Resolutions

I have mixed feelings about New Year's resolutions. Sometimes I think they're just hype. Other times, I think they are useful ways to consider where you want your life to be going. It's just the getting there that's hard.

For example, I probably made a New Year's resolution to quit smoking a dozen times during my life as a smoker. It never worked. That is, it never worked until the year I made the resolution to quite smoking not on January 1st, but sometime that year. It was April by the time I did it, but it worked.

I've also had some other rather remarkable successes with New Year's resolutions.


On the other hand, of the resolutions I made last year, I only accomplished one of the four. The resolutions were (in no particular order):
1. visit a new restaurant or coffee shop every month
2. finish the novel I've begun
3. run a half marathon
4. read or think about the dissertation at least 15 minutes everyday.

I only really accomplished number 1, and really, it wasn't a terribly hard thing to do - I really only made it a resolution because I wanted to explore the new places in the city.

Number 2 and 3 didn't get completed at all. I had to shelve the half marathon because of injury, which I suppose can't be helped, and I was making good progress until I was forced to stop. I may put it on the list again. I'm a little leery of it because the injury, so we'll see. But the novel? It's not like it actually requires a lot of work. It's 80% complete. It's just that last year I didn't write a single additional page. Why is that? I know I tell myself it's because I've been busy - and I have - but there's gotta be more to it that that because I could've made the time. I'll have to keep pondering that one.

Only number 4 was came really close to being accomplished, especially if I cut myself slack and make it 15 minutes every week day. Then I pretty much accomplished that every day except for perhaps August when we were moving. I've made really good progress on the dissertation, and I really enjoy working on it, so the goal behind the resolution - to pick up my progress on the dissertation - was definitely met.

So now I'm left with wondering if there's anything I want to put on a list for this year. Right now, I'm not certain I want to make any resolutions. Can you still call them New Year's resolutions if it takes you till February to articulate them?

Is elearning really better?

For someone who works in elearning, I realize this might be a career-threatening question to ask, but it's not that I'm questioning the value of technology in learning, but that I'm struggling with the social and cultural values around technology and learning.

One of my tasks this week is to create the schedules for two hybrid courses I'll be teaching next week. The syllabi are ready, but I'm struggling with the schedules still. I know my learning objectives, and I know what results I want.

What I'm struggling with is what combinations of online and face to face (f2f) activities will be accomplish those objectives and produce the desired results.

Part of the problem is just scheduling. One of the hybrid courses meets only once a week, which means we've got 4 hours f2f then a stretch of a week of nothing but online. The students will mostly be first term students as well, which will mean they'll need LOTS of hand holding to adjust to this kind of class. But even for the course that meets twice a week f2f, the schedule is still less than ideal.

What would be ideal?

A schedule where we meet for about 6 hours a week f2f and 2 hours online for the first half of the course, then 3 hours a week and 5 online for the second half would be ideal. But I've yet to hear of a post-secondary institution with such flexible scheduling.

If I had a schedule like that, we could concentrate on learning the basics, practicing them in the lab, learning to collaborate within groups and as a whole class, then I could send them off to practice what they've learnt mostly on their own. That would fit the objectives of the course nicely, and it also follows the progression that writing naturally undergoes as well. Brainstorming is a mostly collaborative affair (even if the "collaboration" exists primarily in preliminary research, not discussion), and writing a mostly solitary one. So lots of f2f at first, followed by less direct contact and more remote, online contact as support for the writing would be ideal.

[At first I was going to write that the schedule would be unique to writing courses, but then I realized that might not be the case. Perhaps it would also be ideally suited for the teaching of science, or communication studies, or even engineering. I was going to say that teaching writing is more holistic and harder to divide into discrete units, but then thinking of my own science degree, I sometimes wonder if I might have had better insight into the discipline as a whole if all my classes weren't divided into distinct units, with testing and evaluation at the end of each of them. It made each topic seem so discrete from the others. Perhaps the scheduling of those courses could also do with some flexibility!]

Since I won't get my wish for needs-based scheduling, and will have to meet regularly online and f2f, I'll have to adapt the course. But that desire got me thinking about elearning in general.

There are a few things that I think I can state with relative certainty.

