Archive for School
Some Academic Agonistes
Understanding the quotidian, from “College Misery“:
I know my colleagues think I’m lazy because I’m not standing in the hallways like them all day and night. When I do show up to work – on time and before my class – the “veterans,” who are always huddled together talking about how hard their lives all are, swivel their heads, say a begrudinging hello, and turn their noses up as if they caught a whiff of something bad.
For a time I let it bother me and felt a little out of place, but I got over it. I know I’m doing my job well and have the student evaluations to prove it. …
What I’m saying is that this is an important profession and we do important work, but it’s just a job, people. I think that a lot of you would be a lot happier if you’d just relax a bit. If your student doesn’t staple his paper? Staple it. What’s the big deal. They take a phone call in class? You mean you’re that insecure that you can’t just shut them down and keep going? (h/t Clarissa)
Understanding the long game, by Jon F. Wilkins:
Randy Schekman made news this week when he published a column in the Guardian, where he proclaimed that his lab would be boycotting Science, Nature, and Cell, probably the three most prominent scientific journals.
There is a lot to be happy about in Schekman’s column. Most of all for its existence: Schekman just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, and he is using his fifteen minutes at the Bully Pulpit to draw attention to our deeply flawed system of valuing science, including how we fund and publish it. At a minimum, his column has reignited interest in an extremely important topic, and has already spawned a number of responses, including interesting thoughts from Michael Eisen, Retraction Watch, Luboš Motl, PZ Myers, Junk Science, Scholarly Kitchen, and mathbionerd.
But is he right about the problem? The solution? I’m not sure.
Schekman argues that a key problem is the influence of these “luxury” journals. Yes they publish some good and interesting science, but not everything they publish is good, and not everything good gets published there. In fact, there is an argument to be made that a paper published in a quality field-specific journal is more likely to contain good, solid science than a typical luxury journal paper, at least on average.
Yet, in many fields, publication in one of these fancy journals is a, if not the, primary determinant of who gets that tenure-track slot at the big research university. This, then, distorts the incentives on scientists. Rather than trying to do good science, young scientists feel that they need to do something flashy. This can lead to asking the questions that sound deep in a cocktail-party setting, rather than the questions that actually are deep, and that move the field forward in a meaningful way.
He’s right about this, of course. In fact, there are a couple of additional problems that arise from the Science/Nature/Cell-publication-equals-job system. One is stochasticity. There is always going to be a random element that goes into getting a paper accepted by these journals. There is also a degree of randomness in the nature of science itself. Sometimes you ask the right question, and the answer turns out to be a little dry, or a lot complicated. That means that, no matter how skilled a scientist you are, you’re not going to be publishing your work in one of the glossy magazines. (from “Science, Nature, and Cell Aren’t the Problem, Exactly” – h/t Jenny Basil)
Professor Mike Niman on lowering higher education
Last week Barack Obama visited SUNY/Buffalo, where I got my BA, to talk about education. My friend Mike Niman was not entirely pleased with the president’s message:
The frustrating thing about Obama’s visit is, while he addressed the problem [of much higher costs for post-secondary students], the cause seemed to have eluded him. The math is not fuzzy here, Mr. President. A 2012 study by two Federal Reserve economists documented the relationship between dwindling government support of higher education and increasing tuition. …
One way colleges and universities absorbed state aid cuts is by cutting, and in many cases, decimating academic programs, replacing retiring professors with an exploited overworked contingent “part time” workforce where in many cases workers barely earn minimum wage after calculating grading, prep, course material research, and meeting hours. This trend, which goes back three decades, has transformed academic institutions from environments where ideas were born and nurtured and intellects exercised and developed, into places where ideas are flattened, packaged, and “delivered” on the cheap.
This is the corporate mold for higher education—a system where vendors sell “deliverable” education products. …
The corporate product underlying this delivery system is the “MOOC” (Massive Open Online Course). It works like this: MOOC vendors contract with elite institutions such as Harvard to teach real college classes to privileged students. In many cases they’ll employ the traditional Socratic method of participatory discussion. No doubt this will be an excellent class—for those present in the classroom. The whole experience will be recorded by the MOOC vendors who will deliver the course virtually to the rest of the college world where less fortunate students will watch the elite students participate.
Academic workers, either at decimated campuses or online, will administer assessment tools and, in the best cases, facilitate a scripted discussion. In the worst cases there are no such workers. What we get is a sort of apartheid where working and middle-class students pay to watch the privileged learn in the sort of dynamic, interactive classrooms that once defined a good public liberal arts education. …
The result is that even the select information snippets and factoids that the MOOCS and other online education technologies deliver seldom get the mental reflection and contemplation needed to move them from short-term to long-term memory. For this, one needs to participate in a class rather than simply interact as a voyeur. Perhaps this is why graduates of virtual colleges and universities tend to be less successful in attaining their life goals. It’s because they never actually went to college despite the huge amount of time spent and debt accrued in procuring their online diplomas.
So far, all we’ve seen from such “reform” is an overpriced, second-class education.
Some notes on mentoring …
… can be found over on basil.CA sister site NoContest.CA here and here and here. They are mostly based on the superb presentation given by Erin Dick at the International Association of Business Communicators World Conference in Manhattan last month.
