February 2009

SW TX Popular Culture Friday

The first thing I thought of in this panel was that next time I come to a conference, I want to tweet the whole thing. 140 characters at a time I could micro-blog the conference. Using that approach, however, would take away from thoughtful approaches to the talks.

Scaffolding 2.0: Students Making Sense of Web 2.0
Phil Tietjen, University of New Mexico

Teaching Technical Communication with Wikis
Jennifer Bracken, New Mexico State University

Online Time versus Face to Face Time: Time Commitment for Instructors
Shelley Thomas, Weber State University

Web 2.0 and Scaffolding appealed to me a lot. I liked the presentation of what is 2.0, especially since lots of us are unclear. I was.

He showed the video “A Vision of Students Today.” His talk is what caused me to go post those two videos on my blog.

He applied Vygotsky (as a theorist) with his concept of social learning and the zone of proximal development.

• Here’s what you can do on your own.
• Here’s what you can do with someone else’s help.

His most useful points for me (besides pointing to Vygotsky) were:
1. Give the students low barrier orientation activities.
2. When you structure group activities, think about how they can ask different questions.

Obviously, I do the low barrier orientation activities. Sign up for an account. Write a blog post. Write comments. Write another blog post. Write more comments.

I was wondering if as a class we could come up with a list of questions that our blog could help answer. How can they use our blog to help each other? I think this would be a useful discussion. Maybe it would increase the credibility of the blog by making it more theirs… If they come up with uses for it, does it belong to them more?

Using Wikis to Teach

I have wanting to begin using wikis, but have been really stumped with this.

I hate to admit this, because of what I am going to point out that she said, but on my first page of notes for her presentation I wrote, “Get Ron to help me with this if I can use it for school. We’ll see.”

On the second page of notes, I quoted her. “Students need to learn to learn technology.”

Ouch. What a rap on the knuckles! I haven’t had that sharp a ruler there since second grade.

She gave a lot of good information in bunches.

Reasons to teach with wikis:
1. expands student learning experience and makes them more comfortable publishing online
2. addresses pedagogical goals
3. facilitates instructor feedback

Theorists useful to the discussion:

• Garza and Hern= create paths vs. filling voids
• Wilson= develop multiple right answers to a communication problem
• Kitalong-Will= writing and interacting with info in a digital environment (students need experience dealing with academic and professional information)

Suggested assignments:  (YEAH!  This is what I most wanted.)

Collaboratively select and revise an article from Wikipedia (Kitalong-Will).

Write a wiki for the whole class and create separate pages like Wikipedia (Collier).

Use individually composed essays and create collaboratively written intros and conclusions (Carr, et al).

Students present on interests and strengths.  Based on those presentations they form groups of three or four.  Then they come up with a site map, conduct research, and collaborate on a wiki site (Bracken).

Online v. F2F teaching

Thomas introduced with Sorin Gudea’s book Expectations and Demands of Online Teachers.

Then she discussed some work she’s done on her own, studying to see which classes she spends more time on.  Subjectively, she said, it feels as if she spends more time on the online courses because she is “always on.”

But, what she found was that her times were very different.

• For online preparation: 939 minutes
• For f2f prep: 862 minutes
• For online discussions: 558 minutes
• For f2f discussions: 4050 minutes
• For online class email: 921 minutes
• For f2f class email: ~840 minutes
• For online administration: 534 minutes
• For f2f admin: 40 minutes

Minutes per student

• discussions online 17
• discussions f2f 225
• grading online 141
• grading f2f 75
• total for online: 234
• total for f2f: 441

She spends more time with f2f students and she finds f2f students are more successful.  Are these related?

I have been trying to contact people whose presentations at SWTX PCA I found particularly intriguing. The back of the program guide has email addresses. However, of the five people I have written so far, two of the emails have bounced. One with the “no such person” and one with the “rejection by recipient domain.”

I wonder if people are uninterested in getting emails. Oh well.

Another Michael Wesch video for your perusal:

Do we need proof of efficacy of writing with computers if everyone is writing with computers?

Often, perhaps more often than we realize, we change what we do in the humanities because of our enthusiasms, not because somebody has proved something. It is the ideas we experience as truth in our own minds, in our own convictions, that transforms our lives as teachers, not necessarily the proofs assembled under specific rules of evidence. As Thomas Kuhn has made clear, by specifying a single valid method of inquiry, a science excludes as much as it includes within its scope of inquiry.

I think that at the very least computers are helpful for writing. They allow extensive revising opportunities with much less physical effort than writing by hand requires. They allow significant research and search capabilities.

Just today I was working on a paper and though I had just yesterday read the entire book and marked important pages, I could not find the quote I needed. So I went to Amazon and searched through the “Look in this book” feature and found the page I needed for my quote. Whoo hoo for the computer!

