Category Archives: Bill Caraher

Teaching and Learning in the University of 1965

Posted on February 2, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

Last week, retired professor of history Playford Thorson passed away. He was a member of the Department of History from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s and witnessed some of the key transitions at the University of North Dakota. In the early 1960s, he and a group of his young colleagues – frequently called the “Young Turks” –  were instrumental in pushing the university to adapt to changing professional standards, to incorporate new classroom practices, and to recognize the challenges facing higher education during a period of demographic and institutional transformation.

This group of enthusiastic young faculty members developed a strident reputation and, at their peak, prepared a manifesto identifying the problems facing the university in the 1960s and suggesting changes. The famous Letter of the 25 to President George Starcher offered some substantial criticism of the University at that time, and while it is difficult to know whether this criticism was justified, the nature of the critique offers a view of conversations on campus which have some uncanny resemblances to conversations continuing on campus across the country today.

A primary concern for the Young Turks was the difficulties modifying “student culture”. They argued that students are too willing “to accept passively the doctrines presented to them rather than raise meaningful questions.” Students tend “to listen uncritically” and lack the preparation early in their university careers to reach their full potential.  The 25 recommend a series of one-credit freshman classes designed to introduce new students to the range of course available at the university. In another place they see the potential of eroding the “occasionally artificiality of department boundaries” and recommend that the university do more to foster collaboration between faculty and cross listing of courses (while avoiding terms like synergies). They also looked to ways to manage distractions on campus and build a more vital student life in the residence halls. In a more innocent age, they even recommend funds be made available for faculty who invite students to their homes for “academically justifiable purposes”.

The 25 also offered some interesting critiques of the university’s treatment of faculty. They urged the university to do more the foster the development of new faculty and prevent their idealism from being “destroyed or… driven underground”.  Faculty resources, library facilities, and an increased emphasis on academic matters at the expense of other distractions would all foster the retention of younger faculty. While many of these suggestions have been heeded, retention of junior faculty remains a priority on campus, and it does not seem entirely separate from issues of teaching and student achievement.

They conclude by saying:

“We have been critical — intentionally so — in this statement. Not all of us agree to each of the proposals suggested. All of us, however, are in sympathy with the fundamental aims set forth and the desire to strengthen our institution. We add, in conclusion, that the criticisms we have express stem not from personal animosity nor from our lack of fair in your desire to improve the University and your ability to lead effectively to that end. Were our attitudes and beliefs otherwise, we would have prepared this statement or submitted it for your consideration. The numerous innovations and improvements you have instituted in the past decade are recognized and respected. We now ask that you move us toward new goals and aspirations.”

 

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Reflective Writing

Posted on January 19, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

The great philosopher of history, R.G. Collingwood, famously argued that all history is the history of thought. In Collingwood’s estimation, the historian re-enacts that past in his (for Collingwood, the historian was always a “he”) own mind when he reads a historical text or studies objects from the past. While rethinking the thoughts of the actors who participated in a past event, the historian is aware and critical of his own thinking about the past. This critical practice distinguished “the best kind of historian” from other people who make it a habit of merely assembling evidence into an orderly presentation and passing it off as some kind of objective or impartial truth. Collingwood saw the ability and responsibility of historians to think past thoughts as key to the role history plays in the production of human knowledge. In fact, he argued that history was the only discipline that produced human self-knowledge.

While his arguments for the autonomy of history have not received universal acceptance, Collingwood has contributed to how I think about reflective writing in the classroom. Over the course of expounding his larger argument, Collingwood noted in an offhand way that when he reads something he wrote days before, he acts the part of the historian by reflecting on his own writing and using it to reconstruct a past thought.

This was a helpful idea to me as I sat down to struggle with constructing assignments for my graduate historiography seminar. Graduate historiography is a required course for all M.A., D.A., and Ph.D. students in history in our department. Generally, the course elicits a kind of exaggerated dread because it is designed to force students to examine their assumptions and practices as historians. In general, historians regard an ability to recognize one’s own disciplinary, historical, and social assumptions about the past as a crucial step in a student’s development in the profession. The course, then, insists that students reflect and own up to their own position in relation to the process and methods of historical thinking.

Reflective writing has become an important part of encouraging students to write and think about a text, situation, or body of material. Generally, the practice has allowed students a certain amount of latitude in how they approach a subject and has sought to instill confidence in students by recognizing the authenticity of their own engagement with material.  This goals of reflective writing are particularly suitable for my graduate historiography class where I introduce the students to any number of challenging texts and push them to embrace often uncomfortable critiques leveled against longstanding academic practices. This can be, as you might imagine, a difficult task as the students tend to resist the most critical challenges to traditional historical practices. To allow students to engage these critiques in a safe place, I require reflective essays each week that respond to the readings assigned. These then become, to some extent, the basis for our discussion in the seminar.

