The Salt-Box

Here’s the upshot of my del.icio.us workshop today. It’s useful to have seen my del.icio.us assignment, if you haven’t before. (Here’s an official del.icio.us blog post about its educational uses.)

          4 information-management problems

1. My bookmarks are on my work machine, but I’m at home / on vacation / . . .
2. I’d like to find out more about some topic, without setting aside time to search for it and filter out what’s new.
3. I’ve got all these bookmarks or web pages that I need to organize.
4. My students are all working on similar problems, but they’re not sharing information, or not sharing it at the right times.

del.icio.us solves these problems

1. Your bookmarks live online, not on any one computer.
2. Easy, RSS-friendly tools for passively discovering new, relevant information (Is there a user who seems to use tags similar to yours? Add her to your network. Want to find out whenever people bookmark something about Victorian fiction? Add the tags to your subscriptions.
3. A new approach to organizing information (Folksonomies instead of taxonomies. NB: I’m aware that del.icio.us didn’t invent this. I just meant, “new relative to organizing your bookmarks into folders.)
4. Easy tools for sharing information (In addition to subscriptions and networks, there’s also “links for you.”

         Demo!

Here I pointed, clicked, and talked. We talked through the assignment, too. The assignment tries to do a couple of things:

• increase a sense of in-semester intellectual community, especially among undergrads.
• encourage students to move away from a model where they only think of the class at high-stakes times (right before the paper) to a constant, lower-level kind of engagement. (Ideally, I guess, there’d be a mix of both low-level and intense engagement.)

         Two things that taste great with del.icio.us

1. A real browser, especially Firefox. There are some nice del.icio.us plug-ins for Firefox.
2. An online news aggregator / RSS reader (Google Reader, Bloglines, NewsGator, etc.). Virtually everything in del.icio.us can be set up as an RSS feed, which is convenient.

          Two possible problems, and how to turn them into opportunities

1. Tag proliferation / synonyms, etc. When you start tagging pages on a topic, it can be hard to settle on a particular convention. For a while, I had “digital, humanities, computing, digitalhumanities, humanities-computing, humanities_computing, humantiescomputing” as variations on the same concept. This can make it hard to find stuff. However, del.icio.us makes it possible to rename your tags for consistency, so you just have to remember to clean them up every once in a while. Also, though, for me this tendency has been a feature, not a bug. When I start tagging in a particular area, it takes me a while to settle on a particular convention. That I start to notice this problem, and think of ways to standardize my tagging practice, is one of the signs that I’m starting to get a good feel for a particular topic, or for the scope of the project.
2. “What do you mean by that?” What’s “cool” or “interesting” to someone else, might not be to me. Likewise, I’ve seen people use tags ironically. This is always a problem in any folksonomy. But in a classroom, this is also a teachable moment, because students frequently assume that their judgments are wholly transparent, and not in need of elucidation. Trying to figure out some inscrutable tag can be a proxy for this process.

Do you use del.icious? Any tips/tricks?

CCSU readers may be interested to know that I’m doing a workshop on del.icio.us for the recently re-branded  Instructional Design & Technology Resource Center (the old FCC) this afternoon, 4/30, at 1pm.  Free registration is required: http://www.ccsu.edu/media/ExpertsRegistration.htm

On campus today we had our annual workshop on the renewal, promotion, and tenure process, hosted by the provost, the union, and HR.  There was also a panel of deans, the chair of P&T, and two faculty who had recently been through the process.  I was one of those faculty members, and this, more or less, is what I said:

