jill/txt

Via Espen Anderson, I found this report about a recent study that seems to confirm some of my arguments in the talk I gave a month or so ago at Fleksibel læring, where I argued that young university students are far less digitally literate than we assume:

A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.

There’s also a Slashdot discussion about the article.

Espen’s daughter’s homework apparently, at least on some days, consists largely of searching for answers on Google. We teachers certainly have a lot of challenges in figuring out how to help students not only learn to find information but learn those critical and analytical skills that do not come automatically.

Henry Jenkins has a very useful blog post exploring the origins of the term “digital natives” and showing how its a term that’s increasingly problematic today. This ties in beautifully with the talk I gave in Oslo a couple of weeks ago, where I argued that “the idea of “digital natives” is dangerous - it lets us as teachers and parents off the hook.” As a physical immigrant myself (my family moved to Norway from Australia when I was eight) I particularly appreciated Jenkins’ note on the jingoism implied in the term “digital immigrants”, where an immigrant is seen as always inferior, always going to be struggling with the language, the accent and the culture. In Norway the rhetoric is still largely about immigrants “integrating” successfully, but in the US and Australia, the “melting pot” metaphor has largely been supplanted (thankfully) by the “jambalaya” of multiculturalism, where diversity can be celebrated and seen to be to everyone’s advantage. Jenkins writes:

Surely, we should recognize what digital immigrants bring with them from the old world which is still valuable in the new, rather than simply focus on their lacks and inadequacies.

(..)

At one time, the digital immigrant metaphor might have been helpful if it forced at least some adults to acknowledge their uncertainties, step out of their comfort zone, and adjust their thinking to respond to a generation growing up in a very different context than the realm of their own childhood. As Prensky concludes, “if Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives - i.e. all their students - they will have to change.” Yet, I worry that the metaphor may be having the opposite effect now — implying that young people are better off without us and thus justifying decisions not to adjust educational practices to create a space where young and old might be able to learn from each other.

As I argued in Oslo, the skills “digital natives” bring to universities are immensely valuable, but also very different to the ones that we as educators define as “digital literacy”. Teens use the internet differently to adults, and the ways they use it do not completely transfer to the skills needed in a world based on knowledge and information.

I’m speaking in Oslo today, at the Fleksibel læring (flexible learning) conference at the University of Oslo. Here’s the slideshow I’ll be using. It’s in Norwegian, sorry to all you non-weegies - you might be able to follow it anyway, though.

| View | Upload your own

My main point is that despite today’s students having grown up with technology, and despite their using the net extensively, they still lack very basic skills for using the net in learning at a university level - and the ways teens use the internet differently from older users (e.g. games, IM, social networking) can almost hide the fact that many of them lack skills seen as basic in what we oldies call digital literacy - such as being able to find relevant information, evaluate it, synthesize it and present it. Of course it’s also possible that they’ll simply redefine “digital literacy” so it means something else once they’re adults, but I somehow doubt it. I think actually the idea of “digital natives” is dangerous - it lets us as teachers and parents off the hook.

I absolutely love the babies on the first slide. I found them at a stock photo site, and they only cost me a dollar to download and use as much as I like with only a few reservations (I can’t make a company logo using them, or sell them to you, for instance). Actually I didn’t even pay the dollar because when you sign up you get five free credits. It’s the first time I’ve bought stock photos for presentations - usually I use creative common licenced photos (there are a few of them in the presentation too) or my own photos or I ask the photographer for permission. I love finding photos I can use as a sort of framework for building my slideshow around - my mind works well that way. And those babies are so cute.

The other improvement I’ve made to my slidemaking is using cross-platform fonts. I’ve been so fond of mac-only fonts that my slideshows look bad on Windows - or on slideshare.net. This time I found the list of fonts that both macs and Windows know about and stuck to it - and lo and behold, the result looks far better.

Jon Hoem is leading a group from NVU that will look at uses of Web 2.0 in higher education, and they’ve started a blog, Undervisning 2.0. Should be interesting - Jon has a lot of good ideas about these things.

I have a master’s student who’s almost done, so I’m reading the last draft of her thesis to give her the last batch of feedback tomorrow. It’s always wonderful seeing the progress from the first drafts to the final stages of a thesis - and I love seeing how students always end up managing to connect all those scrambled ideas from the start of a project. It’s very rewarding to be able to follow that journey.

But it takes so long for me to read these drafts and comment them in the way I feel that I should. I always imagine I’ll do about twenty pages in an hour, and I always end up managing no more than about ten pages an hour, and at times even less. This thesis isn’t double-spaced, it’s only using 1.5 spacing, so I suppose I’d be doing fifteen double-spaced pages an hour, but even that seems quite slow.

For a 90-100 page thesis, that means ten hours reading and commenting on the thesis before I’ve even met with her.

Should I be aiming to improve my speed? Am I putting too much effort into it, commenting too profusely? Are there other ways to increase my speed, apart from lowering my expectations of what I should be doing? Or is this simply the way it is and what I need to change is making sure that I schedule enough time for reading drafts during the work week that I don’t have to spend my Sunday mornings doing it?

