Blogs

The new issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is out, and it features an article on blogs by teenagers. I'm thinking Lanette might find it useful for her CCCC presentation. :-)

Take that, student evaluations! Stanley Fish lowers the boom (Via Steve). Fish criticizes the questions some evaluation forms ask of students, like: "Did the instructor give lectures that facilitated note taking?" "Have you learned and understood the subject materials of this course?" etc. I agree, some of the questions put most or all the onus of learning onto the instructor, and some are problematic in other ways -- for example, at my university, students are asked to assess the instructor's use of technology to facilitate learning in the course. The teacher could be phenomenal but low-tech and could end up looking bad just because of that. Sometimes there are questions about course design that ask students to evaluate the teacher for decisions that have been made at the administrative level (the assignments, structure of the course, which textbooks are used, etc.). He's spot-on in that regard. But Fish goes further, suggesting that the very idea of having students evaluate teaching is wrongheaded. He calls instead for a grievance process that would be confidential and would catch problems early, while admitting that most colleges and universities already have such processes. What bothers me about the article is the idea that students' opinions are "ill-informed" and that students are unqualified to assess courses. Fish writes:

No doubt in many colleges and universities a grievance process is already in place, and if it is, there is absolutely no need for the waste of paper and time that now goes into preparing, printing, distributing, collecting, and tabulating forms that report the unfiltered opinions of those who, for whatever reason, decided to express them.

To be sure, there would still be a need for teaching evaluations that could legitimately play a role in promotion and tenure decisions. Those evaluations, however, could be provided by the system of peer visitation already used by most departments. It is, after all, a matter of judging professional competence, and who better to do that than a professional, someone who visits your class and assesses what you're doing (or trying to do) in the context of a career-long effort to do the same thing.

Is this whole article supposed to be a joke...? Some of us find student feedback quite valuable, at least as valuable as a one-time class visit and write-up (though those evaluations are much-needed too). What about the problems involved in peer visitation evaluations? While a sympathetic observer is a good thing, sometimes the resulting write-ups can be a little too rose-colored.

After reading the article, I thought: Oh yeah! I need to email University Course Evaluations and arrange for the Early Semester Evaluation Forms to be sent to my students.

There's a good discussion on Kairosnews about free, collaboratively authored, online, Creative Commons-licensed, open-access composition textbooks. As you might guess, I like the idea, but the planning and execution are going to be very tricky if a group actually gets together and does this thing. But as I was writing my comment, it occurred to me how easy it would be to assemble an online reader for a first-year composition course. There's so much writing talent in the blogosphere, and many bloggers have Creative Commons licenses. I might just do it: Find great, essay-style posts that model qualities of good writing style and argumentation, group them into themes, and copy them into my course site. I could use Drupal's collaborative book module. I'm excited! I'm already thinking of posts I might want to use, like for a unit on the war, I'm thinking of Mike's post titled The Photos and Jeanne's And in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink: A scattered and contradictory post on responsibility and Abu Ghraib (To be sure, Jeanne doesn't have a CC license, but maybe she'd give permission for her work to be reproduced for educational, noncommercial purposes.). I'm also thinking of Jeanne's recent post titled Democrats, Aristocrats, and the Torturer's Assistants.

Such a reader could be assembled for any class; I'm thinking too of an intro to Gender Studies class. I might use something along the lines of Dr. Crazy's "Why Women's Studies Sucks" series (Part I and Part II, and hat tip to Jonathan for those), and the responses from The Little Professor and others. Ummmm, yeah, my argument would be stronger if these blogs actually had CC licenses, I know (heh), but again, they might allow their work to be used for this purpose. If not, there are many with CC licenses who have excellent work on their blogs, like Rad Geek, Lauren, and many more. The more I think about this idea, the more I like it. Reduced cost to students, more freedom for the instructor to design the course around themes, and more opportunity for the students to be an active audience, conversing with the authors of the work if the students also blog, or even if they don't, as most bloggers have an email address displayed.

Via Torill: I'll be keeping an eye on the journal primarily for its subject matter, but I'm also happy to see that the full text of all the articles in IJWBC is available and that the publisher, Inderscience, supports the Open Archives Initiative. They even have RSS feeds for the journals.

I thought of Timothy Burke's comment at Laura's when I read The Waiter You Stiffed Has Not Forgotten. In response to Laura's response to the article on parents' blogs, Burke wrote, "I think you misunderstood what it is that the Times has a low regard for. It's not parenting, it's blogging." After reading this article, which discusses weblogs kept by servers (www.bitterwaitress.com, www.waiterrant.blogspot.com and www.webfoodpros.com are mentioned), I tend to disagree that the Times has an across-the-board low regard for blogging. Julia Moskin, the author of the article, seems alarmed at the pent-up hostility of the posters:

The vengefulness of the posts, and the recurrence of anecdotes that involve adding foreign fluids to customers' food, from breast milk to laxatives, is enough to turn anyone who dares to enter a restaurant into a nervous, toadying wreck.

but simultaneously sympathetic; waiting tables is a stressful job, and people who do it need to vent. She's written a pretty even-handed piece which includes quotes from servers and from higher-ups in the restaurant industry, who, not surprisingly, disapprove of the blogs.

Many of you have seen it already, but if you haven't visited it lately, you really ought to check out Network(ed) Rhetorics, the course blog for the graduate seminar Collin Brooke is teaching this semester. Most recently, seminar participants have been discussing academic blogging and the use of weblogs in pedagogy, and readings include essays from Into the Blogosphere and lots of other interesting stuff.

New 5ives! Especially funny is Five terrible fake LiveJournal memes.

Rosa Eberly at The Blogora offers academics a useful prompt:

you are a professor. you have a phd; your days are divided among the different kinds of people who need to see you -- the people you supervise, students, colleagues, the higher-ups, people who want something from you, loved ones, community members, categories not exclusive.

you have a "discipline" or some combination of commodified kinds of academic expertise.

1. make a list of at least one thing -- generate as many ordinals as you like, not worrying about hierarchy -- that you think your discipline(s) or kind(s) of expertise have done to damage democracy.

2. then make a list of at least one thing -- generate as many ordinals as you like, not worrying about hierarchy -- that you think your discipline(s) or kind(s) of expertise could do to sustain democracy, its habits and practices.

3. finally -- or not finally -- talk with a colleague, a student, someone, anyone, about this exercise and your lists.

I only saw the post a second ago, so I'll have to think on it, but I'll be posting a response, and I encourage others to participate in this activity as well. Andrew Cline responds in the comments to Rosa's post.