Blogging on the Brain

I recently had the pleasure of attending a session of Baylor’s Summer Faculty Institute, a program dedicated to the discussion and improvement of teaching practices at Baylor. This particular day, we heard Gardner Campbell speak about Information Communication Technologies (ICT) including the iphone, web2.0, delicious, twitter, blogging, kindles, ipads, etc. For those of you who may know Gardner, it was, as would be expected, a delightful look at the possiblities these technologies hold for us as teachers (and continual learners, for that matter). It was, however, very interesting to be in this room as at least some of the SFI participants were hearing about and seeing these things for the first time.

I was recently in their position; I had never used twitter or blogged before I began to work with the ATL, and just like my experience, there was quite a variety of  reactions. The position I resonated the most with was one that at least a couple of people spoke up about in the room – pretty strong skepticism. Before I got to know these technologies, I was pretty skeptical about their use for me personally as well as in the classroom (”don’t let kids have their laptops – or, God forbid, phones out during class, they’ll just mess around!”). Over the last year and a half, though, I’ve come to look at things very differently. While some may argue that the fast-paced nature of the internet/texting/etc. keeps you from slowing down or reflecting, I would argue that I’ve never reflected so much on anything as I have since I started blogging. As far as isolation, I actually came across a quote today (thank you, google quote-of-the day) that I think makes a pretty valid point about internet use:

“The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.” ~Esther Dyson

While it was a little hard to hold my tongue when people flatly objected to the use of these new technologies, I think that if they at least give these tools a chance and really look at the potential good they could accomplish, they’ll come around eventually. I think Gardner gave us a beautiful example of what the internet can provide when he showed us a youtube video of a “virtual choir” – 185 participants from 12 countries all made videos of themselves singing their part in the same piece of music while watching a video of the director. The videos were then all compiled to make the final product – a tribute, I think, to the incredible power that the internet has to bring us closer together and allow people to participate in something beautiful that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

My husband recently sent me a link to a very thought-provoking review of an article about college students struggling with an “addiction” to the internet (I’ll admit to having not read the actual research article yet, just this review of it). Apparently in this study, students gave up all forms of media (TV, internet, phones, etc.) for 24 hours. Many of these students (not very surprisingly) reported feelings like cravings and anxiety in the absence of their most common link to the outside world, as well as most of their entertainment.

To some, this reaction suggests that we should begin to think of internet overuse as a diagnosable disorder, something like drug or alcohol addictions. I think, however, this overlooks maybe the most fundamental part of the definition of an addiction: something that is significantly disruptive to your life, and negatively impacts quality of life. Now, just like most other things (food, alcohol, etc.) of course there’s something to be said for moderation, and I think in some cases, people probably rely on the internet/cell phones too much, but overall, I think you could argue for media – especially through the internet – improving subjective quality of life.

That being said, I do find it a tiny bit worrisome that these kids couldn’t go a day without media. I mean, if you can’t take a 24-hour time-out and go for a walk or read a book, that’s probably not so good either.

Well, today was my “Seminar for Excellence in Teaching” for this semester. The last couple semesters I’ve given talks on neuroscience and learning, but this semester I put together a presentation on learning disabilities in higher education, which was really, really interesting, but also a lot of work, as it’s significantly outside my area of expertise.

So I went about researching this topic pretty heavily the last month or so, and spent a lot of time putting together a presentation that I thought really got at the aspects of LDs that grad students and faculty would be interested in, and I was getting excited to give the presentation and interact and get feedback and all of that…and then two people showed up. There were 13 registered and two showed up.

Now, the two people that showed up were lovely people and engaged and discussed as we went through the presentation, but it was just one of those times that it felt like such a let-down to have worked so hard for what ended up being a fairly inconsequential event. Granted, I’ll most likely be giving this seminar again, so I guess I could think of it as something like a dry-run, but honestly, I’m disappointed. I don’t know if people forgot or just didn’t care to begin with – and it probably doesn’t help that I’ve been having serious attendance issues in the reading group I tried to start this semester too. I just feel like I haven’t had a “win” in a while now. Maybe that’s just what the end of the semester feels like.

Oh well. On the plus side, at least I got all the leftover pizza.

