Are we ready for next-gen techies in college?

There’s an interesting piece at Mind/Shift about how K-12 educators are beginning to rethink policies for allowing technology in class. A study by The Consortium of School Networking published a study saying that the story considers in part:

“The advantages of digital media now greatly outweigh the disadvantages and require that schools update their thinking and policies to provide guidance on the use of these tools to improve student learning and achievement,” the paper says.

It simply makes no sense, the paper argues, to try and keep students out of a world – a digital world – that is going to be paramount to how they live and work as adults. In fact, says [Principal Investigator Steven] Bosco, it’s not even possible to keep them out.

There are also details on how a school district in Texas handed out 3,200 Android phones to its students with pre-approved apps that could be used to take quizzes and view educational videos.

I’m fascinated by what this could mean when these kids hit college age. They’ll walk into a classroom expecting technology to be incorporated and necessary in each class. Will they find a barrier to learning when their phones are technology non grata? Will teachers have to adapt to their expectations and learning plans?

Twenty years after laptops became affordable, it’s still very rare to see them appear in a classroom at the schools where I teach — at least during lectures. Yet I see cell phones every day; 100 percent of my current writing class wrote “texting” was one of their primary means of writing. The explosion in use of smart phones has got to be the next animating change in college education — and the next point of tension, I’d imagine, since instructors already uncomfortable with bringing online readings into class are likely to die upon the hill of “no texting.”

An OK Paragraph Writing OER on MERLOT

I played with MERLOT a bit last term and over the break to see what I could find. The initial choices for college-appropriate, developmental-level writing and reading modules seems pretty slim, though they do have several solid 121-level resources available.

So, I added a few links I found on my own to get started. The first is a writing guide dealing with different types of paragraphs from the University of Victoria. The advantage to the site is in its simplicity: pages are simple text and easy to read (and print for readers who prefer paper). The table of contents offers a few short pieces on constructing a topic sentence, 5 different types of paragraphs, and a pretty thorough discussion of different organization choices that one can make.

The downside? This site is under copyright by UVic, not openly shared. I need to research (and read up after next week’s meeting) to see how limiting this would be if this was a one- or two-week resource for class.

I gave this three stars (average) rating on MERLOT.

I’m pretty certain a fair number of my students are in danger from this menace:

LINK: Text-Neck strikes:

Text neck results from frequent texting or looking down at your mobile device for extended periods of time and chiropractors say it is on the rise and is quickly becoming a global epidemic.The repetitive stress injury caused by flexing of the neck for prolonged periods can result in tightness across the shoulder, cause headaches and neck soreness and can even result in permanent arthritic damage if left untreated.

Some of them also suffer from a related disease, I Believe You Can’t See Me Texting If I Hide The Phone Under My Desk-itis, which is easily preventable by pointing out none of the desks have front panels on the first day of class.

A bad habit: Using other teachers for feedback

I’ve realized a bad habit of mine. I often turn to my partner, also a college instructor, and say the following: “Does this make sense to you?” Inevitably, I then show him an assignment or a set of instructions, and usually, he says, “Yeah, that’s totally clear.”

The problem, of course, is that my classes are populated not by English-major professors but by just-starting college students. Things that click for me, or for C, do not automatically come across very clearly for my students.

One of the ways one of my departments has proposed to combat this trouble is to allow/encourage teachers to send their syllabi and assignments to another faculty member with some experience in “grade leveling.” The idea is that she’ll read your papers and tell you what “level” they’re written at. I like this idea, in a way, and I did send my papers off (though did not receive a response), but I also think it may, again, be a circular, insular process.

Far better, probably, would be to hand out syllabi and let students edit and reword them (without changing the content) until they make sense to them.

Oh. Hey. First day activity?

Late Work Rules

I’m reviewing and revising my syllabi for the next term (which begins Monday). This shouldn’t take much work, but it always does because I always end up tinkering with things. The policy I have in mind to change this term is my late work policy. For several years, my late work policy has been one of the most forgiving policies around. Basically, I accept late work — any late work — with no penalty if a student contacts me before the deadline (even the morning of) to request an extension. I take late work otherwise with a 10 percent penalty within a week of the deadline. I do this because I see three main reasons to penalize late work:

1. Late work inconveniences, mostly, the instructor. Since I’m always grading something, it’s not usually much of an inconvenience for me to receive a new paper at a later date. I also don’t really want to punish students for making me work harder, since there are sometimes stretches where they’re working very hard and I’m twiddling my thumbs.
2. Late work offers a student an unfair advantage (of time) over students who submit their work on time. Yes, it does — but this seems to even out in the fact that it puts students who turn in late work at a disadvantage on the next assignment they turn in, for which they’ll have less time. Also, because the late option is available to everyone, I don’t think it’s inherently unfair.
3. Late work demonstrates a student’s unwillingness or inability to prioritize or meet deadlines. Perhaps this is true, in some cases, but I have two problems with this. First, if a student can contact me in advance and admit that he/she can’t finish his/her assignment on time, that is a form of recognizing limits, and I want to reward that honesty. Second, I bristle at the idea that my job should include explicit instruction in time management, in part because it is so often expressed as a “desirable job trait,” and I do not work as a teacher to better prepare students for jobs. That is what on-the-job training is for.

