Notes as a crutch

I'm an extensive note-taker.

Anyone who knows me knows how I extol the virtues of Endnote.

I take notes on pretty much every academic paper, book, or presentation that I come into contact with. But I also record those notes, extensively. I know many people use bibliographic software primarily as a way of creating the Works Cited page, but my "Notes" section of my Endnote files are always huge because I use it as a repository for my notes. I write a lot of detailed notes about a text into the computer, including interesting quotes that I think could be useful in the future as well as summaries of the argument. In fact, I've sometimes had to divide a book into two entries in Endnote because I've exhausted the space available for notes.

My notes are invaluable. At the beginning of any project, searching them helps me get a sense of the breadth of the topic or the research I've done on it, revealing gaps that are entry points into the discourse, or gaps that I need to fill by a visit to the library. Without them, I don't think I'd have as comprehensive a view of the topic or text that I want to write about because I would've forgotten much of what I'd read. Now granted, forgetting some of what I've read wouldn't be a bad idea, but even among largely reductive or simplistic arguments, sometimes there's a gem of a useful idea.

So on my trip I decided to take my laptop. I had hoped to start revisions of the chapter that my advisor and I were supposed to discuss when we met up in San Francisco. My advisor never made it to the conference. Leaving aside how frustrating/angering/futile that made my trip, it meant I had dragged my computer with me for no real good reason.

So on the trip home, I decided I needed to use the computer - after all, I was hauling it around, I might as well use it. So I tried to write some of the next chapter. But of course I hadn't brought all the notes and books I would normally be surrounded by as I wrote.

Thing is, I wrote some good stuff.

Without the notes to rely on, I was forced to think beyond the elements of the argument to the larger picture. Yes, there are places in the writing that I did where there's a note to the effect of "find the quote" and "double check the text" but I got some good work done on the argument in a very general day.

So from now on, sometime near the beginning of a writing project, I'm going to force myself and my computer out to a coffee shop - sans notes - to write as much as possible without the crutch of notes. Then I figure it would make sense to come back and refer to the notes and texts to fill in the skeleton.

So maybe the trip wasn't a total waste after all...

Happy holidays!

I am off in an hour to internet-less land, so have a happy holiday season, drive safe, don't embarass yourself, and be good to the little people....

What is a posthuman?

I've been struggling with the definition of the posthuman, in part because I need to have a clear idea of it in my own head in order to shape the dissertation chapters into a coherent whole, rather than a set of discrete essays, since the underlying figure in all the texts is the posthuman. Right now, each chapter defines the posthuman for its own purpose.

But I also feel like I need to be able to define a posthuman at some point - ideally in the introduction, or perhaps after exploring all its manifestations, in the conclusion. Either way, I need at some point to be able to say just what it is.

One the one hand, a posthuman seems to be a fairly simple thing to define, after all, it's something that doesn't exist yet, so the imagination is free to create the posthuman in whatever shape seems appropriate to the moment.

But unlike the cyborg, with which it is closely affiliated, the posthuman is a little harder to define. After all, the cyb-org - cybernetic organism - is at its most basic core a cybernetic organism, that is, it is an organism that can be controlled. In popular culture, this means that it is a merging of flesh - organism - and machine - control. If you look at the pop culture references to cyborgs, such as the Terminator or Robocop, you get the idea.

But while a cyborg may be a posthuman, the posthuman is more than just a cyborg. It can take many shapes.

Transhumanists - real people out there who are embracing the idea that humans will change in the near future - offer a kind of bridge between the human right now, and the posthuman. But because the posthuman is "post" the bridge may hint at what it would look like, but cannot define it.

Defining what constitutes the posthuman is complicated by the fact that it is a compound word, and the meaning changes depending on which part of the word you emphasize.

A posthuman would be a creature that comes after human, but a posthuman, emphasizes the way in which the human is maintained in its "post" state. These could be two entirely different creatures, and the latter - the posthuman - is the one what I suspect most transhumanists would recognize, while the former - the posthuman - is probably more often what we encounter in science fiction literature and film.

I suppose through this blog post I've started to find my way to a solution for the problem of defining the posthuman, that is, by defining it as posthuman and posthuman, rather than choosing one over the other.

What do you think?

Rejection in academia

I have finally received my copy of Profession, the yearly journal of MLA that engages directly with the state of the profession (hence the name)

There were two articles that caught my eye. The first was about rejection, or more specifically, about saying "no" to a student, or telling a student he/she is wrong.* The writer argues that there are expectations from both sides about the nature of such interactions: when they should happen, what is appropriate, and how the message is interpreted differently by student and teacher.

