A Heads Up

The server where Lanny on Learning Technology is currently being housed is being converted 100% to its original purpose - to support streaming media - and will no longer be used for Web publishing. So I need to find another host, which will either be on a College of Business Server or on Blogspot. A redirect will be set up, which should be fine for users who get there via a browser, but if you are subscribing to the site via an Atom or RSS feed, you'll need to resubscribe.

The earliest this will happen is December and I don't yet have the details of the new site or the timing of the switch. I just wanted to let readers know in advance with the hope this will improve the chance that the switch is seamless. I will also contact folks who either link to this blog or syndicate the blog posts.

Maybe the spammers won't find the new site for a while. :-)

Obama, can this really be the end?

I had some wacko thoughts the last couple of weeks (unrelated to my leg injury). Students need to learn to write in a limited vocabulary context – the discipline will aid with their creativity; by reducing the number of possibilities to try it is more likely that they’ll try several of them. So I thought about an assignment I’d give if I were teaching writing or speech. Get students to make a PowerPoint presentation on some pre-specified topic, where on each slide they had to have some lines from a Bob Dylan song that fit with the context of what they are trying to say on that slide. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

* * * * *

Today, Bob Herbert’s column in the New York Times Op-Ed page (you need to subscribe to Times Select to access the link) is devoted to Barack Obama. Herbert is at least the third Times columnist to have done this in the past week. Preceding him are David Brooks, who urged him to run for President (why is it that the conservative columnist who doesn’t agree with Obama on a good range of the issues acts like his biggest booster?) and Maureen Dowd who tried to skewer him for not knowing whether Obama wants to be a celebrity unto himself or a pol in the spirit of Harry Truman – give ‘em hell. It’s hard to blame Obama for basking in the limelight, but given that rather naïve ethics everyone seems to trumpet these days, if he’s really going to make a run for the presidency then the other pay seems a deal with the devil and surely he can’t have it both ways, can he?

Herbert cautions that Obama should choose his own timetable for making these decisions and not be forced into something too hastily because the 2008 elections are looming. That makes sense. But I wonder if we sports fans of liberal (er, I mean middle of the road) American politics can get beyond the cult of personality here and into the core issues that we’d like to see our fearless leader bring to pass. So the rest of this post is on the issues.

* * * * *

The absolute most basic thing that needs to happen is to re-establish a sense of shared sacrifice in one and all in this country. And here, sacrifice means sacrifice, not some two bit commitment that one can blow off on a moment’s notice.

Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but The next time you see me comin' you better run"
Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61."

(The above is the first verse from Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.) Given Iraq and the Bush tax cuts and the rest, we Americans as a people are ripe for shared sacrifice. We need it as a tonic to the hedonism and lack of real meaning in peoples’ lives. We need it because we want to solve hard problems, like our dependence on foreign oil, like the apartheid in the inner city schools that Kozol describes, like that fact that we want to shop at Walmart (and hence have the stuff at Walmart produced in low wage countries but we want high incomes for ourselves. And we know the hard problems don’t have ready answers and if not shared sacrifice, then there will just be lip service about the problems and no solution whatsoever.

But we know there is a problem with this shared sacrifice stuff – apart from some limited in time episodes in the nations past where there has been real grass roots shared sacrifice, it just hasn’t happened on it own. So we need to the government to help, to make it a fair deal, to encourage universal participation. But as of late the government knows only one way for individuals to make sacrifice – join the military.

The military is not the solution. Indeed, as the Iraq-Vietnam parallel gets more and more play, we’re going to see calls for peace from all quarters. I can imagine Down By the Riverside (obviously not written by Dylan but appropriate nonetheless) as the new (old) theme song for the movement. This particular version shows just how moving that song can be and how apt its message is for the present time.

So we need a mechanism or a set of mechanisms for shared sacrifice but that don’t involve the military. Unlike the Peace Corps and Vista, at least as they were depicted in the ‘60s, we need the burden to be more broadly distributed, both income-wise and age-wise, and not just rest on newly minted college grads. And then I would take one aspect of military service that should be embraced in this new arena and serves to cement the social compact – having done a full stint of such service, the individual would be entitled to medical benefits akin to what Veterans are entitled to. We might not get to universal health care coverage this way, but we could come awfully close, especially if non-military service to country became the norm.

To me, this seems like a pretty good basis for a domestic agenda. We could openly talk about our problems because we actually might have a way to address them. And we could increase a sense of shared purpose and responsibility in the process.

In the 60’s the stereotype was that the hard hats couldn’t get along with the hippies. I’ve no clue whether conservative Republicans (or liberal democrats for that matter) could embrace the idea of sacrificial service toward the country that is not militaristic service at all, but rather in support of the internal social fabric, especially if the other did so embrace. I can only hope.

Far between sundown's finish an' midnight's broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashingFlashing for the warriors
whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An' for each an' ev'ry underdog soldier in the night
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

From Chimes of Freedom.

Paroled

(The title of this post refers to my previous post.)

My orthopedist said I've made enough progress so I need not wear the brace, except perhaps when it's icy outside. I'm ecstatic. This comes none too soon.

Prisoner of the Brace

Tomorrow afternoon I return to see the Orthopedist. It’s been four weeks. The surgery itself is now fully healed, at least on the outside of the leg. I’ll have a nice scar. My physical therapist said some folks get tattoos in the form of a zipper, to dress up the scar from this type of surgery. I’ll probably pass on that one; I’m not a tattoo kind of guy, but if I were to change my mind I probably should do it soon, since to the touch my leg doesn’t have a lot of feeling around the knee where the surgery was done. I was told that lack of feeing was normal and it might take quite a while – up to a year – for the feeling to return. I’ve met all my milestones in the physical therapy. I can do quadriceps squeezes and leg lifts out the wazoo. And now I can flex the leg to 60 degrees, the max that the brace will allow at this point, without too much of a warm up, and then hold that stretch for maybe 10 minutes or so before the leg starts to fatigue from being in that position. I can go up and down stairs fairly readily. And now getting into the car and driving is not such a big deal. With that I can go to work and be modestly productive. So life has achieved a certain normalcy.

But there are still some pretty humdrum things I can’t do – putting on shoes and socks by myself or taking a real shower without getting assistance, for example, and wearing long pants instead of shorts, even though it’s starting to get cold outside, for another. (I can't get the long pants on over the brace.) And because of the logic of the brace design and that for this purpose it is better to think of the leg as a cone rather than as a cylinder, narrower at the ankle than at the thigh, and hence when I’m walking the brace is apt to slide down my leg and will do so unless the straps are pulled very tight, and with that and the further fact that with just the surgical stocking alone and no brace whatsoever, the skin on my leg would chafe and get irritated, the brace rubs me the wrong way, if you'll pardon the pun.

All of these are minor in themselves and collectively are not worth writing about either except for the following observation. I’m aware of my leg and the brace most of the time. Sometimes it becomes the focus of my attention, because I can’t sit comfortably for long spells and hence I must change position, get up and walk around, or adjust the brace itself so I can be at ease. This regular reminder the brace provides creates my own little jail cell, locked into an existence of infirmity with no way out, at least for the time being.

For a very long time, certainly since I was a teenager and maybe even before that, I found refuge and joy in getting lost in thought. I recall that though I’m slothful by nature I actually looked forward to washing the dishes or mowing the lawn (some of the chores I adopted as a kid) because while doing that I could think about whatever I wanted to – I didn’t have to pay attention to something else. And I know when I was at Northwestern and would occasionally drive home to New York, sometimes by myself, I would actually look forward to the drive (between Illinois and Pennsylvania on I-80 there is not much of a view) because it would be an opportunity for being awake yet in reverie, something I thoroughly enjoyed, and I believe an important source of my own personal creativity.

To achieve that state of mind, however, I need to be free from concern about more prosaic real world matters. In that sense, the expression lost in though is misleading. I’m actually found in thought and quite alive in this way. Where I’m lost is in the real world immediacy, where I’ve entirely stopped paying attention or if not that then am doing the minimum so that I don’t get into trouble, but that requires a sufficiently low level of mental power that it doesn’t tax my thinking at all. Over time I’ve found I’m quite happy this way and more recently, since I’ve been blogging, I’ve come to learn that I need to do this from time to time to generate anything that others might find interesting in the writing. (I stumbled upon this short journal which has taken up the creativity theme and which seems sympathetic to my view, though its focus is creativity in the corporate setting.)

The brace makes all of this problematic, and frequently entirely impossible. Indeed it has lessened the intensity of my thinking and, I fear, made me duller. And, as a practical reality, it has made sleep more difficult. Optimism is harder to sustain as a result and optimism seems a critical ingredient for creativity. The lack of sleep itself may matter too.

