Category Archives: Bill Caraher

Teaching the World for Free

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Bill Caraher| Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

This week the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s technology blog featured a short article on two faculty members who offered a course to the public for free and attracted over 2,000 non-credit earning students.  The article argues that, for some classes, opening the course to the public created a more diverse and dynamic classroom environment only really possible through online teaching.  In Profs. Downes’ and Siemen’s class, non-credit students and paying, for-credit students mingled in discussion forums, witnesses the same lectures, and engaged the same readings, but unlike efforts pioneered by places like MIT where the lectures and syllabi are made public, these non-credit students were invited to participate fully in the educational process as well by engaging with their fellow students and, presumably, the faculty member.  In short, their class emphasizes the interactive potential of online teaching over and above the internet’s well-known ability to disseminate prepared content.

I couldn’t help but also see this as an opportunity to democratize the university experience in a fairly radical way.  Not only would students have to consider how a particular class or material or problem solving exercise helps them to navigate the unpredictable shoals of a distant, abstract “real world”, but they will be forced to confront the “real world”, right there, in the classroom.  In other words, such a public course might help students overcome the separation between what happens in the classroom where students sometimes regard skills, methods, and knowledge as simply “course objectives” or tools to get an “A”, and what happens in the real world where these skills, methods, and knowledge function in a far more ambiguous way and the rules followed to get an “A” rarely apply neatly.  Expanding the conversation by bringing the real world into the foyer of the Ivory Tower could have a revolutionary effect on how students understand the application of classroom skills.

I’ve just begun to discuss the possibility of running some classes like this at the University of North Dakota.  As part of my sounding out processes, I talked to my good buddy, online teacher extraordinaire, and frequent Teaching Thursday contributor, Mick Beltz, and he and I came up with some issues that will have to be considered before developing and deploying a class to the general public.  Both of us bring the perspective of teachers in the humanities with some online teaching experience.

So, five observations.

1. Technology. The first thing I thought of is how do we run a course like this.  It seems that the classes described in the Chronicle article ran through Moodle which is open source and, presumably, more flexible (or at least developable) than Blackboard in some ways.  The course will also have to be able to function with almost no live technical support.  I can’t imagine any university who would want to commit large scale technical support to a class full of non-credit, non-paying students. So every aspect of online delivery would have to be iron-clad to work and very straight forward to access.

2. Scaleable content and exercises. Once one had assurances of a solid platform, then the content would have to be scaled in some way. For example, a course that relied on a $400 textbook would not be a very appealing class to open to the public because few public, non-credit students will be interested (it seems to me) in purchasing a $400 textbook.  Open source content and public domain texts would work better.  Multiple-guess type questions are more easily scaleable than essay tests and papers.  Currently I teach my online History 101 class as asynchronous – meaning all the content is available from the first day.  This may not scale well for a massive online course where a less-engaged public might not be inclined to complete weekly assignments in order and prefer to skip around defeating any pedagogical goals dependent upon the sequential engagement with content.

3. Access and Control. One key to managing the relationship between paying, for-credit students, and non-credit students is creating levels of access that, for example, prevent open discussion boards from turning into the worst kind of comment sections on a blog.  I initially thought that limiting the length of time a discussion board was accessible would limit the opportunities for crazy comments or spam.  Mick offered a better solution.  He suggested that discussion boards be controlled through “adaptive release” exercises.  In other words, to get access to a discussion, you have to score above a particular grade on a quiz based on the readings.  Of course, a clever instructor could develop a whole series of adaptive release access points; with achievement would come ever more intimate levels of access much in the same way that video games release bonus features at certain levels.  This adaptive release model would not only limit access to people with malicious intent (to some extent), but also create incentives to non-credit students to engage the material in the class.

