I feel like the talented Chawakarn Kongprasert has illuminated my psyche.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Sunday, November 4, 2012
When Pedagogies Collide: MOOCs
Like most people, I had never heard the term "MOOC" (massive open online course) until several months ago. Yet here we are, in the midst of a MOOC moment. Both the NYT and the Washington Post have run (extremely similar) articles about the rise of MOOCs headquartered in elite institutions. It was big news when Harvard and MIT announced their partnership to form EdX, a non-profit platform for free online courses. The recent articles tend to cover the following angles: 1) what MOOCs are; 2) who takes them; 3) who teaches them; and 4) how they will change everything about higher education as we know it.
Who takes MOOCs and who teaches them are interesting issues: thus far, it seems that MOOCs attract a diverse student body, comprising students from overseas, those who work full-time (in a variety of fields), continuing education students, and those for whom taking courses at Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, UT, or Stanford would be out of the question (for a number of reasons). What most of these students have in common, however, are there general areas of interest: quantitative topics. As Laura Pappano noted in her NYT article, the overwhelming majority of MOOCs are in the hard sciences, engineering, or quantitative social sciences. One well-known counter-example is Al Filreis' course on Modern & Contemporary Poetry at Penn, offered through Coursera (a for-profit platform, currently offering its courses for free).
After looking at a number of different courses, and signing up for Filreis' poetry class, I am struck by how important the lecture is to the structure and pedagogy of MOOCs. Instead of the 55 or 85-minute lecture that has long been the norm at universities and colleges, these lectures tend to be shorter, usually between 10 and 20 minutes. In some sciences classes, they explicate a problem or a specific equation. Students watch the lectures on-line, then generally do some kind of activity (a quiz or a problem set), and participate in an online discussion forum (although there are IRL meetups and study groups, although these tend to be organized by motivated students, rather than administered by the professor).
In Modern & Contemporary poetry, the close-reading videos are usually around 12 -15 minutes, and the webcasts of panel discussions (on a particular poem or poet) are an hour. The discussion forums are lively, but they don't seem fundamentally that different from some of the lively commentariat for certain tv shows on websites like TLo, Vulture, TWOP, and a few others. Having proctored discussions about close reading different "texts" has been happening, for years, outside of academe.
I find it fascinating that MOOCs are being touted as the spearhead of a revolution in higher education when they rely primarily on an antediluvian pedagogical technique. Lectures began in medieval universities as a way to provide information--contained in canonical texts--to students. Books were extremely expensive, and students couldn't necessarily purchase all of the books they'd need for their degree course (although they famously wrote many letters home, asking for money), so the professor's job was to read the text and explicate it. The student's job was to take notes and to master the content.
There are other very old teaching methods that have more student participation than lecture. The Socratic method is often still used in law schools. And the disputatio--invented by Peter Abelard and perfected in medieval philosophy classes--involved debate between teacher and student. But these are both more formalized and rigid than the seminar discussions found mainly in liberal arts colleges. Even the Oxbridge tutorial, which can be (though isn't always) less scripted than the other two examples, dates from the 19th century.
The reliance on the medieval lecture is often still the default in college classrooms, even as it has become increasingly clear, over the past several years, that the lecture is not a great way to promote learning. It's a good format for imparting information, but terrible at getting students to use that information dynamically. Discussion-based learning, or even having regular student discussions of whatever material they're studying, is a relatively new way to teach. "Losing the lecture" is the new pedagogical catchphrase, and there's evidence that peer interaction, rapid feedback, discussion, and face-to-face interaction between students and faculty are even more effective pedagogical methods. To be fair, many MOOCs do incorporate peer interaction and use discussion forums in place of F2F group discussions. Rapid feedback can be more of a problem, given that some students are carrying out (and uploading) problem sets or equations at different times. But they can't offer the face to face interaction with a professor, and a professor, having no students in front of her, can't read their body language and nonverbal cues to make her teaching more effective.