I don’t even know where to sit. I’m most comfortable in my recliner, with leg raised. But that is for napping or reading, or doing the Soduku from the Sunday paper. When I write I do that sitting at a keyboard and need to be upright for that purpose. But sitting upright is less comfortable, not painful but not comfortable either. So what to do, go for comfort or productivity? I find I bounce back and forth. When I’m bouncing, I know I’m not really into it.

My prison sentence will be of limited duration. I’m hoping the doc will tell me tomorrow that I don’t have to wear the brace at all, but even if I do, I know its only going to be a few weeks longer. In the meantime, I may write more posts about the technology because those don’t require as much introspection, just some time playing with the software. The thing is, I don’t believe what we do with learning technology is really about the software.

Ah, penance!

Doing It Wrong

It is a commonplace to offer the advice to “learn from one’s mistakes” after experiencing a failure and almost as frequent that “one learns more from a failure than from a success.” Yet for reasons that I’m not completely certain of, these prescriptives seem to rarely if ever find there way into teaching. That is, instructors don’t knowingly, via an act of commission, take an incorrect approach to solving a problem or to present new ideas, especially in the case where they don’t advertise to the class ahead of time that they are doing exactly that.

For example, there is much talk nowadays about teaching design and getting design inculcated throughout the curriculum. Consider this simple design problem. There are two rooms in which to put flooring, one gets tile, the other gets carpet. Why not start by putting tile in the bedroom and carpet in the bathroom and have students work through the implications of that, before getting to the preferred solution where it is done vice versa?

My guess is that to protect their own egos instructors guard against making errors that they haven’t planned and are so caught up in that issue as well as the related issue that the students might find them out that they don’t venture into this other terrain where things are topsy-turvy, where the instructor’s expertise and authority are revealed only in a more subtle fashion by making sense of it all. This gives me enough of an explanation for why comparatively novice instructors don’t do this and then, since we are such creatures of habit, why more experienced instructors don’t do this as well. And its likely too that most instructors haven’t given the issue enough attention. But consider what they miss through the “telling of truth” approach that so many do adopt.

If someone takes a wrong turn but believes it to be right, there will be a period of time during which the person is happy in their conviction that they are headed on the true path. But then evidence will start to accumulate which suggests that belief is wrong. What evidence is that? How much evidence must be accumulated before changing direction? And when that evidence has been gathered, then what? Which way to head now?

Suppose that we instructors viewed one of our main jobs to be modeling for the students how they should proceed as they learn and that one key skill is to get oneself unstuck after having gone down the wrong path. How can that be taught unless we ourselves deliberately make mistakes, to put ourselves in a position where we are stuck, uncomfortable and unsatisfied, to be sure, but still with our wits about us and a strong sense that this place isn’t the final resting stop?

Knowing how students seem to prepare for class on my campus, my sense of teaching this way is that if the deliberate mistakes where part of a pattern – start with the mistakes and then move to the correct solution – students would soon learn to ignore the mistakes; they wouldn’t be on the test would they? So I think if one teaches this way one most do it by surprise, in an inconsistent way, where the students are not sure what’s coming. It may be the straight dope or it may be a deliberate error but ahead of time they are not sure which. They have to use their own wits to ascertain the situation. And beyond wit, they have to use their own sense of taste as to whether to be satisfied with what they’ve been told or to question/reject the ideas because there are issues with them. Indeed, instructors developing such a sense of taste in the students would seem to precisely the type of deeper learning skills to which instructors aspire for their students. Doesn’t it make sense to deliberately practice doing that sort of thing rather than have it mysteriously happen (or not) when the students are on their own?

But I believe an instructor is not likely to try this unless one sees the need for some “invention” in the teaching, some departure from an entirely linear presentation. Way back when, 15 + years ago, when I was teaching the graduate economic theory class or the summer math for economists class that was preliminary to the graduate students entering the doctoral program, with all those goodies about Bordered Hessians (a certain matrix of partial derivatives), the Implicit Function Theorem, and the Envelope Theorem, the core math behind the economic theory, I learned to lecture without notes. I did this not to show off, but rather because I went too fast when I paid attention to the notes – I knew the stuff so when I was paying attention to the notes I zipped through them, because I was simply regurgitating what was on the paper, there was nothing new in the process for me. Since I knew the stuff real well but this was not the type of material that one might memorize, without the notes I had to re-derive the results from scratch and much of my lectures ended up being talking through how I did that while doing a lot of writing on the blackboard. Perhpas not we romanticize about as good teaching nowadays, but the graduate students then were quite appreciative of the approach.

I tell this story in part to let regular readers of the blog know that I deliberately “made a mistake” in writing the post up till this point and wondering whether any of you noticed the error. Figured it out yet? Here’s a hint – it has nothing to do with that in my little story I talk about lecturing.

Instead, it’s about positioning the story within the Blog post. Normally, I begin with a personal anecdote. I do so for several reasons – to break the ice and draw the reader in, to illustrate by example the point I’m trying to make in the post, to show connections between my experience and my ideas, etc. I think that is the better way to write, from example to the theoretical point, from the personal to the abstract. It is more closely how we actually think, in my view, and as I’ve written elsewhere, I’ve borrowed the approach part and parcel from Stephen Jay Gould.

But I didn’t do it in this post. I started with theory and made a theoretical argument, albeit in chatty terms. Then I went to the anecdote to illustrate. If you’ve gotten this far in the reading of the post, and if you’ve read other things I’ve written you might very well have a sense of which you prefer. Further, you might make come to the meta conclusion that errors of commission are precisely the examples we need from which to generalize about our thinking; were I such a good teacher I'd do it more often.

Let me close with one last point. It may be harder to do this in “live mode” since to a certain extent you then have to “sell” the error as reasonable and that may require an acting skill that many of us don’t have, but I believe this is do-able in writing, in which case the idea is simply to take a somewhat longer journey to the resting stop, possibly by taking a detour or two in the process, those detours offering potential insights via the deliberate making of mistakes and learning from that. Instructor blogging would seem to provide a nice framework for this, as by its essence there is invention in the writing, and the instructor can be thoughtful about the type of errors he would like to make.

Web Spreadsheets – Gathering Student Generated Data – Using Google Tools for Instruction

I’m taking advantage of the fact that with my leg injury and because of transitioning to the new job, my calendar is still comparatively unscheduled and hence I have a fair amount of free time. This morning, I spent some time playing with Google Spreadsheet. It definitely has possibilities.

Let me note straight away, the one function I’d really want to see but isn’t there now. It doesn’t graph data. That is a big limitation, one that will continue to get most folks to stay with Excel. But it does have quite a bit of other functionality that seems to make it a terrific adjoint to be used in conjunction with Excel or as a stand alone for certain purposes (see below). It does have a large array of formulas, with the same names as in Excel, it will import spreadsheets without difficulty, and the really nice part is how it can be shared with others.

Now let me turn to a teaching idea that I think is for the here and now, but which I suspect doesn’t happen nearly as often as it might at present. I’ve discussed the idea before, for example here. (See the section near the end on data ingest.) The idea is design various activities to be done online where each student contributes some data and then collectively the data forms an experiment to be done in class to demonstrate a certain point relevant to the class or to test a hypothesis that has already been developed in class. This would give a much need empirical aspect to what we teach and in my experience would really engage the students.

I will leave the design of these type of experiments to another post and here simply focus on the data ingest issue. One can use the survey tool in the Course Management System for this purpose. But as those tools are currently designed:

(1) The student does not get a record of their own submission for later review.
(2) The students don’t have direct access to the submissions of other students and can only get at the data if the instructor posts it. (Typically done once by the instructor after the deadline for submissions has past, so the instructor uploads all the submission at one time._ But note this is extra work for the instructor. And, further, students might want to look at the aggregate in mid stream, at our around the time they make their own submission.

So it would nice to have a system that addresses both (1) and (2) above. I’ve made a little demo to show how Google Spreadsheet can be used to manage these issues. (To access this demo, you must have a Gmail account and use that as the login.) I’m going to talk through the demo a bit so you can get the idea. It would also help for you to try to make your own spreadsheet so you can see the functionality that you don’t see in the demo.

You have read access to the demo, but not write access. (I’m happy to give anyone write access; just send me your Gmail address and I’ll set that up for you.) When you have write access there is an additional tab called Edit, which is where the data entry occurs. You also don’t have access to the Formula Tab, which allows using the spreadsheet in an intelligent manner so it does data manipulation.

There are individual worksheets labeled with people’s names: Al, Barb, Carl, Don…. up to Lou. Those names are meant to index hypothetical students. I’ve put in the data for the student named Hank. The other students haven’t yet entered any data.

There is one other worksheet called Aggregates. This worksheet shows the data entered by all the students in one view. It gets these data from the individual student worksheets. This worksheet will update automatically as students enter their individual data. You can see Hank’s data in column I. of the Aggregates sheet. (Perhaps I should have put it in column H, but I used column A to label the content of each field.)