4. Goals and Objectives. A public course – like any course – will need a clear sets of goals and objectives. There is no escaping that any course like this would have to be experimental at first.  And like any experiment, we would have to establish certain metrics to determine whether the class was successful or not.  The simple statistics, like number of students and length of time on-site (as a metric for engagement) would be useful, but we would also want to see if we could gather data on student engagement more broadly.  The goal, to my mind, would be to draw people into the subject matter.  Following the model of many video game creators, we’d want our course to create an immersive space, and we would have to monitor certain clear criteria to determine whether this was successful.  We might also borrow from are colleagues in marketing to understand better the various metrics used to determine the success or failure of a website or a viral or web-based marketing campaign.

5. Resources.  The biggest hurdle to implementing a class like this would be to determine whether the benefits of the course are worth the commitment of resources.  A public access course has the potential to break down barriers between “the academy” and the public, engage types of learners who might not be inclined to enroll for credit at a university, and expose students to ways of thinking, priorities, and experiences rare or impossible in the classroom.  On the other hand, how many hours per week does managing a potentially massive online class take, how robust of a cyber-infrastructure, and, even, what is necessarily to publicize the course and actually get non-credit students to “enroll”.  As much as we’d like to say that we’re teaching the world “for free” there is always some cost in time and resources.

Those are just my preliminary thoughts on the potential issues and rewards of teaching the world for free.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Teaching the Public

A Quick Review: Teaching What You Don’t Know

Posted on July 22, 2010 by Bill Caraher| 1 Comment

NewImage.jpg

This past week, I read T. Huston’s Teaching What You Don’t Know, largely on the recommendation of Anne Kelsch and her fantastic summer reading list.  I didn’t have a chance to participate in the OID Faculty Study Seminar this past year, but I did have some observations on the T. Huston’s book.  So, I thought I might offer them here in an informal review in the venerable academic tradition of “book notes”.  The hope is that others might be similarly inclined to share their impressions of this book or another from Anne’s summer reading list or some other book that they found in some way notable.

I spend a good bit of my career teaching courses that are at the absolute fringes of what I know.  In fact, I am far more drawn to class that touches on at least some material outside my main field of study.  It may sound perverse, but I spend plenty of time pondering the wonders of the ancient world; so I never feel particularly slighted if I don’t have to talk about antiquity in each and every class that I teach.  In an ordinary semester, I teach Western Civilization I, which begins and ends beyond the chronological limitation of my knowledge, The Historians Craft, which is part historical method and part historiography neither of which constitute a particular specialty of mine, and once a year I teach Graduate Historiography, which only touches briefly on any scholar whom I have studied intensively.  In short, most of my time is spent teaching what I don’t know, if content is the main criteria by which teaching knowledge is evaluated.

As Huston points out, most of us end up teaching outside our area of specialty sometime during our academic careers.  This is as much a reflection of the narrow scope of most graduate expertise as the nature of undergraduate curricula that tends to be equal parts conservative in the division of knowledge and cutting edge in the move to cross/trans/inter disciplinary research.  For example, my Western Civilization class is a very traditional way of introducing students to European history which probably fits awkwardly with the methods, approaches, and concentrations most new history faculty experience in Graduate School.  At the same time, the expanding influence of digital methods in history and the influence of social science and other disciplines with the humanities ensures a constantly revised body of post-structural/modern/colonial critique.

In some ways, we are always teaching what we don’t know and, as a result, this book provides numerous helpful observations to manage the experience of teaching at the edge of understanding.  While many of these are almost self-evident (e.g. read what you have assigned before the class begins… does this really count as advice?), some deal with how to manage student expectations.  In history, it is always amazing to meet a student who is under the impression that we have taken the liberty of memorizing all of the primary sources.  Managing student expectations is central to moving from the solid ground of content mastery (after all, I can list all the Roman Emperor and their dates of rule, can you?) to the far more marshy ground of teaching method or encouraging students to explore new approaches, analyze new texts, and imagine new problems.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of these techniques in a field like history where prioritizing content has fought a seesaw battle with prioritizing method over the last 125 years(!), the ability to teach what you don’t know is all the more important.  After all the real test of understanding comes only when a student confronts a foreign body of information and deploys successfully the techniques, methods, and approaches necessary to master it.  While it remains easy enough to create “laboratory” type experiments for students where the instructor knows the possible outcomes and the students do not, these kind of teaching models almost always fall short of the risks inherent in real world research.  As I tell my undergraduate historical methods class, when you pick a research topic in the real world, you are, to a very real extent, on your own to make sense of the material at your disposal.  As an instructor, I can bring whatever knowledge of method and content to bear on the topic and material at hand, but there is no guarantee that I know the best way to approach a historical problem and I certainly cannot predict the outcome of any particular line of research.  As the infamous “banking” system of teaching where students master a set body of content gives way to approaches that emphasize learning by doing (or other active learning type approaches) the possibility for teaching what you don’t know increases massively.  In fact, one could even argue that if you’re not teaching what you don’t know, then you’re not doing it right.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Books, Teaching

