The problem with ranking is that it suggests that excellence in teaching is a uni-dimensional construct, which I think even a cursory “gut-check” says is dead wrong. When I think back to my greatest teachers, they have little in common. One was cold, condescending, and frankly not a very nice human, but he was exacting in asking us to clearly express ourselves, and his approach led to a room full of students who could clearly state an argument, lead a discussion, and understand the effects of style on philosophical argument. Another was a little scattered, but brought us into his home and family, was passionate about the field, and taught us how important it was to care about our research subjects. Another had a bit of the trickster in him, and would challenge our assumptions by setting absurd situations. And I could name another half-dozen who were excellent teachers–but one of the things that made them excellent was the unique way in which they approached the process of learning.

And frankly, if you asked a number of my undergraduatepeers who the “best” teachers in our program were, there would certainly be some overlap, but it would be far from perfect. An essential question is “best for whom”? And just as our students are each unique, and we should approach them as whole people (the unfortunate fact is that we *do* rank them by grading them, but that doesn’t make the process right), we should approach faculty as… perhaps a box of chocolate. The diversity of backgrounds, styles, and approaches to teaching and learning are a strength, not a weakness. We shouldn’t all be striving to fit to the golden standard of the best among us.

Now, this is not an argument for absolute relativism: there are better and worse ways of fostering student learning. It is also not an argument against quantification or assessment: I think an essential tool for improving our teaching is operationalizing some of the abstruse concepts of “good teaching” to something measurable, and using qualitative AND quantitative assessments to help us develop as a group. But the problem with ranking faculty is that there isn’t a single scale for teaching effectiveness, nor even the three (or four, if you count “hotness”) that RateYourProfessor suggest, but dozens of different scales that we might be ranked on. And while some of us may be near the top of many of those scales, I doubt any of us are at the top of all of them.

michaelzimmer: Right now: I supposed to be working on a journal article (tenure), but instead I’m writing a blog post (impact).

halavais: ∴ impact ≠ tenure RT @michaelzimmer: I supposed to be working on a journal article (tenure), but instead I’m writing a blog post (impact).

kfitz: @halavais @michaelzimmer Okay, that’s creepy. I literally just proofed the paragraph of the book on the relationship btw tenure and impact.

coffee001: .@halavais @michaelzimmer In some surreal version of the future, people will get tenure for blogging.

halavais: Let me fix that for you: “In some surreal version of the future, people will get tenure.”

coffee001: You have a point. Depends on the country you’re in, though.

snurb_dot_info: @coffee001 @halavais Someone needs to create an ‘I have tenure and I blog’ bumper sticker.

coffee001: @snurb_dot_info @halavais …for that, they need to have tenure and a blog. Not yet a combination that’s common over here.

halavais: Yep: http://www.cafepress.com/jamtoday RT @snurb_dot_info: [] Someone needs to create an ‘I have tenure and I blog’ bumper sticker.

dancohen: Fairly sure if I buy this “I have tenure & I blog” t-shirt I’ll get beaten up, but I’m not sure by whom http://bit.ly/h8pWw8 (via @halavais)

thinkingshop: @dancohen @halavais Not good for crowds containing #adjuncts & grad students (the other 70% of the teaching population)

I don’t care about grades. It’s not that I hate them, but I do hate that students seem so captivated by them. At least at the undergraduate level, and for students who were aiming for law school or med school, where the GPA seems to have a strong effect on admissions, I kind of understood it. But I completely do not get it among graduate students.

In order to reduce the focus on grades, I tried delaying letter grades until the end of the semester, providing more narrative feedback. I would provide feedback, but no scores or letters on students’ work. There is some indication that this can be effective, particularly with formative types of assessment (see Kitchen et al, 2006), but it really didn’t work at all well for me. It increased anxiety and concern over grades rather than decreasing it, resulting in students who were even more concerned with grades than with the material.

So, I’ve effectively thrown out grades. I see no pedagogically-driven reason to issue them, and a number to get rid of them. As long as students meet some minimum requirements in my courses this semester, they get an “A” in the course. I’ve replaced this with badges, which I will write more about soon.

Pass/Fail

There is a low bar of participation–what I would consider something like 20% of the expected contribution–in order to get this A. But isn’t this just pass/fail? I suppose it is, to a certain degree, although not formally so.

A lot of the work around doing away with letter grades is about 40 years old at this point. Sgan (1970), for example, found that the would-be grades of students taking a course pass-fail were lower than the students in the same course opting for a grade. However, this was at Brandeis where not all courses were pass-fail. In such a situation, it makes sense that a student might focus more of her energy on the graded courses. It’s also worth noting that this gap disappeared by senior year, when the students taking a course actually did very slightly better (there was no significant difference in what they would have gotten as a grade).

For our online program, students generally only take one course at a time, providing less of an issue of attention management. But I’ll be curious how it works out for our on-ground program, where students may be taking several courses at once.

Assessment vs. Evaluation

It’s important to note here that there are two things moving hand-in-hand. On one side is questions of thinking about students’ progress and effectively changing the course material to meet the students effectively. The other is communicating student progress (and the acceptability of that progress) to wider audiences. This is the divide, as Cizek (2005) has it, between assessment and evaluation.

Of course, one is related to the other–or at least can be. One can assign letter grades based on an assessment of a portfolio of work done in a class, course, or program, for example. But it is a necessarily abbreviated form of communicating the work accomplished or skills gained, rather than providing an instrument for improving learning.

Cizek notes that letter grades, no matter what they are grading, are “consistently inconsistent.” Any measurement should be both reliable (consistent) and valid (measure what we are interested in) and letter grades are almost never either of these things. This isn’t news–educational researchers have known this for at least a century. There are ways of making grades more explicitly reliable, though often at the risk of being less valid. The application of multiple-choice tests tends to push in the direction of reliability (at the cost of creating a whole generation of students who are highly skilled at taking multiple-choice tests and little else), while grading on participation in class may get at what we really want to evaluate, but it very difficult to do fairly and consistently.

For me, letter grades do a poor job of communicating what they are supposed to communicate. If I see that a student has gotten an A in “Introduction to Interactive Communication,” what does that really tell me? Especially, if I don’t know what the other students received as grades, or what was expected of the students. It’s an empty indicator.

On the other hand, students strive to get that A. Some say that a high GPA at the very least demonstrates an ability to be able to follow directions and plan your time reasonably well, but I’m not sure even that is the case. The student with a high GPA simply demonstrates that she is capable of achieving a high GPA–any correlation with other skill sets seems almost accidental.

It’s when that letter grade evaluation crowds out any room for actual assessment and self-knowledge that it deserves to be more than just ignored or disdained. If we want students to learn better, we need to destroy letter grades. Grade inflation may provide the seeds of letter grades’ own demise, but I plan to hurry it on as best I can.

First Seven Weeks

One of the courses I am teaching this semester runs on an accelerated seven-week schedule, and so has just concluded. Everyone who was registered in the course received an A, as promised. One person withdrew from the course, but no one else failed to meet the minimal requirements.

As a whole, the performance of the students in the course was well above that of those in previous versions. I secretly kept letter grades (not reporting them) and the grade average for the course would have been significantly higher. It’s hard to attribute this entirely to throwing out grades in favor of badges. We had a few students who would have done well no matter what, I think.

Among the highest achieving students in the course, the work was ridiculously good and they worked especially hard. At least one expressed relief that they didn’t have to perform to a specified level, and so they took advantage of this and really went all out. I’ll note that two of the other students in the course felt “intimidated” by the level of these leaders, and this seemed to be a bit inhibiting.

The average student in the course did, I think, marginally better than they have in other courses. I’ll note that–having sent out the final evaluation–a number of the students in this group emailed back asking what their grade was. The syllabus for the course put it pretty clearly:

There is no compelling evidence that letter grades enhance student learning. For that reason all students who meet minimum requirements will receive an A in the course. I expect that most of you, if not all, will go beyond the minimum requirements not to improve your grade, but because you are interested in learning more.

I suspect, therefore, that these students just didn’t read the syllabus carefully. Or perhaps they just didn’t believe it. Nonetheless, the large group of students “in the middle” of the class did better than their counterparts in other courses.

It was not all good news, of course. Several students ended up on the trailing end. In a normal course, they would have failed, or at least would have received a very low grade. I’m still undecided what the A means to them. They know they did poorly in the course (I told them), but the reflection to the world is still an A on their transcript. I suppose I see this as the only negative outcome of what I’ve done, and I don’t think it is that negative. I’ve given failing or very low grades to students in the past who have just gone on to retake the course with another instructor or finish their programs with low (but passing) grades.

I suppose in some sense this is “passing the buck,” to other faculty members. On the other hand, it could be seen as merely being as accepting as possible. I know from experience that having low-performing students in a course lowers the level of discourse and is frustrating for many in the course. But short of raising the bar for passing (and re-introducing the concerns over getting over that bar rather than exploring and learning), I’m not sure how to address this issue.

In sum, the positives far outweigh these negatives. We’ll see how this goes for the courses that are new, and not nearly as well planned.

Cizek, G.J. (2005). Pockets of resistance in the assessment revolution. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice 19(2), 16-23.

Kitchen, E., S.H. King, D.F. Robison, R.R. Sudweeks, W.S. Bradshaw, & J.D. Bell (2006). Rethinking exams and letter grades: How much can teachers delegate to students?

Sgan, M.R. (1970). Letter grade achievement in pass-fail courses. The Journal of Higher Education 41(8), 638-644.

So, down the oubliette with the beginnings of my syllabus:

Mobile and locative applications

This is a course designed to make you think about the world as a place that is Internet-enabled, and give you some of the skills you need to design for that world. What does it mean to work and play in a mobile world and how does this relate to designing and building applications based on places and interfaces that go beyond the mouse and keyboard?

This course is offered in a peer-based studio format. As part of this course, you are expected not only to learn how to do new things, and demonstrate your ability to do those things, you are also expected to create materials that teach others how to do something new.