That’s pretty much it. Obviously this is a fairly simple minded demo, but I hope the idea comes across clearly. Because the entire thing can readily be exported (use the File menu) students can do data manipulation on the aggregates at any time, even while the data collection effort is still in progress. This is really quite nice. (The dark side is that if each student has write access to the thing, they have write access to every worksheet and hence can overwrite other student data. This is, in essence, the same problem that Wikipedia faces. That problem appears to be manageable, but students do need to save a local copy of the spreadsheet after they submit their own data.)

Now let me turn to another related issue. This revolves around the ethics and usability of requiring students to have a Gmail account to be used for instruction. Suppose in a class of 50 or 60, perhaps 3 or 4 students don’t want to have a Gmail account for this purpose, because they don’t want Google to mine their identity information. Is that a likelihood? If so, what should be done in this case?

This is the type of question that would trouble us, in the Central IT organization for the campus, but for me as an instructor, I have a fairly simple work around. I can make dummy Gmail accounts, which when created were sent to my email address, not to the students. I can then give these students the login and password and tell them to use for this purpose only. Google then has no profile info on the students at all. The risk moves onto me. I’m willing to bear the risk.

And actually, the biggest possible hassle from this is that these students forget the login and password info and then I’ve got to spend my scarce time playing the role of help desk for them. If that happened on a recurring basis, I’d probably abandon the approach. But it seems a low risk to me.

So what are we waiting for?

Making a talking head video from your desktop and displaying in Google Video

Gary had asked for a “how to” on a previous demo of talking head video, but last night Google Video didn’t accept uploads and I was a bit afraid that the YouTube acquisition had affected their upload policy. My fears were misplaced. Upload worked this morning. They must have had a temporary server glitch. So, below, is my own annotated instructions on how to do this sort of thing.

* * * * *

I’m going to talk about this for the PC. I’ve done likewise for a Mac, and if you are doing this on a Mac, you can substitute iMovie for where I talk about RealProducer Plus. However, one caveat. I’ve got an iMac with a built-in iSight Camera. For whatever reasons, iMovie doesn’t see that camera. If you use an external camera – no problem. If you do use the internal camera, then you need another program to record the video. I used iVeZeen. For recording uncompressed video, it works fine, but for compression it had problems.

On the PC, I’ve had good success with a very inexpensive Logitech Camera. One of the nice secrets is that for the quality of video I want to produce, this works quite well – for both video and audio recording. If you have a flat screen monitor in your office, clipping it on top of the monitor and then leaving it there out of harm’s way till you need it makes it quite convenient. The camera plugs into a USB port. You do have to install software that comes with the camera, so the computer recognizes the device, but that is pretty straight forward.

In what I do, I’ve used the camera as the audio recording device, rather than any built in recording device on the computer. It is easy to visually gauge distance from the camera and so it becomes easy to get a sense of a comfortable zone where the recording can be done. To do this, go to the Control Panel and select Sounds and Audio Devices. Select the Audio Tab. In the recording area, make sure the camera is selected.



One of the tricks I learned, but only after making the same mistake many times, is that the microphones for these things are pretty sensitive and the right thing to do is to set the volume for recording on your computer down. This will keep the thing from picking up too much background noise. I can live with crappy video, but crappy audio makes the presentation worthless, in my view. So this is one of the key steps in the process. Fortunately, as with the previous step, this only has to be done once. Click the Volume button in the Recording Device area. This is a screen shot of my volume settings.



Now we’re ready to start recording and for that you need some software. At Illinois, a good choice is RealProducerPlus, since we have a campus site license to the software. (UIUC community can get this software from the Webstore. Because of the licensing restrictions and the need for us to assure further distribution to non-licensed users is restrained, the software is available on CD only, not by download.) The two things it offers for this particular purpose are nice frame rate for recording (30 frames per second) so the video looks smooth not choppy and a fairly easy to learn interface. Perhaps there are freeware alternatives for the PC. The Logitech camera itself has video capture software that produces AVI files. That’s a possibility. My experience with that is mixed. Sometimes it is fine but at other times it produces choppy video.

Here is a screenshot of the RealProducerPlus interface. I’ll talk through the minimum set of steps needed to record a movie.

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/l-arvan/Video_Upload/RealProducerPlus.jpg

RealProducer takes as input either another type of media file or from a recording device. The default is the former and so you must actively select the recording device for both Audio and Video inputs. Note that in the screen shot I’ve selected the Logitech Camera for both of these. That is on the left, below the image of me that is shown during the capture. That the image appears shows the Video input is being received correctly.

On the right, there are some buttons, one of which says Audiences. Click it. If you are actually going to record for later streaming, you can choose multiple audiences. But for this purpose, you only need one audience and the one I’ve got is 256K DSL or Cable. Recording for dial-up makes the thing too choppy. The other control to set is the Audio Mode. I believe the default is Music (a higher quality). I choose Voice, which makes the file a little smaller. The quality is fine for this purpose.

You can put in Clip Information, and that might be a good idea if you are concerned about protecting your copyright. But it is not necessary to make a recording. The key final step for that is to identify the four icons below the Destination window, one has the Real logo, the next has an image of a server, then a pencil, and finally a trash can. Choose the button with the Real logo, select a name for your file and the location where you want the file to reside on your computer.

Now you are ready to record. I recommend making a 10 second movie or so, just to test that the recording is working ok. When you make your actual movie, you’ll simply overwrite that test movie. Recording happens a second or so after you press the Encode button. You’ll see another image in the right window pane during actual recording. You click the Stop button next to the Encode button when you are done. On my computer it takes almost no time thereafter for the video to be ready to view. There is a button for playing back the movie and that will bring up RealPlayer so you can see what the video looks like.

The completes the technical part of the recording. There is a different issue about making your own talking head video that you can tolerate. You’ll probably think the first few you make are terrible. (They might be.) One issue is looking at the camera rather than the computer screen. Another is talking smoothly and naturally without a lot of ums and ahs. We’re not actors, so that might not be easy to do. But it certainly is easier if the message is comparatively short and to the point.

At this point you now have a movie in realvideo (.rv) format. Before going further, I want to describe the value add of Google Video, because a possible alternative is uploading the movie to a streaming server or simply putting the file up somewhere for download. So here are some arguments for Google Video.

1. The process can be used for personal video creation as well as academic video creation. Indeed, my guess is that doing the one will encourage doing the other. So the same approach can be used for both.

2. Google Video has no bandwidth restrictions.

3. We’re asymmetric in supporting technology on campus, giving faculty greater access than students. (I think that is typical of most campuses.) The true power here in using this type of thing, I believe, is in student created videos. Then, it would be very good to get the faculty to use the same environment as the students.

4. Google Video has captioning tools (that I’ve not yet tried) for accessibility.

5. Google Video is easy to embed in a blog or other Web page. It has automated tools for that, making it easy to do that part.

Note, however, that Google Video does not render the realvideo file. Instead, it converts that file to Flash format. So what is shown is less good than the original .rv file, but it seems to me it is good enough.

To access Google Video, you need a Gmail account. (I’m saying this by recollection. There may be a different way to create a Google Video account.) I assume here that the Gmail account is already created. Then from the regular Google search page, simply click Google Video and sign in. That is all there is to that part.

Once in, click Upload. You get a screen like this:

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/l-arvan/Video_Upload/image002.jpg

This is a partially completed form. It is pretty straightforward to complete. You do have to accept the terms and conditions at the bottom. Uploading and processing does take a little while, perhaps a minute. (Obviously, that depends on the size of the file.) When completed you’ll see a page where you can view your video. That page has the info for Web publishing the video or sending email alerts about the video to friends.

Voila!!

Comments

I changed the permissions for doing comments do deter spam attacks. To comment on a post now, you have to log into blogger. I do really appreciate legit comments, but the spam is a bummer and it takes too long to delete, so this step was necessary.

Stretching It

My physical therapist has prescribed certain exercises for me to rehab my left leg. I do quadriceps squeezes – 15 in a row, hold for a count of 3 and then release for a count of 3 – and leg lifts, up, 2, 3, down, 2, 3, rest, 2, 3, and again, repeated 14 more times. There was pain with the leg lifts at the beginning. Now there is a less. Doing these exercises, I’m well within myself. I can see the leg getting stronger as a consequence.