The lecture is central to these new frontiers of education,despite its limited utility. I also wonder if MOOCs have been most effective in quantitative and scientific subjects because these subjects have traditionally been taught in very high-enrollment classes with 3 hours of lectures per week, and smaller groups for lab work or problem sets. The on-line platform for teaching these subjects offers, and perhaps requires, certain changes: breaking up the lectures into shorter units (micro-units) and having more opportunities for students to test themselves and give feedback to the instructor (or an algorithm set by the instructor to score student work). It may also be more effective--after all, "lose the lecture" started out in physics.
For more on MOOCs, see Jonathan Rees' series.
Who takes MOOCs and who teaches them are interesting issues: thus far, it seems that MOOCs attract a diverse student body, comprising students from overseas, those who work full-time (in a variety of fields), continuing education students, and those for whom taking courses at Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, UT, or Stanford would be out of the question (for a number of reasons). What most of these students have in common, however, are there general areas of interest: quantitative topics. As Laura Pappano noted in her NYT article, the overwhelming majority of MOOCs are in the hard sciences, engineering, or quantitative social sciences. One well-known counter-example is Al Filreis' course on Modern & Contemporary Poetry at Penn, offered through Coursera (a for-profit platform, currently offering its courses for free).
After looking at a number of different courses, and signing up for Filreis' poetry class, I am struck by how important the lecture is to the structure and pedagogy of MOOCs. Instead of the 55 or 85-minute lecture that has long been the norm at universities and colleges, these lectures tend to be shorter, usually between 10 and 20 minutes. In some sciences classes, they explicate a problem or a specific equation. Students watch the lectures on-line, then generally do some kind of activity (a quiz or a problem set), and participate in an online discussion forum (although there are IRL meetups and study groups, although these tend to be organized by motivated students, rather than administered by the professor).
In Modern & Contemporary poetry, the close-reading videos are usually around 12 -15 minutes, and the webcasts of panel discussions (on a particular poem or poet) are an hour. The discussion forums are lively, but they don't seem fundamentally that different from some of the lively commentariat for certain tv shows on websites like TLo, Vulture, TWOP, and a few others. Having proctored discussions about close reading different "texts" has been happening, for years, outside of academe.
I find it fascinating that MOOCs are being touted as the spearhead of a revolution in higher education when they rely primarily on an antediluvian pedagogical technique. Lectures began in medieval universities as a way to provide information--contained in canonical texts--to students. Books were extremely expensive, and students couldn't necessarily purchase all of the books they'd need for their degree course (although they famously wrote many letters home, asking for money), so the professor's job was to read the text and explicate it. The student's job was to take notes and to master the content.
There are other very old teaching methods that have more student participation than lecture. The Socratic method is often still used in law schools. And the disputatio--invented by Peter Abelard and perfected in medieval philosophy classes--involved debate between teacher and student. But these are both more formalized and rigid than the seminar discussions found mainly in liberal arts colleges. Even the Oxbridge tutorial, which can be (though isn't always) less scripted than the other two examples, dates from the 19th century.
The reliance on the medieval lecture is often still the default in college classrooms, even as it has become increasingly clear, over the past several years, that the lecture is not a great way to promote learning. It's a good format for imparting information, but terrible at getting students to use that information dynamically. Discussion-based learning, or even having regular student discussions of whatever material they're studying, is a relatively new way to teach. "Losing the lecture" is the new pedagogical catchphrase, and there's evidence that peer interaction, rapid feedback, discussion, and face-to-face interaction between students and faculty are even more effective pedagogical methods. To be fair, many MOOCs do incorporate peer interaction and use discussion forums in place of F2F group discussions. Rapid feedback can be more of a problem, given that some students are carrying out (and uploading) problem sets or equations at different times. But they can't offer the face to face interaction with a professor, and a professor, having no students in front of her, can't read their body language and nonverbal cues to make her teaching more effective.
The lecture is central to these new frontiers of education,despite its limited utility. I also wonder if MOOCs have been most effective in quantitative and scientific subjects because these subjects have traditionally been taught in very high-enrollment classes with 3 hours of lectures per week, and smaller groups for lab work or problem sets. The on-line platform for teaching these subjects offers, and perhaps requires, certain changes: breaking up the lectures into shorter units (micro-units) and having more opportunities for students to test themselves and give feedback to the instructor (or an algorithm set by the instructor to score student work). It may also be more effective--after all, "lose the lecture" started out in physics.
