Weekend Reading: Whatever Works Edition

About two weeks ago, The Atlantic posted an unusually ill-considered article, “Composition 1.01: How Email Can Change the Way Professors Teach”, arguing, among other things, that “the liberal arts academy is in some ways allergic to email, that they implicate it somehow — along with the Web, the word processor, cell phones and social media — in the dissolution of the written word, and so abide it only to the extent they must.” I was forwarded this article–via e-mail!!–by about 50 people, with comments ranging from the amused to the baffled to the interested to the cranky; props to Shannon Mattern for being first.

The article goes awry in several different ways: first, for failing to understand that the teaching of composition, in particular, has a history of engaging with online teaching that is, at this point, decades old, as veterans of Kairos and Computers and Composition (now born-digital, as it were; the print archives are also online) can attest. (I myself had a course on computers and writing pedagogy about 13 years ago, taught by Pete Sands; even then, there was already a book reprising the history of computers and the teaching of writing in American higher education. Seriously–this stuff has been around forever, and a lot of people are doing it.)

Second, it failed to recognize, or even to notice, that there are lots and lots of faculty out there doing all kinds of interesting work with students, both online and off. Heck, there are so many faculty interested in the topic that the Chronicle even bought a blog about it.

Finally, as many commenters on the original article pointed out, the article also failed to recognize the specific limitations of e-mail as a tool for teaching writing, and the specific folly of setting as an expectation near-instant e-mail response times. I’m not suggesting higher ed can’t improve–again, that would put me out of a blog–but the vision of higher ed teaching presented in “Composition 1.01″ won’t do.

I held off on posting a response here, though, because ProfHacker’s style usually isn’t to post rants or takedowns, even when they’re good for traffic, but rather to well, you know.

And sure enough, after a week or so the professor featured in the story showed up in comments, to clarify his practice–which was much more reasonable. He uses TextExpander! Tried Google Docs, but it didn’t work *for him*. Recognized that “super-fast instructor response” is a pedagogy that does *not* scale. And so forth: All in all, it was a super-reasonable discussion of one way to run a class, using some of the tools at our disposal these days.

All of which is just to say a few disparate things:

• If you read that article two weeks ago, go back and take a look at the comments. They’re pretty good, especially John Whittier-Ferguson’s.
• I tend to take this as justifying, rather than otherwise, ProfHacker’s above-the-fray approach. The best way to think about pedagogy and process is not to recommend One True Way, or to get into turf wars about which One True Way is best, but to say, “here’s how I do it–what about you?” SImilarly, we probably won’t call out as idiots anyone for adopting a specific strategy that works well for them and for their students.
• That said, journalists really need to stop writing lazy articles about tech and pedagogy that stereotypes professors as technophobic Luddites. It can’t really be impossible to get the nuances right–for a positive example, Audrey Watters kills it on a regular basis.

Ok. On to this week’s links:

• The inimitable Gardner Campbell explains “How Blogging Can Catalyze Learning”: I have come up with a conceptual framework that explains what I believe to be the core elements–and the essential worth–of a blogging initiative, either within a course or across an entire program. I’ve built the framework out of three imperatives: “Narrate, Curate, Share.” I believe these three imperatives underlie some of the most important aspects of an educated citizen’s contributions to the human record.
• Mike Monteiro’s post about “professional relationships and social media” was written with designers in mind, but it’s good advice for faculty, too. (Actually, it’s among the best posts about social media etiquette–by someone who’s far from hypersensitive–that I can think of.): Feel free to talk to clients who decide to follow you, but stay away from project talk. I may talk about how wonderful it was to work with someone after the fact, or congratulate them on launching or reaching a milestone. (I’ve had the pleasure of congratulating a client on winning a Pulitzer. Twice!) But don’t express negative thoughts about a project or a client, or their company or anyone on the client team. (Related: Audrey Watters answers the question, Why Would a Teacher Want to ‘Friend’ a Student on Facebook?”)
• Sidneyeve Matrix has designed a smartphone caddy app–an organizer for class-related tools for her classes. Why an app?: Easily navigable, clearly organized curation of class tools in one place makes it easier for students to discover and adopt them. But when that “one place” is a LMS window, or my course website then lecture notes compete for attention with a number of open windows including of course Facebook.
• What would a “robot-readable world” look like? How far away is it?: Computer vision is a deep, dark specialism with strange opportunities and constraints. The signals that we design towards robots might be both simpler and more sophisticated than QR codes or other 2d barcodes. (Related: Smart skin!
• The incidence of Wikipedia citations in scholarly publications: Interestingly, researchers in engineering and medicine cite more often than do research on Wikipedia, while researchers in mathematics more often write about Wikipedia than cite it. Arts and humanities also give more citations to Wikipedia than conduct research about it.

And, in this week’s video, we come full circle with Terry Gilliam’s explanation of how he makes the cut-out animations for Monty Python: “Whatever works is the thing to use.”:

Via Austin Kleon.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Photo by Flickr user f_shields / Creative Commons licensed