Having heard the words "no" from advisors recently, I could relate as a student. But I also have had to say "no" several times to students this term, and I started wondering about that last point - how the message looks different depending on if you're on the giving or receiving end - and how the difference in perception can really get in the way of learning.

As a student, when an instructor or advisor says "no" it's very easy for me to take that as a rejection of more than just whatever the instructor is saying "no" to. When my committee said "no" to recommendation letters, I felt like it was a rejection of everything - me, the dissertation, the timing, my intellect, everything. That's why it felt so overwhelming. It shook my confidence.

Last night while out with colleagues, my husband was talking about a professor at university that we both had worked with and told of how in the seminar he participated in, the professor reduced a few grad students to tears in his critiques of their writing.

Thinking of all these things made me wonder about providing criticism to students. Do the instructors who reduce students to tears provide better feedback? Do students not understand when gentler criticism is provided? Is it necessary to be cruel to get the point across?

My instinct is no. I think it is possible to correct student errors without reducing students to tears. But it requires effort and attention. It requires time to explain why a student is wrong. Simply saying "No, you're wrong" does nothing to correct the error and invites the kind of devastation that leads to tears. I've seen this happen, and inevitably, the tears come when the news is delivered with little or no explanation or clarification about exactly what it wrong. (I also accept that there are students who will be devastated by even the most constructive of criticism - for those students, the only thing you can do is recognize that your criticism is helping them also learn how to accept criticism)

The article was written by an instructor who recognized herself and a colleague in a piece of fiction written by a former student. The fiction writer wrote from the first person perspective of the student who was told "no" in response to a classroom presentation. The feedback from the instructor was brief, and the student did not see it coming - the instructor and student had obviously never conferenced about the idea that the student presented. The story demonstrates how the devastation of that "no" came from a lack of effort and attention on the part of the instructor.

The effort comes from providing the "constructive" part of constructive criticism. It's easy to say "no". It's harder to spend the time and figure out how to articulate how the "no" can turn into a "yes". I remember receiving advice about grading that I should only point out the errors and leave it to the students to figure out what was wrong. But to me that's always felt a little like hanging students out to dry.

Of course I can't edit all their errors, but I think it's important to suggest how they might correct the errors. It takes time. Oh, does it take time. But without providing them with the correction, how will they know what to do with the "no"? Now in the interests of time management, I don't provide a solution for every problem. But I do try to for the bigger ones. Without providing a solution to the problem, I'm just saying "no". I'm just rejecting what the student has done without demonstrating why it's necessary to reject it and how such rejection can be avoided in the future.

Closely associated with the effort of providing solutions is recognizing that correcting student errors also requires attention. Again, the times that I've seen the devastation of the "no" happen (and experienced it myself) have been when the student doesn't see it coming. When as a student you've done work that you think is good, followed the directions as best you can, and then you're told that it's all wrong. That's tough. When as a student you already know you're on shaky ground because the instructor has told you so - as the project is in process - when you get the "this is wrong" message, it comes as no shock.

It's this attention that I think becomes so important to keep in mind as an instructor in student interactions. It's very tempting based on initial writing that a student produces, to gloss over any problems that emerge because you might think the student is a strong writer. Then suddenly you're faced with a final product that fails miserably, and you know that the criticism is going to hurt because you haven't given the student any indication before this that their work is less than stellar. It's one of the reasons I feel it's absolutely necessary to point out every problem in initial assignments so that students get a feel for the amount of work they need to do. They're nervous about that first assignment, and if they get it back with little correction, they'll think they're doing just great, whereas if you show them everything that needs work, they might not correct everything, but it does give them a sense of how the rest of their work will be evaluated.

You do no service to students to let them work for weeks and weeks on a course without giving them an accurate picture of where they stand. I think this applies in the classroom as much as in the work they submit and that it's important to correct errors that emerge during discussions or in-class work just as much as it is in the graded components. It shows respect for the student to give feedback often - whether it is negative or positive because there's nothing more devastating than the comments that comes straight out of left-field. I think that constant feedback also allows you to say things that are worded in strong language to correct errors without killing student initiative and enthusiasm.

I've had instructors myself who were tough. But I knew that from the moment we started, and it became part of the contract of the course - they'd be tough, and I wouldn't take it personally.

I've also had instructors who seemed to accept everything going on in the class as legitimate and acceptable, who then slam your final work, which is disheartening and confusing.

I want to be one of the former. I know I struggle with it as an instructor. It's easy, especially for us as women to see any negative feedback as undesirable, but we need to keep it in perspective. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, and being inconsistent in the level of feedback you provide is more damaging than the harshest criticism. Consistency, and a solution to the problem - the two components that make negative feedback easier to accept.