I have one other type of exercise, one that I really don’t like, but it’s obviously necessary. The brace I’m wearing has a hinge at the knee. The hinge can be locked, more stability for me, or left open, so the leg can flex at the knee. One can set the maximum angle of flex. When I started that was 45 degrees. Now I’m up to 60 degrees. Getting there hurts and I do it in small steps. Then tendons, which were what got repaired surgically, get a real stretch, and likewise for other muscles around the knee. Unfortunately, it hurts, especially at the beginning. So I shied away from this exercise for while. But I can see the flexing of the leg is the crucial ability that I need to return to function as a normal person (drive a car, go to work, sit in a regular chair, etc.). So now I’m “stretching myself” to stretch my tendons and muscles. In this sense, I’m a highly motivated learner. Progress feeds that motivation. Today I was able to get into my Aztek and drive a bit. Eurkea!!

It occurred to me to use this idea as a metaphor for other learning. And then I thought I had come almost full circle, because when I started to teach Economics, back in the fall of 1980, I thought my role as teacher was to get the students to really stretch in their thinking. But in the main they didn’t share that perception, at least not with the economic modeling, and I was likely not sufficiently gentle with them to get them to do it willingly. My physical therapist adjusts the exercise according to whether I have a lot of pain or not. But as I said, I’m a motivated learner in this regard and he can see my progress. Being gentle in the role of teacher is harder to do if there is a perception that the students aren’t trying.

I thought that might offer the theme for this piece, but I don’t’ have a lot to say on that issue now. I’ll come back to it in a later post when I’ve got more to contribute on the question. I do think there is an important concern about whether, as we let our students drive their own learning, we are properly encouraging our students to stretch themselves. But I’ll set that aside. Here I want to talk on a more personal note, about stretching myself intellectually, and identifying the pain points in the process.

I held off writing this post for almost a week, because I didn’t know in what dimension I could focus that would get at my own issues and say something of value. In the past, I’ve written about stretching it with the writing and I didn’t want to offer up the same old thing this time around. Then this morning, after reading what I thought was an awful column by David Brooks about why the Mets won’t win the World Series (I’m a Yankee fan, enough of a reason to feel grumpy today) and then taking a walk around the park, using only one crutch instead of two and hence enabling me to go more than twice as far as I was able to the last time I took a walk, it occurred to me that I had found my theme.

And that theme is attributable to the same David Brooks, whom on the News Hour last Friday made what I thought was an insightful and telling comment about the Mark Foley case. Namely that the case has the potential to be political dynamite because what happened with Foley, if it were thought to be a commonplace or even had potential to be a commonplace, would strike terror into all parents who have teenage kids, who when not at school may very well be IM-ing with folks like Foley, apparently respectable but with an unsavory, indeed frightening hidden side. And, this feeling of wanting to protect our children from such solicitation is not, in essence, of the Religious Right but rather a natural instinct as parents. In that sense, it’s universal.

It occurred to me during my walk that these feelings as a parent are at odds with my views as an educator and advocate for online learning, where I’m on record as encouraging students to publish their work openly on the Web and equally to get instructors to make their course open by showcasing student work. and if I wanted to stretch myself, I’d have to reconcile my views. Self-contradictions hurt (for example, has my view about DOPA changed in light of Foley?) and I for one have the ability to compartmentalize my life in such a way that the self-contradictions are not so readily apparent. (I’m sure this is ordinary adult behavior, especially among baby boomers like me who as young adults lived according to a different ethic than they live today, and who at present likely need less rather than more stress in their lives.) Let’s deliberately experience the hurt now and see where it takes us.

I should note now that neither of my boys (12 and 14) does IM or email at present, and I have certainly not encouraged them in this direction, though the younger one has been lobbying me and my wife for a laptop of his own (so he doesn’t have to share the home computer) and I had to get the older one a Gmail account (any email account would have done ok) as a condition for him to participate in the Marching Band at school (but I didn’t understand why this requirement was there). Also, let me report that at our old house where we did dialup and used Earthlink (especially when the Campus dialup was busy) I set up those parental controls to block access to content for the kids, but I found that clunky and hard to work with, impeding my own account on the computer. Perhaps I need to look at that sort of thing again. Right now, however, I don’t view it as the solution.

You might ask, the solution to what? The answer, of course, is to provide a safe and comfortable environment for the family. Let the kids learn about the hard realities, but let that happen later when they have matured a bit and have better coping skills. Innocence lost can’t be regained. And when those hard realities come too early, they can create wounds; wounds that don’t heal quickly; wounds that leave big scars. The kids have their own issues to deal with; mostly about dealing with other kids. They are not leading a completely sheltered existence. What is wrong with buffering their world from some of the more egregious forms of abuse?

Of course there is a substantial age difference between my own kids and the kids I taught in my Campus Honors class last spring, a four or five year age difference, maybe more. And sure enough, the kids I taught were not mine. I worried about whether they learned economics. I didn’t worry about their social life and possible awkward experiences they may have had, though some of them wore their emotions on their sleeve more than I would have, one explaining he had a fight with his girlfriend the night before and consequently hadn’t gotten any sleep.

The boundaries between these kids and mine are there, certainly, but the boundaries are fuzzy. I would not know where to draw the line if I had to. Perhaps there is some solace in the observation that being open about their academic work is an unlikely path into their personal life. Facebook offers a more ready route for that purpose, one reason the students themselves have embraced that environment. But this seems to me like rationalization, not strong argument.

The University does protect the students from themselves, particularly with their (excessive) drinking. I couldn’t imagine otherwise. Perhaps the University has some responsibility to protect these kids from more overt threats of solicitation and predation, some of which are online. Sure the University is for the free exchange of ideas. That is the mantra, the bread and butter. But what about loco parentis? Isn’t that an obligation too?

So one side of me, driven by a concern for my own children’s welfare, sees a certain logic in DOPA, although it clearly would be better if the kids had more common sense themselves. But, often, they don’t. That’s the reality. And the question is what to do then.

I got that argument out. It’s an argument that part of me can see. But it’s not an argument I can entirely embrace. It’s an argument that is rooted fundamentally in despair, running away from one’s fears. We live that way sometimes, I admit. Given a choice, however, we should not let it be a permanent condition. We need an alternative that offers hope, personal growth and social value. Having the virtual equivalent of gated communities doesn’t do that. Openness does.

And sensing that, one might think at this point in the essay I’d entirely reject an attempt to make a hermetic environment online and instead embrace openness without reservation. But as I sit here typing this document, my left leg is flexed in a more normal pose, yet one that is still painful for me. I feel the hurt as well as see the promise of my improved mobility in the future. Stretching it means there is both.

We talk in ideological terms about these issues, a purity that belies the underlying ambiguity. I would like to advocate for an approach, yet recognize the ambiguity as well, an admission that an alternative is possible. It is my usual style to make some arguments on both sides. But with that, I normally do take a side. It’s just that in this case I take a different one as parent than I do as educator.

Ouch.

Wimp of Gimp

Another quick video produced at hom to argue for using this genre in our educational context.

Using Google Video

I wonder how many folks have played with Google Video. I'm finding it surprisingly easy to use and it seems to me to have great potential for eLearning. In the previous post is a little video I made about myself, to show how much progress I've been making with my leg injury. I was able to publish it directly to Blogger.

I actually made this video using RealProducerPlus, after having tried first with the video package that comes with my Logitech camera. The difference is the frame rate. The RealProducer does 30 frames per second. The other does much less, perhaps 12 frames per second. The higher frame rate does a better synching of the audio to the motion.

Google video converts what's uploaded into a Flash format. This the actual Web page at the Google Video site. The video itself is too big there an a bit distorted as a result, but still viewable. Look at the links at the right on that page. So the video is available to embed into a blog or other Webpage, to view off the Google Video site, or to download.

Because this is straightforward to make, students can do these and can pepper their work with video clips. And in the totally online or blended context, this would seem to be a good way to personalize the interaction. Instructors can do likewise and deliver some impromptu information to the class this way. And for those who can't resist lecturing, mini lectures can be created and embedded into quiz questions in the course management system. I tested this with WebCT Vista and it worked like a charm. So one can readily meld presentation and assessment, which would seem to be a good approach to content that students are exposed to the first time through.

It also seems to me that Google is not imposing quotas on filespace for the video and even if they do, they base this on your gmail account and you can make multiple accounts for yourself with no problem. This seems like a really great tool.

Update_About_Me

A little demonstraton of how I'm progressing since the injury

Futzing with Elgg

I start my new job tomorrow. One of the first orders of business (pardon the pun) is to find a replacement for the College’s FirstClass server. Some of the staff have been playing around with MS Sharepoint. That is a possibility. But right now Elgg looks more attractive to me, something that might capture the imagination both of the MBA students and the faculty.

I’ve been playing with it at my site at Elgg.net. The blog seems reasonably compatible with composing posts in Word, which for me is a biggie since I’m apt to write longer posts that way. I liked the general structure with community spaces, friends, a resource area for feeds, and a files area. All of that is good as is the general horizontal structure of the – users are symmetric with respect to their functionality. That is nice.