This course organizer is Alex Halavais. He is an associate professor in the interactive communication program at Quinnipiac University. More information can be found on his blog: https://alex.halavais.net

Course Meetings

The course is scheduled to meet Tuesdays from 6:30 to 9:10. In addition, there will be open studio hours from 4:30 to 6:30 on Tuesdays, in the great room at 430 Mt. Carmel Avenue. You are expected to spend the required hours on the course, but the time spent physically in the classroom/studio is flexible.

Course Communication

There are three main ways we will communicate as a group. The instructional material, badge requirements, and any other course documents will be kept at the course wiki at XXX. We will also be using a mailing list, hosted by Google Groups. Please go to XXX to join the group.

Social Contract

When you sign on as a participant of this course, you promise to:

* Be timely in your interactions with the community. If a week goes by, and we haven’t heard from you, something has gone wrong. If you can be with us physically in the hack sessions, that is best; if you cannot, we should hear from you virtually at least weekly. When it comes to responding to questions relating to the learning objects you design, or asking for evaluation for a badge you have designed, you should be especially quick in responding. I would like you to be willing to respond to requests for evaluation within 72 hours, and I will endeavor to do the same.

* Be here to learn. I know, many of you have a degree to earn, and a job market to wrangle, and the like. However, the purpose of this course is to form a learning community. That’s what is the most important thing for me, and if it isn’t the most important thing for you, please choose another course.

* Be willing to teach. This is a community, and I expect you to contribute to the learning of your fellow participants. I applaud your sponginess, but please honor the community by being willing to help your fellow classmates, and not just take what you can from it. This is particularly true for the badges you author, but across the board, I hope that you are willing to pitch in, answer questions, and help where you are able to do so.

* Strive to acquire the minimal skill set detailed below. That is, acquire the five necessary badges and at least five of the substantial skill badges.

As the organizer of this course, I promise to endeavor to embody those principles in my own work during the semester.

Badges

You may have already noted some talk about a badge system. Basically, badges indicate your skills and abilities. If you have ever gotten a Boy Scout merit badge, or been SCUBA certified, or gotten a driving license, or won a Foursquare badge, you already have a rough idea of what a badge is.

For the purposes of this course, we will be focused on badges for particular skills. For example, one of the badges I expect you to earn is the MediaWiki Editor Basic Concepts badge. To do that, you have to demonstrate that you understand how to do some basic things with the markup syntax of MediaWiki. When you submit evidence of having accomplished these tasks, a number of endorsers will acknowledge that you have accomplished earning the badge, and you will be able to show the badge on your home page on the wiki, or anywhere else you choose to do so.

There is an early tutorial on how to earn a badge and how to create your own badges. Anyone can create a badge for anything, and some time during the semester, you will create your own badge.

There are two lists of badges that you should take special note of on the wiki: the “necessary” badges and the “substantive” badges. These are badges that we agree as a community are required for the course, in the first instance, and that represent significant and substantial skills in the area of locative or mobile media in the second instance. If I agree that a badge and associated learning materials are particularly strong, I will add them to the approved “substantive” list.

Expectations, Grading, and Credit

Everyone who enrolls in the course is expected to endeavor to complete all the necessary badges (five) and at least five of the substantial badges, regardless of the way in which they are engaged in the course.

This course is offered for three graduate academic credits at Quinnipiac University as ICM500. If you are not an interactive communications graduate student and would like to enroll for credit, please contact Phillip Simon about arranging to take the course as a non-matriculating student.

As an experiment, this course is also being offered at Peer2Peer University, an open structure for engaging in peer learning online.

I don’t believe the A-F grading system is an effective way of engaging learning or providing feedback. For this reason, anyone who completes the minimum requirements at QU will receive an A in the course.

First, you must complete the following five necessary badges:

* M&L Apps Social Contract Signatory Badge
* MediaWiki Editor Basic Concepts Badge
* Helpful Colleague Badge
* Basic Open Learning Resource Creator Badge
* Badge User and Maker Badge

In addition you are expected to earn a minimum of five substantive badges during the semester. These represent some knowledge, skill, ability, or experience involving mobile or locative media. For example, if your create a piece of hardware that can tweet to the web when something happens in the physical world, you would earn the Basic Sensors badge. In each case, the evidence required to earn the badge can be accomplished by completing materials in the unit(s) associated with the badge.

The initial set of substantive badges include:
* Mobile Web Standards
* Mobile UX
* Kiosk Planning & Design
* Geocaching and Collaborative Mapping
* Geocoded Web
* Google Maps
* 7Scenes Basics
* Basic AppInventor
* AppInventor Web Services
* Blinky Lights (using Audrino)
* Basic Sensors for the Web

It is expected that you will complete the required badges within the time period of the course. Because most badges require endorsements from your peers, continuing beyond the agreed period of the course is impossible. For this reason, incompletes will not be granted. Likewise, if you have not completed a substantial number of badges, including all of the necessary badges, by the midpoint of the semester, you will receive an email from the instructor recommending you withdraw from the course.

Schedule

As a studio course, this class does not have a schedule as such. However, you are required to complete the Social Contract and MediaWiki Editor badges before moving on to more substantial badges. You are also required to complete all five necessary badges before the midpoint of the semester (for QU students).

Beyond those constraints, you are welcome to engage the material as you like. There are many factors that may influence your choices. For example, you may need to order a book or hardware to effectively complete a badge, and that may take some time to arrive. Likewise, although Google claims a one-week turn-around on AppInventor accounts, if you plan on creating an Android-based app, you should probably apply for that account right now, with the knowledge that it will be at least a week (if not longer).

For work that requires outdoor activities, you may want to wait to later in the semester, or for a warm spell, if you are local to Connecticut.

Also, doing things together is more fun. So, I hope you will chose to work in tandem on projects. Each individual is charged with creating their own evidence for a badge, but if you prefer to collaborate while learning working through the learning units, I strongly encourage it. Particularly for doing things that are community-based, working in a group can be a significant multiplier, and it may be possible to demonstrate work on a communal object.

Texts & expenses

Each badge requires you know how to do something. Materials needed to learn how to do this will be assembled on the course wiki. They may draw from open access materials out on the web, or they be entirely original. Each person who creates a badge should assemble the materials necessary for people to learn the skills represented in the badge.

While these need not be original in all cases–curated materials are fine–at least once during the semester, you must create original, open access materials that teach us how to do something in the mobile and locative realms.

It is important, whether curating materials or creating your own materials to respect authors licenses, copyright, and intellectual rights.

You are going to need web space to host some of the projects in this course–feel welcome to use whatever space works and is appropriate to the need. Likewise, as you are creating your own materials, you will may find that the most current and accessible materials are actually available in books. Libraries can be slow in acquiring such books, so you may find yourself purchasing technical books (or camping out at your local bookstore).

Some of the badges require access to particular hardware or software. A preference will be shown for free and open software, when available, but even open hardware often has an expense associated with it. (I will have a limited amount of hardware you can play with in our physical meetings.) Enough badges will be available that it should be possible to avoid such hardware or licensing expenses, but I hope small expenses won’t dissuade you from learning experiences.

Finally, I do encourage you to collaborate with others in the class to assemble these resources. An Audrino board or electronics kit can be shared among multiple people, as long as you are careful with it, and likewise other resources can be effectively shared.

Predictably, the comments bemoan the state of modern education. If Princeton represents our best and brightest, how sad is it that they don’t know who Stevenson is? After several comments in agreement, the backlash begins. Should freshmen know every defeated presidential contender over the last five decades? Inevitably, someone posts that they don’t need to know because they can always look up his bio on Wikipedia.

You probably think you know where I come down on this. After all, I’ve suggested many times before that the nature of knowledge is changing, and that formal expectations of what people should know is changing. That said, I am a little disappointed that these four were not aware of Stevenson. I wouldn’t expect them to be able to provide the details of his biography (after all, that is what Wikipedia is for), but I would expect them to have at least a rough idea of how he fits into the fabric of our history. In other words, I would expect that in their studies before reaching university, they might have already had the opportunity to look up his bio on Wikipedia, and might remember enough to know roughly who he was and why he was “famous.”

The fact that these things exist outside of our heads is only an advantage if we actually use them. Most of what I’ve learned I’ve forgotten, but it leaves some indexical trace, some broad map of the world that will allow me to reacquire these things in the future. So the question is how our most elite student manage to get through high school without ever finding the need to google Adlai Stevenson, and how we can change that.

I’m convinced that part of the reason they never ran into Stevenson is that he doesn’t make a big splash in the textbooks. The fault isn’t in a particular textbook, or even the Texans who decide what counts as history, but in the existence of textbooks at all. Textbooks, and the tests and regents exams they spawn, focus on sufficient knowledge: if it isn’t in the book, it doesn’t matter. The work of a school, no matter at what level, is to create the conditions that lead students to discover things on their own. And somewhere are the conditions under which a student will encounter Adlai Stevenson as more than a presidential loser.

1. Edit your privacy settings and friendships.

This one is easy for me. I practice radical transparency. If I don’t want the world to know about it, I don’t put it anywhere. So, yes, I’ve tracked on some of the Facebook concerns, but since my “friends” know little more about me than other publics do, I frankly am not concerned. If someone decides not to hire me because they’ve seen me being a bit nuts in a classroom, or a bit tipsy at a party, then I don’t want to work there.

(I won’t get into the larger argument. I think there are worthy reasons to pursue certain sorts of privacy, but I think a common understanding of the idea of “privacy” is part of the residue of mass society and now it’s, well… it’s complicated.)

Status: COMPLETE

2. Change your passwords.

This one is long in coming. I’ve had a poor password regimen, and someone has put in a malicious backdoor on my Dreamhost account somewhere that leads to access to this blog among other things. I don’t think that’s a password issue (more likely a poorly protected application), but the damage is done.