Some Teaching Technologies

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Bill Caraher| 1 Comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

I am willing to try almost any piece of technology at least once if I think that it has the potential to improve the way that I teach, write, or do research.  The investment in time required to learn a new piece of software or gizmo while often unsatisfactory one an individual level, has so far paid dividends across the whole range of technologies that I use to manage my everyday life.  To put it another way, I was very reluctant to learn to use the so-called e-mail, but the initial investment in learning Eudora (many years ago) has added a level of efficiency to my everyday life that more than makes up for the time wasted trying to learn to use the latest gizmo or application.

Over the past six months, I’ve used and appreciated a whole range of new technologies, ranging from my iPad and my Android powered phone to light duty web-aps that solve an immediate problem (how is it possible to schedule a meeting without Doodle?).  From that little gaggle of software and hardware, three piece of intriguing technology stand out:

1. Omeka.net. I am really excited to be an alpha test for Omeka.net.  Omeka is an online collection management software produced by the Center for History and the New Media at George Mason University and our neighbors at the Minnesota State Historical Society.  It allows an individual or organization to organize and present collections of material – from texts and podcasts to images and video.  As someone who views the world as a kind of infinite archive, a program of this kind has obvious appeal.  For the last year, I’ve had Omeka running on a server at the University of North Dakota and it has become home for various collections of images including a fine art photography exhibition, a research archive of vernacular architecture in Greece, and a small collection of maps from my survey project in Greece.

The only downside to the program was that it took me quite some time (and a bit of money) to get it up and running on a University server.  Omeka.net eliminates the hassle of running and maintaining server based software because they offer both the software and the server side maintenance in the same way that WordPress.com hosts WordPress blogs.  This means that soon, even the least technologically inclined could be up and running with Omeka and begin to catalogue their personal or group archives.

The potential for teaching is really clear.  Curation is becoming an important watchword in our digital age as people come to realize that the quantity of data produced has come to challenge our ability to manage it. The ability to deploy and teach easily a powerful tool like Omeka for collecting, organizing, and presenting a wide range of digital material (primarily in the humanities, but Omeka is hardly a tool limited to a particular discipline) will introduce information management and literacy skills that are likely to be relevant for our digital age.

Right now, Omeka.net is out in invitation only Alpha testing with all the attended caveats, but I asked for an invitation and received it within a few months.

2. Ecto vs. MarsEdit. This past week, ProfHacker (a must read for tech-curious faculty) discussed briefly the relative merits of two offline, blog composition tools, Ecto and MarsEdit. If you’re a blogger (and these days, who isn’t), it is almost essential to be able to write a blog post someplace other than the online space provided by your blog provider.  In general, the online editors provided by most blogging services (e.g. Typepad, WordPress, Blogger) are underpowered, a bit fickle, and dependent on your connection to the internet (and stability of your browser) to work.  There is nothing more frustrating than composing a brilliant post online and seeing it vanish with a browser crash or internet interruption.  Offline composers are half light-duty word processors and half light-duty html editors.  The best option is probably Windows Live Writer, but there is no Mac version of this flexible and stable little program. The two best for Mac users are Ecto and MarsEdit.  Both provide a word processor type interface that allows you to compose easily, edit HTML, and to integrate various media content.