So I think it's possible to say "no, you're wrong" in a way that doesn't devastate a student if you make sure it doesn't come as a surprise and you provide a solution or explanation of why it must be "no".

*The second will need to be a separate blog post.

Well, at least it WILL get warmer

See that bump in the middle? Where the weather gets warmer (though still below seasonal)? Yeah. Those are the exact dates that I will be out of town. Except for a 12 hour return over the 26th/27th, I will be gone from the city when the temperature finally breaks and gives us some tolerable weather.

What kind of rotten luck is that!?

Knowing is Good

You know how whenever someone is ill, the common sentiment is that it's better to know what the disease/illness is, than to just know something's wrong but not know why? That applies to a lot of things in life.

I've been thinking about knowing vs. not knowing a lot lately, and I would definitely agree that knowing is good.

I just got an email that my proposed paper was accepted for a conference this coming May. I'm tickled to be invited, mostly because it's a Victorian paper, and I've never written or presented anything in Victorian lit, even though that was one of my comps areas. And having seen how many places on the job list were looking for scholars who can do both 19th and 20th century, it would be good to develop some 19th century cv lines. (The conference paper is based on a section of a dissertation chapter I've already written, so it's mostly just a refinement/condensation of my ideas, not a start-from-scratch paper.) I'm also very glad they told me because I'd been flirting with the idea of attending two other conferences in June and August, but that would be really too much conferencing to go to them all!

I also got an email in the last week about a proposal for a book chapter I sent in, telling me they are still working on organizing the volume because of the overwhelming response to their cfp, but that they're still considering my submission. How lovely is that? I don't mean that I'm still under consideration, though that's nice, but that they took the time to email about the status of the project. Since the proposals were only due in October, I thought it was very responsive of them to let people know in December that they wouldn't be making a decision for a while yet.

Compare that experience with another book chapter that I have floating around the ether. I submitted the fully written chapter in August of 2007 after having been greenlighted based on the proposal about 8 months earlier. It was a decent writing timetable, and I was told upon submitting the chapter that I'd hear about the final decision in December. Then at the beginning of 2008, that the volume was being "rethought" and I'd hear soon. I emailed in fall, wanting to know its status so I could update my cv, and was told the whole project was still being reconsidered.

I really should pull the chapter from the volume and shop it around elsewhere, but I've got so many other things going right now, it's not a big priority. But if I don't hear in the next few months (after I finish all the drafting of the dissertation) I will pull it and send it out as a journal article. It's based on a book that came out in 2005, so I'd really hate to sit on it so long that someone else scoops me by writing a journal article about it first! Especially since it's all written up and everything. But that's beside the point. What I'm getting at in telling that story is that the email I got this week updating me on the book status was really just a nice thing to do. Very professional.

I of course am also thinking about knowing vs. not knowing because I'm still waiting for feedback from one of my committee members on three chapters. Yes, three. I realize life's busy, but three chapters is a bit far to fall behind. So I'm chomping at the bit there.

The other reason I'm thinking about knowing vs. not knowing is that I've heard a lot of complaining from job candidates over the years about schools not letting them know about their status. Even though I'm not on the market this year, before my committee made that decision, I'd sent out five applications already. All five have been kind enough to let me know that I didn't make the cut (obvious since they never got the followup reference letters) or that the search was cancelled (only one). So it was very nice to see that these schools - at least if they have no interest in you - were good at notifying candidates.

I have also resolved that if I ever get to join the club, I'm going to be like those schools, and the email sender this week by keeping in touch and notifying people as soon as possible about the things they're waiting for from me. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go write some thank you emails...

Too bad, so sad, but the party's over

Although I have a couple of blog posts floating around in my head about literature and its value to teaching, the rest of the world etc., they aren't worked out yet, so they'll have to wait.

Right now though, I'm staring at a huge pile of take-home exams that need to be marked. I've made my job a bit easier in creating a basic rubric that I'll fill in, and the fact that students usually never come back to get these the next term means that what comments I insert will be telescopic, but it sure is hard getting up the desire to mark these things. I may leave them till tomorrow.

I gave my students a three hour window in which they could hand in their papers, but they needed to hand them in as hard copies - I wasn't going to accept email submissions. They've known this deadline for six weeks now and I even told them they could make arrangements to hand it in early if they had exam conflicts, or if they just wanted to finish it early. A couple made arrangements to drop them off last week, but I still came home one short.

Why is it always the weakest students who do that?

Don't answer that. I know why.

I even stayed an extra half-hour to give them time to get to me because the weather and the roads have been so horrible. I had planned to get to school an hour before I said I would, and even with that cushion, it still took me an hour longer to get to work than I thought it would.