I don’t like password managers, but I do have a set of relatively default passwords that I reuse at various levels of security. I’ve started replacing those–even for the very basic ones–with a unique password arrived at algorithmically. Replacing all those passwords is going to take a while–and probably won’t be done by 2010. But I’ve gotten a good start on it.

Status: STARTED

3. Own your name.

I don’t think there’s much more I need to do with this. Nobody is likely to confuse this Alex Halavais with all the others out there.

Status: ONGOING

4. Prune your feeds.

Truth is, my feed reader has grown so out of control that I stopped using it this year. In large part, Twitter and popurls have taken its place.

Nonetheless, I want to be a little more ahead of the curve. I’ll go back to the system I had before, of organizing reads into first, second, and third tiers. I’ll update here as I decide what those waves are.

Status: STARTING SOON

5. Find a better mobile.

All the chatter about the new Google phone and iSlate isn’t compelling to me. I found the Droid I was looking for. I’m glad I waited. Though I hate being tied to the Verizon contract, and I’m a bit uncomfortable with how closely it clings to Google services, it’s very convenient, and it lets me run my own home-made apps. Even if I never have time to write them, I like the idea of having that option. Looking forward to more locative blogging.

Status: COMPLETE

6. Update copyright notices on your website.

RWW is mostly concerned with copyright year, which isn’t really a big deal, at least for me. But (see below), I will be updating the footer to more clearly indicate the Creative Commons License.

7. Revisit your blog.

This one is a big one. I’ve set up an action plan for this blog, which has mainly gone fallow, and will be starting a second site for a new project.

Over the coming weeks, I will:

1. Blog the creation of my new class, of the work I’m doing on a paper, and of my work with the DML Hub and a research network here in New York.

2. Create a research page outlining my scholarship and providing links to as many of my articles (in draft form) as I can.

3. Create a teaching page that does the same, and links to some of the class sites I’ve created.

4, Work through the categories and a tagging structure, as well as effective search.

5. Rethink the layout, and bring in better archives, searching, and my twitter feed.

8. Back up your data.

This has also been a long-time issue for me. I had a box that I was going to turn into a NAS using OpenFiler or FreeNAS, but because of a number of issues, I gave up on that plan, and realized that the (eminently hackable) DLink DNS-321 was on sale for < $100 after rebate. That’s been loaded with a pair of 2TB drives in RAID1. This is a backup system in addition to another server that’s simply set up with a bunch of old drives. Now that the hardware is sorted, need to get the actual backups going (including an offsite backup for the most vital chunks).

Status: UNDER WAY

As you can see: serious New Years Eve partying this year :). Hoping that “ten” is your best year so far.

Overview and Objectives

The aim of this course is to provide you with the skills needed to implement your designs and create a standards-compliant, functional web site. In particular, you will be learning:

• how a web site works, and how it comes to be displayed in your browser;
• how to create xhtml code that will structurally represent your documents on the web;
• how to use CSS to apply design choices and layout to your document;
• the basics of using PHP to provide some dynamic content that is stored in databases or content management systems;
• a little about how javascript and jquery can be used to enhance the functionality of your site.

Given how much we hope to learn during the semester, it is perhaps equally important to understand what this course is not intended to do. It is not intended to teach you:

• how to organize a website–that is, elements of information architecture, writing for the web, or taxonomies;
• how to design a website–that is, choices relating to color, type, layout, creating graphical elements, etc.;
• website usability–that is, how to specify, test, and work with users to create a better site;
• non-standard extensions of the web–in particular, things like Java applets and Flash;
• development tools–most particularly Dreamweaver, which may be useful under certain circumstances, but is not a necessary part of standards-based development.

That is not to say that we will entirely ignore these things, or that they won’t have any bearing on our discussions. And, in fact, you will have to make design and usability choices as a part of the work in the course. But our focus is on implementing those choices: moving from the ideas you have on paper and in your head to a functioning website.

Communicating with the Instructor

My name is Alex Halavais. Many of you have already met me in the Introduction to Interactive Communication course, but in case you have not, I am an Associate Professor of Communication here at QU, and have taught here since 2006. You can find out more about me at my blog: a thaumaturgical compendium.

The best way to reach me is often by email: Alexander.Halavais@quinnipiac.edu. I generally try to reply to emails in less than 24 hours, even on the weekends. If it has taken me longer than this to reply, do not be shy about resending.

You should install the most recent version of Skype on your computer, so that we can have text, audio, or video chats. It is important that you are running the most recent version of the software, as it includes the ability to share your screen, which can be invaluable in looking through problems or code. My Skype account is “halavais”. You are welcome to chat with me whenever I am online, though I may not be able to engage in a full conversation if I am working on (or with) something (or someone) else. But I am always happy to set up an appointment to talk, if I am not immediately available.

I will have regular office hours at the Mt. Carmel campus in Faculty Office Building 23. [More about in-person meetings.]

Texts an Other Materials

There is no required text for this course, other than the materials you will find on course site at WWWti.me. However, many people are more comfortable with a physical book or other text in front of them. Therefore, I will include links to relevent pages at w3schools, as well as pages in:

Elisabeth Freemen & Eric Freeman, Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML. O’Reilly, 2006.

This book is a pretty solid overview, and subscribes to a similar philosophy to mine in terms of constructing sites for the web. There are a number of other books that are also good, and I’ve also used this one for previous courses:

Elizabeth Castro, HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition: Visual QuickStartGuide. Peachpit, 2006.

These will lead the student through the first half of the material covered in the course. The development of WordPress themes and other advanced topics will be linked to other resources both online and off.

There are some pieces of software that are useful for this course, including a good text editor and FTP program, but these are all free.

You will need access to a web server that can support PHP, as well as access to a MySQL database. Note that this means that the QU student webspace is not suitable for some of the work required in the course. If you are a regular ICM student, you should already have an account on the quicm.net server. If you don’t–or if you don’t remember your password–please get in contact with me.

Course Structure: Instructional Content

Unlike other courses I teach, online and off, this course is largely self-paced. The idea is to work through the core materials in time for the end of the course, and ideally beyond the core materials. As a result, you will be engaging in three areas.

First there are a series of posts, with both video and text components, on the companion site for the course: WWWti.me. These are divided into a total of seven units, as follows:

1. Creating a Website with XHTML
2. Styling Elements and Basic Layout in CSS
3. Advanced CSS and Layout
4. Forms and Basic Templates
5. Basic CMS Installation and Use
6. CMS Theming
7. Databases and Javascript

These must be mastered in order, but may be completed at whatever pace you like. If you already have some facility in some of these areas, you may be able to move through the instruction more quickly.

When prepared, your knowledge of the material in each unit will be demonstrated by completing an exam and practicum. The practicum usually consists of a simple variation of the work included in the instructional component, and is completed before the timed exam. To continue on, students must provide an acceptable practicum, and answer at least 90% of the questions correctly on the exam. If they do not pass the exam or practicum, they may retake it 48 hours later.

60% of the final course grade is based on how much of this material, in total, is completed. Completing 1 results in a D, completing 2 results in a C, completing 3 results in a B-, completing 4 results in a B, completing 5 results in a B+, completing 6 results in an A-, And students who complete all units successfully will receive an A.

I reserve the right, if a substantial number of students are unable to complete the entire set of instructional material, to adjust this grading criteria, but in no case will it be made more strict. That is, if every student receives an A, that is perfectly acceptable, but if none do, I may adjust the grading.

Course Structure: Final Project

In addition to engaging in the didactic content, you are expected to create a substantial website demonstrating mastery of the skills learned in the course. In order to effectively create this site, you are expected to provide the following materials.

1. A sketch of the site

At least five weeks before the end of the course, you are expected to provide a sketch of the site you plan to implement, including an outline providing the number of pages, an inventory of the assets you will need for each of these pages (graphical elements, text, etc.), either a sketch or graphical comps of the layout for each of the pages, and an indication of the back-end you may be using (if any). At this point, you should indicate the difficulty level you are aiming for in the site.

2. HTML comps

At least four weeks before the end of the semester you will be asked to provide a core version of the site, not including any styling necessarily. Real text and images need not be present at this stage, even if they will be included in the final version of the site. The site should load and link appropriately, and each page should produce valid code.

3. Full comps

At least a week before the final deadline, a fully functional and styled site should be presented. This should include all specified functional elements as well as any content (if part of the original plan).

4. Redraft

If there are elements missing from the full comps that would result in it not meeting the initial specification, you must fix these by the project deadline. If they are fixed (or already present in the full comps), you will receive the full agreed grade for the project.

Again, this is a mastery project, and the grade on the project will depend largely on the difficulty of the work undertaken. When proposing your site, you will be asked to indicate the grade you are seeking to achieve. It may seem odd to aim for a grade lower than a B on the project, but difference in the effort, expertise, and time required between a B and an A is substantial, and for those who would prefer to do less, the “B-level” project may be an attractive option.

Any project that does not meet the requirements for a B will receive a zero (F). The only way to receive a grade of D, D+, C-, C, or C+ is if you miss a deadline. Late projects’ final grades are reduced by one-third letter (e.g., from B+ to B), and then another one-third letter for each subsequent 24 hour period.

To acheive a B grade, the site must function correctly, and not produce any errors when run through a validator. It must make use of standard XHTML, and a CSS stylesheet, but that stylesheet need not be at all extensive or include layout. The site must consist of a minimum of three different pages, appropriately linked to one another, and must employ at least one image.

In addition to those requirements, for a B+, a site must include some form of CSS layout (e.g., be multi-column), and styling of a menu of some form. It should make conscious use of appropriate fonts and the textual content should clearly be visually differentiated in different sections.

For an A-, in addition to the elements already described, the site should make use of WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla for the backend, and should employ an original theme. This may be layered on top of existing content (e.g., the student’s ICM 501 blog), if desired, or “lorem ipsum.” However, the templates for the pages should be substantially altered from their existing form.

