Presentation technology

Strategies that tended to work for teachers and professors who integrated technology into class were pretty simple. First, there were no struggles with the tech that they were using. Whether this was simply because of their overall competence or because they tested the tech before class, I can't be sure. But they did not struggle. Second, they used technology either as a way to expand a conversation that could happen in class, or to do something new altogether.

For me the best use of technology is one that expands the conversation in class. So often I've had things to say that I thought of outside of class, and something like a class blog or wiki enables students to continue the conversation outside of class hours. It is not demanding in terms of time commitment, and allows students as long as they want to formulate their thoughts. It also allows for linking to outside materials like readings or videos that supplement their thoughts.

The worst practitioner of technology I've ever had was a professor on this campus last year, who did things like repeatedly clink broken links thinking they'd work. For him technology was a crutch. Instead of using old-fashioned lecture notes and talking with us, he'd read off of his powerpoint slides directly. In all it was a distraction and we'd have been much better served by him simply lecturing or conducting a seminar.

Making the PBJ

Making the pbj from escioe

Booing

listen to ‘In which I tentatively and foolishly defend the so-called canon’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘In which we cultivate critical thinking’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘In which I interview a teacher’ on Audioboo

Works & audiences

One idea I'm particularly interested in is a conversational examination. I think an oral approach can allow for more flexibility for both parties involved. With a recorder the audience could grow from just the teacher to any number of other realms. At its simplest such a conversation could be uploaded to a student blog, where their parents and peers would be invited to check in.

At a higher level two students from widely different backgrounds could converse about it, whether in real time or not. Here the most exciting thing is technology facilitating a multicultural, multiviewpoint approach in a classroom in ways not previously possible.

A small idea that I think could improve reading comprehension and retention would be to take quick audio notes while reading a text. Students could ask short questions or share quick comments on a portable device as they're reading and they could be used to foster class discussion the next day. I know that when I'm reading something I'll often have thoughts in a moment that are gone by the end of the chapter. Having an audio record of unedited thoughts could be very useful for whole text comprehension. In this case the audience would be the whole class, and students could refer back to those audio notes while completing other assignments on the same work. 

Some audio

In which I admit my crippling self doubt.

listen to ‘The fantods’ on Audioboo

 In which I plagiarize Hemingway for self gain.

listen to ‘Flash fiction’ on Audioboo

Things about books

Here's the inimitable DFW talking about Infinite Jest, which you ought to go read immediately.



Here is a collection of his stories.

Wallace, David Foster- Oblivion- Stories by Cho Pan

And here's one smarmy BS-ish attempt at miming his style.

David Foster Wallace Writing from nstearns

Water covers 75% of the earth

Jose Iglesias covers the rest.

NYT on valuation in education

I saw this piece in the Times called 'Guesses and Hype Give Way to Data in Study of Education' today when a pal posted it on the facebook. I read through it and had mixed feelings.

I recognize and value the statistics perhaps more than most other humanities-types due to my interest in baseball and especially in the valuation methods detailed in the book Moneyball ten years ago. There is hardly a more entrenched field in America than the baseball diamond, where there is over a hundred years of conventional wisdom regarding what makes players valuable. Moneyball details the breakdown of a great deal of that conventional wisdom.

This article suggests that a similar upheaval is happening in the world of education research. Heretofore ed research, at least according to this article, tended to be mired in abstract concepts and based on shaky premises. But there has been a tendency lately towards clinical trials. And if we trust those clinical trials in the field of medicine to the extent that we will literally trust our lives with their results, then it would follow that we ought to believe their findings in the ed world.

Some of those results are uncomfortable. No teacher who has worked in Upward Bound will be happy to hear that these trials find the program largely useless, for example. But to achieve the end of educating students as well as we can, whatever it is we might mean by that, then we have to be prepared to change our means.

In short: we ought to pay more attention to statistical studies than our forebears have. My addendum would be, however, that since I am not inclined to do these statistical studies myself, I am willing to take others' word for it on a lot of them. I'd rather be reading Blood Meridian than some bone-dry paper telling me that what we do isn't working.

Tech ed history & conversations

Describing a tech-savvy teacher is difficult for me because so many of them were simply not. Of course there were a few in high school and before who tried to integrate things like powerpoint but this never seemed especially creative or useful for any purpose beyond learning how to use a program. And while I was an undergraduate studying a liberal art so many of the classrooms eschewed the use of technology altogether, unless you can count a blackboard, by which I mean a black chalkboard and not a white dry erase board, as tech. Or perhaps the human voice itself counts as tech. In any case with those mostly fine teachers there was little in the way of what we would recognize as technology in the classroom.

My most useful brush with tech has been at this university as a graduate student, where I took Anna Baldwin's Oral and Media Literacy. I liked this class because we spent half a semester learning ways to promote interesting and engaging conversations in the classroom, which was exactly the method that my best undergraduate teachers must have used. But in the latter half of the semester we looked into using tech to make that conversation possible outside of a seminar setting. 

The upshot is that after a mutiny against the sadist-designed moodle forum feature, we began to use wikispaces for our discussions. We had different pages for different topics and we used different text colors followed by our initials to differentiate contributors. Aside from a few jokes about my colorblindness I found this approach to be shall we say mega-preferable to the godawfulness of moodle. I found it so useful that I used a similar strategy in a summer reading group I participated in online with people from three continents.

The point with a thing like wikispaces and a teacher like Doc Baldwin is that what's actually happening isn't the use of technology but the promotion of conversation that just so happens to take place virtually rather than in a seminar room. To me as an English proto-teacher the conversation is paramount and I want to use pieces of technology to make the quality of contributions better or to encourage students who prefer writing to speaking.