I used Ecto for over a year and found it pretty satisfactory.  It did a particularly nice job managing links (and a blog is nothing without its links to other blogs and sites on the web) and images.  MarsEdit has a slightly nicer interface for writing, however.  I love that I can change the font that I am writing with in MarsEdit without changing the font that appears on my blog.  In other words, I indulge my idiosyncratic preference to compose in American Typewriter font without having to publish using that font. MarsEdit may be a bit less capable of handling images, however.

Either tool makes blog writing less of an adventure and more of a pleasure.  The simple interfaces encourages a focus on the words (not dissimilar from the recent spate of simplified word processors like WriteRoom) and the stability and security the software encourages me to write in a longer form than I might do on the web.

3. Daytum.  Daytum is one of the quirkier services on the web.  It provides a subscriber with an interface where they can record and quantify things.  For example, I count the number of words that I write each day (since I started using Daytum, I’ve written 73,810 words).  I also record whether I get a ride home with my wife or walk; to date, I’ve walked home 35 times and got a ride home 34 times since January.  I like recording the temperature in my office in the morning, but I’m just like that.  I also like the idea of keeping track of how many pages I read each day, but I’ve found that more of an inconvenience as I move from reading paper books and articles to reading across a wide range of media, many of which do not use pages at all (e.g. the web, on my iPad, et c.).

Daytum is a free indulgence for those obsessed with quantifying their lives.  At the same time, it represents the far fringe of a whole batch of software designed to help one become more efficient or at least more aware of how one spends their time. As academics, it seems like we are always running out of time, stumbling across some new deadline, or having to negotiate some kind of delicate work management solution to balance relationships, teaching, research, or “outside” interests.

What technologies have you used over the past six months that have improved how you do what you do?

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Technology

Open Ended Learning in the Summer

Posted on June 3, 2010 by Bill Caraher| Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History (and Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project), University of North Dakota

One thing that I sometimes forget is that most of my learning has come not from structured classroom space with structured relationships to material and environment, clear learning outcomes, and rigid forms of assessment. Summer time provides the perfect time of year for such open-ended learning.  The relentless pressures of teaching and learning are relaxed, the weekly grind of meetings of subsides, and for those of us who do research or teach abroad, the scenery changes allowing for those dislocating moments which are so central to the uncanny experience associated with learning.

For students and faculty summer breaks can be akin to recess or playtime that some education critics see as particularly valuable as an opportunity to develop skill well-suited for real world engagement with the unfamiliar.  The challenge for me and our team, is how do we manage the unstructured environment especially when both students and faculty tend to understand learning most frequently within far more formal  conditions.

The greatest challenge to fostering informal and unstructured learning is in encouraging students to take full advantage of the unstructured opportunities, in allowing for the unpredictability and inefficiency of unstructured learning, and in designing assessment programs that can evaluate a wide range of possible outcomes. 

This summer, we’ve been waiting on a permit to conduct fieldwork and during this time we have had a diverse group of students washing pottery and biding their time with various small projects.  Our lack of fieldwork has removed one of the more easily assessed and focused aspects of the project’s educational goals. In its place, I’ve advocated for a series of open ended learning events, which would force the students to engage with their environment (the city of Larnaka) or a set of archaeological artifacts (plow-zone pottery).

There has been some reluctance to let the students just roam free, however.  Moreover, there is persistent concern that students wouldn’t “get” an assignment that was required, but at the same time had no goals beyond engagement. In fact, students are as conditioned to expect assignments with distinct, assessable learning goals.  This, obviously, is the cause of the most common student question in the classroom: “will this be on the test?”

The summer provides a chance for both faculty and students to shift expectations and to recognize the opportunities for productive learning outside the institutional constraints of regularized university life.  These opportunities, like recess or play time in younger children, can cultivate the sense of wonder, observation, and engagement.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Open-Ended Learning

Teaching Thursday: A Year in Review

Posted on March 25, 2010 by Bill Caraher| 1 Comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Teaching Thursday, for a brief effort to summarize its first year in existence. Teaching Thursday emerged from a conversation between me and Anne Kelsch. The idea of Teaching Thursday began on my blog as an online extension of his regular teaching journal.  The idea was to take time each week to reflect on some issue either in the media or in practice that influences the way in which he taught. As with blogging in general, the reflective writing soon became addictive and this addiction (as they often do) led to changes in behavior.  I found that I became more aware (and, indeed, interested) in how changing approaches to my classroom practice produced different results, created different environments, and reflected changing attitudes toward teaching more broadly.  I thought it would be a great idea to supplement the regular discussions organized by the Office of Instructional Development with a weekly teaching blog where folks across campus (and perhaps even outside of campus) could reflect on the things that they do that influence how they teach.