I do, however, work as a teacher to help students succeed further in their academic career, and time management is a necessary skill for academic success. To this end, I’m not sure my policy is very effective, and I sometimes worry that students come out of my class feeling they’ve gotten away with something by turning in late work. This is usually not true. My one best reason for accepting work past the deadline is that my actual goal in every class is to encourage students to learn certain skills and make their best effort at every assignment. Often, for some students, an extension of a week can mean the difference between turning in a D paper that’s dashed off the night before and that neither of us really understands and a B paper that’s taken enough work that the student actually manages to imbibe some of what I’m trying to pass along.

Sometimes, of course, that week-long extension just leads to a student writing a paper in one night one week later than they would have. Are they getting away with something then? No: that paper still gets graded as it would have. (It is those papers, though, that make my quick dismissal of the inconvenience feel very thin). 

Anyway, this term, I’m probably moving to a one-late-paper pass system instead of the old way. This is mostly because I’ve seen too many students now sink too far behind once they’ve turned in a first late paper. I’m not terribly pleased with this policy, though. I’d welcome any other good ideas on how to deal with delays. 

When You Teach Someone Else You Learn Better

When You Teach Someone Else You Learn Better

gjmueller:

Over at Time, Annie Murphy Paul writes about the “Protégé Effect”, or why first-born children are given tools to learn that their younger siblings don’t have, or why teaching someone else is the best way to deeply learn a subject.

Students enlisted to tutor others, these researchers have found, work harder to understand the material, recall it more accurately and apply it more effectively. In what scientists have dubbed “the protégé effect,” student teachers score higher on tests than pupils who are learning only for their own sake. But how can children, still learning themselves, teach others? One answer: They can tutor younger kids. The benefits of this practice were indicated by a pair of articles published in 2007 in the journals Science and Intelligence. The studies concluded that first-born children are more intelligent than their later-born brothers and sisters and suggested that their higher IQs result from the time they spend showing their younger siblings the ropes. Educators are experimenting with ways to apply this model to academic subjects. In an ingenious program at the University of Pennsylvania, a “cascading mentoring program” engages college undergraduates to teach computer science to high school students, who in turn instruct middle school students on the topic.

via jtotheizzoe

I experimented broadly with having students lead discussions, work in small and mid-sized groups on quizzes, and take charge of certain lessons in class this term. The results were very positive. I’ll be doing more of it next term.

How to Actually Save Students Money on Textbooks

So, if the previous post on textbook pricing discusses ways not to save students money, how can one actually do this?

1. OBVIOUS: Order cheaper books. It is astounding the number of professors who don’t know what their books cost students. It’s very easy to figure this out. Campus bookstores are pretty high-tech these days — check their prices online. Then, with the click of the mouse, you can easily find other texts with similar readings. Amazon is happy to provide you with a “People who bought this also bought that” list. Publishers list similar titles, too. Most departments keep libraries of textbooks that instructors use and have used. Oh, and there’s this thing called the library. More on it in a moment.
2. Get electronic desk copies instead of hard-cover desk copies of books you want to sample. This saves the publisher the cost of ink, paper, publishing, and mailing, and it’s a great way to sample a ton of books. Coursesmart.com, which I’ve mentioned before (I swear they don’t pay me), has a ton of texts on offer for browsing, long- and short-term.
3. Find books that the campus store can rent to students. Textbook rental is still kind of new, but it works much the way that car rental does: students pay a much lower rate for the book, promise to care for it, and return it at term’s end. Students in my classes have reported saving anywhere from $20 to $40 on their readers by renting — and this is a cost covered on student account funding at the bookstore.
4. Place your book on library reserve. The more copies that are available in the library, the more students will be able to actually use them. Give a reasonable reserve window — 2-3 hours — and figure at least 1 book per 20 people. Mention this option on the first day of class. Students who really don’t have the money for the book but are able to plan ahead can benefit.
5. Find out your library’s policy on electronic reserves — and offer them. Some libraries will allow for scanned material to be loaned out for an hour or two at a time. This is a great way to provide the textbook to students for little or no cost without breaking copyright.
6. Use OER. Open Education Resources are Creative Commons-licensed works made especially for educators and designed to replace textbooks. That means you can select them and include them in a course pack or just link to them from your course management system without worrying about legal ramifications.
7. Understand copyright. You can link to about nine articles per term under fair use — nine, and only nine. That’s nearly one a week for me.
8. Understand student printing costs. The beauty of online resources is that they’re free! The bad news is that students will still, often, have to print them out to bring them to class — and hardly any campuses still allow free printing. If your school charges $.05 a page for printing and you assign 20 pages of reading a week for 10 weeks, that’s $20. $.08 = 16. $.10 = $20. And so on until a book may be cheaper. (Plus binder cost!) Beyond this, printing is often an out-of-pocket expense for students, not something that can be charged to a student account. If there’s no money for books, there’s likely not money for printing, either.