I did have some minor issues with some things I’ve tried. I was able to get my files area listed on my resources page, but I wasn’t able to get my resources to appear on my blog, though it seems this should be possible. That looks like a glitch. I thought it was a bit odd that I could invite friends to join the Elgg.net site, but I couldn’t invite friends with accounts already to join a community I created. They have to ask in. That’s a bit odd workflow-wise, but not a huge deal. Overall, I liked the functionality a lot.

My bigger immediate concern is with performance, not functionality. Page loads have been slow. Whether that represents Internet congestion rather (I believe the server is in the UK) rather than Elgg performance itself, I can’t say. I wonder what other North American users of Elgg.net feel about their experience with the site in that regard.

On Friday I had a nice chat with Sasan Salari about his Elgg integration with WebCT Vista. It is an intriguing Powerlink that Sasan has created with pass through authentication and the Elgg Window fitting inside the WebCT frame in a way that looks good. I know there are those who thing environments like Elgg will be the death of the LMS, but the grade book, assignments, and quiz functionality are heavily entrenched hear and so I see a need for both, not one or the other. It would be nice, however, if the PowerLink ran both ways, so that a user could start off in Elgg and then launch WebCT if they wanted to. This way they could go back and forth between personal space and class space and in the latter there could be a public area in Elgg as well as the intranet only space in WebCT.

I know there is likewise an integration of Elgg and Moodle. I don’t know, however, if that is one way or two ways.

There is yet another issue with this software from the provision point of view. This has to do with the expertise to support open source applications in the Linux/PHP/MySQL flavor. The College of Business has in the main been a Microsoft shop, probably a sensible approach historically given their audience. The Campus here has in the main adopted Unix oriented commercial applications. At the Campus level, in particular, where I have some understanding of the personnel issues from my involvement with the LMS, one need redundancy of staff, so that any individual can take a planned vacation or be out for an unplanned leave due to illness or a personal issue.

That redundancy requirement encourages concentration in the approach. It becomes expensive to both have the redundancy and support both Windows apps and open source. Outsourcing may offer an alternative on this score and there appears to be a fledgling hosting service for Elgg.

On our campus, however, there may be security issues that make it harder to implement an outsourced solution. While I personally have no issue with how Elgg.net handles logins and passwords, almost certainly our security people would. And then there is the issue that precisely because the software is so horizontal user-wise, definitely a pedagogic feature, it is easier to run afoul of protecting student privacy (having an open community without a closed community alternative for the students readily available) and ditto for issues about Copyright and Fair Use. But these things can be managed by educating our instructors rather than by imposing restrictions on the software. The software can accommodate these issues if the instructors act in a knowledgeable way.

If I’m right that Elgg will capture the imagination of the audience in the College of Business, then I would characterize the above discussion as a situation where the user wants are pitted against the provider needs. It seems to me that a lot of IT, at least on my campus, has elements of this type of tension. A couple of days ago I was emailing a friend from another university and said that I thought there would be a big culture change in moving from my Campus job to the College of Business job.

One significant aspect of that culture change is how risk is managed. Unquestionably an experiment that would shift the provider toward a more user centric solution entails risk. The Campus tends to be extremely conservative about risk, both for scaling reasons and because there aren’t substantial revenue sources for risk mitigation. I believe the College of Business will likely embrace more risk, if a there is a real upside to the situation, such as I believe there is with Elgg.

Let me close with one final point. On my campus, in particular, but I suspect elsewhere at big universities like mine, the risk preferences I’ve described are likely to be similar, and so it really does make sense for some of the experimentation to happen at the college level or even the departmental level rather than at the campus level and indeed that happens now to some extent. But until now, the learning from that experimentation seems to be contained within the unit that undertakes the effort. That seems horribly inefficient to me, and something where I’d hope we can improve on in the future.

Educause 10 days away

Because of my accident I'm going to miss the conference this year. Below are a few reflections that may be of interest heading into the conference.

* * * * *

Last night I watched an old interview that Dick Cavett had with Alfred Hitchcock. I think it was on the Turner Classic Movie Channel. Of course there were many stories of the making of his movies, but also Hitchcock held forth and told anecdotes on a variety of topics. At one point he made a particularly bad pun (I recall on the word generality). Cavett dutifully gave him grief for that and Hitchcock responded, no, punning is the highest form of literature. Right on.

Earlier that day I was on campus for the first time since my accident. They had a going away party for me. It was very charming. The best part of all - the staff of my EdTech unit had written a bunch of Limericks about me that Leslie Hammersmith read aloud. I loved that. I've appropriated what they had on the internal wiki site to a Writely page so the world can see their creativity.

* * * * *

Still earlier in the day I attended by phone a meeting of our advisory committee on Learning Technology and in the process of reviewing what themes might be appropriate for this year one colleague told the story that in his department he had convinced the head a couple of years ago to allocated a grad student to support instructors with use of technology in their teaching, but that allocation had been cut this year, because the resource didn't get sufficient utilization. He then went on with a familiar lament, the incentives for teaching are weak on this campus, especially regarding P&T (but also via even modest recognition, for example with a competitive small grant program). So the recommendation was for us to make some suggestions about the process by which teaching gets documented for promotion to include learning technology in that.

No doubt, instructors caring about implementing is an issue on my campus (and I'm sure it is an issue nationally) but perhaps we in the profession need to be asking ourselves whether the problem is that we're not providing the right intrinsic motivation. I believe that. And I believe that's because we've got our attention focused too much directly on the technology. Consider this alternative.

The (quiet) revolution that I would like to see is for the entire curriculum to adopt humanistic elements, the basis of which I would call Situated Story Telling. By this I mean that the story depends on the listeners as well as on the teller. The Dialogic Learning Objects approach I advocated a while back is an example of this. There are other ways to do this as well. Story telling is the key skill to promote both deep understanding of the subject and also to make overt connections between the topic being studied and and other interesting happenings going on in the world.

It seems to me that making the case for situated story telling is a lot easier sell job and more faculty will pay attention to arguments to that effect. To date, mostly I'm seeing these type of arguments coming from people like Barbara Ganley, a big time blogger who teaches writing. I love the type of arguments she makes for getting students to open up in their own blogs.

But the problem is, she teaches writing. Where are the coattails for making these arguments across other disciplines? I teach Econ. If I have my students do situated story telling (and indeed I do) then that is to learn Econ, not to learn story telling per se (though that is a fantastic byproduct). We need people to trumpet about story telling across disciplines as the way for instructors to modify their teaching. It has to happen in Engineering, in Accounting, in Food Science, in other words, everywhere, not just in courses English courses.

The technology is a wonderful instrument for students to tell and share their stories. But wonderful as it is, its still an instrument. The technology per se is less compelling, and while instructors do need to get familiar with it over time and not do too much the first time they teaching with it, encouraging instructors to put up their PowerPoints in the Learning Management System is likely sufficiently disconnected from situated story telling they they never get there in their teaching.

With the technology itself getting more mature, we proiders need to get more mature in the way we convince faculty to use the technology. I believe the above is the way to go about doing this.

* * * * *

With my new job in the College of Business, one of the issues I'm vexed with is wether we will rely on campus provided applications, such as the Learning Management System (which we branded locally here as Illinois Compass) or if we need to differentiate ourself more and support our own applications.

I'm sure my campus is not the only one with this question of centralized versus unit supplied application support. The rhetoric about this has been on generic applications (which should be supplied centrally) versus specific applications that will ahe use in only some disciplines (which should be supplied by the units). The reality, as I see it, is that generic still comes in flavors and to get the favorite flavor one decentralizes, but then one loses possible scale economies from central provision.

This seems to me a big deal issue for which there has not been enough strategic thinking and, like with the case about motivating faculty to teach with technology, there has not been enough good arguments put out there for why unit proiders should opt for a centrally proided solution.

I'd really like to see some thoughtful strategic thinking on this issue.

The Road to Redemption

Yesterday marks the start of the third week since my fall. I’m making some progress, small steps but definitely discernible to me. There is less pain when I stand and when I use the crutches it is as a second option now rather than a way to propel me because the left leg can’t bear weight. Actually, it can. Saturday night we had friends over for dinner. I felt unnatural and uncomfortable at first (one of the derivative problems is that I’m sitting so much that my tailbone hurts) so I spend more time than I’d like focusing on my own pain and I have to alter my posture in the wheelchair and that looks weird to others – “can I help you with something?” But we all seemed to adjust into our normal pace after a while and we had a nice dinner and good talk and then caught a few minutes of the third quarter with MSU putting a pasting on Notre Dame. (They are getting their just desserts since having been so highly rated before the season started.) Normal stuff, nothing exceptional to it at all, except in the way it gave me assurance that I and my family will get through this set back ok, not too much the worse for wear.