For more on MOOCs, see Jonathan Rees' series.
 |
| A 14th century painting of a classroom. Art imitates life: the keen students are sitting up front, while the sleepers and the talkers are in the back rows. |
Friday, October 19, 2012
Medieval Star Wars!
This is the perfect mashup of "medieval" and "robots."
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Natura artifex Redux
Here are three images of Natura artifex, or Natura the artisan, standing at her forge. She uses a hammer and anvil to create new people out of existing archetypes.
You've seen this one before. Natura is forging new people out of parts.
AW, our DC correspondent, alerted me to this version, from a slightly later manuscript. Instead of limbs, she has a baby on the anvil, and dismembered baby bodies lie at her feet.
And then there's this one. A naked Natura stands at her forge, whanging away at a wang and Balzac.
You've seen this one before. Natura is forging new people out of parts.
 |
| Yale University, MS 418, fol. 282v. France, C15. |
 | ||||
| BL, MS Harley 4425, fol. 140. Flemish (Bruges), late C15. |
 |
| Obscene pewter badge of Nature at her forge. Netherlands, late C15.Heilig en Profaan: Laatmiddeleeuwse Insignes in Cultuurhistorisch Perspectief. Amsterdam: Van Soeren, 1995. |
Monday, October 8, 2012
Creative Construction
We are just about
to start a new unit on scholarly practices, changing media, and the
purpose(s) of citation in the first-year writing seminar I'm teaching. I
have been re-reading The Footnote and "The End Matter" and
mulling over what I want to say to my students about how historians use
sources to make meaning about the past and the relationship between
one's own work and the work that came before. So I read with interest Simon Reynolds' review essay in Slate,
in which he confronted the assertion, by a number of artists, critics,
and scholars, that citation and stealing and borrowing are the only way
that anything is created. There is only recreativity, no creativity.
Reynolds argues against this, and in favor of a more Romantic (and
romantic) embodied notion of creative genius.
Recreativity has a lot in common with neoplatonist ideas about creativity. In fact, they're remarkably similar. Hugh of St. Victor argued that all art is inherently mimetic: Humans can only copy from existing natural forms. Or, as I put it elsewhere, "Nature fabricates, humanity imitates." Bark, feathers, and scales provide inspiration for clothing and adornment, the sounds of nature are the basis of all music. The human mind, according to Hugh, was plastic, and could only receive the imprints of what it had seen and try to imitate them. It could not create ex nihilo; only God could do that. Even Nature worked with a set of archetypes handed to her by God; she translated the archetypes into matter. Sometimes copying could make way for combining, as with vernacular writers who recounted history, myth, and fable. Their work was often described as combining elements of story with aspects of style. The resulting mash-up was a new literary genre: romance. In the early modern period, History became a discipline with a set of expectations about accuracy. In this case, subject matter was yoked to verifiable evidence, which gave rise to a new set of scholarly technologies for thinking about credit and authentication...like the footnote.
Recreativity has a lot in common with neoplatonist ideas about creativity. In fact, they're remarkably similar. Hugh of St. Victor argued that all art is inherently mimetic: Humans can only copy from existing natural forms. Or, as I put it elsewhere, "Nature fabricates, humanity imitates." Bark, feathers, and scales provide inspiration for clothing and adornment, the sounds of nature are the basis of all music. The human mind, according to Hugh, was plastic, and could only receive the imprints of what it had seen and try to imitate them. It could not create ex nihilo; only God could do that. Even Nature worked with a set of archetypes handed to her by God; she translated the archetypes into matter. Sometimes copying could make way for combining, as with vernacular writers who recounted history, myth, and fable. Their work was often described as combining elements of story with aspects of style. The resulting mash-up was a new literary genre: romance. In the early modern period, History became a discipline with a set of expectations about accuracy. In this case, subject matter was yoked to verifiable evidence, which gave rise to a new set of scholarly technologies for thinking about credit and authentication...like the footnote.
