, how do you get more of the latter and less of the former. Two ways, I think:
The first is modeling. Generally, it’s unfair to students to assign a student-led discussion at the second meeting. It doesn’t give them time to prepare, or an adequate idea of what is expected, usually. Some of my seminars had the prof in charge of the first half, and the students of the second. This was actually pretty nice, since the course had a bit of a rhythm before students took the reigns. But even a class or two where you do the things you want your students to do–prepare, bring in examples, provide opportunities for interaction, ask questions and challenge assumptions–is helpful. Unfortunately, they may miss the cue: so you need to actually tell them what you are doing, engage in a bit of meta-class planning. “So, I was curious about this dude and wikipediad him and found out he named each of his dogs ‘Charles’, and I thought it might be interesting to…” In other words, tell them how you prepare, how you plan for a good discussion, and note that this is one way (and not the only way) to do it. At the end of each session, whether student or instructor led, be sure to debrief: what worked, what didn’t, and how does it inform coming meetings?
Along the same lines, don’t be afraid to distribute a reading from something like McKeachie’s Teaching Tips
Finally, be very clear about what outcomes you want. Students naturally tend to think about personalized outcomes, and want to prove to you, and perhaps to the rest of the class, that they are capable and knowledgeable about the subject. It’s important to push them away from that “brain dump” attitude. Assume (whether or not this is safe) that they will have a solid understanding of the material. Emphasize that what you are looking for is a collective understanding of some core set of concepts, that they need to share in the responsibility of having their peers reach a better understanding of a problem.
For me, the success of a class is measured in a perhaps childish way–but one that tends to resonate with students. Don’t bore me. Show me something new. The ideal class is one in which there is a good discussion, one in which there is disagreement that is worked through and teased out, one in which there are more questions at the end than in the beginning, since that generally is a good gauge of real learning. But for this to happen, students need to know that is what you are looking for and expecting.
HTML as a network
No reason the structure of a web page couldn’t be visualized as a network graph. So, try it. This is what this page looked like before I made this entry. (I could try redoing it now that this entry is here–it’s only a one-level recursive process–but I think I should do something else instead.)
(via Vinson)
Stuff you should have
We did a “bootcamp” for the online masters program. They are required to purchase an Adobe Suite, but there were other things I wanted them to have, or at least be exposed to. So I wrote the following up as a guide. What do you tell your students to get?
Most of the items on this list are either free (as in both beer and speech) or services offered as part of the “cloud” (or “Software as a Service”).
Locked Down Computers
Some of you may work on Windows machines for which you do not have administrative access, and therefore are not able to install new software. If that is the case you should download the PortableApps (Win) software that allows you to run applications from a flash drive. If you have a very security conscious working environment, the administrator may have locked out applications running from the CD or a USB port, but in most cases, you can run many of the programs below. (U3 is a proprietary system that provides similar functionality.)
Communications
If you aren’t on Skype, you’ll need to sign up. It allows for text chat, audio (VoIP), and video chat.
There are a number of other IM, VoIP, and Video Chat services, of course. For text chat clients, I use Adium on the Mac and Trillian on the PC (which is OK). Again, lot’s of possibilities for clients that take on multiple IM protocols. If you are traveling or not on your regular computer, Meebo is a good bet.
Remote Viewing
There may come a time, though perhaps not in this course, when you want me to look at your screen, or want me to do something on your computer. Or, you may want to be able to access your computer at home while traveling or at work. This is possible using a protocol called VNC. For me (or someone) to be able to do this, you need to run a VNC server, like TightVNC for Windows or Chicken of the VNC for Mac.
Email
There are lots of free email hosts. Despite the privacy issues, I use and like Google Mail. For some level of security, Hushmail is a useful service.
Browser
The latest version of Firefox is a great browser: quick and effective. It’s not perfect, but it does a good job. There are some sites that refuse to comply to web standards (notably, those run by Microsoft and at least some of the functions of Blackboard), so don’t throw out your copy of IE or Safari. Not that you can, in the former case.
One of the best reasons to install Firefox is to make use of the plugins. In particular, I think the following plugins are extremely useful for this program:
* Zotero is the best citation manager I’ve used. It’s simple, and gets the job done without a lot of extra fuss. If you install just one plug-in, this is it.
* Firebug is very useful for viewing and debugging a page layout when designing for the web. Unfortunately, it doesn’t play well with Zotero, so you might want to install it in the Spring (and disable Zotero).
* IETab. As noted above, Firefox works with 99% of websites, but some site designers still design for Internet Explorer. This makes it easy to open up a tab in Firefox that runs IE, so you can work more easily with such sites.
* PDFDowload lets you work with PDFs more easily in Firefox
* Delicious plugin, integrates your bookmarks with Delicious (see below).