Traditionally, graduate historiography seminars require students to, say, write a few critical book reviews and perhaps write a longer paper on a particular aspect of historical practice (e.g. women’s history, microhistory, Marxist history, et c.). These are boring things to read and largely reproduce the kind of exercises that students write in their other graduate history courses. On the one hand, historical works tend to be boring, so having students write boring assignments does not make them less useful. And, using an assignment in a graduate historiography class to reinforce skills developed elsewhere in the program can be a good thing. Increasingly, however, I want my graduate historiography seminar to encourage students to engage critically and reflectively with difficult ideas.

So, in the spirit of Collingwood, I ask my students to take their reflective writing, compile it into an archive, and to write a historical paper based that uses these reflective texts as “primary sources”. The goal is, of course, to get the students to think about how they thought about writing history. In Collingwoodian terms, I am asking the students to re-enact, critically, their own learning process.

In other words, it’s an effort to close the loop.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Graduate Instruction, Reflective Writing

The Substance of the Syllabus

Posted on November 3, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

I’ve been thinking about how I run a digital history practicum lately and considering how my experiences in this laboratory course can inform how I teach in more traditional courses. Recently I received a comment on a post that I cross-posted with my own blog, regarding my decisions to go without a syllabus in my digital history practicum.  The well-meaning commenter seemed appalled that I did not have a syllabus and went so far to insist that I “owed the students” a syllabus.

This got me thinking.

It’s not that I didn’t think about making a syllabus or couldn’t be bothered to do it for this class. Instead, I decided that the course was not a traditional course and the goals associated with the course divided evenly between learning by practice and a well-defined goal independent of the learning process.  The course had as a client the Chester Fritz Library and the success of the course dependent in part on the success in putting together a digital history collection and various online exhibits for the library. 

So at the start of the class, instead of circulating a syllabus, the class of four graduate students met and discussed the various expectations and deadlines for various parts of our project. As a result of this discussion, the class itself created an informal syllabus. Since then, we have mostly held to the various deadlines, although I am not convinced that we did as well with the various expectations that involved parties had for the class. 

I will admit that this course is a unique case, the students are almost all graduate students and advanced graduate students at that. We met informally and cultivated a flexible, collegial atmosphere rather than one informed by the traditional teacher – student dyad of authority. 

I had lunch last week with my fellow Teaching Thursday editor, Mick Beltz. Over some sandwiches we discussed the tendency toward contractual understandings of syllabi among students and the rise of the “student as customer” mentality.  We speculated about a  slippery slope where the student as customer arrives in our classroom expecting a precise definition of what it is that they will learn, how much better it will make them, and what the eventual value of this knowledge will be on future earnings and happiness. The quantitative and qualitative character of the imparted knowledge is girded about by a contractual syllabus and a series of rigid rubrics and standardized assessment methods that track the students’ progress through a series of environments arranged like a decentralized assembly line designed to produce a perfected person, a qualified employee, and a happy customer. While we all agree that some parts of this model are inevitable or even intrinsic in how higher education has been conceptualized in the US, the reality of this increasingly commodified view of the educational experience is depressing and limits our ability to adapt to a dynamic classroom environment, disrupt the student-teach dyad, and challenge authority.

In fact, as a result of our conversation, I began to wonder whether the syllabus does more to create the contractual and consumerist attitude by students toward their education than almost anything else. It immediately places the faculty member in the position of someone who owes the students something.  I always imagine the syllabus as a document that basically tells the students that I have something distinct and material to impart and sets their expectations of my performance. Like a contract with a local company, the student is put in the position of making sure that I deliver on the goods that my syllabus/contract promised. 

It wasn’t until my conversations with Mick, that I remembered my first experiment with unconventional syllabus writing. In my Latin 202 course last semester, I wrote a one page syllabus with some vague learning goals. (Something along the lines of “Learn Latin gooder” or “to engooden your knowledge of the Latin language.”)  I did this because I was not entirely confident with the level of preparation the students had or my own abilities to “engooden” their Latin.  Over the course of the class, we discussed various possible assignments re-arranged the value of various successful and failed assessment activities, and established together expectations of weekly work.  This was successful (mostly) because it created an environment where we could adapt the class continuously to our performance. I remember being encouraged by discovering that I am not the only one who approached my classes in this way.

