Facebook policy

Does using Facebook help students or hurt them? Research has been going back and forth. See links. The last school I worked at blocked campus access to the site - except for the police department who used it to check out job applicants and people who may have become an issue.

My policy has been to friend any student who requests it - but not to initiate the connection with students. Other teachers - particularly the female and high school or middle school teachers I've discussed this with, only friend students after class is over.

My class last semester created groups - that we used to some effect, but I'm not an expert on facebook.

I consider Facebook a form of online e-portfolio and have read arguements that creating e-portfolios is a skill students will need in future work environments. The topic shows up frequently in teaching journals and is hotly debated. What do you think?

JCCC Writing Center resources

Located on the 3rd floor of the library in room 308, the Writing Center (or WC) holds a slew of resources. they have a copy of each textbook used by English and Journalism faculty - maybe each text book used by humanities. MLA Handbooks, EasyWriters, and other style and usage texts also litter the tables.

Many instructors keep a binder with assignment prompts and examples of student work. Sometimes an example is worth more than any other kind of explanation. Look for mine.

They also have scads of handouts, but the most useful resources are the peer consultants. Talk to them.

REMEMBER: you need your JCCC ID card for many services.

AT-AT's from Star Wars invade Overland Park

Kevin Burg, a local now living in New York and working in technology, created this using Photoshop. He explains that his mom:

has been sending me pictures of wintry fog in Overland Park, Kansas — and to me it always looks like the ice planet Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back. So, I took it a step further and added some AT-ATs. That’s my high school football stadium in the background.

See his original post.

Inspiration from Animation

The Venture Brothers series has long been a favorite because of its wit, deft skills with parody, and impressive ability to work on several levels at once. It decided the subject of this semester's Natural Narrative.

Episode 45 (?) entitled "Self-Medication" has perhaps 2 plots - the main being:

Dr. Venture attends a group therapy session for former boy adventurers, but a strange death causes the patients to fall back into their old mystery-solving habits.

The boy adventurers are clever parodies of classic action cartoon syndications from a golden age of animation prior to the 80's - when art, story and character development in cartoons were scrapped in favor of extended toy marketing campaigns and banal politically correct bore-a-thons.

But it was the murder weapon that triggered a flash-back and inspired my next Natural Narrative. The name, description, and dialogue about the "Vietnamese 2-step viper" showed an amazing insight and knowledge about southeast Asia (as did the reference to Thailand, boy-girls and the modern sex-tourist/slave trade - but that's in the sub-plot. That kinda thing happens here too). The viper is, like the boy adventurers, real but/and legendary.

Just as "Lance Hale" the mockery of the assertive Hardy Boy series (written by another Dixon) ridicules and disputes the existence of the snake that just killed their therapist - as western experts who haven't lived in southeast Asia denigrate the Bamboo Viper. My knowledge of the snake came from lurid fiction, the legends of the locals who lived on my mountain in JuDong, and some close and physical contact.

The story of evil amah (wikipedia may have it wrong - I like "Grandmother" as an honorific as a better translation) who demanded I kill the viper pictured may be a better story than either the 7.6 Richter-scale 921 earth quake story (powerful - tho perhaps a downer) or the time I posed as a roadie to sneak into a sold out psychobilly show and hung out with The Reverend Horton Heat. Good fun - but questionably relevant; both stories I've told students in the past. I haven't written or told this story yet.

Will post outline of Viper story soon - but it will require an intense amount of orientation (pardon the puns) - and digressions into the intense ethnicity of my jungle neighborhood (Hakka and Aboriginal), other venomous encounters (krait, cobra and an insect that may not have an English name - but it's nasty) and perhaps unpopular history of the occupation and abuse of Taiwan by Japan.

FYI: Venture Bros. aired at 11pm Sunday Jan. 17th on Adult Swim - on the Cartoon Network. Gotta look up MLA for documentation.

New Year/ New Semester resolutions

1. I will lose the 3 kilos I put on over winter break.
2. I will get the coffee monkey off my back.
3. Classes will grasp the meaning of deadlines - I will be firm in NOT accepting late work for credit.
4. We won't extend deadlines for the class.
5. We will make the connection between our comp classes and real life more clear and understood.
   
6. I will make greater use of the text-book.
7. Students will learn that communication is important and excuses only mean something if they come BEFORE the deadline/ missed class/ whatever; Therefore, if you have commitments to school sponsored activity, or religious holiday tell me well in advance and we can work something out.
   

notes

1. Re: # 1 - and then continue to lose 4.5 kilos more.
   
2. Re: # 2 - I will at least stop buying it.
3. Re: # 3 - I'm by far not the only instructor who got burned on this last semester. One had students asking to turn in late work after the grades were posted!
4. Re: # 4 - Students liked it in the short term - but complained about it in summative (semester-end) reviews.
5. Re # 7 - The school formally does not recognize any absence as excused.
   

diversity

I wonder if the cartoon (from SMBC) has a point. If so, what bigotry will traditional (18-21ish) students reject? And what bigotry will they hold on to? Interestingly within a week or so of this cartoon the reputable Pew Research Center wrote on this topic in, "Millenials views ...not so different." The matix below the cartoon comes from their research. You likely will have to scroll down for it - but it's provocative.

I wonder if profs tend to unfairly assume their students are less open- minded? Maybe it depends on the academic discipline. Or, as a few former colleagues have put it, "everyone is prejudiced." That statement has bothered me in the past. What's that say about the speaker? What about Mother Theresa? The statement may not be wrong, but...