Monday, October 1, 2012
College Rank and File
Joe Nocera's recent op-ed piece in the NYT about the college rankings racket exposes a largely unexamined fault line running through contemporary discussions about the many problems facing higher ed and the many problems endemic to academia: credentialing vs. learning.
Students such as the embittered young woman who was "only" able to attend a state school, or the bright senior intent on "marketing herself" so that she can get into an elite private institution reflect a harsh reality of higher ed: a college degree is a necessary credential for greater lifelong earning power and, one hopes, greater economic freedom. This may be particularly true for young women, as this article points out. And the Great Recession has raised the spectre of our nation's newest graduates living in their parents' basements, as part of some extended pupal stage. Rankings, whether from U.S. News & World Report or Washington Monthly, reinforce this idea, as the rankings implicitly turn an individualized four-year experience into an inherent value of the degree itself. A credential from Harvard is "worth" more--in the marketplace--than a credential from Wichita State. The credential mind-set is behind the drive to monetize on-line courses and increase access to distance-learning and extension schools at elite institutions: students who want a credential for the job market can get one, often at the cost of an actual education.
As Nocera points out at the end, there are far more important factors than what school one attended that determine the kind of education one might receive. One of those factors is face-to-face interaction with high-quality professional educators, something a lot of companies and institutions are trying to reduce (faculty are expensive--especially those health insurance premiums--and our work can't be easily scaled up or routinized).
Another is what the student brings to her college experience. A willingness to take risks, to work at the edge of one's intellectual comfort zone, and to fail makes learning more possible and likely. In addition, the lessons of a liberal arts education will stand one in better stead in the long term, as the value of a credential in the marketplace is unstable. Unfortunately, the skills required to get into an elite school are, often, incompatible with intellectual risk-taking and willingness to fail. All too often, students arrive at college and discover that the character traits that have gotten them to college are not necessarily the ones they should continue cultivating. And for the many students who are incurring significant debt to get their credential/education, the cost of taking risks (and perhaps failing) is terribly high.
Students such as the embittered young woman who was "only" able to attend a state school, or the bright senior intent on "marketing herself" so that she can get into an elite private institution reflect a harsh reality of higher ed: a college degree is a necessary credential for greater lifelong earning power and, one hopes, greater economic freedom. This may be particularly true for young women, as this article points out. And the Great Recession has raised the spectre of our nation's newest graduates living in their parents' basements, as part of some extended pupal stage. Rankings, whether from U.S. News & World Report or Washington Monthly, reinforce this idea, as the rankings implicitly turn an individualized four-year experience into an inherent value of the degree itself. A credential from Harvard is "worth" more--in the marketplace--than a credential from Wichita State. The credential mind-set is behind the drive to monetize on-line courses and increase access to distance-learning and extension schools at elite institutions: students who want a credential for the job market can get one, often at the cost of an actual education.
As Nocera points out at the end, there are far more important factors than what school one attended that determine the kind of education one might receive. One of those factors is face-to-face interaction with high-quality professional educators, something a lot of companies and institutions are trying to reduce (faculty are expensive--especially those health insurance premiums--and our work can't be easily scaled up or routinized).
Another is what the student brings to her college experience. A willingness to take risks, to work at the edge of one's intellectual comfort zone, and to fail makes learning more possible and likely. In addition, the lessons of a liberal arts education will stand one in better stead in the long term, as the value of a credential in the marketplace is unstable. Unfortunately, the skills required to get into an elite school are, often, incompatible with intellectual risk-taking and willingness to fail. All too often, students arrive at college and discover that the character traits that have gotten them to college are not necessarily the ones they should continue cultivating. And for the many students who are incurring significant debt to get their credential/education, the cost of taking risks (and perhaps failing) is terribly high.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Black Death PSA: It's Still A Good Idea to Stay Away from Vermin
...especially when it's already dead.
A young girl in Colorado contracted the Black Death after trying to give an infected squirrel carcass a proper burial. The flea bites on the girl tipped off the doctors trying to diagnose her.
A young girl in Colorado contracted the Black Death after trying to give an infected squirrel carcass a proper burial. The flea bites on the girl tipped off the doctors trying to diagnose her.
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