If you respond to student drafts, how long does it take you?

My students generally have no idea what I’m talking about when I ask them to analyse a website or blog or work of digital art or literature. A close reading, I say, textual analysis, and I try to explain it but I clearly haven’t worked out how to get it across because most are just as baffled at the end of the semester (or in the next class they take with me) as they were to begin with. So I found Dr. Crazy’s very specific explanation of how she teaches close reading very useful, and I’m definitely going to try to adapt it for the kinds of texts I teach. Not just yet though - I’m actually done with classroom teaching until after my sabbatical - don’t worry, I have plenty of advising and grading left this semester, so won’t get bored or anything, but I organised the semester so that all the regular teaching was in the first half of the semester. The plan is that this will leave me time for all the writing I have to do in the next months. And the admin, of course, let’s not forget the admin.

I also tried Dr. Crazy’s grading sheets for giving feedback on student essay this week, and the students loved them! It made it really clear to them what they need to work on to improve their essays for the final portfolio. I liked the sheets because it helped me remember the main points I wanted to communicate to the student (hard to remember when you have 20 papers mostly on the same assignment, they all blur a bit) and it also helped me think about what is important in the paper - and as Dr. Crazy wrote, I think it actually saved a little time on grading. Made it clearer to me what I was doing, somehow.

We made a poster about humanistic informatics, too, when we were doing the research project posters on electronic literature and game research. Those of you who can read Norwegian can, well, read it, the rest of you can enjoy the pretty fonts. Ha.

Filed under:teaching, working in a university

Tags: huminf, humanistiskinformatikk, UiB, digitalkultur, digital, kultur, huin

Oh, look: MA students at a British university are editing the Wikipedia as part of the coursework, and it counts for an eighth of their grade. I’ve thought of doing that but discarded the idea worrying that forcing uninterested students to do something like that would potentially spoil the Wikipedia - but that was undergrads; with MA students it seems like a great idea. I must try to find some of the pages they’ve edited. (found because Torger Åge Sinnes sent me an email with the link - thanks!)

This video is amazing - it’s the stuff I teach! From the materiality of writing (handwriting and digital) through hypertext, HTML, XML, the point of it all - I wish I had made this video. And I was so pleased to see that the guy who made it, Michael Wesch, is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology - and this video is currently the fifth most popular video in the blogosphere, according to Technorati [Update at 9 pm: now it’s the most popular…]. That pretty much dwarfs any conventional kind of popularising research academics are supposed to do. Go digital academics!

I guess the only thing I was left wanting at the end of the video was more about how the machine is using us - the title is the machine is us/ing us after all.

I’ve been so impressed by the utvidet arbeidsplan (”expanded work plans”) my daughter’s been bringing home from school after the latest reform of schools in Norway that I’ve tried to make one for my students. The idea is to give them a very clear overview of what they’re supposed to be learning and how to go about learning it. But it may well be ridiculous - will you please have a look and see what you think?

One advantage for me is that having estimated times for the various tasks I can actually see that what I expect them to do outside of class is entirely consistent with the amount of time they’re supposed to be spending on studying. My daughter’s fifth grade worksheet doesn’t show time estimates, I got that from the European Tuning project, which I heard about when I (as head of department) was asked to report on how our department calculates student workload and would the Tuning system be useful. The idea of this part of the Tuning project is to standardise student workloads per credit so it’s easier to transfer credits from one country to another and know that they’re equivalent. This PDF has detailed examples of how to do this when planning a specific course. I’m not sure whether students are ever supposed to see those planning documents, though.

Anyway, according to Tuning, a 15 credit course (in the ECTS - European Credit Transfer System, which we now use) should involve 375 hours of work for each student. That’s actually 19.5 hours a week for the 18 weeks between the first class and the portfolio being due. I’ve only reached 17 hours, but there’s plenty of opportunity for spending more time on things.

Now I really need some feedback though: If I give my students this work sheet will they laugh at me for giving them something based on what a fifth-grader is given? I mean, it’s way too detailed. But my impression is that students don’t do work outside of the classroom because they don’t really know what they’re expected to do. (Is that true?)

I think I’ll try it out next week, and we’ll see whether I keep doing it. And I’m not sure yet whether this is extra work for me or whether it will help make teaching easier for me. And am I sewing cushions under arms? Quite probably adults should be organising their own studies? Although you know, I’m not going to have their parents sign it as my daughter has me do, and I’m not going to check up on them - and I’ll encourage them to change the tasks if they feel others would be more useful to them in reaching their learning goals. Sorry, learning outcomes. For some reason, the EU standard is learning outcomes, not learning goals. I have no idea why.

I think I might pinch Dr Crazy’s strategy for grading essays - she uses a checklist as a front page where she checks off things like “Paper offers adequate context (historical, theoretical, and/or critical) for the claims that it makes about the text(s) under discussion” - or the contrary (”paper does not offer…”) and thus sums up strong and weak points allowing more useful feedback and more efficient grading - without sacrificing traditional comments in the margins.