Since those first conversations, Teaching Thursday has seen 63 posts and 66 comments.  The most common categories (and we divided the post into many, probably too many categories) and those related to online teaching (5), technology (7), cheating (4), student expectations (6), graduate instruction (6), and the future of teaching (6), and summer teaching (4).  These posts were written by over 20 authors representing 15 departments or divisions on campus and several off-campus bloggers to add some diversity to our perspective here.  The posts featured the full range of faculty (both tenure track and non-tenure track, from full professors to assistant professors), staff, and administrators who are all committed to teaching in some way on the University of North Dakota campus.

Below is a list of the 25 most popular posts from the past year.  One of the great things about blogs is that you can track, to some extent, the number of times your pages were viewed.  Of course, any kind of web statistic must be taken with a grain of salt, but the ability to say something about what your audience found interesting, compelling, or timely.  The list below ranks the most popular posts based on the number of page views per day. The diversity among these popular posts is remarkable to me.  They range from very traditional blog posts which merely point toward an article of interest on the web, to inspirational essays, to thoughtful critiques and practice teaching advice.

1. 2.4. Howard Zinn and Teaching, R. Kahn
2. 1.80. The Recruiting Paradox: Recruiting and Teaching a New Generation of Graduate Students, E. Nelson
3. 1.75. Online Teaching, the Panopticon, and the unequal gaze, M. Beltz
4. 1.59. On the habit of cheating, M. Beltz
5. 1.39. How to spot a bad professor, W. Caraher
6. 1.38. The Cost of Cheap Education, A. Kelsch
7. 1.28. The English Department and Beyond: the UND Writers Conference, C. Alberts
8. 0.95. Technology and Pedagogy. W. Caraher
9. 0.87. Teaching Thursday: Critiquing the Three Year Solution, J. Hawthorne
10. 0.70. The New Future of Teaching: Graduate Student Mentoring/Deconstructing Framework J. Benoit
11. 0.67. Teaching Thursdays: Boundaries and Manners, C. Prescott
12. 0.63. The New Future of Teaching: Social Networking, Changing Expectations, and the Perils of Access, W. Caraher. B. Weber
13. 0.57. Teaching Thursday: Some Thoughtful Tips , M. Beltz,W. Caraher, T. Prescott, B. Weber
14. 0.57. The Panopticon and Online Teaching, W. Caraher
15. 0.47. Mentoring Graduate Students, C. Prescott
16. 0.42. The Cost of Cheap Education: Another Perspective , M. Beltz
17. 0.41. Three Thursday Thoughts on Teaching: 1. Lexical Analysis , D. Perkins
18. 0.40. Reflecting on Teaching: An All-Campus Colloquium on Teaching and Learning, W. Caraher
19. 0.39. Call me Edupunk, C. Alberts
20. 0.38. Using Models to Teach, C. Barkdull, B. Weber
21. 0.37. Cheating, W. Caraher
22. 0.31. Reflecting on Teaching Colloquium: On Spurring Self-Reflection in Decision Making, D. Sauerwein
23. 0.30. Online Cheating, C. Prescott
24. 0.26. Another View on Teaching Graduate Students, A. Kitzes
25. 0.24. Making the Most of a Month in China: The Role of a Direct Journal, C. Berry

Over the first year, the blog has enjoyed over 7500 page views (and this does not count views via its RSS feed in Google Reader and the like).  The chart below shows that the trend over the past 12 months is clearly a positive one especially when you consider that December and January are typically slow blog months (both in terms of posts and visits) and March still has a week left and is showing exceptional traffic. In short, I am optimistic that the upward trend will continue.