For my digital history practicum, I anticipated that advanced graduate students might see the syllabus as redundant and perhaps condescending. The goals of the course came as much from our conversations with our “client” (the library) as from what the students wanted or what I expected them to learn. In other words, the syllabus became redundant in an environment where the students knew that they had to learn to complete a task.

This kind of environment, of course, simulates life. As the students in the class look ahead to writing their dissertations, they will likely discover that this process does not come with a syllabus. Moreover, when they write their first scholarly articles, there are no deadlines, learning goals, assessments, or rubrics that constrain what they do or document what they learn.  Even outside of the comfy confines of the academy, the students will inevitably discover that life does not offer syllabi. Success, happiness, and fulfillment, do not come by fulfilling the obligations set out on a sheet of paper.

Do syllabi do more harm than good?

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Syllabi

Thinking about Teaching Digital History: A Follow Up

Posted on November 1, 2011 by | Leave a comment

A short follow up to a post from two weeks ago on Teaching Thursday.  The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Profhacker blog has featured a couple of short posts on integrating a digital project into a class.  The author, Amy Cavender, is discussing how she’s doing this in her class with a post here and a follow-up post here.

Some of her observations resonated nicely with our post on collaboration and teaching digital history through practice.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Digital Humanities

Thinking about Collaboration and Digital History in Practice

Posted on October 20, 2011 by | 3 Comments

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

Over the past half semester I’ve been working with a dedicated group of graduate students on public and digital history practicum. The practicum focused on the creation of a digital history collection and exhibit celebrating the Chester Fritz Library’s 50th Birthday. This project has had its ups and downs and we’re only half way through the experiment, but I felt like we had gone far enough along to reflect on some of the things that I’ve learned coordinating a class in an intensively collaborative, digital environment.

The class was designed, at least in theory, around the needs of our “client” the Chester Fritz Library and through several meeting with various stakeholders in the process – the Director of Libraries and the heads of various divisions – and sitting in on a  town hall like meeting of library staff, we developed an overall strategy on how to approach the library’s 50th Birthday as a digital, public history event. The library helped us set some deadlines and shape some expectations for how this project would fit within the festivities that they had already planned in the fall of this year.

Fritzat50

Check out the page here

The class itself consists of a five student dream team (as an Eagles fan I can say that): 3 Ph.D. students and an M.A. and a B.A. student.  At the midpoint of the semester, I asked the students to reflect upon their experiences in the class and my observations below derive in part from these reflections.  I not only received their generous permission to reflect on their reflection papers, but I’ve also asked them to check out this post and comment on my efforts to summarize their thoughts.

So here they are:

1. Structure and Room to Fail.  When I initially imagined the class, I had figured that our conversations with the library would help us shape our project, its deadlines, and goals.  So I did not create a formal syllabus, but rather created a list of suggested deadlines for various aspects of the project. In other words, the course lacked much in the way of formal structure, in part, because I hoped that our stakeholders and the students would set deadlines and goals.

They did move in this direction, but I overlooked one small issue in the planning of our public, digital history collection: the time to struggle and even fail. Some of the students initiatives which seemed quite reasonable involved far more time than any of us expected. The combination of unexpected delays, problems with workflow, and even plans or projects that didn’t work out, slowed the project down and the lack of a firm class structure gradually eroded a sense of urgency. Only a firm intervention set the class back on track, but by then, I think that the class was behind where we all hoped we would be as the public festivities started around homecoming week.

In the future, I think a firm structure would have provided some context for the kind of risks/reward analysis that my team considered when embarking on a more difficult or ambitious component of the project. In other words, we might have been more conscious of delays and other risks of ambitious plans, if there were checks on he system throughout the process.

2. Digital Immigrants. The digital learning curve was steeper than expected even for the most committed digital immigrants (i.e. students who were committed to learning digital tools but not “natively” familiar with them. I dislike the term “digital native” and “digital immigrant”, but in this case it seems particularly useful). In particular, I found that the students struggled to keep pace with the expectations of the digital world, where content has to appear continuously or at least at regular intervals to attract attention in the din of the internet. Student work patterns tended to encourage episodic writing usually toward the end of the term when papers become due. Asking them to produce content continuously throughout the semester and to write it directly into the digital stream (via a blog, a Twitter feed, and a digital collection) clearly created issues for our students who felt more at home with crafted final papers that emerged from long(ish) gestation periods and were refined over multiple drafts.

History is rather unique in that it tends to privilege to final product over the process. Historians tend not to dilate long on methods. The importance of the final product over the various intermediate steps that a scholar would take along the way, contributed to my students’ reluctance to expose their creative process to the world. So not only was the pace disruptive to their workflow patters, but they had few examples of pre-publication, public work to look to for guidance (and they do not read my blog or any other academic blogs.)