For an A, in addition to the above elements, the student should employ both jquery and draw in extensive external tools, plugins, or modules to extend the core functionality of the CMS system.

The grade on the final project constitutes 30% of the final grade.

Course Structure: Participation

Generally, participation is measured simply by the comments on the lectures. Simply asking a clear question will increase your participation score. Providing a clear answer will increase it more. Ideally, your contribution here allows me to effectively improve the “text” found on the site. If you actually do a substantial rewrite that I can incorporate as part of the text, on several of the pages, that would constitute a clear “A”. If you merely ask a few good questions, that is enough for a B. Your participation makes up 10% of your final grade.

Policies

Help. You are strongly encouraged to draw on each other for help and support. Indeed, part of your grade (participation) is based on how much you do this. There are three caveats here. First, you must write every piece of your final project and be able to explain why it is there. Second, you may receive no help on exams, or discuss the questions openly. Third, you may not pay anyone to aid you in developing work for the class.

Attribution. You should not make use of copyrighted material without permission. When you do make use of work, whether or not it is copyrighted, you should acknowledge the source. When others help you to understand something or make your site work, you should clearly acknowledge that help in the site itself.

Work for other classes. You are permitted to make use of any prep work you did in ICM 501 or 502 to build on in this course. It’s likely that other classes will explicitly allow you to make use of your final project in 505 as well. However, unless such explicit use is allowed, you must have permission of the instructor in order to get credit for the same work in multiple courses.

Incompletes. As noted above, your grade in the course is largely determined by what you manage to complete in the given time period, and for the final project, there are substantial penalties for late work. Please bear this in mind, and recognizing that unexpected events always occur, do your work well in advance of deadlines. Because of the structure of the course, incompletes will not be available.

See lkl for more information.

I’m leaving Diigo only reluctantly, after a year of using it in classes and on my own. I still love it, but more in concept than in practice. The concept, if you aren’t aware, is that with the Diigo toolbar, you can highlight and annotate any web page. Yes, there are other ways to do this, but I liked this functionality as a small extension to the existing bookmarking that can be done on Delicious and similar systems. When they acquired Furl, I was even more excited. I always though Furl was under-appreciated as a service.

It seemed particularly well suited to education. How great to be able to comment at the sentence-fragment-level of a student’s blog post. Think of the conversations that can be built up around annotating a reading together. And in fact I’ve used it for three courses, and really built one course around Diigo. When you submitted an assignment: you used Diigo to tag. When you had questions about a lecture: more Diigo.

What was outstanding in theory just hasn’t made it to practice. And the annoying part is that it really isn’t something major. It’s nothing that I could point at and say: fix this and it would be perfect. It’s the little things. Sometimes, when you do a whole lot of comments on a single page, the page loads can be really bogged down. Sometimes, when you highlight a section to make a comment, the highlighted section “jumps.” It seems like there are a lot of clicks needed to do just about anything. And, though I am generally tolerant of such things, the issue of plurals and odd English constructions on the site could be annoying. Sometimes the internal pagers didn’t quite work on groups.

But most of all, it fails the KISS test. Especially for a new student asked to use the service, the site itself can quickly become confusing. How do you find your own bookmarks? A group? How do you know when you are participating in a forum for a group or bookmarking something for it? Who can read your bookmark? When are you making a comment on a page? A general note for the page? A note on a specific piece of highlighting? It is a simple tool that has been split into a Swiss Army knife of applications and approaches. There is nothing wrong with some extendability and making tools do more, but the core functionality should be simple and clear, particularly to the first time user. And this is especially important in an educational setting, where you want students to be learning about the subject matter, not spending time fighting with a tool.

Delicious works fine for much of what I need to do. It’s a single-use tool, but it is quickly clear how it works. The folksonomies that emerge from Delicious can be complex, and there are interesting ways the tool can be employed, but the tool itself is simple, obvious, and doesn’t take up a lot of space on my computer, my bandwidth, or in my head.

I still have a Diigo account, and I’ll probably circle back to see how things have changed, but the toolbar is gone, and it won’t be showing up on syllabi anytime soon.

Now, I am naturally lazy–a trait I am trying to more actively cultivate, but I gather he had figured that because I haven’t been blogging or tweeting or doing any of those other sorts of continual status updates I must be slacking. As usual, my blogging (including micro-blogging) is inversely proportionate to how busy I am, not the other way around. There is a small caveat: sometimes it is an indicator that I am procrastinating, and therefore should be busy. On very rare occasions, when the stars align, it is actually linked to progress on a project, but generally speaking, silence on this front should never be taken as indication that I am actually relaxing a little.

On the other hand, the number of hours I have each week to work on projects is somewhat limited by being the daytime parent (with some help) of Jasper. This remains my priority, and though it sometimes means sacrificing things I would like to do, there is never going to be another time to hang out with my six-month-old, so he wins. As it is, I wish I could spend even more time with him.

In what seems to be a perennial sort of post, here are some of the projects I’m working on right now, besides raising the future benevolent dictator of our solar system:

• Writing Course at Quinnipiac University. I’ve been dragged–somewhat against my will :)–into teaching the “writing for interactive” course this summer. Actually, the content of the course isn’t what puts me off: it’s that (a) it is in the summer, and I would like to reserve summers for research and projects and (b) it’s 5 weeks long. It is hard enough to teach a course in 15 and have students not feel overwhelmed. When you compress that into 5 weeks–and it’s the same number of credits, so I think we should hit the material at the same depth–it is just impossible. So, dealing with that tension, particularly in a writing course, is going to be difficult. I also need to revise my fall seminars. I’m organizing one of my courses around reading and annotating Little Brother, as well as heavily revising my intro (ICM 501) course. (I have also felt a recent disruption in the force in the ICM program, which will probably require even more cycles being put toward re-keeling it.)
• Digital Media & Learning Hub. I haven’t been talking publicly in any organized way about this, but some of you know that I have been working with the DML Hub, a group constituted to improve collaboration among researchers funded by the MacArthur’s Digital Media and Learning initiative. I’m working with a team to create a DML Collaboratory site for researchers, as well as an external site that will seek to gather the current state of the art in one place. I’m also in the early stages of working with a group to establish some norms of sharing data, particularly qualitative data. I’ll actually be blogging a bit about this latter project in the coming week, and probably tweeting a little about the Collaboratory and that process.
• Twittering and Protesting. Happy to have the opportunity to work with Maria Garrido again, this time on a project that tracks the ways in which Twitter is being used to both build identity and coordinate action. This is one of two papers that I’ve promised for the AoIR meeting next year. Will be blogging a bit as it develops. This is also one of two Twitter-related research pieces I’m working on, both at early stages.
• Association of Internet Researchers. In the short term, setting up a registration site, but I am desperately hoping that I can get the Exec behind using this in the long term as well. It would make my life so much easier, and everyone else’s as well! Still doesn’t solve the paper submission and refereeing system issues, but I really hope we are able to move to a different system for that next year. Looking forward to talking to next year’s organizers about how to make that work out a bit better.

A lot of other things are right on the cusp of needing to be done, but I’m trying to keep my head clear of them for the moment. It really doesn’t seem that bad when it’s spelled out as above. Of course, tthere are the other pending things: three book projects, whipping some old research together into publishable form, a grant proposal sometime later this year, various talks, digitizing my library, etc. But I’m trying to keep those things out fo mind, wherever possible.

Materials

All learning is, in some sense, autodidactic. This is particularly true of reading: one of the best ways we have to communicate with the most brilliant minds, even when they are long dead. I don’t pretend to be one of those brilliant minds, but I am happy to talk to whoever will listen. So, as I build courses, I try to include materials that can be viewed by as many people as possible. This means creating video and audio lectures that are free of charge to watch, and available out on the web in various ways.

These are intended for you to use to learn more about a topic, and to teach others. My restrictions, expressed through a Creative Commons license, are that you shouldn’t profit from the materials by selling them, and you should make clear that I am the author. While part of the reason I do this is because access to knowledge is an important contribution I can make to humanity, it is also a selfish act. I’m hoping that the widespread distribution and use of these materials will bring glory to me and to my university. But I also hope they will bring something equally important: good conversations.

Participation

I also invite you to come into our classroom, at least the part of our classroom that is online. (If you try to come into my physical classroom without a direct invite, you are likely to be tackled by overzealous security guards.) I believe not only “the more the merrier,” but “the more the smarter.” Now, you might say, shouldn’t classes–especially grad classes–be the purview of the intellectual elite?

I’m not sure I am in the best position to judge how smart anyone is, but I do know that the best students I’ve had are the ones who are interested in learning the material of the course more than any extraneous (grades, credit) rewards. So, I figure that if you want to be part of the class, you are welcome to, within the bounds of any limited resources. What does that mean?

Well, obviously QU students come first, and occasionally those courses are already way bigger than they should be. In that case, I may not have time to look at your work. These are, after all, donated cycles of my time, and therefore I can’t guarantee them. Likewise, if there is something (other than my time) that the university provides directly, I clearly cannot pass that benefit on to students in the class who are not matriculating at QU.

As a practical concern, I’m sure that there are other reasons someone might not be included, but I can’t think of them now. I guess, although IANAL, I can fake it: you’re part of the class only insofar as I decide you are, and I can boot you at any time.

Credit

While I know you are the sort of person for whom academic credit just doesn’t matter, for some people it does. Luckily, there are two options for doing work in once of my classes without becoming a student at QU. The first is to sign up through QU Online to take the course as a non-matriculating student. This makes you a bona fide member of the course from QU’s perspective, and gets you credit that you may be able to transfer to another graduate program. (Note, most graduate programs have a limit of transfer credit, including ours, even if you take the courses here. That is, there are only so many you can take as a non-matric student and still have it count if you decide to apply to the degree program.)

The second way you can do this is to reach an agreement with your supervisor to take directed study credits from her at your home university, while engaging in the coursework in my class. Show her the syllabus and other materials, and she will check your progress. I’m happy to coordinate with her directly on this, if you like.

