jill/txt

The summer I worked as a guide at the Edvard Grieg museum at Troldhaugen I lost every need for social contact. Every single day between 1000 and 1500 tourists visited the museum, and because of the way the museum was set up, I smiled to every one of them, reminding them to be careful because the house was fragile, chatting with many about their journeys and of course telling them about Edvard and Nina Grieg.

When I got home at night I was exhausted. I wanted to be alone. My usual love for people was completely drained by the intense social contact of the day.

Blogging feels a bit like that to me now. My working life is so filled with people, students, meetings, administrative needs and emails with small tasks that must be attended to that there is no room for blogging. Blogging requires calm enough to think.

Of course, blogging also creates space and time in which to think. Right now, though, I feel as though I’m already doing enough of my thinking in public.

I’ve tried writing an essay about all this. It’ll be published later this year, in Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacob’s anthology The Uses of Blogs. I’m not entirely happy with the essay, but it’s a try at figuring this out, anyway - and the other essays in the book look very promising.

Letizia Jaccheri is researcher at the computer science department at NTNU in Trondheim who’s interested in digital art. She recently started a weblog with links to books, sites and ideas that interest her - lots of good links there.

I also recently discovered Odd-Wiking Rahlff, a researcher at SINTEF, also in Trondheim, who’s doing work on using mobile phones to tag physical places, like Yellow Arrow etc, though no doubt with many differences. I “met” Odd-Wiking at Underskog.no, a new (as in still in beta and not quite open yet but very promising) Norwegian social software site for finding out what’s happening in the towns of Norway.

Nice to find more and more interesting people around the place :)

This semester Anders Fagerjord (at the University of Oslo) is teaching a course based on Gregory Ulmer’s book Internet Invention. The course at UiO is called MEVIT2500: Multimodal design (web-design) (NB: It’s in Norwegian). I’m really impressed - I haven’t read the book thoroughly, but took a look last semester (at Anders’s suggestion), and thought wow, this looks like a great way of doing a course but way too complicated, especially in our Norwegian system. Basically the students construct their own online identities, creative web-based mystories, and learn a lot about rhetoric and theory on the way. Ulmer includes all the exercises and lecture notes and such, but the level seemed quite ambitious for undergrads. Perhaps I judged too fast: Anders is running this as a course for 100 undergrads! He’s set it up in a cool way, with just five lectures and a lot of structured group work (that link is to an xml file, for some reason I need to reload it to see it properly formatted), where students meet in groups of five to work on very clear topics. I asked how they manage this, and Anders says three teachers will move between these little groups of students giving advice and seeing how they’re doing. They’re also planning to give feedback to students’ on their assignments along the way using email. Students will get no help with HTML and coding, though there are links to online resources (and frankly, the very basic HTML required isn’t that hard).

I think it’s a brave and wonderful idea and I’m really interested in hearing how it works out. I suspect it might turn out really, really well. As, uh, a head of department in charge of managing resources and stuff, I’m very impressed at how they’ve set it up in a way that shouldn’t over-tax their resources and that places students in charge of their own learning yet supports students throughout. Let’s hope so, anyway.

This semester I’m using Anders Fagerjord’s brand new textbook Web-medier with our web design and web aesthetics students. For yesterday’s lecture I made a quiz for the students based on the first two chapters, which introduce a lot of concepts and ideas. It worked wonderfully - I gave students ten minutes to work through it individually, then about ten minutes to discuss it with their neighbours. After that we had nearly an hour of plenary discussion, which I really enjoyed. No grading or anything: the point was to get them to think through central concepts and apply them and discuss them. There are about fifty students in the class, so the standard strategy would be to lecture at them and leave discussion and student activity for the tutorials - but apart from all the excellent pedagogical reasons for engaging students in active learning rather than trying to pour one’s own knowledge into them as though they were empty vessels, I’ve discovered I really don’t like lecturing. When I think of my teaching as lecturing, I resent it and feel drained by it - all that preparation just to talk to a bunch of bored-looking students and get no feedback or input? Pah. Fortunately, active discussions with enthusiastic students leave me energised and flying back to my office remembering that I love my job.

The students had lots of good input in the discussion - out of nearly fifty students, I think at least 15-20 spoke, which is really good for such a large group. I asked them how they liked it at the end, of course, and they said it was great, and yeah, let’s do this again. As for me: I far prefer organising a class through a structured discussion than by me lecturing. Working with the questions individually and then in pairs got the students talking, and it was easy to spend nearly an hour simply going through the ten questions in the quiz and discussing them. And although it’s never easy to know what the students who don’t talk really think, they appeared to be alert and attentive, and I figure that at least they got to talk in the first part of class, with their neighbour. Oh, I snuck in fifteen minutes lecturing about Online Caroline too. I like lecturing for short bursts about things I’m really keen on ;)

Anyway. Here’s the quiz as an .rtf file - feel free to use it or adapt it if you’re teaching with Anders’s book. If I make more for the other chapters I’ll put them online too. Oh, there’s no answer sheet - I used it as a starting point for discussion, not for grading. (The file displays in my webbrowser with no images; if you right-click/apple-click the link to download it instead you’ll get a file you can edit in a word processor, with images.)