Some time last week, I had begun to ask myself how I might turn the accident into a strength and if so, how would I go about doing that? A couple of months ago I had posed a query to a philosopher of education friend of mine on use of the term “authentic” and whether it was appropriately used in the contexts in which I was reading it. (For example, Ken Bain uses the expression freely in his book about the best teachers.) The way this term has been used affected me much in the same way as I reacted the first time it was pointed out to me that many in the Midwest will ask, “Where’s it at?” rather than the better sounding to my ears, “Where is it?” In this case the gnawing question is: precisely who determines whether an activity aimed at promoting or assessing learning is authentic? Is it the learner? The teacher? How can a third party affirm or deny that an activity is authentic when the teacher does otherwise?

By coincidence, my friend’s belated response to this question arrived last week and he suggested looking at the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor. Almost immediately after getting this message from my friend, I dutifully do a Google Search on Charles Taylor. I find this WowEssays site on Taylor, not exactly the definitive source on the subject that I was looking for, but readable, as well as this book review by Michael Novak. While the second piece gives me more of a sense about what Taylor is really writing, it is the first piece that seems to more directly relate to my question about turning the accident into a strength. My take away message is clear to me – I’m spending too much time thinking about myself, wallowing in it so to speak. Sure, the writer should write about what he knows, what he is intimately acquainted with, where he is more likely to penetrate deeper. But Taylor seems to say that reality requires human interaction --- other people are a critical piece to the puzzle. Does the introspection ultimately lead outward? If not, it represents a shallow form of existence.

I’ve had some unusual dreams since the accident, I think partly induced by the pain medication. Armed with some of these “visions” and looking to the accident to signify something, I had a brief encounter with the question of whether this is my “opportunity” to embrace religion. I’m not comfortable with the question. So I ultimately dismiss it. Aferwards, I rationalize, perhaps a little more than rationalize, that embracing religion now would be giving in, defeatist, untrue to my self. If anything, I’ve been for reason and intelligent argument (and I've been a tacit atheist for years.) Whether I’m right about what I say is a different matter, but this entire blog is for reasoned argument. Now I’m having a bit of a tough time because of the accident. Do I throw that all away during a time of need and embrace something because the situation seems beyond me? That doesn’t seem right to me.

Then, on Saturday, I start to think about Ross Levy, a classmate from back in Bayside (Junior High and High School), not a particularly good friend, but somebody whom I played basketball with and hung out with a bit, along with some other kids. In previous posts I’ve characterized myself as a math nerd, and I was, but I also played a fair amount of stickball, basketball, and other ball (I was on the tennis team). I hung out with a different group of guys for that. Ross was one of those, a little squirrelly looking, but actually a pretty good basketball player. I remember in gym class watching him outplay somebody else who looked more athletic and was on the team. Ross was a fooler that way.

Ross wrote something in my high school yearbook that was a little different from the rest – let the warmth continue. I don’t know why he wrote that, but maybe he saw it as my essence. And maybe it is. What about becoming a champion for human warmth? It was a value that was quite important when I was growing up, something my parents really embraced, something codified in the Yiddish expression, “Be a mensch.” What if I could become an advocate for human warmth in teaching as the core value, whether with or without technology, an approach that both would be a tonic for the current alienation and nihilism and would bring me back to my roots?

So I began poking around in my recollections, looking for a way to define human warmth; it’s easy to know when you see it, but is there a way to communicate about it with our students in a way that they get the picture. I thought about having those students do team projects and invariably before the fact some of the students openly saying they didn’t like to work in teams, because they didn’t like slacker teammates to get credit for their own good efforts. While I understood the lament, I’ve never been comfortable with the students making that point. Might we get past all of that with an embrace of human warmth?

This is a case where mental pictures are better than textbook definitions. I thought about visiting my parents in their old age and infirmity where I’d just sit and hold their hand and then occasionally take the back side of my hand and place it along their cheek, so they literally could feel the human warmth, and watch the sense of comfort and joy that would appear in their face when I did that, evidence to me that it wasn’t so usual a feeling for them at that point in their lives.

Then I thought about the film, The Apartment, with Jack Lemon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred McMurray. The Jack Lemon character goes through a transformation in the film – from an over ambitious corporate climber to someone who genuinely cares about another who is down and out, and it is this notion of personal transformation that would be good for our students to confront –do they see themselves at all in the Lemon role pre-transformation, is such a personal transformation needed, and can it happen without the dire circumstances that underlie the story in the movie? I was surprised when I did the search on it that The Apartment had won 5 Academy Awards. I wonder how students today would react to that film.

I don’t yet have a plan of attack for how to project human warmth in teaching. I only know that nowadays we are prone toward over indulgence. So it has to be there, and it has to be real enough, but it has to be done in a light way, paprika yes, sour cream no. In other words, a big yes for thougthful and senitive response to others, especially when they are struggling, but a big no to throughtless sentimentality. That makes things worse. Let’s see if we can make a bit of progress on this front. Any suggestions on how to proceed would be appreciated.

A new job for me

Starting October, I will become the Associate Dean for eLearning and CIO for the College of Business here at Illinois. My email address will remain unchanged. So for my readers, the change may go unnoticed except for a modest change in the "About Me" area. I'll soon get a better sense of whether the job affects my perspective on the issue, but I'm sure on the "when do I have time to do this?" issues, the jobs won't be exactly the same and so I would anticipate a somewhat slower output here, at least for the next several months.

Been Offline for a While

For my regular readers -

It's been a rugged year healthwise. A week and a half ago, I had a bad fall. This happened in Ann Arbor while visiting my brother for his 50th birthday. Having the accident there was an added burden. I had surgery on my left leg to repair severed tendons. That was a week ago. I came home the following day and been convalescing at home ever since.

Here are a few Web resources about the accident. A campy video clip, intended for my EdTech Unit's open house last friday. An autobiographical essay that was meant to be a blog post about the accident, but it got way too long. I put "Draft" on the document as a watermark, not necessarily because I'm going to re-write it, but rather because I'm not so certain about the quality of writing and didn't have the guts to put it up as a post in this blog. In other words, the document didn't get through all my own internal filters and I wanted some way to convey that. I do think there are valuable lessons from this experience for teaching and learning. In some upcoming posts I will try to extract a few of those.

And, finally, some limericks below. Enjoy.

The family has now adjusted,
To the fact that my left leg is busted.
The home computer I used night and day
Is now theirs with which to work and play.
While it is my Tablet PC that I've now entrusted.

I'm still doing email and browsing,
While staying inside the family's housing.
It's not that different from before,
And though I didn't think my existence a bore.
I also certainly true that I didn't do a lot of carousing.

One irony from my fall,
Is that it's now I who on the children do call.
Once I transfer to the wheelchair with a plop,
The notion of dependence in the family flip flops
And seeing them be helpful is a ball.

One side effect from killing the pain,
Is a certain unease regarding my processes of the brain
If one fears one's ideas will be dull,
Then drugs that create in the brain a lull,
Are worse than other drugs which might drive one insane.

So far while I convalesce,
If anything I've watched television less.
One might guess it's a great distraction,
With some of the shows a real atrraction.
Yet with the News a source that only can depress.

The Need To Process and Reading As Its Own Universe

It’s probably not a great idea to imitate your kids in their recreational pursuits, but after having seen my older son absorbed in the puzzle page of the Newspaper working on some number thing, I tried it myself and very quickly got hooked on Soduku. (Or is it Sudoku?) I’m a sucker for this sort of thing. There is the challenge of figuring out how to do work through the puzzles and there is very little information provided in the way to guide you on how to do that. I did find the Soduku.org Web site, where the one thing I read that stuck a little was at the beginning you would write things down in terms of what you knew, to help with the inferences, but eventually most of that would be done in your head.

I think my process learning to do these things might be called “effortful study” though I certainly didn’t set out to “learn” all I tried to do was “play” but in so doing I developed pattern recognition so could see how to do these things quicker and came up with something of an algorithm for how to work these puzzles. The processing leads to discovery of the algorithm and what is interesting to me, especially in light of the current fascination with Video games and trying to leverage those for enabling students to learn other things, just how little structure there is with these number puzzles. The structure is invented through the processing, not vice versa.

The way it works in the Newspaper, pretty much the same with as with the crossword puzzles, the Sudoku is easier earlier in the week and gets harder each day, with the hardest puzzle of the week on Sunday. This past Sunday, my wife caught me talking aloud as I was working through the puzzle. I was oblivious to that at the time, though I ultimately picked up her remarks about it to the effect that now we know where my younger kid gets his thinking aloud behavior. I laughed that one off and about 15 minutes later proudly displayed the completed puzzle to her. I think I’ve gotten this out of my system now, but the only way for me to do that was to successfully complete a handful of the hardest (insane) puzzles.