1. elearning has been around long enough that most educators are familiar with the concept. Early adopters still continue to push the envelope, but most post-secondary institutions and instructors (and a good number of primary and secondary school boards) are using at least some technology to "enhance" learning.

2. most educators did not experience elearning in their own education, and if they did, it was in its very early stages (I realize this is not universal, but note that I said "most") so it is sometimes a challenge to understand the learner's experience.

3. learners (particularly post-secondary learners) are generally familiar with at least some of the elearning technologies they will encounter in the classroom, so that as a designer of elearning and blended/hybrid courses, you can count on most of your students/users familiarity with some of the basics.

4. elearning has changed so rapidly that there is little long-term research on the effectiveness of various technological solutions to educational problems, although most educators and designers would seem to feel that at least some technology has made the job of teaching (or the administration behind it) easier.

Perhaps you might challenge some of these assumptions, but they are based on my observations both in post-secondary classroom settings, and in the corporate elearning environment.

But the title of this post asked if elearning is really better because I have some doubts about it.

To be honest, my doubt does not arise from some kind of anxiety about technology itself. I think as a tool, technology provides us with a means to produce effective learning. What I do have reservations about is that in adopting technological methods to try to deliver learning, we are adapting our teaching to the technology rather than using the technology to aid our teaching.

I'll try to explain by describing a few experiences over the last few weeks that have got me wondering about it all.

A few weeks ago, I assigned an essay to my students. It's a challenging essay, but I've taught it before, and when students are prepared for the challenge, encouraged to undertake it, and then supported in the classroom through their questions about it, then generally perform fairly well. Not this time. This time, even with extra support and time, the students disengaged. They thought the essay too long. They thought it "irrelevant" to their lives. They didn't like that they had to look up some of the words they didn't understand (or they didn't even bother and just ignored their ignorance). They complained en masse about the length of the assignment. As I'm working on the schedule for this term, this complaint is on my mind and I'm trying to decide whether to use the essay again.

A week after this, two of my students bragged to me that they hadn't read a book since high school. Another one told me that even in high school he hadn't read a book - he would just read the back cover when required to write about it!

Also a few weeks ago, I watched this video over at Phendrana Drifts, which began to worry me. The students in the video seem to justify their non-reading of course material by pointing to how much time they spend on Facebook or their cell phones. The argument seems to be equating reading a textbook with reading a social networking page. Call me old fashioned, but I think the cognitive engagement involved in reading a textbook is qualitatively different than what is involved in reading a Facebook funwall.

Then a few days ago during a family discussion, my children told me that their friends think they use big words. They also said this is because I use big words at home, and that being surrounded by a large vocabulary it became natural for them to adopt the same.

I object. I don't use big words. I don't use a big word just to sound more intelligent than I am - but I will use a less than common word if I think that it more accurately represents what I want to say. I am a bit particular in that way.

But the discussion got me thinking about vocabulary and how one acquires it. I never spent time reading a dictionary to learn the words I know. Sure, I've looked up a few words in my time, but mostly I acquired vocabulary from reading and discerning through context what a word meant. Usually multiple contexts. I surrounded myself with language, and it became second nature to me to use the language that I've read.

A light dawned then. Although I've known for a long time that good writers are also readers, I'd always had a bit of a suspicion that at least some of my students wrote so horribly (and inimaginatively!) because they just didn't want to try. It really hit home during that discussion that they just don't have big enough vocabularies to actually write accurately. They just don't know enough different words to be able to express themselves, or describe things, accurately.

So maybe you can see what I'm thinking now. For myself, I know that the sustained effort of reading books, including long ones, and reading many of them, has trained me how to read long pieces of writing and has given me a large enough vocabulary to be able to understand most of what I read. If my students have read only a handful of books in their lives, and their only current reading consists of magazines and webpages, then when will they have had the opportunity to learn how to maintain interest in a longer piece of writing or to even understand enough of the words in it to know what they all mean?

The problem with elearning is that it encourages this kind of superficial engagement with the material in the course. This isn't to say that it isn't possible to create elearning opportunities that go beyond just the superficial, just that the association between online and superficial is strong.