The end of a semester always brings on a lot of crazy times – students studying everywhere, faculty writing and grading finals frantically, and everything seems to reach sort of a fever pitch before dissipating for the summer. Another phenomenon we see as teachers is general student desperation on the rise. Whether in the form of round-the-clock studying, begging for extra credit opportunities, or your basic psychotic break, the students are freaking out. Unfortunately, I recently saw this take the form of cheating.

Now, I’m very, very solidly anti-cheating. I am, however, even more solidly against stupid cheating. I won’t go into details, as I don’t think I’m allowed to, but seriously, kids, give us instructors a little bit of credit – we do actually read your assignments and papers, and we absolutely will notice if you copy and paste another person’s work and hand it in as your own.

In addition to the frustration/irritation of the whole ordeal, we now have to 1. decide what to do with the students (fail them from the lab? give them zeros on the assignments in question? and 2. report them. As graduate students, however, we’re apparently not allowed to report these ourselves, even though we’re the teachers of record for the lab (I have no idea how this makes any sense). So now we have to work through the instructor for the lecture course that goes with the lab course, and the whole thing is turning into a giant time-suck (which is leading me closer and closer to the psychotic break option listed above).

Sigh. At least this round’s almost over.

Well, I think I may have found a new role model in Maxine Greene. Seriously, what a lady. Born in 1917, Greene managed to get  a BA in American history and philosophy in 1938 (not super common for women back then), and went on to get a masters, then PhD in the male-dominated field of educational psychology from NYU in 1955. Among other things, she was the first female president of the Philosophy of Education Society, and the first woman to preside over the American Educational Research Association. She has taught social philosophy, philosophy and history of education, literature, writing, and aesthetics. She now heads the Maxine Greene Foundation to support the arts and education.

Of the many, many ideas and philosophies Dr. Greene has developed in her career, I’d like to focus on just two. These are the two that struck me most as I read about her, so please don’t consider this in any way a thorough account of her work.

The first idea that I loved was that of one of her books, Teacher as Stranger (1973). The main idea, according to Greene is to “suggest that the stranger’s vision brought a kind of acuity unlikely to be found in a person whose vision was dulled by familiarity. In effect, I was asking the teacher to take the view of the critical onlooker, someone attentive to inequities, false pieties, groundless promises.” Basically, she challenged teachers to continually question the material they taught, and to keep themselves from becoming dulled to the information they imparted. I love this idea, that we as teachers should remain almost uncomfortable with the material in order to always look at it critically and with fresh eyes.

This leads me to the second idea that I loved – the role of the teacher in cultivating what Greene calls “wide-awakeness” in students. Part of our job is to teach our students that the possibility of learning is everywhere and that we have only to engage fully in the world and in our interactions with others to start seeing it. I only hope that I can someday cultivate that in my students!

If you haven’t read Freakonomics, you should. If you have read Freakonomics, you should read their blog. If you’ve read the book and the blog, you should listen to their podcasts.

If you’ve done all of those things, then you should eagerly anticipate the production of the Freakonomics documentary, like me! (To be produced by the same people that brought us Man on Wire and Food, Inc.)

For those of you back in the first category (those unfamiliar with Freakonomics), it’s this crazy fun book filled with what they refer to as “the hidden side of everything.” The authors work together (one is a journalist, the other an economist) to present data in a way I promise you’ve never thought of before. For instance, in one of their podcasts (which just recently started up), they talk about the dangers of increased safety measures. They look at the number of injuries, specifically concussions, in football players since the advent of good helmet technology – counter to what you might think, concussions are on the rise. Why? Mostly because football players now feel safe enough to use their heads as battering rams. They talk about the same sort of effect in Nascar – the cars are getting safer and safer, so the drivers are becoming more and more reckless.

In a different podcast, they talk about what the country would look like if economists ran it. One ecnonomist, when asked what the first thing he would do would be, replied something to the effect of “Well, I’d get rid of the Department of Education, because they’re not really doing any good, and I’d legalize all drugs and tax them.” So, that probably won’t get him elected, but it’s super interesting to hear about the numbers that really do back up the stuff they’re talking about.