Those are the essential plug-ins in my book. There are hundreds of others, many of them worth looking at. I use FoxyTunes, StumbleUpon, Zemanta, TwitterFox, a couple of video download tools, and several others.
Text Editing
For editing documents without the application doing strange stuff to the text, you need a plain text editor. In particular, when it comes to writing HTML, CSS, or scripting, you need to be able to cleanly edit text. Windows has Notepad and Wordpad, but there are better replacements. Notepad++ and Notepad2 are both great for Windows, and if you don’t have a lot of extra needs. For the Mac, the (not free) Textmate or Text Wrangler are good.
Blogging
We will be using the WordPress blogging system on the QUBlogs host. Head over there to sign up. (There’s a screencast on how to do it, as well.)
Social Networks
These are often sites that are either for loafing, building community, or standing in as an enhanced Rolodex, depending on who you talk to. I recommend being on LinkedIn for professional reasons, and I am, of course, on Facebook, where we will be setting up an ICM community page (unless one of you does it first).
Ning is kind of interesting.
Folksonomies
Folksonomies occur when people tag things and then share the tags. Delicious is the one we will be using, and it is a kind of public replacement for bookmarks. There are dozens of similar systems, and tagging is making its way onto a range of other kinds of places, from newspapers to peer-production to retail sites.
Microblogging
There are a number of microblogging platforms. The “status” line on Facebook or on your IM client might be considered a kind of microblogging: a way of saying if you are “available” or what you happen to be doing at the moment. This semester, I will ask you to try using Twitter. Twitter has been undergoing some growing pains, but it is still one of the most widely used microblogging systems.
Jott is an amazing service that lets you do microblogging or text messaging via voice.
Closely tied to microblogging are “awareness” sites like Upcoming, Brightkite, and Last FM.
Photos
For photo manipulation, it’s hard to beat Photoshop. The Gimp is a powerful (free) piece of software, and worth trying if you don’t already have a copy of Photoshop. It’s available for Windows, Linux, and Mac (Intel), but it’s a slightly painful install on the latter.
There are lots and lots of photo hosting services, I continue to prefer Flickr and will ask you to set up an account there, and try posting a picture.
Audio
Audacity is a very popular audio editor (and what I use to prepare the lectures).
Utterz allows you to voice microblog via phone.
Video
There are applications for video editing that are no/low cost for Windows and for Mac. Windows supports the Windows Movie Maker, and Mac the iMovie. Both of these are fine for simple editing jobs, though each is somewhat limited in the effective size they can handle, complex edits and transitions, the nature of the “tracks” used for editing, and the codecs they can read and produce.
Two very useful free piece of software can help here. For the PC, Super, despite the strange web page and cryptic instructions, is a very useful tool in converting file types. VLC is a must-have video and audio player, that can also transcode many videos.
In terms of actual editing, FLOSS is a bit behind the curve of commercial providers. Jahshaka is working toward a solution here, and Blender can be used for 3D effects, or you can try editing in Jumpcut. But for now, there isn’t a good replacement for middle-range video editing software.
YouTube is ubiquitous. Revver has a better licensing scheme. Viddler lets you tag/comment anywhere within the video, which is very convenient sometimes. And Seesmic is a microvlogging platform.
Aggregators
There is a lot of stuff going on up there!
An aggregator is a tool that gathers syndicated content from around the web. Think about a newspaper with no journalists (many are very close to that now). It might pull stories from a few different wires (AP, Reuters, Xinhua, Kyodo, DPA, etc.) and from some syndicated columnists and cartoon artists, and maybe from a company that collects classified advertising, and assemble this all into a daily paper. An aggregator does that for web content, pulling together RSS feeds, in one place where you can easily read them.
For many years I used Bloglines, but I finally switched to the Google Reader, and that is what I would recommend.
Be sure to add this blog to your aggregator and visit your aggregator throughout the semester so that it doesn’t get lonely. Also, I strongly recommend adding your fellow students to your aggregator, to make it easier to see what they are writing about.
There are other “kinds” of aggregators. Yahoo Pipes and Google Gears allow you to do fairly sophisticated things with the feeds and other data you download, mashing them together in interesting ways.
The newest type of aggregator is a personal aggregator like FriendFeed, which tracks your friends’ Twitter, last.fm, blog, flickr, and everything else activities. And it allows for comments. Many have remarked that the new interface for Facebook bears a more than passing resemblance to FriendFeed.
Web Development
I am a big fan of the “less is more” group here. Aside from a good text editor, you will need an FTP client like Filezilla. We’ll be doing web programming in LAMP, and you can download the AMP part of it for Windows or Mac as XAMPP. (This can also go on your PortableApps flash drive!) We’ll be using the third P, Python.
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