3. Collecting vs. Interpreting. One of the most interesting challenges of the process of producing web content on the fly is that my students initially insisted on a rather rigid division between the process of building a digital collection and the process of interpreting it. This divide, of course, is grounded in traditional models of historical research which imagines the first step to be data collection which forms the foundation for the analysis and interpretation.  This approach relies on a view of historical artifact as objects that exist outside of the interpretative process.  In fact, historians are still something bothered by the idea that our research questions can and do shape the kinds of evidence we look for in our sources and collections.

The dichotomy between collecting and analyzing is not grounded in reality, of course, (as any graduate student in the field could tell you): historical evidence and collection are the product of conscious decisions and selection processes. In other words, the collection itself – with its limits and character – is the product of historical thinking in the same way that more formal, written analysis and interpretation is.  Understanding these two processes as separate created a rift in their workflow and contributed to their difficulty in creating content continuously for the collection

4. Collaboration. In working with a group of students, I somehow expected a magic moment of collaboration to occur as individual’s found complementary interests, abilities, and schedules. So far, this has not happened. In fact, most of the year it was a challenge to get the entire group together at one time (we did not have a scheduled class time because I anticipated having to meet in different venues and with different stakeholders; this oversight is related to my point 1) much less having them work together as a cohesive unit.

The lack of collaboration between the students led them to be concerned that they were working on the same projects at the same time. Moreover, it became difficult for the students to synchronize content production, analysis, and interpretation across multiple sites and across different forms of content. The result is a series of fine semi-independent projects that are attractive, intriguing, and almost exciting, but not nearly as good as they could have been.

I’ve learned the collaboration requires a certain amount of leadership on my part as the instructor.  On the other hand, understanding how collaboration worked and didn’t work brought to the fore the challenges of public and digital history as a process. While collaboration always seems like a way to make a project easier, it also requires that all participants have a commitment to a particular approach to documenting and understanding the past. Finding this middle ground for all the collaborators likely requires more effort from everyone involved that simply letting team members go out and work on related, but ultimately independent projects.

Of course, this is the genius of promoting collaborative work at the University. It forces collaborators and supervisors to not only articulate a (frequently shifting) final product, but also forces everyone involved to focus on process. As so much of what we do in the humanities is refining our processes (methods, procedures), I have come to appreciate the value of collaboration not as a means of getting students to work together, but rather as a means of unpacking the process of creating the knowledge.

5. Final Projects. As the semester crosses the half-way point, I’ve begun to think about what I can expect of this group for a final project. To some extent the work itself – with all its flaws and strengths – represents a final product. On the other hand, it seems like a public work should represent more than just an exercise in process. To manage a final product, we have to have consensus on what would make our efforts to collect and analyze a digital collection successful. (This does not mean that the process has to be closed or the final results definitive.)

At the same time, we need to have some kind of reflective component to the class so that we can all consider the academic, intellectual, and practical lessons of our work. My hope is that this blog post is a first step toward that.

Crossposted to New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Digital Humanities, Digital Workflow

Live Blogging the Reflecting on Teaching Conference… Tomorrow!

Posted on September 29, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Why no Teaching Thursday today? Because we’ll be live blogging the Reflecting on Teaching Conference tomorrow.

See you then!

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Reflecting on Teaching

Five Easy Tools to Digitize Your Workflow

Posted on September 22, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

On Friday, I’m joining a colleague, Tim Pasch, to give a short talk to help graduate students and advanced undergraduates in the humanities to find easy ways to digitize their research workflow. The talk is at 12 at the Digital and New Media Lab (O’Kelly 207). Of course, everyone is welcome and some of these tips might be as useful for faculty types as student types.

Our goals will be to (1) encourage students to understand that incorporating digital tools into their research is not some kind of new hassle, but actually part of being a careful and systematic researcher. We also (2) hope to show the students that they don’t necessarily have to do learn new and complicated skills to digitize their workflow, but that there might be simple and better ways to do what they already do. Finally, (3) we want to introduce students to the idea that digital tools can help them make their work more transparent to the public and this can often facilitate the move from disorganized fragments of ideas to completed thoughts.

I’m going to introduce 5 simple tools that I feel can complement almost any workflow and can help us do what we do better.