TeachingThursdayStats

While we do not collect a full set of analytics data, we can say a few things about how people got to our blog.  The biggest referrer is und.edu, followed by und.edu/dept/oid (the home page of the office of instructional development). My personal blog — The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World provided some traffic as did the Official Blog of the Graduate School , but more important perhaps are various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter which drove a considerable quantity of traffic to the site.  Finally, several other sites picked up our blog and linked to it.  The most exciting link came from the the New York Times, but we also attracted links from India, South America, and several blogs in the US.  The most exciting thing is that every day, every week, and every month we see more and more traffic coming to Teaching Thursday to discover what our faculty and friends have to say about teaching.

Without sounding sappy, I’ve been very pleased to discover so many people on campus willing to write critical, reflective, and practical posts on aspects of their teaching.  As we look ahead to our 10,000 visit and 100th post, I am excited to continue to work to develop content and participation on the blog. In particular, I’d like to get more participation from across campus, and extend invitations to my colleagues in the College of Engineering, Nursing, the Law School, and Medical School (I’m already working on ways to draw in colleagues in Aerospace!) to contribute what you do that is inspirational, practical, and exciting to the conversation.  With the recent emphasis on the STEM disciplines, I think that this forum can become a useful place for teachers both within and outside of the STEM fields to  exchange ideas that will enrich all of our classroom experiences.

I’d like to thank all the contributors over the past year — especially those who wrote multiple posts or took the time to write about teaching during busiest parts of the semester — and thank Anne Kelsch’s for all her hard work to keep the blog in the campus eye.

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Posted in Bill Caraher

The Panopticon and Online Teaching

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Bill Caraher| Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota
Crossposted to Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

In a blog post a few months back dedicated to the topic of online teaching, I mentioned an observation by Mick Beltz, a regular contributor to Teaching Thursday. He suggested that teaching online captured some of the essential characteristics of M. Foucault’s panopticon as outlined in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this metaphor, Foucault used Jeremy Bentham’s vision of the panopticon to describe modern society. The panopticon is an architectural form, most famously used for prisons, where an observer stationed at a central point can see into a series of cells. The people in these cells can always see the observation post (although they do not know whether they are being observed), but cannot see into any of the other cells. In this way they are together, yet isolated from one another In practical application, this means that a warden can observe the behavior of all the inmates almost simultaneously while the inmate cannot observe each other’s behavior.

For Foucault, the pressure of constant observations implied specifically in the panoticon, but functioning elsewhere formed the ideal environment for maintaining the kind of discipline introduced in the prison, the factory, and even the modern school. For Foucault, this kind of internalized discipline produced by the fear of being constantly observed, ensured that society maintained a degree of conformity sufficient to keep the engines of capitalism moving. The panopticon and its culture of observation were part of Foucault’s analysis of discipline in modern times and part of a greater goal of the modern state to produce “docile” bodies .

The parallel between the panopticon as a physical building and the experience of teaching (and presumably taking) an online course are quite striking. First the observer, in this case the faculty member, can observe student behavior through a comprehensive array of statistics as well as submitted work. The individual student, on the other hand, has almost no view of the faculty member, except for when their work is evaluated. At the same time, they have only limited abilities to observe the work of other students and rarely would know when another student is being particular successful in the class or struggling. In a classroom setting, of course, students can interact freely with one another both before and after class and encode their behavior in ways that make it difficult for a faculty member to observe, much less understand. Even during class, verbal and non-verbal cues from the blatant — like laughter at a particularly innane comment by a fellow student — or subtle, like glances at one another or eye-rolling or even the frustrated figiting that occurs when a class runs over, provide clear modes of communication between students. Moreover, students can use these techniques to force a dialog with even a reluctant faculty member. The classroom dynamic presents a formidable and almost irresistible check on unfettered faculty authority.

