digital digs

spreading iTunes U

We've had iTunes U at Cortland for three semesters now, and its use has grown slowly. There are a number of local reasons for that.

1. The primary interest in iTunes U at Cortland has been from faculty like myself who are interested in having their students produce audio or video podcasts and share those podcasts with their classmates. Perhaps, in the long term, such compositions will become more regular features of academic work, alongside the essay, the blue book exam, and the in-class PowerPoint student presentation. Right now though, this is a fairly small demographic of faculty who have the interest and expertise to incorporate student podcasting, as well as a curriculum in which the time devoted to such practices makes sense.
2. On the other hand, there has been little or no interest from faculty for doing what has become the conventional application of iTunes U: coursecasting. Cortland's faculty, I believe, are fairly typical in their level of technological proficiency. That is to say I believe most of them could learn to podcast if they chose, but very few know how right now. So there's a question of the time involved in learning and then implementing this practice.
3. Finally, there are ongoing concerns about the effect of podcasting on education. If I coursecast my lectures, will students stop coming to class? Do coursecasts improve student performance? Or do they prevent students from learning other important skills?

These are all valid issues. More generally I believe they point toward the way that convergent media networks are reshaping education. And that we need to think on that level as we approach these concerns.

making the e-book pay off

There's been much recent discussion of Amazon's new e-book, Kindle, on KairosNews, if:Book and many other places. Apparently the device has sold well here at the start and has received more positive reviews than I've seen for past e-books. Here are what seem to be the main issues for me:

• Cost: at $400, that's a steep buy-in for a device I'm not sure I need.
• Wireless web access: It seems like the main positive of Kindle is that you get free EVDO internet access. Unfortunately, the device is designed for reading electronic books, not surfing the web. It seems like the device missed its mark! I would pay $400 for a mobile device that would bring me quality, free web access. Who would care about reading books on it!
• Proprietary book formats: Do I really need to explain why this is undesirable?

Anyway, here's how I think you get this product out to a bunch of young, tech-loving consumers. If you have electronic versions of textbooks, give students who buy the device a couple hundred bucks worth of e-book textbooks. Most students will go through that in a year. Then they'll be back next year buying more. It's not unlike the way that Microsoft gives away its Office product to students (or at least they used to when I was working at Penn St).

Personally, I don't see buying this thing. I don't have any problem accessing books in their print form. I like the idea of digital ink making the screen more readable. I really like the idea of free, cellular web access included. Perhaps when the web access is better or when the device doesn't look so clunky or when e-books start to take better advantage of the fact that they are being published in a dynamic, convergent media network rather than on paper.

time for students

As I've been thinking about the revision of our FYC program, I've been breaking this business down into its component parts. Fundamentally, if we truly want to revise our program, that means faculty and students doing different things from what they are doing now. So this morning I was thinking about these component parts in terms of time.

Let's say my job is 45% teaching, 45% research, and 10% service. (It's probably more like 45/30/25 with most of my research getting done in the summer when I'm off-contract, but you get the idea.) So I'm on a 3/3 load, which means that each course is 15% of my workload. Let's say I work a 50-hr week, that might mean, time-wise, that I'm spending 7.5 hours/week on each class. How does that break down?

• Classes meet for 3 hr/wk
• 1 hr a week doing the reading for the course (a very conservative estimate, though maybe about right for an FYC course).
• 1.5 hours spent in course prep, office hours, bookkeeping, responding to e-mails, etc.
• 2 hours a week responding to student writing

Two hours a week on student writing or 30 hours a semester. Let's say I have 20 students. That works out to 1.5 hours per student per semester. In our current FYC course, it would be typical to evaluate at least 3 essays, plus a mid-term and final portfolio. So I can devote 15 minutes to each essay and still have time to meet for one 15 minute conference. Of course I don't really calculate my time in that fashion, but that's one way to look at it.

Interestingly, if you look at our full-time lecturers with 100% teaching responsibilities and 4/4 teaching loads, things change somewhat. They might be able to spend 10 hours a week per course (assuming a 40-hour work week). That would open up an additional 2.5 hours per week or say 35 hours a semester, giving you 3 hours per student. You might even increase this slightly if teaching multiple sections reduces prep-time. (Though let me say that that's a lot of hard work!)

Anyway, my point isn't really to look at the difference between different ranks of faculty, though I think this does indicate that instructors might be in a better position to provide the kind of one-on-one support many students require (and I believe they often do provide better support of this kind).