1. NValt (or Notational Velocity) for note taking (in plain text!). I write almost exclusively in plain text these days and only work in a full blown word processors when I have to add citations, format for publication, or use track changes in a collaborative environment.  There are a ton of slick little, light weight text editor applications that are just too good not to use and use often (Omwriter is another favorite). As long as they save in plain text format, the documents can be read in any word processor and take up almost no disk space making them super portable. More importantly, many of these programs have features like full screen views designed to make writing more pleasurable and to cut out a bunch of the distractions that make using a full blown word processor such a chore.

2. Zotero for citation management. Most of us collect citations almost continuously, so it is important to have software that allows you organize and retrieve these citations. For the past 5 years, I’ve been absolutely dependent on Zotero to manage my academic citations. Developed by the Center for History and the New Media at George Mason University Zotero is free and was developed with the needs of researchers in the humanities in mind. Originally Zotero was a Firefox add on, but recent versions of it – including Zotero 3.0 Standalone – has made it compatible with the Chrome browser and Word for both PC and Windows. It is easily sync-ed across multiple computers, multiple platforms, and on the web, so you’re never far from your bibliography.

3. Evernote for various notes, images, documents, webpages, and other varia. As more and more of us get smartphones, applications are being developed to make them part of our research workflow. Evernote is perhaps the best of a group of applications for organizing notes, images, documents, and webpages both across computers and between your computer and your smart phone. With Evernote, I now use my smart phone for research all the time. I click an image of a page of a book, article, or document and upload it to Evernote where Evernote use OCR (optical character recognition) to make it searchable. I’ve recently started using Evernote to take voice memos and even to associate them with a particular document when I’m walking home (directly from my phone). I also use Evernote to clip whole webpages, organize them into folders, and look at them when I get a chance. With the various Evernote plug-ins available, it is possible to clip an entire webpage right from your browser with one click. Once the page is clipped, Evernote has a great search engine that makes it easy to find the page without having to venture out once again into the wilds of the web. It’s a nice piece of software.

4. Blogging and Mars Edit / Windows Live Writer. I want to encourage graduate students to include a public, digital component in their workflow. I love the recent emphasis in the UK on graduate students blogging as they work on their thesis. It makes their research public, helps them to develop their online presence (which is really important when they go on the job market), and helps them learn to write every day (or at least regularly). Two pieces of software MarsEdit for Mac and Windows Live Writer (for PC) make it easy to blog offline and to upload content to a blog. The interfaces are like a standard word processor and it makes it even easier to blog.

5. Embrace the Cloud. Most of us already rely on the cloud for email and maybe for our music files, but it has also becoming a simple way to sync documents between computers and to share files. Everyone (perhaps in the world) with a computer should have a Dropbox account. This application creates a folder on your computer that automatically syncs with the cloud making it available wherever you have an internet connection. While I wouldn’t put your credit card numbers in it, it is secure enough for everyday research documents.  Google Docs is a cloud based word processor that is getting better with every passing month. It’s a great platform for writing  and for collaborating.  And like any cloud based application, the documents that you produce or upload to Google docs are available anywhere you have a computer and an internet connection.

Tim Pasch will present his 5 tools and tips tomorrow over at the Graduate School’s blog.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Digital Workflow

The Power of Poster Sessions

Posted on March 17, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Elizabeth Howell, Graduate Student, Space Studies, University of North Dakota
Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

At last week’s scholarly forum Elizabeth Howell, a professional journalist and space studies graduate student, and Bill Caraher, an assistant professor in the department of history, decided to write a post that tried to capture what they liked the most about the poster session.

PosterSession1

At first, they thought that they might combine their posts to make a single list of tips for a great poster, but their impressions were so different and so complementary, that they decided to preserve their individual perspectives in a single post.

By Elizabeth Howell

Years ago there was a show that ran on television where the host would throw a dart at a map of the United States, show up in the town and find a phone booth (remember those?), then open up the phone book and pick a name at random.

The host would then show up at that person’s door and have them tell a story – tell the most interesting thing about their lives.

That was the same experience I felt strolling along the posters at last week’s Graduate Forum. There were students who had put years of their life into a few words – often, drawing on personal experience to bring their research to life.

Take Jessica Steinhauer, who became inspired to look into distance-delivered mental health when, as a nurse practitioner, she had the chance to try it out herself.

“There’s a perception that it’s not as good of a therapeutic treatment, but that’s maybe a generational thing,” she pointed out, saying that older people just may not be as comfortable on a computer or over the telephone.

I saw so many posters where students brought their personal experiences to the table – whether it be finding better fertilizer for crops, treating selective mutism through art or studying the degradation of moraines in the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains.

And really, the best research is about storytelling – but how best to convey that on the limited amount of space that a poster provides?