Please do not hesitate to contact me or comment below if you have questions. I hope to see you in my courses!

Update 6/20: Had a couple of requests for “what courses are you talking about?” I actually wrote the above with the intent of linking to it from future courses, including a writing course next month, and my “Intro to Interactive” and a course based on extrapolating out some of the issues from Little Brother that I’m teaching in the fall. However, the two courses I taught in the spring were open as well:

Web Programming (ICM 505)
Search Engine Society (ICM 542)

I’ll be revising and teaching the former again this spring, and the latter is in a bit of limbo. I’ll link to future courses when they are ready.

As a result of this process, I’ve been trying to decide what (if any) book to use. My normal assignment in introductory courses is Strunk & White, and it may end up being so again this time. But I’m going to take a closer look at On Writing Well as an alternative.

This is after considering Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams. The book is widely acclaimed, and I could see why. Many of the issues addressed (or, rather “he addresses” :) ) would be familiar to those of us who read a lot of student work. But then I started reading his “corrections” of existing academic work, and got a bit worried.

One of his examples draws from Talcott Parsons, a sociologist celebrated as much for his terse and verbose style as for his role in establishing functional structuralism as the dominant paradigm in the middle of the last century. Williams suggests that there is no need for the complexity. He takes this passage from Parsons:

Apart from theoretical conceptualization there would appear to be no method of selecting among the indefinite number of varying kinds of factual observation which can be made about a concrete phenomenon or field so that the various descriptive statements about it articulate into a coherent whole, which constitutes an “adequate,” a “determinate” description. Adequacy in description is secured in so far as determinate and verifiable answers can be given to all the scientifically important questions involved. What questions are important is largely determined by the logical structure of the generalized conceptual scheme which, implicitly or explicitly, is employed.

Mostly in the context of a discussion of subjects and active/passive verbs, he changes this to the much clearer:

If scientists have no theory, they have no way to select from among everything they could say about something only that which would fit into a coherent whole, a whole that would be “adequate” or “determinate.” Scientists describe something “adequately” only when they can verify answers to questions that they think are important. They decide what questions are important on the basis of the theories that they implicitly or explicitly use.

Now, I am far from an expert on Parons’s thought, but this seems to me to be a wholly inaccurate paraphrasing of the original paragraph. Williams has taken “varying kinds of factual observation” and rephrased it as “everything they could say about something.” Less jargon? Of course. But it also means two different things. “Kinds of observation” have little to do with “ways of saying.” Moreover, Williams collapses “theoretical conceptualization” with “theory.” The two, I suspect, were not the same thing for Parsons. Likewise “generalized conceptual scheme” is not the same thing as “theory.” In a work of sociological theory, conflating the two is highly suspect.

While we’re at it “scientifically important” is not the same is “what they [scientists] think are important.” Sure, we could enter into a debate over whether they may be the same (i.e., there is no ideal of “scientific importance” beyond that which is agreed upon by the plurality of scientists), but I doubt this is what Parsons is intending to suggest.

Williams goes on to rephrase it further:

To describe something so that you can fit it into a whole, you need a theory. When you ask a question, you need a theory to verify your answer. Your theory even determines your question.

This is pablum. If a grad, or even an undergrad, wrote the above in a basic theory class, I’d fail them on the spot. I’ll admit, Parsons did not write in a way that was particularly comprehensible. But you don’t “fix” that by tossing out the meaning of whole phrases, and “dumbing down” the material. This is precisely why it’s frustrating when students read Spark Notes. Williams concludes that

The simplest version may omit some of the nuances. But Parson’s excruciating style must numb all but his most masochistically dedicated readers.

He’s right, it does. But at least there is some implication that there is a there there, that Parsons has something to say. No copy editor would keep his job if he suggested changing the first version to the last. This is more than moving away from passive verbs, it’s stripping the paragraph of its meaning.

I continue, hoping that this was merely a brief lapse. But no, in the very next section, Williams suggests that a better version of

Early childhood thought disorder misdiagnosis often occurs as a result of unfamiliarity with recent research literature describing such conditions.

would be

Physicians are misdiagnosing disordered thought in young children because they are not familiar with the literature on recent research.

The idea here is that noun chains should be broken up. Again, if I read this in a paper from a student, I would assume it was written by a non-native speaker. I am not a doctor, but I suspect that “early childhood thought disorder” is a term of art. It doesn’t actually mean “disordered thought,” but rather the alternative meaning of disorder: that is, according to OED “a disruption of normal physical or mental functions.” I am shocked that anyone could confuse the meaning so thoroughly. Sure, pull misdiagnosis out of that long phrase, but don’t make the sentence incomprehensible to its target audience. Likewise “research literature” is fine. If you have to fix it, remove “research” or “literature” rather than changing it to the awkward “literature on recent research.”

So, in case the above does not make this clear, I cannot assign this book to my students. If you have better suggestions, please let me know.

I’ve recently posted something complaining that the university provided little that couldn’t be had from a local Panera Bread. That was meant, in some small part, as a “modest proposal.” Ideally, the university is very much a place, somewhere that encourages the life of the mind, home for a special kind of intentional community. The question is not whether universities of today will end: they will, either with a whimper or a bang. The question is what comes next.

Some suggest that Kaplan and Walden will replace them, or that corporate universities will. Unfortunately, many of these are the same folks who think universities should only teach the “useful arts.” The reason online-only universities like Kaplan and Walden do not have better reputations–and let’s be clear here, they simply do not–is not merely that they are online. Rather it is because few have managed to escape the idea that online education tends to be training, rather than some broader form of enlightenment.

There is nothing wrong with training; training is necessary and important. Learning particular skills represents an important resource for any individual to draw on. But that is not enough on its own. You can learn, by rote, all of the grammatical rules there are to know, but that doesn’t allow you to tell a story. A large part of what results from a good university education is not predictable and nor should it be. We want to allow people to do things that they didn’t know they could, and that we didn’t know they could. Kaplan may very well provide outstanding opportunities for training, and should be applauded for that. But there will remain a need for people who have been engaged in an intellectually challenging conversation, and so far, universities are one of the few places this can be found consistently.

If I taught a truncated online version of Social Media CoLab for 6 weeks, no accreditation, what would students pay?

In particular, I tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to relocate a small grad seminar to the local Panera Bread. I was struck by the fact that by doing so, I improved a lot on the “classroom” experience (as it has in the past when I taught a senior seminar at a local brewpub–though this introduces some other issues). We had more comfortable seating, better and more convenient food and snacks, a better net connection, and parking steps from our classroom. There was a Barnes & Noble next door, as well as some of the other big box shops within easy reach. No, we didn’t have a white board or data projector, but that was survivable–we could use paper or shared documents on our computers. What did we need the university for?

Unneeded

When it comes to online teaching, the question is even more pointed. I am a thorn in the side of my online division because I don’t like to use Blackboard. I’ve yet to find a faculty member who likes Blackboard, but I get a lot of “it’s better than nothing.” I’m actually not sure that’s true. But in any case, there are better tools available (many for freee!) out on the wild, woolly web.

There is the issue of the library, and our expensive subscriptions. Hard to get around this one, except to note that there are an increasing move toward open scholarship that provides good text-like material and opens up research. And, frankly, students rarely use the library anyway, unfortunately. And at least in NYC, our public libraries are pretty decent for academic research.

University administrators will add that they provide all sorts of other things beyond classrooms and libraries: dorms, a registrar, health and counseling, faculty support, specialized labs, administration of grants, and the like. What they won’t tell you is that university administrators are paid far better than faculty are for what they do. I won’t dismiss the amount of work that administrators do, from faculty administrators like department chairs all the way up. But I am pretty sure that we could do without that work.

The key issue, then, is accreditation. If accreditation could be based entirely on what students know when they get out, we would have no problem. Unfortunately, accrediting bodies are interested in process as much as outcome. And the question on many students’ minds is “can I get credit for this?” I can picture a peer-review system that would “certify” particular teachers, courses, and even programs, entirely outside of the orbit of the university, though the question of “what peers?” is always at the forefront. I have a feeling that in a decade or so, this idea will seem commonplace. Another alternative model is the creation of an institute (in some form) that can borrow credibility, and even faculty and for-credit course offerings, from a friendly university. This is pretty common for summer institutes offered at the graduate level. Finally, although there are issues with certification from corporate universities, I can see a Panera U (or, more likely, a Google U) building their brand through an educational arm.

Professor Pay-per-play

I am not about to complain about what I get paid. I choose to do this job, and the perks outweigh the minor inconveniences. My paycheck is better than that of the average worker in the US, but far worse than the pay for many (doctors, lawyers) with less specialized training than I have. So, I don’t want this to sound like whining about my salary–it’s not. If that were the primary issue, I would muster out, amakudari style, into industry, or supplement more heavily with consulting.

Yet, the question remains: when I am creating much of the content for students and engaging in teaching, what part of their tuition dollar do I deserve? As a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, my salary and benefits make up about 45% of what the students are paying for a course. (Some quick Googling backs this up as a reasonable approximation of the percentage of the operating budget coming our way as faculty.) At that rate, I am probably way, way ahead of the average prof, though that’s always hard to gauge. I mean, when I was teaching an undergraduate course of 350 students, even at a public school that percentage was a much lower proportion of the tuition dollar.

So, what if we were to pay the professor directly. I can offer you the class I teach at Quinnipiac at half-price. Heck, you bring cash in an envelope to each class, and if you decide to drop out, you just stop coming/paying. Maybe I give you a discount for paying all up front. This sounds terrible to many. Professors touching money?! But it is all too easy to forget that education is big business, and that business is built on the work of the profs.

But then what of open education

Of course, you don’t have to pay for my online course, anyone can take it. Really, if you pay Quinnipiac, you are mainly paying for official credit from the university, indicating that you have taken the course. Unaccredited universities lack the kind of reputational boost that most people want out of a degree. It is easy to argue that I can only do this because I am employed by a university.

