"There is nothing so impossible in nature, but mountebanks will undertake; nothing so incredible, but they will affirm."
A quick entry from the free wireless hotspot (what a civilized amenity! :-)) at the JetBlue terminal in JFK.
I’m on my way to Long Beach for the MERLOT International Conference in Costa Mesa next week (adding a few days early to the trip for vacationing and visiting purposes). I’ll be doing some blogging from the conference, I expect.
I sure do hate air travel, though! Where is my transporter?
A really great trip yesterday to see (for my first time) Dia Beacon. They really have a fantastic collection–and the space for the installations is perfect. It was completely worth the drive out of the city, which I enjoy anyhow. I was especially impressed by the Robert Smithson pieces, and (of course) Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois. But I really liked discovering the people whose work I hadn’t seen before–like Donald Judd‘s wooden boxes and Dan Flavin‘s fantastically beautiful flourescent light sculptures.
My colleague John’s blog onReligion.com alerts me to this very interesting snippet (which he got from The Revealer, via AKMA):
President Bush met last week with some Amish folk in Pennsylvania, and he reportedly told them that he couldn’t do his job if he didn’t trust that God speaks through him.
I’ve been trying to get to the newspaper site, Lancaster Online, where this quote can be found in its original context, but the site is “currently unavailable. Please check back in a few minutes” for the past two hours–I guess getting hammered by people who want to read this story. After all the times I’ve read that Bush really doesn’t believe that he speaks to God, or that God speaks to him, this statement, “speaks through him,” is even worse! It could be one of the famous Bushisms…but then what did he mean?
After resisting for a long time, I switched my pocketsolution (which they no longer make anymore) completely minimalist Palm flipcover (just a velcro-ed aluminum flap) for a very nice leather case from Sena. Mainly because I wanted something with pockets for extra SD cards (the duct tape arrangement I tried earlier was just ugly and ineffective). This is very nice. That brand new leather smell, a soft smooth feel, and a much more “executive” appearance. It adds a little more pocket bulk than the aluminum flipcover (more than triple, I’d say), but there’s no free lunch, is there?
Finally got the page to be valid with both xhtml and css (as the cute little icons demonstrate). How proud can I be!
A wonderful day to be, um, over 40! Hot, humid, struggling with some appliance installation all day–but all in all, a birthday is a birthday, and, as they say, it’s better than the alternative!
I even got a very nice gift, something I’ve been craving for quite some time. A new radio, especially one so very attractive and rich-sounding as the Model One, is something any birthday boy just has to love!
It looks like, aside from some minor tweaking (I’m not completely pleased with the way the rss feed is working), the switch is finished.
This is now a WordPress blog, instead of MovableType. I had some configuration problems, and figuring out the new templates was (as I expected) a little hard on me. But I think I can give myself a big round of applause! 🙂
First Monday has an article (which I read via Palimpsest) about “Students’ Frustrations with a Web-Based Distance Education Course.”
The article is a very good example of a very bad kind of research. It points out (rightly) that there’s a shortage of good qualitative research on Distance Learning, especially research that focuses on the experience of the students. But then it doesn’t really provide that kind of research.
The students in the course which the article examines are frustrated…but they’re not frustrated because of any inherent problems with DL. They’re frustrated because this particular course (“B555”) is poorly-designed and poorly-implemented.
In summary, in this distance education course, students’ frustration originated from three sources:
- technological problems;
- minimal and not timely feedback from the instructor; and,
- ambiguous instructions on the Web site as well as via e-mail.
Now, these frustrations are real–and these problems with this course are real, too. But they are not necessarily representative of any large majority of DL courses. The article’s authors, Noriko Hara and Rob Kling, do try to address this objection:
It is easy to place the burden of students’ frustrations wholly upon the instructor’s limitations. With an experienced and skilled instructor, the students would have found the online version of B555 to be a valuable delight! There is good reason to believe that many online courses are taught sufficiently well that the students value them and do not experience the kinds of frustrations that we discovered in this case.
One might argue that this course was a unique case of a poor instructor poorly teaching an online course, and that this “oddball case” tells us nothing about online courses. We differ with this last interpretation. The department chair had taught some online courses and his department had notable experience with online courses taught by several of his faculty. He could have cancelled the online course if he could not find a competent instructor. He could have sought mentoring help for the instructor. Alternatively, she might have sought advice from the faculty about improving her teaching of this online course. None of these alternatives were enacted. It would be remarkable if this were the only time that an academic administrator mis-perceived the pedagogical capabilities of a replacement instructor when faced with the loss of the original instructor. It appears that even an experienced administrator and online teacher also mis-perceived the kinds of pedagogical shifts required from face-to-face teaching, and could underestimate the extent to which mentoring could be critical. Certainly, these issues arise in traditional face-to-face courses.
Yes, these issues arise in traditional face-to-face courses. But do they arise more frequently in online courses? The authors make no such claim (as they have no evidence to support such a claim) but they clearly make such an implication. It’s a very unfortunate implication.
The article’s ultimate conclusion:
Clearly, we need more student-centered studies of distance education. We need research that is designed to teach us how the appropriate use of technology and pedagogy could make distance education beneficial for students.
is one I support 100%.
But the overall tone of the article, the implication that these authors have “discovered” some hidden node of failure or frustration in distance learning generally, is extremely harmful–and misleading.
Bad instruction is bad instruction. It’s frustrating for students, and detracts from the educational mission of the particular course and the institution as a whole. But that fact is not exclusive to DL.
Similarly, research which succumbs to utopianism or a pollyannish extolling of virtues, is not a useful kind of research–but it is not a kind of research that is exclusive to DL research.
Studies like the one presented in this article, however, go too far in the other direction. If we really want a worthwhile look at the benefits or drawbacks of distance learning, we need to look at a competent (at least) example.
Lee Lefever has posted an excellent little guide–“Wikis Described in Plain English,” from which I will borrow liberally (giving him credit, of course!) when I talk to faculty about wikis in the future.
For a “technology” which is so simple, the wiki is surprisingly difficult to explain. Showing, of course, is better than telling, but it’s nice to have someone make such a clear and accessible effort at telling, too.
The “Scribbling Woman” says that she’s thinking of having students in an Intro to Lit class do a wiki–for a collaborative study guide. I’m not sure if that’s the way I’d want to use it–as my Intro to Lit doesn’t use exams, but papers instead. But I think she’s got a good point about the advantages for students of an ongoing effort and instant gratification.
Yahoo! News – Expedition Will Seek to Find Noah’s Ark. This is one for (you’ll pardon the expression) The Book!
A team of “explorers” (maybe better called “nitwits”) will be climbing Mount Ararat, hoping to find Noah’s Ark.
Geologists say even though there is evidence of a flood in Mesopotamia in Sumerian times, it is not possible for a ship to make landfall at an altitude as high as Mount Ararat.
One wonders what the “explorers” will say when they find that it’s not a boat of any kind…and wonders even more if they’ll come down “by twosies, twosies.”