  • Be passionate about your subject. If you enjoy what you do, you’re far more likely to put the effort into making the poster look like more than just a big block of text.
  • Make your research about people. Admittedly this is tougher when working in the pure sciences or in engineering, but there are still ways to bring humans into the equation. How does the research affect the public? How will it benefit humanity – or even a small group of humanity?
  • Think of how you’d describe the research to your grandmother. Imagine a person who has no background in your work – that would be the average person reading your poster on the Scholarly Forum floor. Keep your words non-technical and the description of your research to the point.
  • Include questions, and avenues for future research. This encourages the audience – your readers – to participate and to suggest their own ideas, putting the core of the story in their own minds.
  • Most of all, be present at the poster. “Present” doesn’t mean checking your iPhone, or chatting exclusively with your buddy at the poster next door. Talk to the people that come by. Conversations can be tough, but every person you met was once a stranger – and you never know what you can learn.

PosterSession2

By Bill Caraher

I love Elizabeth’s emphasis on the poster as story telling, and, in particular, her emphasis on the poster as the basis for a conversation about research both as an ongoing concern and as something that will continue into the future. And she’s right, of course, people make the poster! But there are some ways that draw people to the poster and to intrigue them enough to draw them into conversation, and here are my observations along those lines.

  • Flashy colors. A few of the best and most noticeable posters used some kind of flashy color to attract my eye. While I know that poster sessions shouldn’t necessarily be driven by visceral reactions to common advertising ploys, bright colors do draw the attention to content.
  • Visual Content.  The best posters also relied heavily on pictures, charts, diagrams, and other illustrations. Posters are really ideal for communicating visual data. Our poster included too much text and it was tricky for people to find the time and space to stop and read a text heavy poster in the bustle of the poster session. Some of the best posters communicated their message through straight forward diagrams and visual images.
  • Non-linear. I’ll admit that despite my training as a historian, I find linearity boring.  Posters that depicted linear processes from one stage to the next did not attract me. I found myself drawn to posters that captured non-linear character of processes.  Posters are a great place to experiment with non-linear explanations and descriptions because they allow the reader to engage the content of the poster from multiple starting points. Just as long blocks of text make engaging of the content of a poster difficult in the bustle of a crowded ballroom, a non-linear approach allows viewers to engage the content of the poster from different angles and directions.
  • So many icons. I really liked the posters that marked the project’s affiliation, partners, and funding through icons. It made it easy to understand the institutional basis for the research without having to read some small thank-you text at the bottom of the poster board. It reminded me of the importance to developing a slick logo or icon for our organization!
  • QR Codes and more information. One thing that our history poster DID do right is to include QR codes to allow the viewer to quickly get additional information on the material present. QR codes worked so much better than a clumsy url directing the viewer to a website. In fact, the QR codes worked so well that they actually drew attention and comment to our poster!

Aerial view of the poster session

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Elizabeth Howell, Poster Session

The Future of the Computer Lab

Posted on March 3, 2011 by | 3 Comments

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

This year, I’ve been serving on a committee that distributes technology funding for teaching within my college.  One of things that these funds do is maintain computer labs in departments and programs across campus. Many of the computer labs that these funds will renovate are difficult to keep up to date (and currently rely upon computers purchased more than 5 years ago which is an eternity amidst today’s fast moving technology cycle),  relatively small with fewer than 40 computers, and serve relatively focused constituencies (typically limited to particular departments or programs). These three issues: the difficulty in keeping labs up to date, their small size, and their focused constituencies led me to think a bit about the future and function of the computer lab in the modern university.

As a preemptive caveat, I’ll admit that I do not teach in a computer lab and our department does not make use of one.  On the other hand, I have been involved with building a lab and have observed student behavior and the tech scene over the past 10 years.  So with that framework, I’ll offer some observations here and invite everyone to critique, expand, explode, or reject my observation in the comments!

1. The desktop computer is on the verge of extinction.  Computer labs are almost always associated with the desktop computer.  At the same time, a Pew Study (h/t to Mark Grabe) released last month has shown that just over half (57%) college-aged students have desktop computers whereas 70% of them have laptops.  The reasons for this are pretty clear.  Laptops are now powerful enough to handle all but the most robust computing needs. To be sure, the limitations of laptop computers – particularly at the extreme high end of, say, complex graphics production, video editing, controlling scientific equipment, or other processes that require significant computing power – still require desktop work stations with massive, multicore processes, massive amounts of storage, and robust cooling capacities, and ability to be customized and expanded. These environments, however, are fairly rare outside of upper-level or even graduate research programs.  Few students ever explore the fringes of their laptop’s computational power (except perhaps when they are playing games).  The growing preference for laptop computers among “millennials” makes clear that fewer users and ultimately software makers require the kind of performance limited to desktop hardware.