Among the things that you don’t know when you work through these puzzles is whether you should only fill in empty squares when a “tight inference” has been made – the logic dictates that’s the only possibility – or if you should guess. I did a Google search or two to find out about that, but I struck out. (Just because you process doesn’t mean you don’t look for “cheat codes.”) So I discovered on my own the empirical regularity that with the easier puzzles you should not guess at all – everything should be tight inference – but with the insane ones sometimes that is too demanding and if after a fashion it seems that all those inferences have been exhausted and you’ve narrowed it down to two possibilities in a certain square, then a guess can really speed things up and a lot of other things fall into place. The guess isn’t always right. One of the nice things about playing online (at least with IE as the browser) is that by opening a new browser window one can copy the game along with all the progress made to date, so if you go astray you can return to the point just before you made the guess.

The Harper’s Magazine article, Grand Theft Education, about the educational possibility of games, starts with a quote from Montaigne, to the effect.

It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.

I’m inclined to agree (with what Montaigne said. I have some reservations about games that I hope will become clear later in this post.) My question for Montaigne, were he alive today, would be this: are children always at play? Or do they need to be led to play? I don’t know the answer to this. I’ve only got very intimate knowledge on this with my own kids and the kids of a few close friends.

In my title, “the need to process” refers to an “always on” need, like a need to keep busy, an internal urge rather than a normative recommendation. I definitely have that need. My kids seem to have the need. In one sense it is a very good thing in that creative thought is a byproduct of the processing. At least creative thought emerges if the need is bundled with Montaigne’s notion of play (or Ericsson’s notion of effortful study). In other words, the need is not satisfied by a process that is purely dissipative. The process must seem like it gets somewhere and to the extent that is driven by past success there is a feedback loop that encourages the processing.

But even with that, in another sense the need to process is vexing. The need means you can’t put less than fully formed ideas aside to simmer in the subconscious while something else commands your attention. You’ve got to keep processing on the partial idea or consciously discard it (and the latter is hard, unless it becomes known to be a dark alley). So the need implies some degree of compulsion

Recently I’ve been reading about how much in teaching is providing the right motivation for the students (for example, the Ken Bain book that I’ve mentioned before) and so much of what is written to do about student learning is actually about good approaches to teaching. But I’ve not seen anyone talk about encouraging intellectual compulsion to motivate the need to process in our students (and maybe articulated that way, perhaps not too many people would endorse the goal). This can’t be all about instructor provided motivation. A lot of this has to be students working through things on their own via thoughtful play. Sure there is a social dimension to it. But there is an individualistic piece too.

One wonders whether the overall environment is conducive to this sort of thing? For example, what about reducing the number of courses students take but encouraging those they do take to be more intensive – perhaps offered over half semesters rather than full ones? Or what about getting students out of the course environment all together and putting them into a purposeful play scenario, and then sanctioning that with course credit.

This sounds like video games, but now the part where I’d discourage that particular solution, is on the following questions. Can the purposeful play happen in non-media assisted environments as well? Do the students acquire a need to process that they can bring on their own to other situations? And can they convince outsiders of that fact? (Ultimately they will be looking for jobs and though the credentialing part of student work may not help much in the motivational domain, it surely does help with landing a good job.)

I want to switch gears now and turn to reading. I’m aware that in some of m reading I process just as if I’m writing, or working on an Econ model, or playing Sudoku. In other words, I argue with what the author has to say, agreeing with some points, disagreeing with others. I will pause for reflection to make the argument in my own head and then return to finish the piece a little later. And I do believe one can do some processing while reading as one can do some while listening or watching – trying out the ideas in some way as they are being presented. So I want to focus on a subset of reading where narrative is important where the processing doesn’t occur; something else happens instead. And I chose reading rather than, say, watching a film because the distinction may be less obvious with reading, but it is an important distinction to make.

When I read fiction, I work in the service of the author and in a very real sense I’ve surrendered myself to the author’s creation. It is true that I supply the mental images that correspond to the words in the text, and I suppose more effective writing conjures up more vivid imagery (for example, not too long ago I read A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, where there is a scene where the young Daedalus, away from home at school, gets painfully smacked on the wrist with a stick by a teacher he absolutely detested, a scene so vivid that I welled up with emotion in the reading) so certainly reading a good book can be immersive and one might be inclined to call that processing.

But there is no experimentation. No trying out different ideas. (I am focusing on the case here were I do a once through reading rather than where there might be several re-readings. The re-reading activity might in fact invite experimentation in the sense of trying to gather a different meaning or sense of what the author was up to as compared to the first time through.) My analogy is that of taking a journey, where I’m the passenger, not the driver. As the passenger, I see what I can see and try to take it all in. Indeed I want to be led someplace that is interesting. Part of the joy in reading is seeing something new and it is the freshness, depth, and texture of the narrative that makes the reading worthwhile.

I do think I process after I’ve read something and put the book down, but not while I’m reading it, although the book review of Francine Prone’s new book that I mentioned in my previous post might change that for me in the future. It may be that the professional writer does process as she reads the works of others, in good part to learn how better to write.

Even if I’m correct in this distinction what is one to make of it? Here is my point. There is a lot of loaded language these days in talking about learning – the words “active” and “passive” when used to modify the word “learning” are effectively synonymous with “good” and “bad,” respectively. Yet reading as I’ve described it, where I’m clearly being led along by the author, would by that description have to be called passive, though I think this is a wonderful thing to be doing. And doesn’t purposeful play happen outside of contexts where instructors supply the motivation? It seems to me that we as a profession are not thinking right about these issues because there is a focus more on the trappings than on the underlying behavior.

The Student Newspaper as an Exemplar of Student Writing

School started here last Wednesday. Although it comes out each weekday and is free, today is the first day I picked up a copy of our student newspaper, the Daily Illini, which I read over my lunch break. This past weekend I had read a book review on Francine Prose’s new book, Reading Like a Writer and I thought the review was an interesting piece, especially from the vantage of what we instructors want students to do with their writing. That piece helped to crystallize what I’ve been coming to realize for some time about how my blogging is helping me to appreciate the creative work of others.

My sense is that most faculty, especially those who don’t teach writing (in other words the vast majority of us) don’t sample much student writing outside of the courses they teach. Mostly they read professional writing, either from within their discipline or from more general interest outlets and so probably have a tendency to compare student writing to that as opposed to comparing student writing to other student writing. One place where student writing is on showcase is the student newspaper. And though for years I’ve been on again and off again reading the DI, today was my first day of looking at it from the perspective of displaying student writing rather than from the vantage of learning the news or seeing student opinion on some issues.

We in the campus IT organization, occasionally the object of stories in the DI, are generally concerned about the accuracy of these stories and whether the reporters have done sufficient homework ahead of time before writing the stories. Reading the paper with that thought in mind makes for a less than satisfying experience. The pieces seemingly fall short of the ideal on a regular basis. So I was surprised today when reading from this other perspective how much I enjoyed what I read and how I felt about these students/fledgling columnists in their personal trajectory toward getting to being mature writers with their own distinct voices.

This is the Opinion Page if you’d like to take a look. There is one unsigned editorial and there columns. I believe all the columnists are undergrads, though this Web reproduction of the paper doesn’t include that information. I don’t know any of these students personally and as far as I know I’ve not read any of their work before.

The column by Brian Pierce is extraordinarily well written, compelling to read from both a personal and an educational perspective. It’s the type of piece that I think could be reprinted in other student newspapers nationally, possibly in other types of publications as well. I did wonder as I read it, since it is so personal, whether columns of this sort belong on the opinion page. I suppose this is a more general issue with student newspapers – the better writing is likely to be personal because then the students will be writing about what they know – but for it to be newsworthy there must be some generality about it. In this particular case, I’m glad they included the piece in the paper because it is such a good read, and I’m not aware of an obvious alternative outlet. In any event, I will be looking for Brian’s future columns to see if he can keep up with the high level he has set with this piece.

The column by Tyler Friederich is also well argued and has a certain personal aspect to it, both good things, though the article title betrays something in the piece itself - a perspective of right or wrong only, and does not admit the possibility of other ways in which to consider the question. So if Tyler were my student I might ask him to respond to the following question: Obviously, attending the U of I is an “economic good” in the sense that there are more people who apply than are admitted and since Tyler was initially one of those he’d have to agree with that part. This economic good is partially financed by tax dollars paid by taxpayers in the state of Illinois. So the question is, what type of admissions policy makes this type of funding an acceptable part of the social contract, where overall the taxpayers who might have children who could attend the U of I think it is a fair deal? What would Tyler come up with if he took a reasonable stab at answering that question? And then, how would the writing change as a consequence?