• You should love the p&t process.  It’s normal to feel anxiety about such a high-stakes process.  But the promotion, tenure, and renewal process is the only time in your career when people care about your work in its entirety.  Ohio State UP doesn’t care that I do a lot of service, or that I’m a good teacher.  My students don’t much care about the details of either research or service work (though they may like the idea of these, or the results of them).  And no one on, say, the assessment committee cares that Lost Causes has gotten  good reviews, or that I have two editions of various novels forthcoming.  But during the p&t process, members of your department, your dean, your colleagues from around the university, and your provost or president will all think seriously about the nature of your work.  Embrace that opportunity!
• Be mindful of the collective bargaining agreement, but do work you care about.  It would be foolish to advise anyone to ignore the stated standards for promotion and tenure.  But don’t  get trapped into thinking that you should undertake *any* activity solely for the purposes of p&t.  Every day you come to campus, or check your e-mail, or open your research files, or grade a paper, you have to live with the consequences of your decisions.  Activities that you can only imagine as makework for p&t will make you crazy.
• Be able to explain the values, principles, and methodologies that animate your career.  This is what I learned from Donald Hall’s The Academic Self:  Come up with a set of coherent intellectual concerns that excite or interest you, and be able to talk about how those concerns underpin all your activities around campus, even service.  Sometimes this might take some work, and, as I’ll say in a minute, you may need to think about service in a different way.  But if your core values or concerns aren’t engaged by a class, a research project, or a service commitment, then something needs to change.  Maybe you need to rethink the way you teach the class, or you should stop teaching it.  Put the research project on the back burner for a second and try something different.  Figure out a way that you can get on at least one committee related to your intellectual or personal interests, or sponsor a student club, or something.  The surest way to burn out is to think of the work you have to do as imposed on you from without.
• Think differently about service.  People get appalling advice about service.  If I didn’t know better, I’d think that the standard advice about service is actually designed to make people resent their jobs.  I’ve said all this before, so won’t repeat myself here.
• Remember that the promotion and tenure process, while important, does not hold the meaning of your life, your worth as an intellectual, or even your career.  You can’t let a bureaucratic process decide whether or not you can be happy, or live an intellectual life that is sustaining and meaningful.  The p&t process is significant enough without investing it with those additional powers, as well.

I didn’t say, but would have done except that we were over time: Read blogs in your area.  Especially the pseudonymous ones.  You’ll gain fresh perspective on your own institution and your own struggles and triumphs.

This isn’t to say anything at all about the merits of the tenure system, or about the specific justices/injustices about the tenure process at other schools, or the merits of any individual case at my own school.  They’re just some thoughts for faculty who might be going up for tenure in a couple of years.

At some point over the past week, this poster appeared in the stairwell I use every MWF:

“All that it takes for prejudice to prosper is for good men to do nothing.”  As you can see in this detail, this is an homage to Edmund Burke, who famously said “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

I can’t figure out whether the poster invites us to reflect on the irony of having Edmund Burke, the famous defender of prejudice (albeit in a different sense), repurposed in this way, or whether the designer simply didn’t know much about Burke beyond the famous quotation.

If it’s the first, then the poster could be read either as a tweak at Burke, or, contrarily, as a jab at the heavyhandedness of current disputes over diversity in higher education.  After all, Burke’s idea that prejudice can represent a kind of practical wisdom, and must be preferred over abstract ideas until experience dictates otherwise, doesn’t sit well with contemporary conversations about diversity.

Such readings probably assume greater knowledge of Edmund Burke than I fear is current, which suggests that the designer found an interesting quotation and adapted it.  (There might be a question as to how, if that’s the case, the poster got picked for public distribution, but we’ll leave that alone.)

I’m always happy to see people using Burke, who is the starting point for my Brit Lit II classes.  (And I  think that the reflexive habit of labeling him the forefather of modern conservatism doesn’t do Burke any favors, because then people assume there’s some connection between Burkean thought and, say, Rove/Cheney/FoxNews-style political practice.)

It’s come to my attention that not every single person on the internet has seen Merlin Mann’s steampunk video, so here’s the link.  Don’t watch it while consuming food.

(And, yes, this will be the first 4 minutes of this fall’s cyberpunk class . . . )

One of the reasons Daring Fireball makes such compelling reading is that John Gruber frequently links to things that, while perhaps Apple-related in some sense, are really broader concerns about writing or thinking.  A couple of weeks ago, for instance, he linked to a nice post about the subjunctive mood, and today he’s tracked down another winner, David Weiss’s splendid essay on “Metacognitive Miscalibration.”

Here’s the problem that interests Weiss: “Why are the unintelligent or uninformed so arrogantly confident while the intelligent and well informed so often unsure and apprehensive? There is something very human to thinking you know more than you really do about a subject or issue.” He’s got great examples from his own coding experience, and, has clearly thought a lot about the problem of sustaining curiosity.

Weiss’s post is well worth reading by anyone who teaches, since this dynamic is one that you see a lot in class discussions.  (It’s also a particular problem among certain kinds of cohorts in which students are frequently assured that they’re better than their peers.)