For learners/users who are accustomed to short, pithy online writing like they find in email, instant messaging and social networking sites, this kind of superficial writing becomes associated with the medium in which they view it. So they come to expect everything online will be a sound bite, a short, focused piece of writing, or that it won't contain any big words. When confronted with writing online that requires a sustained, thought-provoking engagement with the material, how are they then to respond? There is a good chance they will respond by rejecting the material, because it involves a level of concentration and attention they are not accustomed to giving to online content.

All this makes me think that there is a real value to the old fashioned book. Books require discipline to sit down for extended periods of time, focusing your attention on only one thing. I realize that many of my students can focus their attention on only one thing for a long period of time - I do have plenty of gamers in my classroom. But there's a difference in cognitive engagement with a book, which requires active imagination of the action taking place, and the reaction to a video game, isn't there? I realize many games require active participation - more so than say television watching - but they still are passive at a certain level, aren't they? Even if the cognitive activity of gaming is equal to that of the book, things like vocabulary development are still absent.

But even if we don't bring back the book as the standard text for education, as an educator and elearning designer, I think it's important to work to create that kind of discipline in students. In corporate elearning, the sound bite works, but that's because elearning is a secondary layer of education that always pre-supposes a more formal layer of education in the form of a degree, or training. eLearning in the corporate world is usually for upgrading or skills maintenance. But in that first degree, the one post-secondary students (and even secondary students) are pursuing, one of the skills they will need to develop is the ability to stick with a project for an extended period of time.

The challenge, at least for me, will be to develop the depth of understanding that students need while at the same time using the technological tools at my disposal to do it. Part of the challenge will be re-training students to understand that just because it's online, doesn't mean that it won't be hard and they won't have to work at it. Shifting students' mindset from online = superficial to online = just another medium is a challenge I think those of us who work in elearning have to manage in order for the technology to really make a difference in how we teach. The difficulties of meeting this challenge is part of the reason why I question a wholesale embrace of elearning in the classroom. Without understanding the nature of the medium, it would be far to easy to dumb things down to the level students come to expect from online instead of challenging them to reach the levels of complexity the content requires.

I've run across an analogy a couple of times that is usually used to demonstrate the need for technology in education. The analogy compares surgery and education. A surgeon of 100 years ago brought into a modern surgery would not be able to perform surgery because so much has changed, while a teacher from 100 years ago would be able to teach in a modern classroom (aside from lacking knowledge of what's happened in the last century). In other words, the practice of surgery has radically changed, but the practice of teaching has not. This story is usually used to demonstrate how teaching needs to get on the technology bandwagon and upgrade itself.

But I have to wonder. Is the practice of teaching mostly the same as it was 100 years ago because it works? Is this a case of "if it's not broke, don't fix it"? Surgical survival rates are higher now, which demonstrates the success of the changes in surgical practice. But is teaching the same because we've already figured out a good way to do it? After all, by most measures we're smarter, more literate, and better educated today than we were 100 years ago. We must be doing something right, mustn't we? Is elearning just a case of unnecessary messing with something we already do well?

Just an average Joe... or Stephen

Today after work I had one last stop to make aside from groceries. I stopped into my local Chapters bookstore, which was packed with people, though the helpful salesclerk who directed me to what I was looking for told me it was actually quiet!

As I approached the long line at the cash register, I noticed a security man next to the line. He wasn't wearing a uniform, but those distinctive ear pieces are a dead give away. I found myself wondering what had recently happened in the store that they'd decided to hire security. I'd been a regular at this store for many years before we'd moved away, and had never seen a security guard there before. I assumed it had something to do with the holiday rush.

As I stood in line, I saw a gentleman leaving the tellers, far ahead of where I was, and thought, "he looks familiar" and then a second later, "he looks like Stephen Harper." Then it dawned on me. It was Stephen Harper.

Two thoughts flashed through my mind in rapid succession. The first was curiosity. What's in his bag? What kind of books does the Prime Minister read? (Then I realized peeking in his bag wouldn't do any good because it was probably a gift.)

The second was a sense of approval. Some of it was for the man, but only a bit, since I don't agree with a lot of his policies; mostly it was a kind of sense of inclusiveness, a bit of homegrown pride, and a touch of admiration. I live in a country where the leader of my nation does his own Christmas shopping! I think that's pretty cool. Sure, he was surrounded by three men in dark coats and another in a plain suit who I assume was some assistant (I'd finally noticed the other security men when I'd realized the Prime Minister was in the checkout line with me). But at the same time, he was making his own purchase. And when a woman stopped him to ask if she could introduce her daughter to him, he stopped and chatted a moment before leaving the store.

