Mountebank Blog

After more investigation–there’s no way to get the school to get me set up on a server for this semester. It’s too late.

And I can’t serve it from my home machine–technically (or not even technically), running a server from home would violate my ISP’s Terms of Service. I don’t feel like risking my home DSL account for this.

And my kind webhost folks politely and kindly told me that it would be impossible–their firewall would block the built-in webserver which CourseForum needs to run.

So I think I’m going to be paying CourseForum, at least for this semester, to have them host it and let me give it a real-world try. It’s only $15/month, so the semester will cost $60, and I think I will collect $2 from each student. That will pay the bill, and I always find that students (not just students) tend to value things more if they’ve had to pay for it (I’ll even give them a printed receipt), then if they get it for free. They know the corollaries of TANSTAAFL very well.

But for me, what this really exemplifies, is a long-standing tendency in my teaching. Just about every year, in the last week or two before classes begin, I get an innovative idea, some new thing that I just have to implement. The logical thing would be to get these ideas several months in advance, or to wait a semester and think them through and test them out before implementing them immediately.

But that’s not what I do!

I have to plunge in right away, and try it before I’ve even figured it out completely myself.

It gets a bit chaotic, and it keeps me very nervous and only half-a-step ahead all semester, and I never implement it quite as well as I should the first time around, but it actually seems to work out OK. I’ve done it with the Digital Poetry Project, the Internet Lore unit, the NY Newsday activity (over a decade ago!), the writing/walking tour, MaGiCS, the Dub Poetry lesson, the custom textbook, and many more. Some of my best tricks and techniques are the things I’ve come up with suddenly, planned insufficiently, and implemented prematurely. The really good ones get improved and developed further each time I try them–but I don’t think any of them would have benefitted a whole lot from waiting until the initial excitement subsides.

This semester, because I’m teaching four completely different classes all at the same time, I’m actually trying two different completely new things (the e-portfolios and the blogs, or more if I think of them) at the same time. And that’s been making me a little nervous and resistant to really plunging in. But it’s not worth it. I know I’m going to go for it. I might as well give in to the inevitable!

I think I found the solution to my eportfolio quandary. CourseForum, in the free version, seems to be perfectly suited. I just have to figure out a server solution, since (as usual) I’ve waited much too long to get this done on the school server in time for this semester. (Actually, it would probably mean setting up a new server–which will certainly take more than the one week I have left). So I’m going to play with it a little–maybe find a way of running it on my own home machine (or throwing a linux distro on an old machine from my museum of ancient technology) and somehow finding a way to serve it through the firewall/router–and deal with the dynamic IP problem. Or, I can see if my ever-so-nice and understanding webhost folks will be willing to let me run it on the server this blog runs on. Or, I can pay a minimal amount (could even collect a dollar or two from each student) and have CourseForum host it for me.

I’m thinking about using blogging for the first time in at least one (maybe two) of my classes. I want to have all the students in the Intensive Writing class use blogs–but not as journals in the diary sense, strictly–more of an emphasis on critical reviews–something they’ve read or seen, with a weekly (or more frequent?) required post.

I looked at the free blogging services, and Xanga looks like the most user-friendly and bell-and-whistle-ridden. Ideally, we should be hosting the blogs at the college, but that’s a step for the future.

Then I started thinking about my Comp. I class–and the portfolio experiment I wanted to pilot (as a substitute for the much abominated departmental final exam). I was trying to figure out how I was going to design a template, and get a hosting server (maybe using Blackboard?) setup to make these e-folios, instead of the cumbersome paper folders I’ve used in the past. Then at the MERLOT conference I heard that McGraw Hill (I was going to use their textbook, anyhow) has a system called FolioLive! which seems to make all of this much easier. My McGraw Hill contact doesn’t really know anything about it…but she is going to refer me to someone who does.

We’ll see how it all turns out!

Mark McCallon of Abilene Christian University has a great list of Periodicals in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Some excellent resources as opportunities for publishing, and it’s sorted by discipline, too.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed is continuing their uninformed, inaccurate, crusade against online learning, with this interview (probably not a good permanent link–unless you’re a Chronicle subscriber) with historian (and major technophobe) David Noble.

Noble is pushing his usual line, the line that the Chronicle pushes over and over again–that online teaching is worse than face-to-face teaching (and thus doomed to fail) because it includes no “real” interaction.

Yes there is something more authentic about the classroom because it allows for genuine interpersonal interaction. And this is not a controversial issue. Ask anyone to tell you about what they remember about their education and they will talk not about courses or information imparted, but about the people they encountered. Especially the teachers who changed their lives.

Of course, Noble pretends not to know that this is a fundamentally flawed premise, since in almost every case, and certainly in my experience, students report more “genuine interpersonal interaction” and more quality in that interaction online than in a traditional classroom. The interaction can also be (as I have reported on my VKP Poster) deeper, more significant, more challenging intellectually, more open to productive digression, and more persistent (thus available for review, re-thinking, and criticism), than face-to-face interaction.

Noble’s point of view is not only inaccurate, but willfully inaccurate–ignorant, in fact. Not only does he have zero personal experience in this issue (he’s never taught an online class, he’s never taken an online class as a student), but he seems to have never read a single one (of the literally hundreds) of widely available studies of online learning. The No Significant Difference homepage would be a good place for him to start–he’s got a long way to go before he’s ready to move Beyond No Signicant Difference.

Noble does what these critics do so often–he looks at the worst examples of online teaching and compares them to the best examples of f2f teaching.

My CUNY colleague Steve Brier, and my VKP colleague Roy Rosenzweig, do an excellent job of debunking Noble’s nonsense in their review of his recent book in The Nation (thanks to BMCC colleague Barney Pace for the link!).

Noble’s position is useful, in a way, though–it shows us how far we have to go in informing even our fellow academics (although non-academics may actually be far ahead of the trend in this regard!)