The removal of this opportunity for spontaneous, collective action certainly removes a key aspect of the faculty-student dialog from the classroom setting. Moreover, the realization that one is being constantly observed initiates and conditions the student for a world where companies like Google see everything from your mundane search patterns to your house to your financial, personal, and religious identities. The conditioning of students to be observed in an online environment prepares them for a world where companies and governments constantly gather information and construct identities for individuals which are so subtle, varied, and complex that they exceed the individual’s ability to understand or realize them.

The impact of this environment on teaching as a profession is significant. While the “teacherly” gaze has always been one of any number of treasured weapon in the teacher’s arsenal (able, when deployed successfully, to bring to order even the most disruptive student), it now has the potential to become the single most powerful tool for conditioning behavior. We can observe when a student comes online, how long they stay for, what they look at, as well as the what they produce. With only a little exaggeration, we can say that the student study habits, reading behavior, and analytical practices are de-mystified and can be placed in direct correlation to student performance on evaluated work. In effect, the barrier that has long separated the mystical process of learning from the work of evaluation has come down.

The advantage, then, of online education is that it conditions students to become the docile bodies in our information age and to accept our individuality as a commodity in the information economy. The documented life is the commodified life.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Online Teaching, Technology

How to spot a bad professor

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Bill Caraher| 3 Comments

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota (via Anne Kelsch)

This past week one of the blogs hosted by U.S. News and World Report published a short list of ways to spot a bad professor (via Anne Kelsch).  Two former university professors, Lynn F. Jacobs and Jeremy S. Hyman write for the blog giving some kind of authority. 

Here’s a short summary of their list:

1. The professor is boring.

2. The professor is bummed out.

3. The professor doesn’t give out a syllabus—or hands out a one-paragraph syllabus that is just the course description from the Web.

4. The professor isn’t clear about the requirements and how much they count.

5. The professor assigns an undoable amount of work—or no work at all.

6. The professor has incredibly petty rules.

7. The professor can’t fill the whole class period.

8. The professor seems unsure about the material.

9. The professor presents the material in a confused way.

10. The professor never involves the students.

First, it is probably important to realize that this list is designed to attract hits to their blog as much as to advise students.  Once we accept that, it is hard not to think that the list has some merit.  I think I would flee from a class if a professor showed any number of these traits.  More troubling, however, is the assumption that this kind of behavior is widespread on university campuses or at least common enough to make a list. 

There is also the issue of how to determine whether a professor is boring or whether a particular workload is “undoable”.  Petty rules and honest insecurity about material are likewise in the eye of the beholder.  Big classes often require some rules that would appear petty in a seminar environment.  For example, I tell my students that I am not particularly offended if their phone rings during class (and most of our students here at UND know that this is rude), but I am offended if the student answers the phone.  This kind of explicit statement is hardly necessary in a seminar environment.  On the other hand, I’ve found it productive to admit in a seminar that I struggled with a particular text.  This can often put a student at ease when confronting a very challenging text.  I am not sure that this strategy would be as effective in, say, a large lecture course.

The real question, I suppose, is not whether a list like this is good or not (after all, who would want to be taught by a “bummed out” or confusing professor?), but what are the basic assumptions about good teaching (or being a good professor) in this list. 

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Posted in Anne Kelsch, Bad Professors, Bill Caraher

Holiday Reading

Posted on December 10, 2009 by Bill Caraher| 2 Comments

Each long holiday break, I find a couple of books that I would not ordinary read and make them a priority. This gives me a chance to get a new perspectives on old problems or to see what all the buzz is about for a book outside my primary (and increasingly narrow) field of research interest.

This winter, I plan to read:

S. Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time. Oxford 2008. This books caused such a buzz last spring and summer that I was actually embarrassed not to have at least skimmed it.
M. Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. J. Howe. Verso 1995. Mostly because I am going to spend about 65 hours in airports this break and airports are quintessential non-places.
Cyril of Scytholopolis, The Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Trans. R. M. Price. Cistercian Press 1991. The real question is what can’t you learn from 6th century Palestinian monks.

So, let’s crowdsource a reading list for this winter break. What will you be reading this holiday season?