To be honest, I had intended on *missing* this presentation, believing there was little for me to learn on the topic. In a spasm of self-awareness, though, I understood that my reluctance to go was based on arrogance – and arrogance means that I had grown too comfortable with my ways. I wondered, too, why I seemed afraid to subject myself to new insights on a theme so dear to my heart.
Fear can lead to poor mental hygiene.
I forced myself to attend by making a promise to do so to my friend Sarah Jackson, a fearless young journalist who herself will become a wonderful mentor one day. I am glad I went. I learned a ton – and found I have lots to work on.
BS, Redux
A long-time correspondent points me to this graduation speech recently published in The Atlantic: “Life Lessons in Fighting the Culture of Bullshit: What politics taught me that graduates need to know.” The piece is by Jon Lovett, who has written speeches for Barack Obama after having worked against him on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Lovett’s take on the topic is conventional:
“One of the greatest threats we face is, simply put, bullshit. We are drowning in it. We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research; in social media’s imitation of human connection; in legalese and corporate double-speak. It infects every facet of public life, corrupting our discourse, wrecking our trust in major institutions, lowering our standards for the truth, making it harder to achieve anything. And it wends its way into our private lives as well, changing even how we interact with one another: the way casual acquaintances will say ‘I love you’; the way we describe whatever thing as ‘the best thing ever’; the way we are blurring the lines between friends and strangers. And we know that. There have been books written about the proliferation of malarkey, empty talk, baloney, claptrap, hot air, balderdash, bunk. One book was aptly named ‘Your Call is Important to Us.'”
My correspondent suggests, “I think graduation is too late to introduce college students to the academic literature on bullshit. It should be in the form of a workshop or course in 1st or second year college.” I agree. BS should be forcefully addressed sometime in the first year. To me BS is a form of Rhetoric, which is a fundamental lattice undergirding all academic disciplines; it is the start of knowledge and of discourse and debate.
My definition of BS: It is the use of a message to hide one’s true intentions. It can be a lie, it can be the truth (with some key points left unsaid), or it can be something else altogether, like “changing the subject.” Its ethical possibilities are polyvalent; after all, we cannot live without hiding our wishes and our natures sometimes.
At any rate Rhetoric should indeed be a required first-year course at university. Students need to know how to spot and how to make arguments.
Facing the Sky
Here’s a good little discussion on “flipping” classrooms. “Flipping” refers to the idea that faculty lectures waste class time that should be spent on “student collaborative work” and “mastery exercises” instead. (Instructors should put their lectures on videotape, according to this idea, so students can watch them at their leisure before or after in-class time.)
When I teach, I tell stories that students find memorable (that’s what they tell me), and I ask questions. I’ve tried reproducing the former on videotape; it doesn’t work. (I follow my students’ eyes and the way they are moving at their desks and adapt my lecture to these responses.) And of course the back and forth of Q/A also doesn’t work via video.
A number of my colleagues, who I know are superb teachers, mock the lecture model. They call this model “sage on the stage” (which is nowhere near as good as “guide on the side”). But this model is a straw man. My own models are Johnny Carson and Professor Kingsfield.
It is very common for people to talk about teaching technique the way people talk about religion: with unwarranted conviction and righteousness. My view: There are as many ways to face class as there are to face the sky.
(h/t Jonathan Mayhew)
I can get used to this
After a wonderful term as the chair of the Applied Communication department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, I’ve returned to my role as 100% instructor.
It feels as though I have lost my X-Ray vision. Things to which I needed to pay attention for three years are now hidden, in particular matters regarding employment and contracts and much of the hullabaloo that happens among the divisions at my fine institution. (I have also been taken off of a number of email-distribution lists.) Life is still not quiet, though. My home departments are bustling with creative development and debate, and my students are writing a ton.
This gig is a blessing I will always cherish.
Teaching I would do for free …
*Marking* is where I earn my millions.
The current marking marathon: 270 documents. (120 done so far …) Expected date of completion: next week sometime. (This would be a dreadfully painful experience without my outlandishly expensive Aeron Chair.)
I like …
… that the President of my university, Dr. Alan Davis, blogs. His tone is friendly and informal, and it’s clear he likes being at Kwantlen. (He tweets, too.)
Learning from my students
I tell people I learn more from my students than I teach them. It’s a cliché, I know, but it is still very often the case.
This semester I’m teaching a third-year course in digital marketing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. (Course description: “Students will learn the key business and technological elements of digital marketing explained through theory and business case analysis. Students will become familiar with a variety of online marketing tools that support the online marketing functions that help drive traffic to a website, improve conversion rates, and achieve overall marketing objectives.”) It’s my second time around with this course, and, as much as I hope I’m getting the hang of it, it’s a challenging endeavor, because social-media platforms are coming into being or heading into the “sunset” continually.
Each of my students has a blog and a Twitter-feed in which he or she addresses developments in digital media. I learn something crucial almost every day from what these keen and wonderful students post. My students don’t get paid, but they are team-teaching a university class.
You can follow some of their conversation on Twitter: The class hashtag is #MRKT3311.
The Home Team
Yesterday Kwantlen Polytechnic University was named one of British Columbia’s “top employers.” This is the seventh straight year my university has been so honoured.
It really is a great place to work. It’s a great place to learn, too.
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