Followed the development of history as an academic discipline,
Investigated conflicting philosophies of history, and
Become more skilled in elements of historical method:
research, writing, and anlysis. These skills will help you find the thousands of resources available in our electronic age, evaluate the reliability of the organizations and individuals providing that information to you, and make you more confident in your ability to select trustworthy information you can professionally and in your private capacity as well.
Examined the basic concerns of historians in the modern world,
As one can tell from the date-gap, I haven't posted anything here for a very long time. I gave a party and nobody came. But that doesn't mean that I can't throw another party. This one will be a quickie. As I want to catch a bus in about eight minutes.
I think I'm going to have fun with Sakai once I've had a chance to play with it. (Play is serious, of course--just watch how hard little kids work at playing). I was glad to hear that we will be able to upload some art (sic) to individualize our class sites and make them more interesting (hopefully). Here's an example of a banner header made with Flaming Text--a free online generator of logos, buttons, and the like.
Total time to make the banner. 1 minute
Total time to Find where I put it on my computer 3 minutes
Total time for this little post, 7 minutes (so far). Now time to put on a wild Hawaiian Shirt and head off to class.
Well, I guess it is arithmetic that counts, really. Either way, most historians don’t, at least not often. However, I occasionally do–especially when I’m teaching either Urban America or Class and Culture, and I get my students counting, too. To be a bit more precise I get them analyzing the counting done by other people, chiefly the American Census Bureau through its tool, American Factfinder. Factfinder is an interactive website which allows users to visually chart a number of demographic characteristics by geographic areas down to the level of zip codes. The maps created come complete with legends, and show the characteristic broken into quintiles. The color scheme is standard: the darker the color the higher the concentration.
Creating several maps of the same area allows a student to mark rough correlations between different characteristics. Here, for example, are three maps maps I created for New Haven, Connecticut, based on the 2000 census.
Showing these without title, students have no trouble noticing there are correlations here. Ineed to explain the legends a little so they understand what the same colors do and do not signify.
I can then tell them that the first map represents median household income. I can ask them to speculate what the second represents. It represents percentage above the age 25 with at least a high school education.
The third? The percentage who declare themselves white.
Lots of opportunities for discussion with this. The United States Postal Service provides a quick way to locate zip codes if one wants to run comparisons in a smaller area. These tools can be combined with another interesting tool, Streetview, which is integrated into Google Maps and Google Earth.
With Streetview, one can visit the neighborhoods investigated through Factfinder and look around.
For all the foolishness the Internet has engendered, it has offered new opportunities for service to the community: the traditional community and the online community both. I direct my students toward the former and in one of my courses I require participation in the latter.
Many of you may be familiar with one or the other of the resources I’m presenting this evening–and for boring you with what you already know I apologize. But perhaps some aren’t familiar with both or with either, and with that in mind let me introduce everyone to
IDEALIST. I love plays on words, puns and double entendres. Whomever dreamed up the name for this website must have loved them, too. In its own words,
Idealist is a project of Action Without Borders, a nonprofit organization founded in 1995 with offices in the United States and Argentina. Idealist is an interactive site where people and organizations can exchange resources and ideas, locate opportunities and supporters, and take steps toward building a world where all people can lead free and dignified lives.
Briefly put, Idealist connects not for profit agencies with persons looking for opportunities to be of service, in both paid and volunteer capacities. As I type this (about 8:00 Sunday evening), there are 4, 498 jobs listed, 17, 749 volunteer opportunities listed, as well as 2,723 internships. The latest volunteer opportunity was posted within the hour (Washington DC–a bit of a commute). There are also listings for events. I note, for example that there will be a Graduate School Fair in Providence on September 13. Brown University is hosting, and 75 graduate schools and programs will be represented, including RWU hooray, hooray.
For those who would like community service in the comfort of their own house, there's
PROJECT GUTENBERG. Anyone whose scholarly interest leads to searching for out of print materials probably winds up at Project Gutenberg sooner or later. Gutenberg is the grand-daddy of e-text production, begun in 1971. Over 30,000 books have been produced by Project Gutenberg since its inception. My guess (quite possibly wrong) is that most who use Project Gutenberg are unaware that the books they use are produced by thousands of volunteers through a process and program known as Distributed Proofreading. To date, over 15,000 of the Gutenberg books have been produced this way.
My History 203 students have an assignment at Distributed Proofreaders. Each is responsible for proofreading a minimum of ten pages to receive credit for the course, and from that point onward, can enhance their grade by exceeding the minimum requirement. The process is very simple. Pages are provided as photographic images online, and scanned using optical character recognition software. The proofreader has an interface which lets him/her see the photograph and the OCR proof simultaneously and make corrections on the proof. The process is repeated several times to minimize proofreader error. For the ten pages minimum, students upload the image to their “blog” on Blackboard and their proofread corrections as well. I check for accuracy. If their first ten pages are accurate in the main, I just take the tally of the total pages they’ve done to assess their grade for this project.