My point instead is to suggest that one way of rethinking an FYC program is to ask how we are going to make use of our time.

Ludo-capitalism and metanomics

Julian Dibbell gave a talk last month in Second Life on the subject of ludo-capitalism. It's a concept that arose in this last book, Play Money, a memoir on Dibbell's experiences in making a living selling virtual goods (like gold pieces in online video games). (See his recent NY Times article on this subject.) Apparently, it is also the focus of his upcoming book. It's an interesting subject and one that would give many of my old grad student colleagues conniptions.

Essentially, the idea of ludo-capitalism explores the relationship between playing games, having fun/feeling pleasure, and creating value (in an economic sense). Of course playing a game isn't always fun or result in pleasure. Setting aside the experience of losing a game, there's also many work-like activities involved. When I was a kid and into Dungeons & Dragons (yes, I know), my mom would look at me pouring over charts, shake her head, and make some comment that it looked like I was doing my taxes or something. Contemporary online role-playing games aren't much different, the "grind" of acquiring gold and experience (much like in real life) remains. And yet millions choose to do this work/play; indeed they pay for the privilege.

lessons in teaching I get to learn over and over

I have to admit that this year my Writing in the Digital Age online course has not gone as well as planned. I'm a little bit at a loss to explain it. In the spring, the course went very well. It was the first time I'd taught it online. I tweaked it a little but basically kept it the same. This semester the students just didn't show up. I can't explain why. With some exceptions, they never got into the groove of participating in an online course, and I can't really point to anything I did differently from last semester or anything I could have done but didn't do.

I can only post some many times and send so many e-mails reminding students they need to participate on a regular basis. I even met with them face to face to try and get them going. It worked for some, but only some.

Of course this is a lesson I've learned many times before, I guess. Back when I used to teach multiple sections of composition, it was ordinary for a syllabus to work great for one class and horribly for another, for an assignment to excite one class but not another, for a class plan to work really well in the morning and flop in the afternoon.

Given this, I sometimes wonder what I am supposed to be learning as a teacher. When I teach this course again next fall, will my students respond with energy as they did last semester or will they not show up like this semester? Of course in a class like Writing in the Digital Age, the content will change so it won't be the same class anyway, and even if the class could keep the same content I don't think I could do a good job teaching the same material three times in a row.

And let me say that I'm not trying to blame the students here. Obviously students have responsibility for their own education, but I also have responsibility for creating positive opportunities for them to learn. I recognize that those opportunities were not as productive this semester. So that's on me, but I'm just not sure if there's a specific cause at work here.

What I do know is that students really struggled with the responsibility of learning online. I didn't provide them with a tremendous amount of structure. If anything I believe I was too ambitious in trying to move students into a mode of learning for which they were unprepared. The next time I teach the course I am going to do it as a hybrid. I guess we'll see how that works.

SUNY Cortland to be a National Writing Project Site

Congratulations are due to my colleague David Franke for putting together a proposal to bring the National Writing Project to SUNY Cortland and Central NY. As a college focused on education, Cortland is an obvious place for the NWP, and we'd talked about it for years, but it took a lot of hard work from David and others to make it happen.

Politics and professors

The Chronicle reports on a recent study (working paper PDF) on professorial politics. Overall, the report suggests that professors are more liberal than average Americans (kind of a dog bites boy story), but it also indicates that there are a growing number of moderates in higher ed, as well as waning radicalism in younger generations.

For example, 14.3 percent of professors aged 50-64 consider themselves liberal radicals, as compared to just 3.8 percent of professors aged 26-35.  Similarly, whereas 17.2 percent of professors aged 50-64 consider themselves liberal activists, this is true of only 1.3 percent of professors in the youngest age cohort. (40-41)

Following on that point, the report makes the following observation of political leanings based on respondents answers to questions on a range of political issues:

	Liberal	Center/Center-left	Conservative
26-35	21.5	59.5	19.0
36-49	31.0	51.2	17.8
50-64	31.0	56.6	12.4
65+	27.7	64.4	7.9
Total	30.2	55.3	14.5

So the purpose of the study, in part, is to engage the perception of higher education as a "hotbed" of liberal radicalism. And the study does seek to argue that while professors are liberal, they are more centrist than radical/extreme and that radicalism seems to be associated with a particular generation of faculty who originally attended college in the sixties or seventies.