Just another one of us poor, benighted souls trying to squeeze in a little last minute shopping... there's a kind of humility there that I can't help but admire. But then I realized, while he might be fighting the last minute shoppers, at least he has an entourage that can help clear the way! Not like the rest of us...

Feathered Fan

Walter must be fairly impressed with the Flames' 6 road-trip win record...

Posts begun and not completed

By the looks of this blog, there's been no activity. But that's not true. I've begun many posts. They just don't get completed. Sometimes they haven't even gone beyond the boundaries of my brain! They've been started; just not completed.

It's not that I don't have anything to say - I certainly do! It's just that I've got so many other demands on my time right now I can't seem to get any posts finished. Perhaps all those drafts will get completed at the beginning of the year....

I will say I was disappointed by the end of I Am Legend. They made it a Hollywood ending, and their explanation of the "legend" was lame, tacked on as if it was an after-thought. I went back and flipped through the ending in the book because I thought perhaps I was being unrealistic in thinking they could've filmed that ending. But no. I can clearly see how they could've translated the book's ending - far superior - to the screen. Someone just chose not to. Disappointing.

Last week I hated my students. This week I love them. It might have something to do with having a lot of marking to do last week. Too much marking. But if you've ever taught, you know what I'm talking about... and even if you haven't, you know what parts of your job you hate. Yep, that's where I was last week.

Holiday preparations are mostly complete. There's the grocery store still, and some gift wrapping yet to do as well as one more party, but I should not have to enter another retail outlet till after the holiday season, so I'm breathing a sigh of relief (partly because I won't have to listen to that horrible Christmas music anymore).

January and February are going to be very busy months for me, so I'm scrambling right now to finished academic and teaching activities as well as the online proposals that need to be gotten out of the way before the crunch hits during those months, but I'm hoping to finish those up this week as well and actually relax. (Yes, I know it won't actually happen, but the fantasy is keeping me going right now...)

The great thing about December is that you can always hope that the new year will be different than this one!

Straight No Chaser - 12 Days

If the department stores could just play this kind of music instead of the stuff they're playing, I'd be a much happier shopper!

Wow! That IS a long time...

My head hasn't been in the dissertation lately - which I'm missing terribly. I keep looking at the pile of dissertation books, wishing I could pick up the next one. I suppose I should just be glad that I'm not at the part of the process where I dread working on it.

My online work has been really busy, as has teaching, but that's not the only reason I'm not dissertating these days. What I am working on is that project I mentioned a while ago - the one where a colleague contacted me out of the blue to contribute to her book project.

I've set aside the next two weeks to work on the revisions. I figured two weeks (which really with everything else translates to about 3 days) would be enough when I first heard of it. But I just looked at the requirements again, and because I actually have to pretty much double what I've got right now, I've got lots of room to talk. That's good. I've got lots to talk about.

I'm also thinking there's another really good reason I should give this project a bit more attention. After all, I've been working on it for almost 10 years already. Such commitment deserves more than a couple weeks revisiting, don't you think? Hard to believe it's been that long, but it has. I first wrote on the Dark Tower series when there were only 4 books in the series. In fact, when I wrote the proposal for my undergrad honors thesis, the fourth volume was still in production and I read it as I was doing the research for the project.

I enjoyed it so much, that once the last three books were produced, I decided I wanted to revisit the work I'd done back in undergrad, so I submitted an abstract to a conference and dug out the thesis and started working. I certainly needed to do a lot of work on the thesis - after all, I'd written it many years before as a novice scholar. But to my surprise as well, there were some really good bits in it. Surprisingly good. I found myself marvelling that I'd actually written it in some places. I didn't remember being that insightful...!