It’s true. I have a family to feed. I can’t just give courses for fun. I would, of course. Even if I were driving a truck, or whatever, I would still probably want an opportunity to teach. But since there are not a lot of openings for “public non-school teachers,” I would have to have a day job, or win the lottery.

I suppose I could use free courses to flog my book. Buy the book for $16, and you can be a part of my course. Unlock the director’s cut of the book, or something. But the truth is I would like to make the book as free as the course. In fact, if anything, I would rather it went the other way: publish the book for free, and collect some income for teaching. But somewhere in this equation, there needs to be a little money coming in.

Begging and Advertising

As much as I hate to admit it, I think the most likely model is not student-pays, but advertiser-pays. Textbook Media is one company providing ad-supported textbooks. Why not sponsored courses. Big banners on the blackboard. A short commercial at the outset. There are some obvious niche advertising opportunities here.

Does that make you a little queasy? Me too. But I suspect that this is because universities still manage to hold a sheen that textbook publishers may have once had, but have lost. Given the kind of market pressures that universities now face, the intrusion of ads may become more tolerable.

Those ads could take several forms. Maybe Panera does pay teachers to lecture and hold discussions. Or do teachers put AdSense on their online materials. Or movie theaters handle the tickets and give profs 75% of the take, making the rest on popcorn. At least for the equivalent of large lecture classes, advertising support makes sense. For seminars in which there is give and take, it makes more sense for people to pay directly for a coordinator. The specialized skills of making discussion work, along with expert-level subject knowledge, remain important marketable skills.

I’m using Diigo to organize the first course. I had originally planned on using Delcious, but Diigo has a nice notes function, which lets you put sticky notes on web pages. Yes, others have done this, but I like Diigo’s implementation, and I think it will work well for a class.

I had intended to use CommentPress in the other course, placing a copy of my book up (behind a wall) for students to comment on and discuss. I’d link to CommentPress, but Institute for the Future of the Book has temporarily taken down the site. I found a copy of the files, but haven’t managed to make them work. This is either because I’m dumb, or because (and some searching of the web suggests this may be the case) because CommentPress doesn’t play well with the newest version of WordPress.

Of course, I’m not the first to notice that the two approaches share some similarities. In fact, for many courses, Diigo actually makes more sense. But I was hoping to integrate CommentPress with Seesmic to allow for a video exchange of comments. Unfortunately, that looks pretty unlikely now.

So, here is me plea. Since I don’t want to have to replicate the functionality of Diigo, it would be cool if we could do embeds in Diigo bookmarks, or otherwise integrate video comments. It would be nice if this were accomplished within the next 48 hours or so, since we are at the beginning of a semester, but otherwise, by the end of summer. Thank you very much.

Or, is there some better way to sling this together?

I am already using self-assessment in all of my classes. Rather than giving letter grades, I will list the strengths and weaknesses of each student’s work, and leave the assessment–in terms of grade–until the very end of the semester. Of course, I would prefer to go all Evergreen, and have narrative grades make up the final grade in the class, but I don’t think this can happen at my university.

I have toyed with another possibility, which is not assigning a grade, but rather force-ranking students and revealing to them where they land on that ranking. As a matter of practice, in large undergraduate classes, I have often force-ranked assignments, in order to make sure that all my Bs were grouped together, all Ds together, etc., and that I hadn’t somehow mis-evaluated a project. Moreover, students can estimate their ranking when they see the histogram (when I provide one, which is rare). And at some essential level, this is what we are doing when we grade: my grades at QU are essentially a comparison of work I’ve seen at QU. It would be unfair to compare them to, for example, students in a top doctoral program, or students in 9th grade.

Nonetheless, I can’t decide whether the dire knowledge that your assignment was the worst in the class (or the third worst, or whatever) would be so depressing that you would just give up, or if it would spur you to get off the bottom of the list. According to an article that appeared in the Chronicle, a couple of universities have toyed with class rank and similar measures as alternatives to the all-mighty GPA, but these have generally fallen through.

I suspect, however, that class rank on assignments frankly would not change much from assignment to assignment, even if grades varied somewhat more. I wonder whether the stability of this rank over time would lead to extreme competition among students. My experience has been that under conditions of such competition (think law school) students actually tend to band together, and that may not be a bad thing.

In any case, I’m trying a structured non-grading approach to my courses next semester. If you’ve had success or failure in doing this, I’d be interested in your feedback.

Butler, R. (1987). Task-involving and ego-involving properties of evaluation: Effects of different feedback conditions on motivational perceptions, interest and performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 79(4), 474-482.

Ask any professor and they will tell you that some classes just “click.” When I was a TA, a decade ago (yikes), I would teach discussion sections–the same lesson plan four or five times a day. Sure, there was variation according to the content and the process, but there were also glum, depressing sections and sections that were lively and engaged, and it seemed to have very little to do with me. Sure I wasn’t the same person from section to section, but I was (I think) close.

So, what are some of the ingredients? Well, there are some things I might be able to control. For example, the room really makes a difference, I think. I hate the fact that we don’t have enough real seminar rooms to do seminars in. But this year’s course was in a room that I don’t like–tables bolted down and facing front–and that has hosted two of my favorite courses since I’ve been at Quinnipiac.

As much as I hate to say it, size matters. Despite my preference that seminar courses be around 12-14 people, the best grad seminars have always been those with around 20 people. I think that 19-21 range might actually be a sweet spot, though I have no idea why. At that size, I am unable to really give a lot of personalized feedback on the students’ work, but that doesn’t seem to hurt the learning environment as much as I would like to think.

It helps to have some really brilliant people in the class. That seems obvious, but it isn’t. I mean, logically, it would be good to have people all at the same “level,” but in my experience so far, the best classes are those in which there is a small number–3 or 4 people–who raise the level of discourse in discussions and set the bar for other students.

It is good to have “characters,” those who are interesting and throw a curve ball into the room. They don’t have to be the brightest students, necessarily (though often they are), but they need to be willing to inject themselves into the conversation and give everyone a bit of a kick in the side of the head now and then. I don’t mean a class clown–not exactly–but I do mean people who are showmen or women, who can carry an audience and know it, and who are also engaged in the material of the class.

It’s good not to have people who are either really stupid, but more importantly, best to avoid those who really don’t want to be there. I choose not-too-bright but engaged over bright-but-disengaged any day. It only takes one or two people who just obviously don’t want to be there to ruin a class, and I have rarely been successful in motivating these folks to jump in with us, at least beyond short periods of time. I don’t know what to do about this, but I need to review my strategies.

Ideally, the class feels like a group from an early stage. There are ways we could encourage this (expose them to an extremely stressful event, require a jumping in, or something like that) but it’s hard to know how to do this ethically. I’ve always been a proponent of something like a paint-ball day or skydiving early in the semester–some sort of physical, bonding experience. Short of this, it’s difficult to know how to get students to come together. Actually, a poor classroom experience does a great deal to create an esprit de corps, but that’s cutting off your nose to spite your face. Maybe we could have a sacrificial course at the beginning of a program: a really bad and demanding course taught be an adjunct that would require students to band together out of sympathy and survival. Maybe not.

I’ve always thought food helped to bind students together into a group, but this semester was pretty foodless, suggesting this is not the case.

I’ve also assumed that group projects had an impact, and they can, but students often seem to do better work and learn more when working alone than they do in a group. Let me reiterate: in my experience group work is not as good as individual work. I think in future courses I will encourage single-person projects, but will also group folks into peer support groups, who are charged with reading each other’s stuff, and the like. Not quite sure how to make the mechanics of that work, but it might be a good alternative to group projects.

So, how do you get a class that meets these requirements. One way is to cancel classes smaller than a dozen, even at the grad level. Actually, this is something the dean is pushing us to across the school, and it is particularly difficult in our program because we need to provide enough required classes to allow people to graduate in a timely way. It also plays against my own gut feeling that the smaller the class the better–a feeling that has not born out empirically.

Perhaps it’s a matter of just being thankful for a strong cohort, and for getting to work with a great group of students in all three of my seminars this semester. Hopefully, this does not portend an outlier on the other end any time soon.

After too many years at this job (I am in my mid-40s), I have grown to question higher education in ways that cannot be rectified by a new syllabus, or a sabbatical, or, heaven forbid, a conference roundtable. No, my troubles with this treasured profession are both broad and deep, and they begin with a fervent belief that most of todayâ€s college students, especially those that come to college straight from high school, are unnecessarily coddled. Professors and administrators seek to “nurture” and “engage” and they are doing so at the expense of teaching. The result: a discernable [sic] and precipitous decline in the quality of college students. More of them come to campus with dreadful study habits. Too few of them read for pleasure. Too many drink and smoke excessively. They are terribly ill-prepared for four years of hard work, and most dangerously, they do not think that college should be arduous. Instead they perceive college as an overnight recreation center in which they exercise, eat, and in between playing extracurricular sports, they carry books around. If a professor is lucky, the books are being skimmed hours before class.

I’m of two minds on the piece. Most of his critique is right on. And naturally, I think he is right that professors need to take responsibility for a good deal of this. But there is enough blame to go around.

As demonstrated over on Open Education (a great blog, by the way), colleges seem to be doing a pretty poor job of graduating students. So even with the anonymous “Mr. Smith’s” criticism that college has effectively been dumbed down, students still don’t manage to graduate. And I will be the first to note that at UB we graduated people who were functionally illiterate. The case may not be as extreme here at QU, but I have had graduate students–some of whom did their undergraduate work here–who said that they had never been required to write a research paper as an undergrad. That’s both scary and sad.

As I was leaving my offices last week, a freshman advisee came in to visit a colleague, and noted that she had blown off a meeting earlier in the day because she was too tired from partying on Thursday night. I was flabbergasted, but I’m not sure why. The six people scheduled to come in for advising on Friday before noon had been no shows.