I was surprised how into it some of the students got. There was the element of competition, plus a desire to see what was on the next page. My star pupil proofread over 500 pages, and is till proofreading for fun, long after the course ended last May. I proofread for my own pleasure as well. This is an obsessive-compulsive’s dream project.
The online e-text is growing by leaps and bounds. Project Gutenberg is only one of a number of providers housed under the umbrella of Ibiblio.org. Through the associates of Ibiblio, over 100, books are available online, for free. This is only one reason I keep saying that the Internet is the most democratizing medium since the invention of moveable type. Ibiblio is a project of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It has long been my dream that Roger Williams University make a contribution of some sort to the online world of knowledge. I’ll mention a few of the other projects from time to time in this blog.
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion... We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half, for each State. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion?" --Thomas Jefferson to William S. Smith, 1787.
Thirty-seven years, and counting. I’m trying to remember how many different revolutions Roger Williams College/University has experienced in those years. When the memory fails in precision I revert to the word I tell my students not to use–lots. Like Jefferson on rebellion, I think this is a good thing. What’s troubling is the sense I sometimes get that each change is the universal panacea for whatever ails higher education as we practice it here.
When I first came here, taxonomy was the word of the hour. The argument was to move from the lower levels of cognition to the higher–from knowledge to evaluation. Each level was dependent on the previous level...not like love and marriage, you can’t have one without the other, but rather like Dry Bones: “The heel bone connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone connected to the shin bone, the shin bone connect to the knee bone” etc., etc. That made all the sense in the world to me. I’m reminded of the difference between “if I had some eggs I could have ham and eggs, if I had some ham,” versus the recipe which begins, “first break the eggs”.
Next was Myers-Briggs. Dr. Lorraine Dennis, now Professor Emeritus, introduced us all to the work of Isabel Myers-Briggs, based on the psychology of Carl Jung. A simple forced choice test provided a personality profile. A version of this is available on line, for those who would like to see where the pointy parts of their profiles are. I’m an INFP, or am I? I don’t know if this the version we took at the faculty conference so many years ago. But the idea was an intriguing one: at the root of the idea was a theory that not every faculty member could be equally successful with every student, and that student performance (and teacher satisfaction) could be maximized by aligning teaching and learning personality styles. It made sense to me back then, and makes sense to me now.
We never did much with this–the logistics were formidable in the days before computers ruled the world–they’re probably formidable now. But informally we all made use of this in advising. Given options, we had a pretty good idea which professor would make a good match for which student, and we sold the matches as well as we could. “You really have to have a course with ________, you’ll just love it”. Now when I get a course schedule with the very busy Ms./Mr. Staff teaching about a jillion course sections I shrug and advising is a much less satisfying activity. I can still suggest that five classes back to back MWF isn’t a very good schedule, but when the student asks “What is class X like?” I have to say I don’t know, because I believe the teacher makes all the difference.
On to Education by Mission Statement. I forget what year we had to have one of those jobbies... But I noticed shortly after we decided what our mission was everyone had one–Here is Starbucks mission statement:
To inspire and nurture the human spirit— one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.
I expect it must be hanging on the wall someplace on the ground floor of Global Heritage Hall.
From there (or simultaneously, don’t know which) we became Managers by Objectives, or something like that.
MBO aims to increase organizational performance by aligning goals and subordinate objectives throughout the organization. Ideally, employees get strong input to identifying their objectives, time lines for completion, etc. MBO includes ongoing tracking and feedback in the process to reach objectives.
We tried, and I expect if more of us could separate a goal from an objective with 95% accuracy we might have found this more stimulating. I couldn’t do it, and I really did try.
As I reminisce on paper I notice something about the direction of things here–the paths we followed to better ourselves in our craft moved further away from student centered education. Assessment and objective measures of performance became management tools. Just about the same time or maybe a little later we all became human resources. I never much liked that term, human resources. I guess it elevates me a bit above a piece of chalk or other non-human resources. But it begs the question resource for whom and in what way?
Now we’re embarking on another revolution, replacing the Core with General Education. We used to call that part of a student’s education General a score or more years ago. I don’t mind calling it that again...but I worry about the possibility of a false sense of novelty. I think we may be trying to think outside of a very small box–and that other institutions are devoting more energies toward a radical rethinking of the curriculum than we are. For example, on this year’s agenda is Creditizing the general education program. How many courses and how many credits should it constitute? Universities like George Mason have moved beyond that, and beyond the idea that one mode of delivery of General Education fits all. I’ll probably write a bit about some of the absolutely fascinating innovations going on around the country and abroad in a later entry on whatever this is evolving to be.
For now, let me conclude with a bit of Parker Palmer–whose approach to teaching I find inspiring. I was a Palmerite before I knew he existed, or so I believe. Later, I’ll introduce his thinking more thoroughly, but for now, I’d like to offer this–and a video as well.