I liked the column by George Ploss because he argued strongly for students taking social responsibility, in this case African American students helping out each other, this especially in light of the low graduation rates of such students. This seems like a good argument to me and one that sounds as if it should be made on an ongoing basis. But I thought the piece itself had some awkward places where George seemed to want to use fancy language that didn’t quite fit in with what else he was saying. (Incidentally, so I don’t seem like I’m picking on George, I thought the editorial suffered from the same issue.) If George were my student, I’d encourage him to talk through the article aloud without referring to the written text. Then I’d encourage him to rewrite the way he talked about it. And finally I’d ask him to read both versions and see which one he likes better.

I do hope all these students continue to write more. Reading this stuff you can see the potential. Writing for the student newspaper under deadline is probably not the best way to go through many drafts on a single piece of work, but if one has a regular column one can collect the work and see how it changes over time. That is a fascinating possibility.

Life Lessons

Through the magic of TiVo on Monday night I watched the second part of Martin Scorcese’s documentary, No Direction Home, about the early years of Bob Dylan as a songwriter and performer. I had caught the tail end of the first part the week before on one of the PBS stations we get on the Dish Network. There the American Masters series airs on Sunday night, but I saw something else last night on American Masters about Elia Kazan (less compelling to me) so since I don’t regularly watch this am a bit confused about their scheduling.

Dylan had not been a hero figure for me till I watched this film. As an undergrad I had a few of his albums on audio cassette – Highway 61 Revisited, Blond on Blond, maybe a couple of more that I copied from a housemate, and I know I bought Blood on the Tracks on vinyl, because I still have the record. A few years later while in graduate school I got to see him perform at Chicago Stadium and my vague recollection of the experience was that it was extremely loud and kind of grating on the nerves. As an undergrad I had seen Jerry Garcia perform with Merle Saunders somewhere in Rochester and I remember feeling that we had experienced “total volume” so that the loud part was not new per se, but the grating on the nerves part was new. And it was not really welcome. I suppose the reaction of some of the fans at the Newport Festival in 1965 captured in the film was similar, but this was more than 10 years later so I don’t believe there was any sense of betrayal, just a feeling that it wasn’t very good --- around that time I had also seen the Rolling Stones at Soldier Field and that was awesome. It was Dylan’s performance that was at issue, not Rock and Roll.

There were other occasional reminders of Dylan and his music after I came to Illinois; he was in the film of the Concert for Bangladesh and has a segment in The Last Waltz. I would occasionally find refuge in listening to my old tapes when alone in my apartment, something of an antidote to Devo, Blondie, The Talking Heads, etc. And then once in a while Dylan would come up in other contexts. When I first started to date my wife, she regularly did her impression of Dylan --- not bad.

This Scorcese movie kindled something in me. I know I had a rather intense dream Monday night about being with Dylan and talking to him. The last couple of days I’ve been scratching my head about writing a short story with that theme. I don’t write short stories; I write blog posts, so this would be a stretch and it probably wouldn’t be very good. But maybe I’ll try it anyway and in the meantime try to bring out some of those things that make Dylan such a compelling character to me.

He wrote his songs and he performed them, separate activities to be sure but each fed off the other. At the beginning he performed the works of others and every time you see or read about Dylan you’ll get a tie to Woody Guthrie. Indeed as the film makes clear he was influenced by much of the American folk music tradition and it had a big impact on his Art. His discussion about Pete Seeger and Seeger’s reaction to the performance at the Montrose festival is telling on this point. In browsing the Columbia Records Web site on Dylan, they have an alphabetical listing of his songs with links to lyrics and audio clips, I was surprised to discover that he had recorded Blue Moon, a standard written in the 1930’s by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart. I believe Dylan feels a genuine connection to a great array of different types of music and much of that has had a profound influence on him.

Of course, Dylan grew in his own style of delivering the music and then his writing of songs that helped accentuate his style – raspy and rhythmic yet with seemingly odd phrasing that helped to convey his meaning in a way quite differently from how others had expressed such ideas. The footage of interviews with Allen Ginsberg make it clear just how new Dylan’s writing was and how he had leapfrogged ahead of the poets and songwriters that were his own inspiration, but then as he succeeded more and more of what he wrote came from inside himself.

In letting his inner voice speak he ended up speaking for millions of others. The talent of great artists, as I’m increasingly learning to appreciate, is that giving air to the inner voice and the idiosyncrasies within creates such broad appeal because the message is universal and the idiosyncrasies show the message is being delivered with a genuine passion. So in speaking for himself Dylan ended up speaking for his generation, but as shown quite clearly in some rather awkward interviews with the press, Dylan strongly resisted being classified as a spokesman, a prophet, a leader, or a politician. He was quite convinced he was doing something at a higher level and part of the resistance was evidently so he would not be brought down to a more pedestrian place just to make others comfortable about his motives.

With this and with Dylan’s expressed need to keep trying new things and not to stay pat – the move from acoustic to electronic music is but one example of this – and his insistence on staying the course and not caving in on his principles are the essence of his heroism. And since his principles seem so much in line with what many edu bloggers are arguing for these days, I would think this film would resonate with them and show indeed that their own ideas are not at all transient but rather more enduring and that their aim is in some sense to see the spirit emblemized by Dylan take root in all of us.

* * * * *

My older son, who started High School this week will turn 14 at the end of the month. There has been banter between him and his younger brother about taking Driver’s Ed, which in Illinois can be done once a kid is 15. (The drinking age has been raised to 21, why not the driving age?) So it is beginning to dawn on me that although the old man has not been directly involved with his schoolwork and other activities, he may begin to ask serious questions about when to respect authority and when to ignore it, when to find his own truth and when to accept the wisdom of others, when to stick to one’s principles like Dylan and when to avoid fighting battles that there is no chance of winning. If he does ask, I’d like to engage him and not blow him off.

The driving thing raises these questions immediately, because just about everyone speeds and he can’t fail to notice that. We have three Interstates that go by Champaign-Urbana and in traveling almost anywhere outside of town it is likely to take one of those. So it’s an unmistakable lesson that breaking the law is a normal adult thing to do. Every teenager at this point must get the lesson that ethical behavior and obeying the law are not one and the same but rather two separate things. That there is overlap is easy to communicate. Defining where that overlap occurs is much harder.

I want my son to find a strong ethical sense in himself. All the adults I know whom I respect have that. I think it’s really important to develop, but I’m unsure how it is learned. My son is a well behaved kid now but I suspect he’ll hit a wall in a couple of years, as I did, about figuring out the underlying motives for his behavior, especially when getting good grades starts losing its primacy as a motivation and the need for learning appears more fundamental. In expecting that realization to occur, I don’t want him to think of me as the voice of the other side, for arbitrary authority, rules because there are rules rather than because the rules make sense to address some more basic need. I’d like him to think of me as thoughtful on these issues and in turn I hope he too becomes thoughtful about them.

And because these questions are beginning to emerge in me, I’m asking myself whether what I profess at work is consistent with this view of being a parent to a young adult child and in particular as a campus administrator whether the rules and regulations that we pass onto our students at the University of Illinois and which I’m obliged to embrace are those that I would want my own kid to obey if he were a student here.

Of course too much of this sort of thing can make you neurotic, but I think some of this is healthy to examine one’s own beliefs. Here is one example for me. Music and video file sharing are a hot issue now and one that I find vexing, without simple answers, and I’m somewhat dismayed by others who are proffering them. Part of the reason for including the first part of this post on Dylan with this second part was to show that while I was no bootlegger of illegal music, neither was I a purist on making copies when I was a student. Rather I lived in that gray zone that so many others occupied, drivers on the metaphorical highway who go faster than the speed limit but not so fast as to get a ticket.

Nowadays, I make copies of all sorts of content online (though mostly images and documents) and redistribute primarily via email, where I believe I can make a quite credible case for Fair Use since I literally do live my job – promoting learning technology – and my purpose is almost certainly educational (as well as the other factors for a fair use case such as the impact on the market being negligible). So I found it disturbing yesterday when I learned that Educause was promoting this site, in support of an RIAA sponsored video about illegal file sharing. The video doesn’t mention Fair Use. Nor does it mention content produced by instructors that is intended to be free for their students to download, nor other content produced by students themselves aimed at their fellow students, nor content that is freely available by podcast, etc.

And that the video itself has Graham Spanier, President of Penn State, featured in it is also disappointing, because that gives credibility to what is an overly simplistic message. The message doesn’t encourage students to think about the issues and modify their behavior because of the thinking. It encourages them to conform to the message out of fear that they might get sued for copyright violation. It is an argument about avoiding punishment, not about the sensibility of obeying the law.

Perhaps with this post I’ll end up at odds with the higher ups in administration from my own campus on this one. But to be clear I’m not denying that illegal file sharing is a problem. Instead, I’m trying to affirm that our students must be educated as adults with messages that appeal to their own sensibility, skepticism, and general distrust of authority. And in doing my little bit, I’m giving modest effort to follow Dylan in sticking to our own principles as we define them.