August 2008

Google is Not Research

Profs expect students to march into the library and acquaint themselves with the subject’s/discipline’s fiefdom. If not, then the student is lazy and lacks the necessary drive or will. The Natives don’t expect to have to navigate fiefdoms. For them, at least thus far, knowledge and data have been without borders. It does not occur to them that there would be a specific database for articles about Colonial literature that is not accessible through a quick key-word search from their dorm.

It can be useful though. If we start talking to our students right away about the relative value of websites.

Of course, I don’t hate Wikipedia. (Unlike most faculty.) I’ve seen it do some good things.

Obama is lauded as everyman says the LATimes.

Erin at Critical Mass tells of her brother being assigned wussy, girly books for reading and how much he hated reading as a result. Her comment was in response to a thread on Joanne Jacobs’ blog.

Read the comments, too.

I agree with the whole, why make our students READ Shakespeare’s plays? We ought to be watching them.

I also agree that a lot of teachers have a poor background in their literature. If you have to teach a work you don’t like, go find something good on it. Look for the things you like in it. There is good stuff written about any novel that would come up in a high school reading class. Find it and use it.

The issue of students enjoying it (and its accessibility) is why we read Frankenstein. We used to read Gulliver’s Travels, which is a little less accessible because of the language, but the students still read it, enjoyed it, and “got” it. Another odd little book that is a classic and needs a good explanation as it is read is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Get the annotated version.

I’m going to say you should teach. That’s the most important thing. But what’s after that? What is most important (at a college) to get hired or get tenure? (Not relevant to community college teachers because… er, you’ll have to wait for my CCTE presentation–I hope.)

“The relative importance attributed to research, teaching, and service is reflected also in the ranking of activities within each of these categories of evaluation. For example, within the category of research, publishing is deemed a more noteworthy activity than presenting papers (akin to lecturing) or editing or reviewing for a journal (akin to grading). And within the category of publishing, publishing articles in scholarly journals (for other researchers) is considered more important than publishing textbooks (for students), and both of these activities carry far more weight than publishing essays in the popular media (for the general populace) – an activity typically deemed utterly insignificant for the purposes of tenure and promotion review. Finally, within the category of publishing scholarly works, publishing purely theoretical articles often ranks above publishing articles which “merely” apply theory to a problem and, typically, both of these rank above publishing educationally oriented articles” (48).

Shelley M. Park
The Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Jan. – Feb., 1996), pp. 46-84

Benjamin (2002) has suggested ways that overreliance on part-time faculty may undermine successful student integration. Not only did he find part-time faculty to be relatively unavailable, but he also found that many used less challenging instructional methods. Plausibly, then, reliance on part-time faculty may hinder both social and academic integration and may also be understood as a factor that connects the integration model to the Bean and Metzner barrier or “student attrition” model.

New Directions for Higher Education published a dedicated volume documenting concerns that poor institutional assimilation by part-time faculty adversely affects student learning. The effects included reduced instructional quality, lack of curricular cohesion, and weak advising (Benjamin, 2003a, 2003b; Cross & Goldenberg, 2003; Elman, 2003; Schuster, 2003; Thompson, 2003; Townsend, 2003). While successfully raising questions about the instructional effectiveness of part-time faculty, the quantitative evidence in that volume did not address the central question of whether heavy reliance on part-time faculty significantly alters student outcomes. This issue was directly assessed in two quantitative studies examining student persistence and graduation. Harrington and Schibik (2001) studied one large midwestern university and found that, when freshmen took a higher percentage of their courses with part-time faculty, they were less likely to persist towards their degree. Ehrenberg and Zhang (2004) tested a large sample of institutions for which there were multiple observations dating back to 1986. They concluded that for each 10% increase in the percentage of faculty employed part-time at four-year institutions, graduation rates decrease by 2.65%.

from the Journal of Higher Education

CC1 is offering an adjunct certification program again. (I had signed up for it this summer, but since I wasn’t in school it completely slipped my mind.) I am going to take it, but the option has made me think.

Why do I need to be certified?

I am an adjunct at my college, but I have a PhD and multiple years of teaching experience. Very few full-time faculty in my department have their terminal degrees. In fact, the college brags that “most of the faculty have their master’s and a bit more.”

My CC1 does not intend to hire me. I applied last year and they chose someone else. Another adjunct has been applying for the last twelve years and has not been hired. So why do they want me to be certified?

Why does anyone (who is an adjunct) have to be certified?