It becomes a race to the bottom. Anyone who considers themselves a good teacher wants all of their students to succeed, but it is frustrating to have to teach things you expect to have been learned in high school in graduate seminars. It’s bad enough that for many students the high school experience is social rather than academic, now a bachelors degree consists of doing the bare minimum, just to get by. And communication programs have the unfortunate reputation (“football major”), of being less rigorous than many other programs, a reputation that is too often well-earned.

I see this reflected in my own syllabi. If I look at a syllabus from a decade ago, when I first started designing my own undergraduate courses, and compare that with something like the syllabus I just posted the differences are stark. Admittedly, this would be comparing senior level courses to freshman, but even leaving that aside, my expectations have plummeted. I am shocked to hear from students that I was their “hardest” professor, especially after I feel like my courses consist of a pretty light workload.

As “Smith” notes, there are a lot of reasons for this. The university seems to be most interested in keeping up the student-to-faculty ratio, and growing admissions. “Quality” in admissions, is always something to put off until we can afford to be more selective. Considering we accept nearly half our applicants (as opposed to the college down the road, with a 10% admit rate), and more than 70% of those graduate, I’m not entirely surprised at the mediocrity. Can you imagine what sort of improvement in the overall educational experience would occur if my university decided to shrink, accepting an incoming class of 650, rather than 1300? That would put our admit rate at lower than down the road in the other direction, as well as lower than places like Tufts and Barnard. Now, realistically, it would also make us a much tinier college, and given that most of our operating expenses come right out of tuition, it would mean we would have to also cut our expenses by 50%, which would be pretty much impossible (though killing off our intercollegiate sports programs would cushion that a bit).

Once students are admitted, we need to keep them happy so that they don’t either drop out or transfer. Many believe that this is a problem that is restricted to private institutions, and particularly with regard to Ivy League schools, you hear a lot about the difficulty in dropping out. If you have a pulse, you’ll graduate, probably with a B average. But even in public institution, funding is tied to how many students you can retain and teach.

Smith says “enough,” and is moving out of higher ed. I am not willing to give up on it, so how do we fix it?

1. Track especially talented students. I think a lot of universities have picked up on this idea, since it is helps with “selling” the university as well. It can be a hard sell: as a student do you want to be a big fish in a small pond? But from the faculty side, encouraging these kinds of “cadre” programs makes a lot of sense. Many of them are pretty weak programs, and I would like to see them cultivate high school students directly, and prepare teachers to challenge these especially able students, but at least it’s a good start.

2. Be the mean guy. I’ve played the heavy in most of my programs, taking on the first class and treating it as a “cut” class. Unfortunately, that’s no fun for anyone involved. I don’t like failing people, and it’s bad for the cohort. Too much stress is as damaging as too little. Even better, convince the whole faculty to grade more rigorously (good luck!).

3. Use student learning to assess faculty performance. Teaching evaluations are, perhaps, the stupidest waste of time ever. Sure, there are insights that can be gleaned by the professor who wants to improve his teaching, but too often these are just popularity surveys; we find out who the students like, but not who provides the best learning environment. A lot of learning is difficult to measure, but we need something other than student evals to do it.

4. Resist treating education like a business. I think faculties need to stand up to their administrators, and demand quality over quantity. University administration is going to be looking at the dollars: how much does it cost to educate a student. They see more ROI in investing in things like pretty buildings and sports stadiums than they do in the “softer” form of student achievement. We need to focus on ways of selling student achievement and making it more visible, and use that visibility to argue against the commodification of student experience, and the numbers game. Students are not hamburgers, and we should not be judged on how cheaply we can assemble them and pop them out.

Finally, I want to stress that I disagree with “Smith,” on the issue of fun. I think a demanding educational program can still be fun. I think there is a place for a nurturing learning community, and that teaching is more about figuring out how to get (trick!) students to learn than it is about instilling knowledge. The most interesting, exciting, and rewarding things in life are also the most challenging. There has to be some give and take, and if you can show students why you are passionate about learning, some of them will become equally passionate. If you concentrate on grades, they will too. Try to keep them on their toes.

Communication, Media, & Society
ICM/JRN 522, Fall 2008
Tuesdays, 18:30-21:10 (GMT-5), Buckman Center 137

Instructor
Alexander Halavais, 522@halavais.net
Skype, Google, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed: halavais
Telephone: +1.646.961.3526

Office Hours
Mon, 12:00 – 13:00 (GMT-5)
@ Video/Text: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/halavais

Tues & Weds, 16:30 – 18:00 (GMT-5)
@ QU Mt. Carmel Campus, Faculty Office Building 23

(Or by appointment.)

Introduction

The catalog description for this course is as follows:

This course focuses on the historical and contemporary state 
of personal and public interaction with popular media in the context 
of technological developments and the impact of these developments 
on society and culture. 

Students completing this course will study journal articles, survey 
the research literature, and write papers on the historical trajectory 
of  information consumption from the emergence of mass-produced 
paper-based texts to the development of the World Wide Web.

This has always struck me as an impossibly broad description. The advantage to this is that it allows some flexibility in what we focus on, and in previous versions of this course, I have successfully turned the planning of the course–to a greater or lesser degree–over to the participants in the seminar. (See the end of this document for a statement on the philosophy surrounding this approach to organizing the course.) Therefore, this initial syllabus is really only a temporary skeleton, to be fleshed out collaboratively on our first meeting. It is hosted on Google Docs, and we will be editing it on our first meeting. What is listed here initially is the “immutables”–things that due to the structure of the university, my own standards, or the description of the course must remain fairly strictly defined.

In terms of course content, we should cover:

• Some of the ways in which media affects (and is affected by) society and its coevolution with social structure.
• The evolution of media: how it changes over time.
• The history of mass, networked, and interactive media.
• The future of mass, networked, and interactive media.

I will be distributing (both online and in person) some resources that will help us to plan out a course. I’ll ask you to brainstorm before our first meeting as well. We will find a topic, or topics, that allow us to dig deep into a particular historical or contemporary issue and make connections to social effects and the media environment.

Schedule

We are scheduled to meet on the following dates. We may choose to group some of these meetings together into “modules” or split some of them into parts, depending on what we want to uncover and how.

Week 1: Tuesday, August 26 – Brainstorming and Writing the Syllabus – BRING A LAPTOP!

Objectives for our first meeting:
* Introductions: who are we?
* Mini-lecture: “Society and Communications Media: Some Highlights”
* Syllabus: brainstorming topics. Clear questions we want to get at.
* Syllabus: schedule. Who is doing what and when.
* Syllabus: assignments. What do you need to do for the course and how are you assessed?
* Syllabus: reading assignments. What do we need to be reading.

Week 2: Tuesday, September 2 –

Week 3: Tuesday, September 9 –

Week 4: Tuesday, September 16 –

Week 5: Tuesday, September 23 –

Week 6: Tuesday, September 30 –

Week 7: Tuesday, October 7 –

Week 8: Tuesday, October 14 –
(Please note that on this date the instructor will be out of the country. You can meet without me, I can try to attend via Skype, we can bring in a guest to work with, or we can figure out another alternative.)

Week 9: Tuesday, October 21 –

Week 10: Tuesday, October 28 –

Week 11: Tuesday, November 4 –

Week 12: Tuesday, November 11 –

Week 13: Tuesday, November 18 –

Week 14: Tuesday, December 2 –

All assignments in: December 9
(Because the instructor is expecting his first baby this week, he’ll need every moment he can to get the grading done. Therefore, all material for the course–including a final project or exam if we decide to have one–must be in by the 9th so that he can get grades in on time for the semester.)

Assignments

The assignments should be things that we think will make for the best learning experience in the course.

There are some special, baseline requirements that we must meet:

At least some of the material we engage in each week must be of expert-level quality. This means peer-reviewed journal articles and the like. We can certainly draw in more popular stuff as well, as this can often help to uncover interesting perspectives and point us in interesting directions. Indeed, in most of the previous 522s we have made use of an “organizing text” of popular fiction or nonfiction, and then found more scholarly work that related to it in order to dig a bit deeper.

As the catalog description indicates, writing makes up an important part of this course. As a minimum, each student is expected to write about 7,500 words during the semester. A significant proportion of that writing should be scholarly–that is, written in a style that would be acceptable for a scholarly journal, and supported with evidence from the scholarly literature. We will decide as a group how best to split up this writing. It could consist of a single, long paper, or as 750 haikus, or some mixture of these. This work might take on a more collective nature. We could do our own research and write a paper for publication. Last semester, the class wrote a book.

If it isn’t clear from the structure of the course, the instructor also thinks that conversation and discussion are an important part of learning. I hope we can assign some part of the final grade to participation in the class.

Evaluation

Evaluation has a couple of meanings, and though they are united, some see them as different: feedback and letter grades.

In terms of feedback, the instructor will do his best to give you expert-level evaluations of your work, and suggest ways of improving it. In areas where his expertise is weak, he will clearly indicate this, and in planning for the course, we should try to avoid those areas as much as possible.

In terms of letter feedback, I suppose there may be an impulse, since you are determining the structure of the grading, to just toss out the grades all together and say “everyone gets an A.” We can’t do that for a few reasons. First, I (Alex) am untenured, and that would run far enough against the standards of the university that they would probably give me the boot. Second, I (Alex) have tried this in the past, and it did not work out well. Even though it seemed like a good idea at the outset, people who did work in the class were resentful toward those who did not, and that sort of made the experience sour for everyone.

Short of that, I’m willing to discuss rubrics and other processes. I have some preferences, but will air these when we discuss the assignments evaluation process as a group.

