Blogging Pedagogy

A team of psychologists from several universities recently conducted a study of procrastination in undergraduates. They wanted to find out if how you think about a task affects your willingness to actually tackle it. The original article (EID required) is written in rather abstruse psychologists' lingo, but the gist of it is that people who thought about a task in concrete terms -- for example, by listing the steps they would need to take in order to accomplish it -- tended to procrastinate less than people who thought about the task in the abstract.

The gist? Perhaps, in order to help our students (and ourselves!) manage time better, we ought to be encouraging them to write specific, detailed plans for when and how they'll do the work, early in the process.

I'm looking for suggestions from my fellow teachers, regarding encouraging a risk-averse student to make mistakes. Read on for full details ...

The London Times Higher Education Supplement has an editorial up on the practice of marginal annotation in paper grading. Here's the link:

Margins Aren't Meant to be Written In

My comments after the break ...

I am facing a new difficulty this term. Some of my students are too engaged.

My students often making sweeping statements about "red states" and "blue states" which don't bear any resemblance to reality. The "red vs. blue" maps that the media trot out after each presidential election may be useful representations of how the Electoral College has voted, but they're useless for anything else, and contribute to grossly simplified views of how people vote. So I decided to go look for a "purple" map.

More below the fold ...

My students submit their papers to me electronically, and recently I've started taking greater liberties with those documents. In addition to writing marginal comments using Word's commenting features, and writing notes at the end, I've begun making direct alterations to their papers.

(This is a lengthy post - click "read more" for the rest.)

Those of you teaching Free Culture may be interested to hear that Steve Jobs recently wrote about Digital Rights Management in the iTunes store. His argument boils down to "DRM don't work and it's never gonna." It's interesting to compare this to Cory Doctorow's anti-DRM op-ed piece from last summer. Doctorow alleged that Jobs wants to control the music industry and prevent iPod users from switching to other music players. Jobs doesn't mention Doctorow directly, but he clearly responds to some of Doctorow's positions.

Unsurprisingly, the music industry failed to announce their sudden conversion to the holy gospel of unprotected music files. During a conference call about Warner Music's earnings, Warner's CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. dismissed Jobs' argument, saying "The notion that music does not deserve the same protections as software, television, film, video games or other intellectual property simply because there is an unprotected legacy product available in the physical world is completely without logic or merit." There's more to his remarks, which are available in a complete transcript of the call.

And to round it all up, The Economist printed a commentary on Jobs' essay (asserting that he's self-serving but right), and by Leonardo Chiariglione, who asserts that DRM hasn't failed, it just needs to be standardized. (For those who, like me, haven't heard of Chiariglione before, he's not in the mafia. He's the chairman of the Motion Pictures Experts Group, a trade association which created the DVD technical specifications.)

With the exception of Doctorow's article, all of this took place in the last week. It might be interesting to have a class read these articles and then hold a debate. Or write analyses of the pieces perhaps; or trace debates. I thought of asking my students to debate whether Doctorow's presentation of Jobs was fair or not, but unfortunately Doctorow's essay appeared in their first assignment. I've found that class discussion of a text they're supposed to analyze independently greatly narrows their thinking. They tend to wind up repeating whatever was said in class. Anyway, I hope some of you find this useful or at least interesting.

I just stumbled across a bizarre little video entitled Gimme the Mermaid. It involves a mermaid, a seriously aggressive lawyer, and human figures with cat heads. If you're doing Lessig, like visual rhetoric, and want an ambitious paper prompt, you could ask students to do a rhetorical analysis of it. It's so delightfully bizarre ... it's just begging for explication.

I should also add that it was featured on illegal-art.org.

I prefer to grade essays in a random order, so that people with last names near the end of the alphabet don't necessarily get graded last. I also like my list to be truly random, and I hate doing it with dice. So I wrote a neat little list randomizer using random numbers generated by random.org. The randomness comes from a computer in Dublin which records static from a radio tuned to an unused frequency and extrapolates an unpredictable stream of binary from that.

The upshot is I've made a web page where you can type in a list of names (or anything really) and have it rearranged into a random order. Here it is. I hope you find it useful. If anyone is interested, I can provide source code.

All those who have students doing research may be interested in Zotero, an amazingly cool citation manager. It does much the same job as Endnote, but with one major difference - it runs inside your web browser and automatically extracts citation information from web pages. So, for example, if you pull up a book record in the Library of Congress catalog, or an article in JSTOR, Zotero will automagically extract the title, author, publisher, and other metatdata so that you don't have to type it in yourself.

I haven't explored it thoroughly yet, but apparently it's also integrated with social networking sites like del.icio.us. And, of course, it can produce citations formatted in MLA, APA, or Chicago citation styles that you can then paste into your documents. Your choice of RTF or HTML output.

Sadly, it's not compatible with the UT catalog yet, though I'm making efforts to see that that comes to pass. It is, however, compatible with quite a variety of other library catalogs (Library of Congress, WorldCat (partial support), a whole bunch of university catalogs) and also with a number of proprietary databases (Lexis-Nexis, JSTOR, Amazon.com, Project MUSE, EBSCOHost, etc). It's free, it's open source, and I suspect it's going to be replacing NoodleBib in my RHE 306 courses in the near future. Not to mention my own personal use. What a time saver!