And now I'm returning to it again several years later. It's a really interesting project to look back at my work on this particular piece of scholarship over the last decade. It kind of nicely chronicles my development as a scholar. The thing that surprises me the most about looking back at my undergrad writing is that there were some good ideas there - but they were badly expressed. Or more often, only partially expressed. I wrote a lot of observations, but failed in a lot of cases to make the connections between them. I didn't move beyond the surface. I didn't pose difficult questions of the text. Probably because I was still in the grip of author-awe I wrote about a few weeks ago. (Being reminded of my own struggles, even as an honors student has also helped me understand the fumbling rhetoric of my students a bit better)

But the work I did then was a good start. It has created a nice groundwork for me to take now and shape into a more nuanced argument. Or at least that's the hope! But it's funny how my grasp of the implications of some textual moments that I just observed earlier is much firmer now than it was then.

What's the neatest part of all this is it gives me an idea of what it might be like to be a professor, working as a scholar, knowing all the foundational texts, or having heard all the arguments before, having that huge reservoir of knowledge and experience to draw upon when making an argument.

In the dissertation, as much as I love what I'm doing, I feel like a novice. I feel like there's so much that I DON'T know in comparison to what I DO know that it's difficult to adopt the authoritative voice that I need in order to make the very arguments I need to make. In this project, I've worked over the material so many times now, the writing is all developing the best argument possible and then choosing an effective means of expressing it - I find I'm not worrying so much about authority.

It's a really nice feeling. I'm looking forward to attaining that confidence in more than just this one text. So this must be what it feels like to really be an expert, not just write as if you are one!

Nothing

It's not that there's nothing happening in my life. There's a good bit going on. But most of it is work - which is boring. The parts that aren't boring, are mostly just making me grouchy, and I've never mastered the art of the rant. When I rant, it just sounds grouchy. The world doesn't need more of that.

So until I find something pleasant or intelligent to post on, I'm afraid all you're getting is silence. I hope it doesn't last long.

'Tis the season...

... for funding applications. Apparently many funders out there leave their application season till the end of the year. Part of my online learning job is to file funding applications, proposals, precis, whatever you want to call them, for the projects we undertake.

I'm good at it. I've usually got a pretty good idea of what a funder is looking for and can translate their "criteria" into something that works with the project we're trying to do. So far the vast majority of my proposals have been accepted, which is good because that means I have work. It also helps that our marketing guy finds some really good funding sources for us to make proposals to.

But proposal writing is a tedious, long process, often requiring a great deal of research in order to mesh the purpose of our e-learning program with the criteria the funder uses to decide who they want to fund.

So on top of the holiday season, which is already making my life busy*, I've now got funding season to contend with - I'm feeling tired already....

*strange thing is, I have never really felt a holiday crunch before - it's always seemed manageable. I'm not taking on any more than I would any other year, perhaps even a bit less, and yet it seems to be more of a hassle this year and I can't figure out why. It's strange. It's also making me feel even more Grinch-like than I usually am!

Time, money, brains and children

There's a lot floating through my head these days, making it difficult sometimes to figure out how to make sense of it all. A couple of threads came together for me as I was reading an article on public perceptions of genetic technologies. From "What Do You Think About Genetic Medicine?", a paragraph stood out. It's the statement of a woman participating in a focus group of parents of children with genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis:

You have an imperfect child in this society and its a real handicap, its the money, its your time. The demands on a woman’s time [are] profound. If you have a handicapped child, then you’re looking at the heartbreak if she loses that child [and] all the investment. And these mums develop a very excellent and moving characteristic that makes humans human you know. They’ve got their feet on the ground and they can see the way things really are. That’s the mothers who have a child that’s disabled within the family. It does develop part of you that if you’ve never had to look at you’ve just not grown up . . . perhaps it keeps us being human. I don’t know how boring we’d all be and how dangerous we’d be if we were all a mob of intellectuals.

It's the last sentence that really got my attention. I don’t know how boring we’d all be and how dangerous we’d be if we were all a mob of intellectuals. The juxtaposition of boring and dangerous seems to border on oxymoron - danger tends to be thrilling, does it not? But that's not what my first response was. My first response was to wonder about this woman's need to contrast human-ness with intellectualism. Mothers who care for disabled children are kept "human" while intellectuals are not. Aside from the gendered bias of her statement, which of course brings up the question of where the fathers are, and whether they can be kept more "human" by caring for their disabled children as well, her statement is interesting.