This week’s podcast is about the authors’ first trip to Hong Kong – can’t wait to hear what they have to say!

So I think the presentation went pretty well! On Thursday, my fellow graduate fellow (Ashley Palmer) and I gave a presentation on blogging at Baylor’ s EdTech showcase. It ended up being a relatively small group (6 or 8 people) which was nice, as it felt much more informal and conversational. We talked about some of the issues that initially caused us some anxiety (technology, self-conscious writing, etc.) and it was good to realize how far I’ve come in the blogosphere since then.

I’m certainly still lacking in a lot of the technical aspects (I haven’t made any significant changes to my blog since I started it, you know, that whole “if it ain’t broke” thing…), but I feel I’ve moved past the paralyzing fear of judgment that kept me from blogging very frequently when I started. This is a good thing, I think, although it may lead to more grammatical errors, comma splices, and misspelled words for you to slog through. In addition, I have come to find blogging in itself a very rewarding and useful tool for me, which I wrote about a while back.

Anyway, as is usually the case after a presentation, I’m feeling all excited about this again. Maybe I’ll try changing some things up sometime, like *gasp* adding a new widget or something (don’t judge, that’d actually be a decent step for me!). At the very least, it feels good to want to blog. Hopefully that feeling will continue for a while!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the keynote luncheon at Baylor’s Educational Technology Showcase. The keynote speaker was Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium. In addition to his impressive background in education, Dr. Johnson is also, apparently, quite a talented photographer and used many of his own photographs as a part of his presentation, which I quite enjoyed.

His talk was entitled “Seven Channels of Change,” and it outlined seven ways that we’ll see computing/technology change in the coming years. Dr. Johnson could be considered an expert in this area, as he – with the NMC – have recently published their 14th edition of the Horizon Report, which outlines emerging technologies in education (and is currently being translated into 10 languages!). As an introduction to his talk, he used two photographs he had taken to illustrate what he wanted to get at.

Both were pictures of water, one of a small waterfall taken in 1/5000th of a second, the other a 5-second time-lapse of the stream that waterfall was a part of. He said that at any given point, the image we have of technology is like the short shutter-speed waterfall – it’s hard to tell what’s happening, what direction things are going it, and what the nature of the water is really like at all. He then said that what you can see over time (as in the long shutter-speed photograph of the stream) is how the water moves, how it gets around obstacles, and where it’s heading. I really enjoyed that analogy, and I think it also served to put us non-tech people at ease by showing us something that we could easily understand.

So here are his seven channels of change:

7. Computing in Three Dimensions: this allows for a level of precision in manufacturing, etc. that would be unattainable using any other method.

6. Games are Reality: He made the point that games have been used for centuries as tools for learning (he used the example of mancala, a very old game that essentially teaches how to count quickly), and we’re just talking about changing the method of delivery

5. Keyboards are for Old People: A very good point – keyboards really aren’t necessary for computing, we’ve just adapted to them because we were already used to the typewriter.  We’re already moving away from it with new interfaces like the iPhone/iPad that’s totally dependent on gestures. (Check out these videos of a new interface called sixthsense – crazy stuff!)

4. Users ARE the Content: This one is becoming more and more evident all the time (consider Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.) He also showed us all the options you can use on Google Maps (which I had previously been unaware of – look at the “more” tab in the window) which is entirely user-generated content.

3. Collective Intelligence is the New Knowledge: This is related to #4 above, in that we don’t do things like read critics’ reviews of restaurants anymore, we read reviews of “normal people” that have been there.In addition, a lot of us “hear things first” through social networking sites like facebook or twitter, not the news.

2. The Network is Everywhere: As seen from space, the area of cell-phone (and therefore internet) coverage is actually more encompassing that the electrical grid, which is pretty impressive.

1. The People are the Network: The internet really isn’t about connecting to files or folders or printers anymore as much as it’s about people connecting with other people.

So overall it was a very enlightening and very enjoyable presentation! Today is the second day of the Showcase, and Ashley and I will be giving a presentation on blogging, which I’ll be sure to blog about later!