Policies

We will arrive at an appropriate policy on late work and attendance as part of the above discussion. However, the following are not open to negotiation:

At the beginning of the course we will discuss the problem of plagiarism and proper citation. At its root, plagiarism constitutes misrepresenting the authorship of work for a course. If you make use of another’s ideas, this must be cited. If you make use of words and phrases that are substantially similar to another’s work, you must cite this. If you make use of phrases that are identical to another’s, regardless of the length of the phrase, you must place these in quotation marks. The following resources will be of help in understanding what constitutes plagiarism:

Plagiary and the Art of Skillful Citation: http://www.ece.mtu.edu/faculty/rmkieckh/cla/3970/Rodgers-plagiary.pdf

Writing With Sources: http://www.rochester.edu/College/honesty/docs/harvard_guide/index.htm

Please also refer to the Quinnipiac University Academic Integrity website (http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1046.xml) for information about Academic Integrity and proper student behavior. Students are expected to be familiar with these university policies. Forms of dishonesty include:
* cheating or helping another to cheat on an exam
* using a paper authored by someone other than yourself
* plagiarizing another’s written work (papers or outlines), in full or in part, including failure to properly cite all sources
* deliberately distorting information
* falsifying information (e.g., reason for absence)

Students found guilty of any of the above will be subject to sanctions, usually a failing grade for the course, and will also be reported to the Academic Integrity Board.

Students with disabilities who wish to request reasonable accommodations should contact: John Jarvis, Coordinator of Learning Services in the Learning Center, Tator Hall Room 119 at (203) 582-5390 or at john.jarvis@quinnipiac.edu. More information may be found at http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1168.xml . Quinnipiac University complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.

I generally do not offer “Incomplete” as a grade, and when I do, it is only under extraordinary circumstances, and when the work up until the last several weeks of the course has been of a quality that would suggest the student would have otherwise received a passing grade in the course. Please carefully assess your grade by the last date for withdrawal (October 31), and consider withdrawing if you are not receiving a passing grade.

Course Philosophy

Why am I not just providing a finished syllabus in this course? In fact, I do this in most courses, but I have had success with this method in this course in the past. Frankly, providing a ready-made syllabus is a lot easier for me, as an instructor. For one thing, it means I only have to design a course once, and then can re-use it over and over. That sounds bad, but there are some advantages to it, including the potential making small tweaks and improving it over time. However, there are some real advantages to starting the semester without a syllabus as well.

You should be given the privilege of playing a significant role in helping to decide where your mind is going. I don’t think my attitude should be: “This is my course, follow me or get off the bus.” I think, given the time investment I am asking you to make, the dedication to the course, you also deserve a strong voice in its direction. Teachers like to talk about the “guide on the side” in opposition to the “sage on the stage” (see King, 1993). I’m not sure I want to be on the side, but I also don’t want to be the only one in the room that gets to talk or create. I want to engage in learning too, and I think it’s better for students when I do.

I think I can immodestly call myself an expert in this subject area. That’s not because I’m especially smart, but rather because I’ve chosen to devote more time and energy in reading about, thinking about, and doing research in the area than most people have. That doesn’t mean I have all the answers, but it does mean that I have some wisdom that can be helpful to you in your own quest for knowledge. What I am not an expert in is you, your experiences, and your passions. You may not be an expert in those things either, but they are worthy pursuits of your energies. In a one-on-one situation, we could explore your own interests directly; in a seminar, we can engage in some push-and-pull, and come up with a plan of study that reflects some of your interest, and maybe introduces you to some things you didn’t know were interests. In the end, we find a set of objects of curiosity for us all to share.

Note: it’s a trap. I’m transparent enough to tell you ahead of time that I plan on tricking you. I know the kung fu of connections. I know that knowledge is connected in far less than six degrees. I am a ninja of networks, deity of the digression. I have the knack for nodes, a talent for tangents. In other words, I suspect that no matter how we enter the issue of media and society, and no matter how we make our way through it, there will be enough to see that we will begin to be able to map the whole; and that, after all, is my hope…

For look! Within my hollow hand,
      While round the earth careens,
I hold a single grain of sand
      And wonder what it means.
Ah! If I had the eyes to see,
      And brain to understand,
I think Life's mystery might be
      Solved in this grain of sand.

– Robert Service, “A Grain of Sand.”

References

King, Alison. 1993. “From sage on the stage to guide on the side.”College Teaching 41(1):30.

* Finishing up my new book, Search Engine Society. I’m putting the finishing touches on the index. All of it was desperately out of date the moment I wrote it, but that was inevitable. Luckily, Polity has been very good about turn-around timing on this. It’s due out in October, if the gods of printing allow. Indexing is more annoying than I thought. Can’t we just Google it?

* Research for a paper about Digg, and ratings. I had originally planned on writing this up in the form of a Dr. Suess book, but I think I’m headed for something a bit more traditional at this point. This actually follows a line of research from my dissertation, lo, so many years ago.

* Research for a paper about the use of hyperlinking in the rhetoric of extremism (and particularly racism) on the web. Again, this is a project that I’ve been thinking about for about a decade, but I’m only now getting things together for it.

* Early stages of planning to take the initial ideas I presented in a paper at NCA last year, about collaborative filtering, netroots, and the public agenda, and apply them to the presidential election. I want to finish this up sometime in, say, November.

* Organizing materials for my next book. Will be working on it over the next year or so. There are a three separate ideas I’ve been working on, but I think I’m going to look at the nexus of networked communication, learning, creativity, and government.

* I’m revising my “Intro Interactive” course. No, really. This will be the first time I have revised a course rather than starting pretty much from a clean slate. Very exciting. Hoping to outsource some of it, and interview some friends and former students to get a look at the interactive industry.

* I’m rewriting “Communication, Media, and Society” from scratch, trying to provide the means for doing my “students design the class” thing and still having it work for an online version.

* Early stages of planning for my spring courses: “Web Programming” and “Something Else.” There are several possibilities for my special topics, including: Search Engine Society (duh!), Surveillance, Virtual Worlds,

* I’ve been doing some prep on a major project, which will be my top priority when it launches later this year. Laying the foundation and doing some planning over the next few months. I’ll announce it formally on my birthday later this month.

But I haven’t been blogging. I’ll try to do better. Oh, and if I owe you something (refereeing, emails, invoices, money, the head of your sworn enemy), I’ll get to it. Just a bit bogged down right now.

Many of the people whom I have met who have benefited from an education at an elite school are bright but uninteresting. And they seem to believe that they are brighter and more accomplished than they actually manage to be. As long as I am painting with a stereotypical brush, I’ll note that in my experience, this is particularly true of graduates of Harvard and Yale, and least true of graduates of Princeton and Cornell. The funny thing is that these expectations are often born out.

I didn’t really think much about the Ivy League until I came to Quinnipiac. I attended state schools, and my impression is that there is a lot in common in terms of coursework between a large public school like the University of Indiana, and a large private, like Harvard. But the attitudes that Quinnipiac students hold toward Yalies, and the reverse, has brought into sharp focus the cultural capital held by Yale.

Every couple years, Yale’s student paper publishes a sort of “safari” piece on Quinnipiac students that always manages to set a colonial tone. (The most recent is awed by the fact that in their native habitat, Quinnipiac students seem to spend–gasp!–a great deal of time studying.) I have the feeling that for most Yale students, the experience of Quinnipiac students is utterly beyond their grasp. The gap here is not between the working class and the elite. Quinnipiac students generally come from “new money,” it seems to me: their parents are almost prototypical members of the bourgeoisie, sons and daughters of successful entrepreneurs, lawyers, and stockbrokers. That Yalies consider Quinnipiac students to be heavy partiers suggests they have never visited ASU or SDSU, but there is definitely a difference in what is considered an expected workload. Some of our best students rival the abilities of some of their best students, but our average student seems unsure of why he is in college, and unsure of what he wants to do afterward. (This is new for me: ambition seems more common both among children of the working poor in Buffalo and in a different way, among children of the aristocracy.) I chafe a bit at our emphasis of professional skills, but it seems likely that Yale graduates will be working with Quinnipiac graduates, and our students will probably teaching their students the nuts and bolts of professional practice. That Yale and Quinnipiac students can find so little common ground is an indictment of both institutions.

I think the article overplays this as endemic to the Ivy League. Students at almost every university seem to feel entitled to a high-paying job upon graduation, regardless of what they actually accomplish in school, and grade inflation in our own program rivals Yale’s. But he may be right that the graduate of an Ivy League school has been told so often that he is a member of the elite that he believes this as part of his being. Unfortunately, at least until mellowed a bit after graduation, this makes many students at Ivy League schools fairly insufferable to talk to.

Of course, there are exceptions. Many of my friends are survivors of Ivy League programs, and I don’t hold it against them in the least. Some of them even deign to read my blog ;). But unfortunately, since the Ivies tend to set the cadence for “aspirant” institutions, the problems outlined in this article seem to trickle down. When this is compounded with the fact that our political leaders are disproportionately products of these schools, it seems clear that an adjustment is needed.

If you want to see the significance problem first hand, visit a classroom and pay attention to the types of questions asked by students. Good questions are the driving force of critical and creative thinking and therefore one of the best indicators of significant learning. Good questions are those that force students to challenge their taken-forgranted assumptions and see their own underlying biases. Oftentimes the answer to a good question is irrelevant – the question is an insight in itself. The only answer to the best questions is another good question. And so the best questions send students on rich and meaningful lifelong quests, question after question after question.

Unfortunately, such great questions are rarely asked by students in an education system facing a crisis of significance. Much more common are administrative questions: “How long does this paper need to be?” “Is attendance mandatory?” Or the worst (and most common) of all: “What do we need to know for this test?” Such questions reflect the fact that, for many (students and teachers alike), education has become a relatively meaningless game of grades rather than an important and meaningful exploration of the world in which we live and co-create.

[…]

My job becomes less about teaching, and more about encouraging students to join me on the quest.

The article reads veers pretty nearly to my own teaching philosophy. I may be willing to give some ground–sometimes students have their own ideas of what they want to get out of the classroom, and they may be able to get me to join them for their quest, but in any case, the quest is the thing.