As a mother and an intellectual, I feel like I have the authority to respond to this kind of sentiment. This kind of anti-intellectual rhetoric is not unusual, and I've certainly heard my share of it. In its most common expression, it opposes intellectualism to common sense, or life skills of some sort. The intellectual is derided for an inability to read a map, use a hammer, cook a meal, or other "basic" human skills.

Now I don't wish to take issue with this generalization as a generalization. I agree that there are plenty of intellectuals - myself included - who fail miserably at tasks that many people find simple. Sometimes it's because we over-complicate things, but more often I think it just comes from a lack of experience. In some cases, intellectuals (and others lacking common skills) are like children who just haven't had enough experience with something to develop a real competence at it. Even when intellectuals engage in routine or everyday activities, I suspect there are times when their attention is elsewhere, and thus they never pay close enough attention to those tasks to really get them right. I know that there are many times I'm not paying real close attention to mundane activities, and sometimes I find myself at a loss when I suddenly realize that I haven't been paying attention. You can be inexperienced at something because you haven't undertaken that task before, or you can inexperienced at it because you've never taken the time or energy to really pay attention to the task and learn it well. Of course you can also just be plain old incompetent, but that quality seems not to be limited to any single socio-economic factor.

I will give the author of the above quote credit for identifying a difference between the mother of a disabled child and an intellectual, but she's misplaced the nature of that difference. She identifies the difference as levels of "human-ness" but I think the primary difference between the two lies more simply in activity.

The activities of the mother of a disabled child are largely physical - caring for the child, working to secure funds, resources, and other necessary items in order to raise that child. In kind, this isn't much different from what parents of able-bodied children do. In quantity however, the workload of a parent of a disabled child is far greater. Everything takes more time and energy (and money). Although I don't have a disabled child myself, I know from the stories told to me by parents of disabled children that they have to expend far more effort to provide for their disabled child's needs than I do for any of mine.

The activities of an intellectual are largely mental. In fact, it's one of the things I sometimes find the hardest about an intellectual life - sitting still for the kinds of time that solid intellectual inquiry requires. (It's also what makes the life of the intellectual and the life of the parent clash so often)

I think it would be more accurate to oppose physical and mental activity as the hallmarks of the mother of a disabled child and the intellectual, than assigning humanity to the mother and inhumanity (that's what I read the dangerousness to be a sign of) to the intellectual.

But as human beings, are we not both physical organisms and thinking creatures?

I realize the humanist characterization of 'man as thinking creature' is outdated, but that's mostly because it defined 'man' as man, not as a dual-gendered humanity. If you let women into the thinking creature category, then the definition of humans as thinking creatures does seem fairly inclusive as well as definitive, marking off human from animal in a clear and reasonable way.

I'm starting to get a little lost in my own argument to some extent at this point, but I'm also trying to puzzle out this idea of the "dangerous" intellectual because I think it's critical to the kinds of public discourses we need to be having in our society with the emergence of so many potent biotechnologies - biotechnologies that the woman quoted above was responding to. Is the "dangerous" intellectual in this case based on the "mad scientist" stereotype of a man (not a woman) in a lab, trying to create life in a test tube? Is the speaker in the quote above actually making an opposition between women (who take care of disabled children) and men (who build dangerous technologies)? Or is it more simply as I first thought, an opposition between "real" people, and intellectuals?

I don't know that I have the answer. Unfortunately, the article I was reading gave no additional information beyond the quote I've reproduced above. I do know from other research that has been conducted, that there is a real opposition between the general public's concerns over biotechnology and the biotechnologists embrace of it. Certainly for researchers in biotechnology, there is the tendency, driven by curiosity (a strong human characteristic) to see how far the research can go, without necessarily stepping back to take a look at the big picture. The research also shows that there is no correlation between genetic knowledge and concern about biotechnologies - people who know their genetics are just as concerned as those who don't - so that it is not actually a case of those in the know being against those who don't know.

How pervasive are these assumptions - the stereotype of the mad scientist - or the equally damaging stereotype of the martyr-like mother who expends all her energy on her child? And more importantly, how do they get in the way of our understanding of each other? I don't know. As a mother and an intellectual, I can understand both, but identify with neither. Perhaps I'm just an oddball that way.