I start a new teaching unit tomorrow: IKT og læring, or learning and technology. There’ll be lots on blogs and wikis, and some wonderful guests (I’m so lucky!) - and also essaywriting. It’s silly how motivating I find tricks like the one Dr Crazy described. Suddenly I’m all excited about getting to give feedback on essays soon. Good thing I know how to fool myself into working, eh?

One of my advisees is defending his MA thesis today. I hadn’t realised, before becoming an advisor myself, that advisors get a bit nervous about this too. At our university the advisor is always in the three person committee that discusses and grades the thesis, which is good because the advisor can often clarify things for the other members, and because it’s often good for the candidate to have at least one person they know reasonably well in the oral defence. It’s also bad, or at least hard, because when you’ve read all the bits of a thesis a zillion times as it was being written it’s very, very hard to form a clear, objective opinion of the finished product as a whole. I imagine this is why the University of Oslo has exactly the opposite policy to the University of Bergen, and bars advisors from being in the committee that grades an MA thesis.

Ah, another round of this discussion - how should we react when students cite the Wikipedia in papers? I used to say no, you can’t, not unless the fact that it’s the Wikipedia is the point of your argument. Then I eased up a bit, but after spending the last couple of weeks editing the Wikipedia a fair bit, I’m disillusioned (though still in love with the thing) and feeling strict again.

A few months ago, Alan Liu sent out a draft of guidelines for students wanting to use the wikipedia, which just reached Fibreculture. Alan gives two main reasons to be careful quoting the Wikipedia:

1. As in the case of any encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not
   appropriate as the primary or sole reference for anything that is central to an
   argument, complex, or controversial.
2. The Wikipedia is of uneven quality, some articles are contested and frequently vandalised, and because its constantly changing, if you do cite it, you absolutely have to include the date you referenced it.

I mostly agree, so far, and am especially glad to see the first point - really, encyclopedias aren’t sufficient references for research papers, whether they’re the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Wikipedia - but there are other issues Alan Liu doesn’t cover that have become more and more foregrounded to me in the last weeks while I’ve been editing the Wikipedia:

1. The style - cumulative editing encourages articles that become lists of trivia instead of coherent presentations of a subject. Nicholas Carr demonstrates this in his piece “The Amorality of Web 2.0″ using the entry for Bill Gates and for Jane Fonda, showing how they’re both, to be honest, rubbish. (They’ve been improved somewhat since he wrote this).

   I’ve been working some on the lonelygirl15 article in the last weeks, and it certainly suffers under this. Lonelygirl15 is a current, pop culture, technological event and so a prime example of where the Wikipedia shines. The Wikipedia entry is clearly the most comprehensive online - newspapers articles don’t try to tell the WHOLE story, and blog posts are even more fragmentary. A very large number of people helped write (are still writing) the article and there’s a lot of activity on the talk page. But because everyone wanted to add something, the article has a lot of that “list of trivia” quality to it. The discussions about writing the entry are really rather dysfunctional - the “talk” page for the article is just another wiki page and despite conventions about how to show threads of an argument and so on the interface isn’t ideal for organising a discussion.

2. Accuracy. Alan Liu mentions this, but I think it’s a bigger problem than he really suggests. While in a sense the lonelygirl15 article is a good example of a mostly accurate entry, despite its other flaws, accuracy is a particularly large problem for specialised articles where no experts have been involved - and often students go to these articles. I can’t tell what the accuracy of “nuclear fusion” is like, but for specialised articles where I’m an expert I see a whole lot of flaws.

   For instance, the article about “ergodic literature” really sucks and would directly mislead students - a couple of weeks ago it largely consisted of a list of “examples” that quite obviously are NOT ergodic literature. Looking at the “talk” page for the article it’s clear that nobody editing the article had actually read the book where the concept is introduced and defined - editors were saying hey, look, I found something by this Aarseth geezer online that says it’s the first chapter of a book about this, someone should read it and integrate it into the article. Having read the book and taught the topic, I put an hour or two’s work into trying to fix up the entry, but writing a good solid encyclopedia article is a LOT of work, and it’s really not in proper shape yet. I did at least put a tag on it showing that it’s not accurate - that’s one great thing about the Wikipedia, there are lots of ways of showing that an article is contested, or inaccurate, or unsourced, or incomplete. danah boyd wrote once that as an undergrad she contributed lots of articles to the Wikipedia simply based on excerpts from her first year sociology textbooks - a lot of the articles sure read like that’s what happened.

Puzzling over how to explain students who’ve never tried it how to write a textual analysis I remembered how they loved the quizzes we did earlier this semester. So here’s a worksheet (rtf) I made for Hanne-Lovise Skartveit’s Take the F train, which is one of the works they can choose to analyse. (more…)

But the larger point here is that education is coercion, that most students would rather be working and getting paid for it, or be with their families, or getting high, or eating pizza, or doing laundry, or fucking, or fishing, or whatever it is that undergraduates do, than sitting in a classroom either listening to a deathly dull lecture by an egghead or alternatively running around the classroom doing group exercises and tossing plastic balls and drawing on craft paper. (Slaves of Academe)

(This post may, in time, become an actual post with content other than this quote. Or it may not.)