Phoebe Prince

I saw an article in the New York Times yesterday that 9 teens have been charged with a variety of felony charges in the suicide case of Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old high school student who hung herself in January after being subjected to serious harassment by her classmates. Apparently Phoebe had just transferred to the school (in Massachusetts) from Ireland that fall, and after briefly dating a popular senior at the school, several students started taunting her, threatening her, and spreading rumors about her. The day of her suicide was particularly bad, with a car of students following her home, calling her names, and even throwing a soda can at her. From what I heard around the actual time of her death, the students involved didn’t even show any remorse when interviewed about her death by the police.

I, for one, am glad that legal action is being taken. I understand that there are a lot of issues to deal with here (free speech vs. harassment, etc.), but I think someone needs to take responsibility for the actions those students took – and apparently their parents were either unaware or unconcerned with their behavior. The article also mentions that there were several teachers/administrators aware of the situation at the school, but nobody reported anything or tried to do anything about it.

It should be noted that much of the harassment was in the form of text messaging, which again makes me wonder if these kids were being monitored at all by their parents (I don’t have kids, so I’m unaware of how involved parents generally are in the texting/social network lives of their children). The NYT article also links to another article, where it is reported that the average American teenager sends and receives approximately 80 text messages a day. I just can’t imagine anything terrible good can come from teenagers spending that much time texting.

Anyway, as far as the Phoebe Prince case goes, I’m pleased that a precedent is being set for legal action in these cases of extreme bullying in schools. I think it was probably a necessary step to take now that bullying doesn’t necessarily just take place at school, but now, with texting and social networking, can literally be inescapable.

Link to the DA’s statement on Phoebe’s Death

So in an effort to get back into the habit of blogging more (which I have clearly been failing at), I’ve decided to reinstate the 50 Modern Thinkers series, or at least throw a few in now and then. These help me in that the book offers lovely, discrete (-ish) little nuggets of information, then I tell you what I think about them. Sometimes that seems a lot easier to me than organizing my thoughts about some abstract concept (like “education,” or “science”). I know I also need to do more of that really challenging thinking, but in the meantime, I figure reading about other people’s thoughts might do me some good…and keep me blogging!

***

Over the span of his career, Donald Campbell contributed to many fields, including social psychology and experimental methods, for which he is best known. Among other things, he often spoke out about the over-confidence and elitism of those in academia, and particularly those in the sciences.  He held strongly to the belief that scientists shouldn’t be proclaiming universal truths, but conservatively suggesting possible explanations for a particular data set. There’s a great quote in his profile about what happens when you get over-confident scientists and over-zealous politicians on the same side of an issue:

Government asks what to do, and scholars answer with assurance, quite out of keeping with the scientific status of their fields. In the process, the scholar-advisors too (along with the politicians), fall into the over-advocacy trap. Certainly the idea that one already knows precludes finding out how valid one’s theories are.

He was often critical of his own field of social science, feeling that more often than not, social scientists set out to validate their own theories, rather than let the data guide them to new theories that might be socially useful. In one of his attempts to follow his own advice, he set out to conduct a study on prejudice and social attitudes (in the 1960’s). With his usual precision, he set out with a great team of statisticians and research associates, and this is what he said about the experience:

We were a high morale team, working on the best integration of theory and data collection I have ever achieved, with an extreme enough sample size to be definitive.

The results were crushingly negative and threw me, at least, into a temporary depression. Our research write-up began ‘This thorough, tedious, expensive, and disappointing study…

Despite feeling pretty bad for the guy, I was actually comforted to know that “grown up” scientists feel this way too. There’s just nothing worse than putting everything into a project only to get nothing out of it. Apparently Campbell had quite a few periods of depression throughout his career, particularly at times when he couldn’t keep up with all his commitments (of which there were many), but he was able to maintain an overall optimistic outlook.

He also felt strongly about the role of government in education, saying tests “that have been valid for describing the state of society become invalid when they start being used for political decision making…Thus, achievement tests once valid for describing educational status have become less valid when used as the basis of rewards to students or teachers.” This is certainly a hot topic in education today, and from what I’ve gathered from almost everyone I’ve spoken with about it is that standardized/state required testing is (one of the things) killing the public school system in the US. I would certainly say that’s the case, but don’t listen to me – you’re much better off taking Campbell’s word for it.

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