Or, the shorter version: There’s a lot you can do to reduce costs. It all takes some effort, of course, and some practice, but it’s very likely someone down the hall is already doing these things. If we learn nothing else as teachers, surely, we should learn how to share what’s working.

Anyone else have good tips on reducing cost to students?

How Not to Save Students Money on Textbooks

There was a gem of an article at the end of the NEA mailer this week titled “The Scandalous Cost of Textbooks.” In it, Professor Gordon Clanton wrote about the legitimate problem of textbook costs on campus. Expensive books price some students out of the market completely, he writes, which I absolutely agree is a problem. Where we don’t agree is where he ends, with this nugget of wisdom:

Professors can reduce textbook costs for students without reducing the number of pages students read (1) by assigning an earlier edition of the textbook, (2) by teaching from three or four short paperback books, and (3) by constructing customized course readers. Whatever the format, students learn best when they mark and review their own copies of a text.

Here are the problems:

(1) Most official campus bookstores cannot stock older editions of textbooks because publishers can’t guarantee them old copies. (Publishers have no incentive to do so, of course). This means that most professors can’t order older editions of books without going around the bookstore. On some campuses, this is against policy. On most campuses, what this means is that students who rely on financial aid to pay for their books will suddenly be forced to buy their books elsewhere, like Amazon or other online used book sellers. This means they can’t count on that expense being covered on a student account. It also means — as has happened to four of my students this term — that they may end up paying twice as much when their first order ends up being fulfilled incorrectly.

When students are forced away from a bricks-and-mortar store, moreover, two other detrimental consequences occur. Because the professor can’t put an order in before class starts, students can’t order the books until after the first class, meaning it can be up to 10 days — two full weeks of class — before every student has a book. At my school, that means losing 20 percent of the term.

Second, students can’t look at the books before they buy, so they may end up with badly marked books with previous highlighting. In some cases, like in my developmental writing classes, they may end up with workbooks that already have answers in them or pages torn out. Can this happen at the campus bookstore? Sure, but it’s much, much less likely.

(2) Working from three or four short paperbacks might be a great fix in some literature or history classes, but for most classes this is infeasible at best. History and English texts — which are the most likely to be replaced by shorter works — aren’t the most expensive. Students are being gouged by the cost of computer science books, mathematics texts, engineering packets, and so on. Now, you’re thinking, Why in the world would people have to redo a math book? Isn’t it the same year to year? Sure, the methods might be — but if the answers all stay the same, there’s a very real problem of cheating and copying that begins to multiply. 

As for science and engineering and computer texts, well, I hope they’re getting updated frequently. I don’t really want to rely on 1980’s bridge building techniques or spend a term studying the natural world without the option of discussing the Fukushima disaster.

(3) I would love to construct a customized course reader. However, it takes a huge amount of time. Since I work at an institution where I am responsible for obtaining copyright clearance on my own should I decide to use anyone else’s work, and since our printing packet deadlines often come about a week after I find out what classes I’m teaching for the next term, I doubt I’ll be able to jump on this. 

Luckily, places like Norton and Bedford will do this for me! I can go to their web sites and put together a course pack for students and the bookstore will mark it up and sell it and… oh. It’s still $50, but now it has fewer readings? Huh.

It’s also a bit of a fable to think that students will save money from a college-made course packet. Most students can sell back their textbooks at the end of the term for a loss of $20-$40. Course packets, however, will rarely if ever be something they can return.

So how can professors save students money on textbooks? See my next post, please.

If anyone would like to pay me to teach String Theory, I am up for it.

Link: Seeing Value in Ignorance, College Expects Its Physicists to Teach Poetry