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Books

Three Thursday Thoughts on Teaching: 3. Are You Running Out of Time?

Posted on December 3, 2009 by Bill Caraher| Leave a comment

William Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

Here’s a final post on our Three Teaching Thought Thursday.  I often have trouble communicating the notion of time to students.  For example, it is hard to convince them how long it will take to, say, write a paper.  The notion of a timed test is also a challenge as, without fail, a student will tell me that he or she ran out of time.  E. P. Thompson in “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” (Past and Present 2 (1967), 56-97) suggested that this is because students are one of the groups who still exist in pre-capitalist modes of production (p. 73).  Time and its accompanying “work discipline” have not extended their grasp to embrace the docile student body.  Instead, they proceed with their studies as artisans or crafts-people, taking every opportunity to enjoy life and then frantically working to complete piece-work goals.  This is even more challenging for an online class where the relationship between the overseer and the artisan is the most attenuated.  The only motivation, in this case, is the distant and somewhat mystical end of the semester.  This clearly will not do.  As part of our job is to complete the process of transforming our fun-loving artisan class into good capitalist automatons, I have discovered a simple trick to impart a sense of foreign (to them) urgency to my online class: a countdown timer.   I’ve put one up over on my blog since I couldn’t figure out how to put it up here.  This timer installed easily on my Blackboard page.

This one doesn’t let you set the hours so according to this countdown timer, grades are due at midnight on December 22nd.  It doesn’t hurt to get them in early, right?

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Time

Teaching (with Twitter) Tuesday

Posted on November 24, 2009 by Bill Caraher| Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

The Chronicle of Higher Education this weekend ran a story on Teaching with Twitter.  Aside from its appealing alliteration, the story presented two case studies of faculty who use Twitter in the classroom. One was from a consumer science class at Purdue and the other a history class at University of Texas at Dallas.  Both used Twitter as an official back channel for their classes providing students with another opportunity to ask questions, interact with one another, and archive these remarks (organized through twitter hashtags) so that students could return to them later.  The faculty members report more or less positive experiences from setting up these Twitter back channels, although the Chronicle story and the faculty members themselves admitted that there was some risk involved.  Students could, for example, use Twitter as a place to snipe at the professor or other students in a semi-anonymous setting.  On the other hand, Twitter could serve as a platform to engage students more fully in the classroom experience — especially students who are too shy or reserved to speak out.

Longtime readers of my blog know that I experimented with Twitter in a graduate seminar.  In my experiment, I hoped to encourage the students to “read actively” and tweet their impressions of the various books as they read them.  These impressions could range from quotes to questions, visceral responses, or even complaints.  I had hoped that the Twitter feed would make the exercise of reading — typically an intensely private, personal, and reflective time, into something that was public, social, and dynamic.  The goal was to break down some of the intellectual isolation (first year graduate) students sometimes experience when reading a challenging text and encourage them to formulate ideas while reading to break through the tendency to read a book passively. 

Using social networking applications to increase student engagement is an interesting example of how technology as technology can engage students in new ways.  My History 101: Western Civilization class this fall is relatively large (150 students) and meets once a week, at night, in a large theater style room.  The basic content driven lectures are available online (here).  The classroom time focuses on “primary source” texts (i.e. texts from Antiquity and the Middle Ages), recapping the major points in the content driven lecture, inclass writing assignments, testing various models for understanding the past, and informal question-and-answer sessions that focus, generally, on more difficult concepts.  I playfully refer to the classroom time as a live concert environment and the podcast lectures as the studio album.  While this can produce an exciting, improvised, and responsive environment, the class tends to become dominated by a relatively small faction (10%-20% (i.e. 20-30) students). 

Many of the students in the class are freshman from smaller high school who find the large classroom to be a very foreign and maybe intimidating environment. At the same time, as Monica Rankin points out, many students are comfortable with the social-networking environment native to Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter.  The plan would be to use the familiar and more intimate environment of the social media to bridge the gap between the student and their classmates (and teacher) in the large lecture-style classroom.

Do any of the readers of this blog use Twitter in the classroom?

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Technology, Twitter