If you're interested in this topic check out some links collected at the social bookmarking site under these tags: diversity, gender, or race

TheDaily Show's Wyatt Cenac takes a funny look at the subject on the Jan. 12th 2010 show.

essay writing

Daily Writing tips, a writing instruction and learning blog, has a useful post on essay writing. The link also has links to instructions on writing student essays, literary essays and perhaps other types of essays. The problem most students have is that they haven't read many essays before.

They also mention the 5-paragraph essay(click for wikipedia explanation). The grad students at KU back in the day much maligned the 5 paragraph essay for being too formulaic and ...lame. But it's a legitimate form of organization - just not a form students use often in my classes. I have no prejudice against it. I'm reminded of a favorite quote, "when the only tool you have is a hammer - everything looks like a nail." Most comp 1 instructors assume students know the 5 paragraph essay form, but maybe we shouldn't assume.

Outside of formal class/ student assignments -most people don't write essays often; HOWEVER, the essay form is alive and well . I'm reading (OK - listening to the audio book - an authentic form of reading IMHO) a collection of essays by Malcolm Gladwell called What the Dog Saw. Of it, the New York Times book review says

Have you ever wondered why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup? Or what Cézanne did before painting his first significant works in his 50s? Have you hungered for the story behind the Veg-O-Matic, star of the frenetic late-night TV ads? Or wanted to know where Led Zeppelin got the riff in “Whole Lotta Love”?

Gladwell tracks it down - does the research - and writes essays about it. See press release here, see Amazon to buy here, or check out the audio book from Billington Library here on JCCC campus.

He shows how essays can be surprisingly engaging.

To recap: reading essays may be the best preparation to writing good essays.

Don't forget about your textbook as a source of interesting essays. The Norton Field Guide has some fun stuff.

Facebook redux

Since so many of my students spend so much time on Facebook - I want to learn more. I'm collecting links to resources and research on Facebook at the Social Bookmarking site and will be adding links as I find them. Sounds like a good research activity for Comp students....

It'd be fun to see students take the quiz - How addicted to Facebook Are You.

I've posted on the subject before - see earlier posts

The shape of student journals to come

We will be keeping journals (or working files) in Comp 1. Nothing has been shown to improve writing skill as much as daily writing. Some classes have used the $.09 spiral notebooks, some have used the 3 prong portfolio folders, and too many have gone rogue and turned in some sort of 3 ring monstrosity that makes transporting them ...challenging. I went into this in detail in the first educational blog I wrote for. In them we will keep daily writings, handouts, drafts of essays and some homework.

I taught a graduate class at KU that posted journal entries online in personal blogs. The results impressed people who evaluated me - but there were challenges.

A professor writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education makes a provocative case for posting all journal writing online - his class found fame and fortune and learned something along the way. He says:

By changing their homework assignments from disposable, private conversations between them and me (the way printed or e-mailed assignments work in students’ minds) into public, online statements that became part of a continuing conversation, we realized very real benefits. The very first semester I began asking students to share their homework this way, a popular e-learning newsletter found and liked one of my students’ essays and pointed its readers to the student’s blog. When the visits and comments from professionals around the world started coming in, students realized that the papers they were writing weren’t just throw-away pieces for class – they were read and discussed by their future peers out in the world. The result was a teacher’s dream — the students’ writing became a little longer, a little more thoughtful, and a little more representative of their actual intellectual abilities. And this benefit came by simply asking students to submit their homework through a different channel. They were already going to write and submit it; I was already going to read it.

Blogs can be private - by invitation only - or public (which is more fun). And you can add video, photos, links and such.

Whatever our classes decide - the journals should be in a uniform format. That maximizes my time reading and responding and minimizes confusion and hassle.

Email - appropriate usage

What are the appropriate and inappropriate uses of email? A friend's divorced dad told her about his remarriage over email. Didn't sit well with my friend. Is this the currently accepted way to break up with a paramour?

In a refereed journal article from EDUCAUSE, faculty note they like using email for communication, but don't like answering substantive questions thru email (lecture clarification, grade discussion, etc), BUT students still feel more comfortable asking these questions through email (perhaps due to shyness, or because written questions can be better composed).

If it's a personal issue or grades - office hours are the most effective and appropriate way to communicate, but if the whole class could benefit from a response– instructors are increasingly blogging it. They can share the info once, and archive it indefinitely to pre-emptively address future class needs - without necessarily identifying the source of a question.

It's interesting what the article mentions in their conclusion:

Additionally, we propose that the development, communication, and adherence to agreed-upon e-mail expectations, norms, and guidelines would improve communications, lessen faculty and student frustrations, and alleviate student anxiety.

Achieving these goals requires instruction in e-mail use, however. Despite objections to attending e-mail training, both faculty and students agree that it would be beneficial—for each other. By raising awareness of the association between student success and one-on-one communication with faculty in an environment where e-mail serves as one of the primary methods of contact, we hope that both faculty and students will begin to see the value of e-mail training and become more willing to attend.

Whatdda ya think?

Teaching/Learning- cartoon screengrabs & links

On Taking Notes:

And also on the subject of taking notes and keeping a calendar/ schedule - but not screen grab friendly.

On Rhetoric/ Logic and Debate:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20100102.gif

happy new year

image found at BoingBoing.net

Big decade. In aught 1 bought a house, got married in aught 2, had a kid in aught 7 and hired on at JCCC in aught 9.