I travel the country talking with faculty about the reform of teaching and learning, I meet many people who care about the subject and who have Compelling visions for change. But after we have talked a while, our conversations take an almost inevitable turn. "These are wonderful ideas," someone will say, "but every last one of them will be defeated by the conditions of academic life."
* * * *
The constancy of this experience has forced me to think more carefully about how change really happens. I have found myself revisiting an old but helpful distinction between; an organizational approach and a movement approach to change. Both organizations and movements are valuable, worthy of leadership, and channels for change and a healthy society will encourage symbiosis between the two (indeed, reform-minded administrators often welcome movement energies). But when an - organizational mentality is imposed on a problem that requires movement sensibilities, the result is often despair. I believe that some of us are making precisely that mistake when it comes to the reform of teaching and learning.
The organizational approach to change is premised on the notion that bureaucracies- their rules, roles, and relationships define the limits of social reality within which change must happen. Organizations are essentially arrangements of power, so this approach to change asks: "How can the power contained within the boxes of this organization be rearranged or redirected to achieve the desired goal?" That is a good question except when it assumes that bureaucracies are the only game in town.
* * * *
But there is another avenue toward change: The way of the movement. I began to understand movements when I saw the simple fact that nothing would ever have changed if reformers had allowed themselves to be done in by organizational resistance. Many of us experience such resistance as checkmate to our hopes for change. But for a movement, resistance is merely the place where things begin. The movement mentality, far from being defeated by organizational resistance, takes energy from opposition. Opposition validates the audacious idea that change must come.
* * * *
The genius of movements is paradoxical: They abandon the logic of organizations in order to gather the power necessary to rewrite the logic of organizations. Both the black movement and the women's movement grew outside of organizational boundaries-but both returned to change the lay, and the law, of the land. I believe that the reform of teaching and learning win happen only if we who care about it learn to live this paradox.
In my last, I mentioned that occasionally I find something which looks useful, but I'm not entirely sure how it might be used. The most recent of these is Wordle. Wordle describes it self a
...toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
It does what it says it does, but I think it can be more than a toy. I plan to try to see what it tells me about student writing, or perhaps it would be better to say what it can tell students about their own writing. It can tell us a bit about Roger Williams University's official writing, too.
Here's a Wordle I created from the text of the Pledge of Academic Integrity.
And here's a Wordle I created from the Description of Definitions and Policy
One can tweak a Wordle by removing words or by limiting words. I haven't done that above. What you see is what I got. Some things are not particularly surprising, Academic shrinks, Plagiarism dominates. But if these are suppose to be definitionsand policy, and the pledge also includes assisting one another and mutual support, wouldn't it make sense to define the positives as well as the negatives? What are the bounds of legitimate support and assistance? Are violations of these aspects of the pledge Aristotelian, in that one can violate by assisting too little as well as assisting too much?
I am thoroughly addicted to web browsing and have been for a very long time. Several years ago I had a colleague (no longer here) who offered an assignment in a course which had among its instructions a ban on using the computer for research--never mind that the library card catalog was internet based. I tend to go the other way, myself, and think that one of the best things I can do for my students is teach them how to use the Internet effectively--by which I mean something other than face book, my space, or twitter. There are other search engines besides Google (yes, I do Google, but not only Google).
When I'm avoiding television (which is most of the time) I've got Pandora going on the computer, and I look for usable materials on the Internet. I have a very broad definition of usable. Some are usable in specific classes, some are usable in pursuing some of my outside interests, some are usable to escape boredom, and some I'm convinced are usable for something or other: I just haven't discovered what yet. Consequently my bookmark collection is on the large size--how large I don't exactly know, but I've discovered over three hundred new stumble upons in the process of assembling it. Don't know what a stumble upon is? I'll probably write about that sometime or other.
Carnegie, Gates, Hewlett Foundations Unite to Tackle Roadblocks to Student SuccessThe Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced a $2.5 million investment to identify promising strategies to dramatically improve college success rates, especially among those students least prepared for college-level work.
Of course I had to chase that down. In the process of the chase I came across the Open Educational Resource Commons, which translated into street speech means FREE STUFF!
Open Educational Resources are all about sharing.
In a brave new world of learning, OER content is made free to use or share, and in some cases, to change and share again, made possible through licensing, so that both teachers and learners can share what they know.
Browse and search OER Commons to find curriculum, and tag, rate, and review it for others.
Use the Tutorials as a guide. Join and contribute to the global Open Education community.
What a noble idea this is. I haven't begun to look it over thoroughly, but the count of post-secondary education resources available for free exceeds 16,000. 16,000 wheels we don't need to re-invent. A number of these wheels are offered no-strings, which means we can use them, modify them, and add the new, improved model to the commons as our contribution
It would be a great thing to see Roger Williams University faculty adding to the Open Educational Resources Commons. If I were in a position to tell the powers that be what to do (I am in the position to make modest suggestions) I'd say publishing to this collection is both a community service and a proof of scholarship and should be considered in judgments about tenure and promotion.
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