Mountebank Blog

As my electronic portfolio experiment comes to an end with my Comp I class, I’m having some ideas for an article on the subject. I think that most of what I’ve seen about the benefits of this kind of exercise has been on the benefits for students, as writers and as graduates (giving them a transportable, referrable, job resource, for example). But I’ve noticed a new important feature that I haven’t seen mentioned before.

The software I’ve been using, Courseforum, includes an option for an RSS feed of the forum (it’s a wiki-based system), so that with my bloglines (or any RSS aggregator) I can see exactly when, and how often, each student works on each piece. That’s a tool for scholarship of teaching, and for fine-grained analysis of students’ writing process, which can’t really be achieved in any other way. When I go to class on Monday, I can know that over the weekend student X revised her paper three times (twice on Saturday night, both times within a 0ne-hour time span, and again on Sunday afternoon), while student Y revised hers six times (but all six were on Sunday night, between 1130 and 1145). I can also see exactly what changes they made with each revision. It’s a snapshot tool which is unparalleled.

My favorite art history teacher had been asking me about what kind of software, or web service, she could use to post an image, and have students (easily, with simple instructions) annotate the image–not just posting comments underneath, but actually writing right on the image, focusing on specific areas or details, and having their annotations show up for everyone to see, preferably as little popup windows, with their names (or at least nicknames) attached.

I remembered that a VKP colleague had mentioned Fotonotes at some time in the past (although I misremembered it as “Footnotes”). But that didn’t quite satisfy–not clear enough in the documentation, buggy in the implementation, and generally lacking in the UI (as too often happens with open source efforts).

I figured that a good programmer could easily whip Fotonotes into shape–but I’m not a good programmer, and don’t even have easy access to one. Besides, my favorite art historian wanted to be able to use this for her class now, like today, or sooner.

In looking around the Fotonotes website, we happened to see a line that said “try Fotonotes at Flickr.” I remembered reading about Flickr, in a very positive light, on boingboing, and I remembered that I’d really been wanting to try it.

So I showed it to her, and she gave it a try, and with a few iterations of writing the specific, step-by-step, hand-holding instructions for students…what a great success. Her students are doing real, active, looking and thinking about the images, zeroing in, adding their annotations, making connections and asking questions–and they can all (easily) see and benefit from each other’s ideas.

The odd thing is that neither Fotonotes, nor Flickr, seem to have really thought of the educational uses this tool can have. For art history, of course, it’s excellent, and my VKP colleague was using it for (I think) a history or American studies course. But I’m sure there are many more. Part of what they seem not to have been seeing (ironically) is that a “photo-sharing service” is really an image-sharing service–it’s fine for baby photos, or cool phonecam shots of Tokyo storefronts in the rain, or Toronto graffiti, but it works even more marvellously for the Merode Altarpiece.

Three classes in a row–all meeting for the first time–makes for a very long day. But it also reminds me of why I like this job. Walking into a room of recalcitrant, reluctant, uncertain, edgy, vulnerable people, and breaking that ice, kickstarting that engine, beginning the work of building a class–it’s invigorating. I get out all charged up, jumping and running, and it’s a rolling momentum that carries me through the day.

It was a bit weird this time, teaching more than I expected to, and a course that I’d rather avoid (our ENG 095). I also had the three classes, not in the computer labs, and I had to give them some kind of introduction (warning?) about the tech work we’re doing in each one. And in two of them, it’s projects I’ve never even attempted before. They’ll see it in more detail later–but at this point they just have to trust me. And the really fun thing is that…they do! 🙂

A post I read on the CUNY Senate-Forum listserv (from which I seem, suddenly, to be banned–maybe not inexplicably–but that’s another story) made me think about how Blackboard is good for some things…and how there are some other things that for which it’s definitely not good. Or not as good as the alternatives.

In that post, my colleague George Otte gave a very cogent and accurate defense against the uninformed charges that Blackboard hurts academic freedom (the administrative access to courses could allow “spying” on what instructors are doing) and promotes undesirable conformity (because of the uniform interface). I was glad he was so clear on that.

But he also mentioned, briefly, that he thought that Bboard could handle any of the tasks and purposes of electronic portfolios. The only problem with that is that Bboard (especially now that we’re on this centrally-controlled CUNY server) is distinctly a closed system. Students can do portfolios within Bboard, but they’re not accessible to anyone outside the course. So using them for a permanent resource, or for assessment by anyone other than the professor for that course, becomes impossible.

I had this discussion last year, on the subject of blogs, with a different colleague. I was of the opinion that Bboard could really do anything that a blog could do, accomplishing all the same goals, but she pointed out–and easily persuaded me–that the public nature of blogs was an essential feature, and one that Bboard can never offer.

This is why I’m using the CourseForum for portfolios (rather than Bboard) and why I’m using Xanga (rather than Bboard) for blogs.

Of course, Bboard still does Discussion Boards reasonably well–so I’ll certainly use it for that, and for the standard course management and course information tasks, it does offer an exceptionally user-friendly and simple interface.

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!