To get to work, I have to go through the river valley. The main route through was slick, slick, slick! this morning. I crawled down with everyone else in first gear, and even on the way back up, which of course is usually easier, I didn't get above second gear because it was really slick too. The snow management in this city has just not kept up to its growth, that's for sure. It was never great, but it's definitely gotten worse over the last few years.

I have to say though, some of the students who ran in at the end of the three hour window really need to use some common sense - two of them told me their cars wouldn't start this morning (no, really, your car wouldn't start in -30 weather?) So they had to plug them in. Umm... ??? We live in Canada, people! When it's this bloody cold, you gotta plug the car in! What I want to know is where they've been for the last several years? (And yes, they're upper level students - this isn't their first year here.)

Anyway, aside from some of this kind of silliness, I actually had some really nice conversations with some of them. One even said that she was worried at the beginning because the way I'd structured the course differed from what she'd been told by other students who have taken the course before. But she found it really helpful the way it was set up. So that was really nice to hear.

I think that might be one of the best compliments a person can get about a course - that the student came expecting one thing and got more than they bargained for. Everytime I've heard such a comment, the subtext has usually been that the student had expected to hate the course (the perils of teaching required gen ed courses) and found they ended up liking at least a part of it. I think the best comment I ever got on an eval was for a public speaking course and was something to the effect of "making a course most students dread enjoyable". Defying student expectation certainly isn't my goal when I design a course, but I think it's a bonus when it does happen.

Here's hoping the coming term will also defy students expectations of their course!

Winter and holidays

Busy last few days. I mailed off a chapter to my advisor this week, which is a nice load off my mind, but it also meant I had to turn my attention to my other work, which I've been taking my time on. I also finally got material from other people for the online work, so I spent a lot of time doing quality assurance on it.

Mostly I kept busy preparing for an open house we hosted last night. I'd never really done an open house party before, but I think I did a pretty good job of making sure I had fresh food throughout the evening. We had a lower turnout then I originally expected - some people had to change their plans because other things came up, but we also have had nasty weather over the last few days, which is a definite party-killer any way you cut it.

I don't know what the exact amount of snowfall was over the 24 hour period, but it was a lot more than we usually get, and then it got very cold. Between the possibility of getting stuck in a snowbank, and the cold, I would've been sorely tempted to stay at home too!

The snow took about 3 hours total to shovel, and reminded me a lot of Saskatchewan. The main roads are clear enough, but it's the side roads that get tricky to navigate. I wouldn't have taken my car out yesterday, and I might even consider carpooling with hubby on Monday if the side streets are still heavy with snow.

I love my little car, but like all little cars, it just doesn't have any weight to it, so deep snow will bog it down. It would be silly to own it if we didn't have a heavier vehicle to fall back on for those few days when the fresh snow makes manouevering difficult, but since we have a heavier car, I can afford to keep it in the garage for those couple of days every year when we get dumped on.

I'll say one thing though - it certainly feels and looks like winter around here now!

A bloggy year

The rules for this blog meme are quite simple: Post the link and first sentence from the first blog entry for each month of the past year. So here goes:

I wish everyone a happy new year!

NEW RULES FOR ENTERING ALBERTA

Thank God for the Church ladies who type them.

I've seen a much shorter clip of Big Dog before, but this one shows some really interesting scenarios that the robot works through - hills, ice, being knocked off balance.

Jazzfest was an intense yet relaxing weekend of good food, good music and good company.

Since my good friend was on a list-making binge lately, and I have nothing really intelligent to say, sharing lists ought to easy...

Happy Canada Day!

Remember when you were a kid, or even a teenager, and a year seemed like forever?

Most of our clients are much more reasonable than this, but there are times when I totally get the designer's frustrations!

In the past few weeks several parts of my life have come to the fore, each vying for importance and attention.

I did manage to re-start writing on the dissertation over the weekend.

I've realized the blog has been rather dull lately and when I do actually post, just a bit on the whiny side.

Well. That was an interesting and very strange exercise. A mix of boring, perplexing, ordinary, and life-related posts by the looks of these openers. I suppose this exercise is probably more interesting for the blogger than for the audience. For instance, it made me realize how much I rely on titles to do the work of jump-starting the blog post, and also that I pay a lot of attention to holidays... I'd never realized that before. Not that the realization will necessary change the way I blog. I guess I'm just now a little more blog-aware!

Sometimes the things you dread the most actually turn out to be good for you

Okay, so I wasn't exactly dreading the Holiday party last night, but I had almost blogged yesterday about how one of the stresses of the holiday season is going to all the parties and such - they might be good opportunities to network but they aren't necessarily relaxing. I suspect that's why so many of them involve alcoholic beverages as well... but that's another post.