Let me state clearly that I do not think computer use in the classroom is a fad. I took my doctoral prelims on a computer, the first to do so at my college, in 1989 I believe. I found it much easier to write, to revise, and to read what was written with a computer. (Though I did manage to lose my entire work about an hour before the test ended. Thankfully I found it again.)

I just thought it was a good question.

Because academe is so tolerant and diverse. (Sarcasm.) These notes were taken during 2009′s PCA conference. However, I did not feel I should publish them here immediately.  They show a very clear example of the “everyone thinks like me” political left-leaning bias in academia.

<blockquote>I looked at “the leading candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama” … Frances, first speaker

Sarah Palyen- Stephanie, second speaker (pay lee en)

“I don’t want to hurt anyone’s sensibilities,” said the third speaker Muree. “You don’t have to worry about that. I think you will find we are all open minded here.” Panel director.

“the past eight years were so bad” Muree

“constitutional lawyer versus a president who spent eight years ignoring the constitution” audience questioner

For why Europe likes Obama: “Bush was the anti-American cowboy” rugged, drawl, cowboy boots –audience member</blockquote>

The panel was on political rhetoric, so the comments weren’t off topic. They were just significantly biased.

It’s almost time for this year’s PCA, so I think it has been long enough.

Southwest TX Popular Culture Conference Thursday
Well, the eight a.m. Myth and Fairy Tale turned out very oddly. Only one of the panel presenters attended. That was especially odd since there were four papers scheduled for that hour. His paper was, thankfully, fascinating enough to get five pages of notes out of and everyone was very interested in what he had to say.

Hungry Like the Wolf: Sexual Discovery in “The Story of Grandmother”
Michael Howarth, Missouri Southern State University

Since I read “Little Red Riding Hood” in class when I am introducing literary analysis, though I usually use the Grimm version, I thought this was particularly interesting. In fact, I am hoping he will send me a copy of his paper so that I can reference it in my presentation for CCTE next week.

Here are some of my notes:

The wolf is a gothic symbol. (monster)
The wilderness is a metaphor for change…. The characters need to exit the wilderness in order to symbolize growth and change.

“undiscovered and dark side of human nature”- something to look at

Adolescents are confused over their roles. This is a good work to use to talk about those things.

Dealing with the wolf is dealing with both sexual urges and male predators. (Is the reason male predators are more common in lit because there are so many or because they make more interesting stories?)

Wolf has the role of an independent friend and of a seducer.

The girl and the wolf meet at the crossroads of Pins and Needles (a metaphor there, too). She says she is going down Needles, which is relevant to growing up in French culture, serving an apprenticeship in embroidery/sewing. (Question: Was this work originally in French?)
…
There is a talking cat.
“The slut is she who eats the body and drinks the blood of her grandmother.”

This is a clear eucharistic image. It even borrows the language.

Michael said the talking cat comes out of nowhere, that the girl seems not to hear it. Perhaps it reflects the cultural mores of the day.

I thought that it was an insertion of the narrator into the story. Interesting, narrator as talking cat.
…
In French slang, a girl losing her virginity is “meeting the wolf.”

“The Grandmother” was an oral version of the tale recorded by an ethnographer in 1914.

I am in New Mexico this week for the very popular and well attended Popular Culture conference for the Southwest Texas region. There are people here from Columbia University, Pennsylvania, and Tacoma. It’s not just for Texans I guess. ☺

I came in Wednesday afternoon on a plane and twice already the issue of what to do with non-participatory (poor) or non-behaving (poor) students has come up. On the plane, a woman who teaches at a college in northern Georgia said,

I have a lot of students who come to school and they just do not know how to behave.

I know her students are mostly in generational poverty and so we talked about that for a while and what could be done to help them based on Ruby Payne’s work and suggestions and what I have seen work in my own classroom. Then she said,

Sometimes I have students, usually women, whose husbands don’t want them to come to school. They just want to help, to be ready to help if they need to. Lots of their husbands work manual labor and it is quite possible that they would be injured. The women want to be able to get a job to help their family.

At that point, I pulled out A Framework for Understanding Poverty and began “preaching” to her on the topic.

Here are some of the things I think are incredibly useful from that book.

Generational poverty and situational poverty are different. Generational poverty is defined as being in poverty for two generations or longer. Situational poverty is a shorter time and is caused by circumstance (i.e., death, illness, divorce, etc.). (3)

That’s the difference I wrote about the other day, when I was talking about my life. I was poor but I wasn’t in poverty. I wasn’t (mostly) in the culture of poverty, which is what is created and sustained by generational poverty.

Schools and businesses operate from middle-class norms and use the hidden rules of the middle class. These norms and rules are not directly taught in schools…
For our students to be successful, we must understand their hidden rules and teach the m the rules that will make them successful in school and at work. (3)

We live in a world that is as foreign to them as their world would be to us. Imagine taking a plane trip to Nepal to teach and finding out that your students don’t speak a word of English and neither does anyone else in the entire town. It’s something like that for the students. Only we and they all think that the students do speak the same language. But they don’t.