I am guessing the idea is to “beef up” the looks of their adjunct pool. There are over 300 adjuncts and 108 full-time faculty at my college. It’s a 75% adjunct teaching rate. I am assuming they are thinking it will be great to be able to say “Our adjuncts have all been certified.” Maybe they will eventually use it for beginning adjuncts.

All the adjuncts have to have the same minimums that the full-time faculty has, though, so I don’t know why the adjuncts have to be certified and the full-timers don’t.

Why am I going to be certified?

I am going to be certified because I like to learn and this will offer me an opportunity to do that. I need to be a bit more careful about my back-patting. I often feel that I have more experience than everyone else and while the breadth of my experience may be wider (Who do you know who has taught in a one room schoolhouse?), my years of experience are often similar to others.

I am also going to be certified because it is continuing education that I can point to and say, “See, I do still care.”

And just in case they change their mind and decide to hire me, I want to be available, as a graduate, to teach the course later.

What does it mean to be certified?

It means I will have four classes, two hours each, and show up. (Yes, I know I didn’t do that part last time.)

It means I will read all the online assignments and respond to them. These are supposed to be 24 hours worth of work. (They turned out not to be anywhere near that amount, but I spent time researching the topics more online.)

It means I will create a reflective journal. (Can I blog and print that?)

And it means I will have to do a project after the class is finished.

But I still don’t get it.

Why do they think I particularly (as opposed to full-time faculty) need to be certified?

I’m not going to ask anyone. I don’t want to make waves.

But I would like to know.

I think educators get that, but sometimes our students don’t.

I thought this was a little obvious, too.

The researchers found that when reading unfamiliar texts, subjects more often reread parts of sentences and they more often looked back to previous sentences. Their reading speed was also slower overall compared to when they read familiar texts. These measures indicate that processing is slower when reading about something unfamiliar to you.

One of the reasons we read multiple essays on one topic is the above. And it works because

A rich network of associations makes memory strong: New material is more likely to be remembered if it is related to what is already in memory.

Yes, if you don’t know a lot about a subject, reading about it is slower. Did someone not know that?

This study illustrates the importance of the working memory advantage that background knowledge confers (see also Morrow, Leirer and Altieri, 1992; Spilich, Vesonder, Chiesi, and Voss, 1979). Most of the time when we are listening or reading, it’s not enough to understand each sentence on its own—we need to understand a series of sentences or paragraphs and hold them in mind simultaneously so that they can be integrated or compared. Doing so is easier if the material can be chunked because it will occupy less of the limited space in working memory. But, chunking relies on background knowledge.

And that is what our students don’t always get. It’s one of the reason that reading multiple articles on the same topics gets easier. As you read, you learn more.

The intensity of learning matters too.

Since everyone’s memory gets better with prior knowledge, assuming equal exposure to new knowledge (as in a classroom without extra support for slower students), the student with overall lower aptitude will still be behind the student with higher aptitude (Hall and Edmondson, 1992; Hambrick and Engle, 2002; Hambrick and Oswald, 2005; Schneider, Bjorklund, and Maier-Brückner, 1996).

Why does knowledge improve thinking?

Knowledge enhances thinking in two ways. First, it helps you solve problems by freeing up space in your working memory. Second, it helps you circumvent thinking by acting as a ready supply of things you’ve already thought about (e.g., if you’ve memorized that 5 + 5 = 10, you don’t have to draw two groups of five lines and count them).

Read more.

If your school isn’t in contract with Follet’s (which requires us to buy books from them and only then and every teacher must have a book that is purchased there), then you might want to look at Lapham’s Quarterly as an option. It comes out four times a year and includes readings which are on a single subject and which have stood the test of time. (Is there some other way to say that?)

They are fifteen dollars each.

I have five classes and I am enjoying them so far.

I did get a bit ahead of myself in two classes, because I assumed a greater familiarity with computers than some of my students actually had. But they still managed to get started and blog. (Go read their stuff at Davis English Addendum.

I’m going to have my other classes read and comment, trying to create a confluence of academia through this one blog portal.

… I’m a little po’ed about CEA’s “fragmented blogs” comment, which was just a throw away line in their conference inivitation.

We live in a world atomized into text messages and jump cuts, socially constructed snippets on networking sites, fragmented blogs and news bites, ones and zeroes.

says their call for papers

Is that atomized like reduced to atoms? So the world has been destroyed by texting, networking sites, blogs, and programming?

Don’t think so.

Odd perspective that.