There were two parties last night, so we had to choose between networking with my new colleagues and networking with hubby's colleagues. We went with his. Partly because I had forgotten our party was on the same day and he RSVP'd to his before we'd realized the overlap. But I suspect the fabulous four course Italian meal we had was far more delicious than the potluck my workplace was having.

I'm sorry to have missed the chance to get to know some of my colleagues a bit better socially, but there was one thing that happened at the gathering last night that would never have happened at my staff party.

I got a chance to interact with people who weren't academics.

It was neat to talk to people who didn't deal with students everyday (though many of them deal with patients everyday, which yields some very similar frustrations). It was also nice to talk to people who are in fields entirely unrelated to what either hubby or I do and remind ourselves of the wonderful variety of fields outside of our own experience. I found out things I hadn't known - for example, I met a woman who is a commodity trader and she was telling me that although they do a lot of communication electronically, they still need to yell across the floor at each other sometimes. I thought that was one of those things that would've gone the way of the dodo. Apparently not!

The other neat thing was that I got lots of opportunities to practice the "elevator speech", you know, where you try to summarize what you do in 30 seconds of less. I think I did pretty good, and phrasing what I do - especially for a non-specialist crowd - meant I had to think carefully about what parts of my work I could make relate to their own work or experiences. Although I don't tend toward jargon-laden writing or thinking about my topic, there are some assumptions we make as academics when we talk to each other that we need to adjust when talking outside our disciplines.

Getting the chance to explain what I do in a way that expresses why it's a worthwhile endeavour was a really good experience, and I needed that to ground me and give me the chance to look up from the writing and remember the world out there!

Incremental progress

My dissertation meter has moved 3%. Woohoo! That might not seem like much, but it represents forward movement, and for that I'm thankful. I won't even begin to guess at the quality of the work, but the quantity is getting cranked out, and it follows the basic plan for the chapter, so I'll take it to be progress.

Looks like education is a pretty good thing

I've realized the blog has been rather dull lately and when I do actually post, just a bit on the whiny side. Regardless of how disrupted my life feels, or how justified I might be in annoyance, that makes for bad blogging.

So I decided to go back through blog post drafts and finish up some of them. I found this Kelly survey about Satisfaction with education and jobs Of course since the blog is all about me, I found upon re-reading the article that I can relate personally to some of the findings:

Key findings among Canadian survey participants include:

72 percent wish that they had studied further.
41 percent wish that they had studied something totally different.
12 percent say that they definitely chose the wrong career, while 24 percent are 'not sure.'
28 percent say that their school education did not prepare them well for working life.
17 percent say that their post-school education did not prepare them well for working life.

Okay, so I can't relate to the first one. I'm ready to be done studying for a while. Aside from perhaps pottery or basketweaving classes when I've retired, I cannot imagine what other (formal) education I would want to further attain.

But I can relate to those who wished they'd studied something different and those who have doubts about their choice of career. These days I find myself wondering if the last 7 (seven!) years have been a collosal waste.

I can also relate to the quarter of respondents who said their education did not prepare them well for working life. Although my doctoral program has a very good orientation/training program about teaching for which I'm grateful almost every day I step into the classroom, I feel entirely out of my element as a scholar. I have so little sense of what's expected of me after I finish this thing that I would agree with those people that I'm not prepared.

Of course I'll do what everyone else does: fake it till I make it...!

But the last one makes me wonder - the 17% who said their post-secondary education didn't prepare them for life. ???? Is that really an expectation of a post-secondary education?

I realize that a lot of students come into post-secondary with very little sense of how to conduct themselves as adults - I see it every semester. But in that way, they are no different than the other high school graduates who have to figure out how to now be adults as well. It's not the kind of thing that you can learn from a manual, or from someone else. It's learning by trial and error. Sure, the easiest transitions are when those errors aren't life-altering. But shouldn't there have been a base set in high school and more importantly at home, that prevent "new" adults from making the most disastrous errors as they figure it out?

No one can really tell you how to act like an adult. You figure it out by interacting with other people who expect you to act as an adult. When you get a bad response, then you try another approach (or at least most people do). So how is it that your post-secondary education is supposed to prepare you for life? It's not something you can learn in a classroom, so how does the post-secondary institution become responsible for it? This response confuses me, and I have to admit, I'm not sure if that's just because of the way I'm reading it, or whether I really can't figure out what it points to.

The article also notes that 63% of Canadians wished they'd worked harder during their education. Perhaps they've convinced themselves that the lectures they skipped were the ones that would've better prepared them for life?