Dr. Payne later moves into a discussion of language register (from Joos 1997). The formal register is what is used in school. Most of us learned it at home. It is what is used on all state tests. It is what is used in an interview to get a job.

[M]inority students and poor students do not have access to formal register at home. As a matter of fact, these students cannot use formal register….
This use of formal register is further complicated by the fact that these students do not have the vocabulary or the knowledge of sentence structure and syntax to use formal register.

This is why it is so hard to teach these students to write. They don’t know standard English, so they are actually physically and mentally incapable of writing the way we expect in school – until we teach them how to do that.

I had a smart, hardworking student last semester. He wrote lengthy, well-thought out papers. He had a large vocabulary and wanted to do well. He wrote papers and then he rewrote them, probably with a grammar book at his elbow, to get the grammar right. The grammar of formal register is not the grammar anyone in his family speaks. But he figured it out on paper.

Unfortunately, the formal register hasn’t gotten into his head yet and I didn’t think to suggest Payne’s book to him. He dropped out of English class this semester when he had a teacher who read his standard writing of casual register and said he needed to take a remedial course. (I need to recommend the book to the teacher, too, in case he hasn’t seen it.)

This information is vital to our students success and so many of us, like my new friend on the plane, don’t know it.

Southwest Texas Popular Culture Conference Wednesday
This weekend I am attending the Popular Culture Association’s Southwest Texas meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It has been a lot of fun.

I went to a Myth and Fairy Tale presentation.

From Green Shores to Green Beers: The Myth-story of Ireland’s Saint Patrick
Kevin Michael Visconti, University of Miami

Men, Women, and Unicorns: The Influence of Pop Culture on Mythology Through Gender Roles
Owen Thompson, Western Illinois University

The Death of Chupacabras: How the Internet Demystified and Poisoned a Cultural Phenomenon
Charles Hoge, Metropolitan State College, Denver

I enjoyed all three of these.

St. Patrick
The one on Saint Patrick was a survey done last year during the week of St. Patrick’s day. I have to admit that I wear green and don’t go to church. (This was part of what he was asking.) I am of Irish descent. My great-great-great grandparents came from Ireland to Pennsylvania where their son married a German girl.

I thought it was a fun study and an interesting beginning for a discussion/investigation into the creation of Irish-American culture.

Unicorns
The unicorn paper included some beautiful unicorn pictures. I would have enjoyed that just for itself, even if there had been no content to the paper. Thankfully, there was a lot of content. He posited that the change in unicorn sex from male to female came about as a result of the 1967 book The Last Unicorn.

I think he said that unicorns hard pretty much disappeared from literature and art following some church council. (I can’t remember which one. Owen, if you read this, which one was it?) But I remember Jewel the Unicorn, a male unicorn, from C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle. And I wonder how many others there might have been. I figure that now that he has alerted me to the thought, I’ll be seeing unicorns everywhere.

Chupacabras
I was fascinated to learn that Chupacabras hit the planet in 1995 in Puerto Rico, that “they” were only seen singly (so there may only have been one), but that by late 1996 people were blaming many kinds of destruction on chupacabras in the US as a joke.

First, I didn’t know they had been real -or at least thought to be real.

He showed this picture, which I found on wikimedia.

He said that some suggestions for it were that it was a robot, a concerted attempt to destabilize the government or economy (?), or maybe an alien pet left behind by a family in a UFO.

I am fascinated about this, and not just because Texas Anti-Alien Militia has something like these things show up and they are alien animals.

Then I went to another Myth and Fairy Tale presentation.

Breaking the Glass Slipper: Subversion of Gender Stereotypes in Classic
Cinderella Tales with Contemporary Feminist Variants
(Winnie) Chieh-Lan Li, Pennsylvania State University

A Change of Focus: Male Heroes in the Background
Thomas Leek, Saint Cloud State University

This was a very fun panel and fit in very much with what I do in using fairy tales to introduce literary analysis. I enjoyed the panelists’ presentations.

Winnie presented on Cinderella and various presentations of the fairy tale. I liked that she did not simply say that there were other presentations, but actually talked about them and said what they did well and what they did poorly. She mentioned five particular works, three of which I had read. Despite the fact that I had read them, she helped me to think about them in a different way.

Winnie did a good job with her audiovisual presentation. I liked that she had her main points up for us to follow. She also shared a Tata Young video at the end in which the words contradict very explicitly the visuals of the music video. (Cinderella)

But the language is very different from the actions. A true disconnect here.

The discussion afterwards was especially fun because I had something that I thought was worthwhile to contribute.

This conference is going to be a lot of fun.