A weird version of this that I see a lot is a kind of misplaced modesty: I know many students who are convinced that they have things to learn, but that only the teacher can deliver that knowledge.  Their classmates aren’t a source of useful feedback, nor are these students willing to engage seriously with their classmates’ ideas.  This problem crops up in a variety of situations:

• Peer review in first-year writing
• Discussion-focused classes
• And, to a first approximation, EVERY SINGLE ONLINE ASSIGNMENT I’VE EVER DESIGNED.

Nothing in my teaching causes more dissatisfaction and pushback from students than the various “Web 2.0″ assignments that I use, in their implication that the class is an intellectual community, and that the experience of sharing an interest with others for several months is an important part of the learning process.  At least at first, they don’t want to follow each others’ blogs, they don’t want to know what sorts of resources they find useful . . . the value of peer knowledge and experience appears to be zero.

This has been an ongoing struggle over the past 3 semesters: Many assignments, and all of my born-digital ones, target students’ desire to remain isolated in their academic work.  Which is weird, because all you hear about Millenials is Facebook this and text-message that.  So, in their *social* lives, they want to share and to hear about what people are up to, but they don’t yet see the value of this in academic contexts.

The interoffice mail has brought word from the provost’s office that I’ve been recommended for tenure, which will officially be conferred in May by the Board of Trustees.  Longtime readers will remember that I was promoted last year, but denied tenure for “insufficient achievement in years in rank.”  And so, after continuing to breathe for another year, I’ve made it.

It was my understanding that the university would have been in precarious legal position not to offer me tenure after promoting me,* so this is hardly a surprise, though it’s welcome all the same.

I will say that the timing’s all wrong: We’ve still got 2 weeks of classes, plus exams . . . it’s not as though I can kick back or anything.  In fact, taking a peek at the calendar for the next couple of weeks, we may not even get a dinner out of this.  And the pay raise came last year, so I’m not sure what effect this will really have.  Maybe it’ll be clearer in a couple of months.  (More blog posts with a mid-afternoon timestamp?)

–

* A friend of mine on the promotion and tenure committee has been joking since *last* April about convincing the committee this year *not* to tenure me, in exchange for a finder’s fee from the inevitable lawsuit and fat settlement.

From the looks of this subject line, today’s spam-bots don’t think the average internet user is smart enough to . . . read spam:

A new approach for spam: Boost your vocabulary *and* your penis size!

The blog went quiet for a week because I took three of our Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day senior prize winners to the 22nd National Conference for Undergraduate Research, at Salisbury U in Maryland.  There were some technical difficulties–spotty shuttle service, some moldy food in the boxed lunches, and devastatingly, a hotel wireless network wholly unprepared for the # of laptops that were hitting it throughout the weekend.

In the main, however, Salisbury U was a gracious host, and this conference always elevates my spirits.  The worst thing about working with students is that the material they produce is almost always deformed in some way by the practical demands of the semester.   Maybe a good student had to rush your paper because she had 3 other assignments due that week.  Maybe another got sick at an inopportune time and was too proud to negotiate an extension.  Even very good work usually hasn’t been sharpened to the student’s best capacity, because students are fully capable of figuring out how much polishing will produce the desired grade.

At NCUR, however, the students have generally polished their work to a fairly high degree.  Even when I disagreed profoundly with their arguments, it’s still clear that they’ve brought their best lights to that project.  As a result, it’s almost uniformly a very impressive, even–to risk a little mawkishness–inspiring sight.  It’s a weekend when all your encounters with student work take place in an ideal realm: The one where students care a lot about the work they’ve done, and are excited to talk about it.

Plus, I got to hang out for a bit with an old friend from graduate school, and compare notes about teaching at a 4/4 school, living close to campus, and having a young kid.

Our boy started playing in the local U-6 soccer league last fall, which has been fun for all of us.  He plays, and we have both held coaching and administrative roles with the league.  In the fall, I coached, and A. helped out with a variety of organizational tasks.  Her title?  “Soccer Mom.”

Going into this season, A decided that she didn’t want to be pulled in a hundred different directions while the kid was playing, and so she gave up the soccer mom role and signed on to be my assistant coach.  Meanwhile, I’ve become more involved with the organizational side, in part because I always go to the league meetings.

Last season, A’s title for that organizational work was “Soccer Mom.”

This season, my title for comparable organizational work: “Assistant Commissioner.”