2. The cloud can do almost everything.  My suspicion is that while personal computers will continue to become more powerful, the real growth in computer power will come through leveraging “cloud” based computing.  In other words, powerful, remote computers with many, many times the power of even the most robust desktop will be available to handle the most demanding processes. Unlike a desktop or even a laptop which is designed for a single individual, cloud based computers can accommodate many users, sometimes simultaneous, and thereby reduce unnecessary duplication of processing power common to a computer lab where processing loads are often distributed unevenly across all users.  For example, processor intensive functions – like graphics rendering – now typically reserved for the most powerful desktop computers, can be sent out to the cloud where clusters of powerful computer can more efficiently and quickly handle demanding tasks.

Moreover, companies like CiTRIX are working to bring even common software to the cloud (like the Adobe suite of image editing software) making it possible for students to use specialized software which is not running on their computer, but in the cloud. The student’s computer become just an access point for the computer power of the cloud and the software running in that environment.  This both eliminates the need for students to purchase expensive, specialized software for one or two classes and eliminates the need to limit software on a group of designated machines in a computer lab environment.

So cloud computing is not only more powerful, but more efficient. If a student can leverage the power of cloud computing from their laptop, why do we need to provide a lab full of powerful desktop computers?

3. Decentralized learning.  Cloud based computing will become more and more important as programs turn toward increasingly decentralized models of instruction. The physical computer lab is based on residential, spatially local models of instruction.  While it is my hope that universities will always have classrooms, labs, and physical locations, I am also aware that the move toward online instruction will make some of these facilities less important for the definition of university education.  Students taking a class from around the world will no long be able to use a computer lab located in a particular building with particular hours and particular physical hardware.  Just as cloud based course management software like Blackboard or Moodle facilitate spatially decentralized learning models, more specialized software will also gradually become available in an online environment making the hardwire computer lab as marginal as the bricks-and-mortar classroom.

4. The line between a classroom and lab is increasingly blurred.  As Anne Kelsch has discussed, new models for classrooms – particularly those designed around the principles of active learning – have incorporated many of the features of the traditional computer lab directly into classroom space. While computer labs do have the benefit of physically concentrating students working on similar projects and problems, the classroom as computer lab brings that focus to even a finer point.  Spaces like the SCALE-UP classroom take computers from the lab (where my mind’s eye sees banks of computers facing the wall or arranged in ranks) and organizes them both in physical space and through software to encourage students to work together.  While labs have always been teaching spaces, the line between the lab and the classroom will become increasingly blurred.

5. The new economic normal. Computer hardware is expensive to buy, to maintain, and to keep current. Public universities are under increased pressure to trim budgets and use resources more wisely. Traditional computer labs will not remain a cost-efficient way to provide students with access to computer power, software, or a sophisticated instructional environment.  Specialized labs will continue to exist for particular kinds of highly-specialized computing needs or to support certain learning environments, departmental or program based computer labs designed to serve diverse constituencies will soon fall victim to the changing economic realities of American university life.  While many of the more powerful and specialized cloud based solutions are not inexpensive, they offer structural advancement over desktop computing by leveraging economies of scale.

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These are simply my reflections on the role of the computer lab in the teaching and learning environment. What do you think the future holds for the computer lab in the 21st century university?

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Computer Labs, Technology

More than four reasons to teach more than four classes (sometimes)

Posted on February 17, 2011 by | 4 Comments

Bill Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota

To celebrate the filing of my application for tenure, I decided to indulge in a teaching sabbatical.  This involved dramatically increasing the amount of time dedicated to teaching for one semester.  If a research sabbatical emphasizes research, a teaching sabbatical focuses on teaching.

To do this, I decided to take an overload and teach a digital history practicum. This took my normal spring teaching load from 3 courses to four and a half course, and four and a half different preps.  Each class is different. I am teaching a large (100 student) online introductory course, a smallish (20) midlevel course for majors, a four-credit language class, a graduate seminar, and a 2 student hands-on practicum.  Many people offer condolences when they hear about my teaching load, but so far this semester (5 weeks in!), it has been a blast, and, more importantly, I’ve learn things about teaching, my work flow, and what it takes to be a productive and successful in academia.

1. Always Be Teaching.  Malcolm Gladwell has famously argued that expertise is only achieved after 10,000 hours of practice. My typical teaching load (2 or 3 classes) occupied 10 “contractual” hours per class per week. So each year, I earn about 750 hours of teaching practice.  At this rate it will take me about 13 years to become an expert teacher.  Adding one extra course a year, or 150 hours of expertise will cut over 2 years from that number.  I think the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps attributed part of his dominance of the swimming world to his willingness to practice 7 days a week rather than 6 like many of his competitors. Over the four years between Olympic games, he gained 200 days of training or a 17% more practice than his competition.  While there is a line between pushing oneself to exhaustion (over-training to continue our sports metaphor), I also think that the more we do, the better we get at things. Taking a semester periodically to increasing the intensity of our teaching commitment can give us an advantage in the classroom.

Unlike many semesters, where teaching is a pretty modest part of a diverse, busy, and demanding week, I have discovered that the 4 course/4 prep combination makes it almost impossible to compartmentalize the responsibilities of teaching.  As a result, I am always teaching this semester.  So not only is one more class 10 more hours (or so) per week of experience, but, for me, those 10 hours per week are the tipping point. Teaching has become what I do this semester rather than one of the things that I do.

2. Efficiency. In order to survive my other responsibilities, however, I have had to become much more efficient.  I hear colleagues who have had children say that they become much more efficient scholars as they learn to balance professional and family responsibilities. This semester, after only 5 weeks, I am feeling similar results. I am becoming better at getting things done in the interstices between classes, reviewing lectures while walking across campus, and answering student emails as they come in (rather than letting them pile up and having to deal with them as a unwieldy batch).  I have come to think much more carefully about how I grade and comment on student papers to make sure that I focus my comments on the most valuable information and avoid my time-consuming habit of rambling remarks.  I have also begun to review my reading and writing assignments and consider how well and efficiently they achieve the stated course goals. In a semester where I can feel even 20 extra pages of reading a week, I have become extra sensitized to how closely each page and assignment contributes to what I want to do in the course.

3. Good Work Habits.  At some point in my life, I stopped working much in the evening. I tend to be an early riser and I am usually at my desk by 6 am. For some reason, I began to declare my day done around 6 pm. While this is a nice long work day, I found that I typically wasted evening hours watching TV, reading, surfing the web, or just doing … well … nothing.  This semester I have rediscovered my ability to do work in the evening.  Even just an hour of work – typically course preparation or light grading – makes my day far more manageable and allows me to use my prime working hours (typically from around 7:30 am to 11: 30 am and from 2-5 pm) to accomplish more thinking-intensive tasks. I only rediscovered the evening as potential work time when I began to push my day to the limit with short term responsibilities of teaching.  Long term research and writing goals can always be put off. Grading papers, designing tests, or working on lectures are pressing and immediate.

4. Being able to walk away.  I am teaching a mid-level language class this semester for the first time. Sometimes the class goes well and I feel like I’m a genius, and sometimes the course goes poorly and I feel like fraud. When experiencing the ups and downs of teaching in the past, I would take time to revel in the high of a good class and linger over a botched explanation for hours.  Now, I don’t have time. Quick notes in my teaching journal and, if necessary, on my to do list (e.g. re-learn the gerundive), and I am on to the next class.  Rather than dwelling on the emotions that come with teaching, I have had to channel my energies into pro-active practice. When I botch things, I note that I need to do them better. When I am successful, I write a quick note reminding myself of the success of a particular assignment.

5. Work-Life Balance. There is a good bit of talk in academia today about work-life balance. In college I developed some pretty unbalanced work habits which became more exaggerated in graduate school.  I don’t have much of a life, but since I’ve never really had one as an adult, I am not sure that I understand what I am missing.  That being said, the daily demands of teaching this semester have made me appreciate a lazy Friday or Saturday night with friends or Sunday evening in the kitchen with my wife far more. Simple things like writing this blog or reading a book have become far more pleasurable and important, because I have to make time for them.

There are downsides to my all-teaching, all-the-time semester, of course. My modest research program has suffered. I am not writing as much as I usually do and when I do write it is less polished and more fragmentary. I am fortunate to have understanding colleagues who have picked up whatever I have dropped in terms of service. I am only on a few committees that have regular responsibilities.  Finally, the intensity of always be teaching is probably not sustainable, but I do hope that some of the lessons in efficiency, good work habits, and being able to walk away will carry forward when my schedule returns to a more normal pace.

Finally, I am concerned about student learning outcomes.  While it is difficult to determine at this point in the semester whether I am still as effective in the classroom as I was with a lighter teaching load, it is something that I intend to monitor both through standard assessment practices, student grades, and my own continued reflections on classroom performance.

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Posted in Bill Caraher, Teaching