Poet Ponders the Digital

Fourteen units into my MFA in Film and Digital Technology, I passed the Apple certification exam for Final Cut Pro X 10.2 (Post-Production). As a believer in digital composition and new media, having the skills to edit audio and video — and the ability to teach those skills — was important to me. But, as a colleague noted, credentialism is fading quickly in the technology industry. Finally, people have realized passing an exam is not indicative of having essential job skills.  When I was in college, Novell NetWare certification was the golden ticket to many jobs. Networking was a mix of hardware and software, with little standardization. Testing assured a minimal level of knowledge. Today we have the return of the Builder/Maker culture that started the PC revolution. People learn to build Raspberry Pi contraptions, with Arduino controllers and Java or C code. Networks are easy, relatively speaking, compared to building a home robot. The reason to take any exam today is to ...

When I read academic job listing for "Digital Humanities" the skills range from HTML coding to video editing. Some list audio editing. The jobs are so varied that you cannot pinpoint what the phrase means. Is my doctorate in rhetoric, scientific and technical communication sufficient? Often it is not. Some posts suggest an MFA or Ph.D. in media production. Starting January 2016, I am going to be working towards completion of my MFA in Film and Digital Technology. This feels like a last-ditch effort to revive my academic career, while also giving me more credentials to support my creative writing. With or without an academic revival, I'll benefit greatly from the courses and the exercise of creating and editing digital works. One of the frustrations I've had on the job market is that nobody seems to know what the "Digital Humanities" are or how to prove you have the skills to teach the courses. My age and my experiences are a serious obstacle on this...

A drawing made in Tux Paint using various brushes and the Paint tool. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley November 2, 2015 Deadline December 2015 Issue Randomly clicking on letters, the young boy I was watching play an educational game “won” each level. He paid no attention to the letters themselves. His focus was on the dancing aliens at the end of each alphabet invasion. Situations like this occur in classrooms and homes every day. Technology appeals to parents, politicians and some educators as a path towards more effective teaching. We often bring technology into our schools and homes, imagining the latest gadgets and software will magically transfer skills and information to our children. This school year, I left teaching business communications to return to my doctoral specialty in education, technology and language development. As a board member of an autism-related charity, I speak to groups on how technology both helps and hinders special edu...

Zork I cover art (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley July 6, 2015 Deadline August 2015 Issue “This is an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. A rubber mat saying ‘Welcome to Zork !’ lies by the door.” These familiar words, which I once read on the blue screen of a Commodore 64, now appeared on my iPhone. Considered one of the first dozen computer games ever developed, Zork has a special place in computing history. Zork launched what is known as interactive fiction or text adventures. In 1977, four programmers working in the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science created the interactive fiction story “Zork.” Some of these friends would go on to create one of the earliest video game publishers, Infocom. From 1979 through 1986, Infocom was one of the leading game publishers, marketing games for every major home computer. Purchased by Activision in 1986, the Infocom brand and its classic games live on, a...

Lego Digital Designer (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley April 6, 2015 Deadline May 2015 Issue Building things provides me with hours of relaxation and a sense of accomplishment. As children, we appreciate the creativity expressed by Tinker Toys, K’nex, Lincoln Logs and LEGO bricks . As we age, we discover new building kits, from detailed plastic models to advanced robotics kits. Yet, for many of us nothing beats the plastic, stud-covered bricks. Though LEGO remains the undisputed king of plastic bricks, interesting kits are available from Best-Lock and Mega Bloks. And recently, I discovered the challenges of working with Nanoblocks from Japanese toy company Kawada. Nanoblocks are one-eighth the size of standard blocks. Following standard plans, the resulting models are incredibly small. The real joy of bricks, however, isn’t in following a plan designed by someone else. Completing a Taj Mahal or Empire State Building model feels like a huge accompl...

Math Mark (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley December 5, 2014 Deadline January 2015 Issue In 2013, California began phasing out the algebra requirement for eighth grade students. Math and science requirements have been reduced in Texas and several other states that followed California’s lead. This is the wrong path, especially for Central Valley schools that have extreme achievement gaps among socioeconomic groups. In 2013, some social advocates argued that the algebra and science graduation requirements disproportionately penalized poor and minority students. Instead of reducing our standards for middle and high school completion, our schools should have developed better math and science education in our elementary schools. I fear the choices made a year ago will lead to more economic isolation for the Central Valley and similar regions. Cutting math requirements might make graduation easier, but it also limits the future opportunities for our youn...

English: Flowchart example of calculating factorial N ( N! ). (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley Aug 4, 2014 Deadline September 2014 Issue Think, Code, Solve: Programming as Career Skill “Until I had to code it, I didn’t understand how many perspectives there are.” This spring, a group of my statistics students attempted to model the return on investment for various degrees at several colleges. To develop their model, they had to ask themselves what is “value” and how would they measure “return” for those students not seeking financial wealth. Developing their computational model, they learned more about what college provides society. Creating variables and functions, collecting data and creating output, the task of creating a computer program opened up new ways of considering the question these students sought to answer. Was a degree from one college better than the same degree from another school? Was one degree better than another? If you want...

Online education is an accommodation to life's realities. For years I denied that online education was in many ways inferior to physical campuses. But, now that I'm working at a research university, my views are evolving. There simply are things that online education cannot do. Denying the differences, the strengths and weaknesses of various "locations" of education, can lead us to become promoters of either online or physical campuses. We should instead admit the space in which an institution exists matters. I once argued that online degrees awarded by leading universities could improve a regional economy. Now, I admit that the most a handful of degrees can do is improve the lives of a fraction of residents. A quick tangent: most online degrees aren't from leading universities. I've taught in an online program at a regional university and online was not equivalent to the on-campus degree. I don't blame the instructors who did all they could to ma...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley July 9, 2012 Deadline August 2012 Issue The Teacher’s Pet: Computers Grade Homework While technology long ago replaced human grading of multiple-choice exams, with the familiar “machine gun” rattle of Scantron machines heard in schools around the globe, few teachers expected software to start grading student essays. Early this year a research paper was published by Mark Shermis, dean of the University of Akron’s College of Education. Co-authored with two graduate students, the paper went unnoticed until it was reposted on in the New York Times and featured on National Public Radio this summer. This report, “Contrasting State-of-the-Art Automated Scoring of Essays,” compared nine software-based systems for grading student papers. The researchers found, “By and large, the scoring engines did a good of replicating the mean scores for all of the data sets.” Surprisingly, software-calculated grades matched the grades teachers would have assigned...

There are colleges and universities moving towards 120-semester-unit bachelor's degrees, down from 132 or more in many cases. Others are seeking ways to offer "accelerated" degrees in three years instead of four. Of course, the not-so-secret truth is that many students take much longer than four years to graduate as it is — for a variety of reasons. Nationally, the four-year graduation rate from our state and regional public universities is 31 percent, according to Jeff Selingo, editorial director for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Private universities graduate a slight majority of their undergraduates, 53 percent, "on schedule" based on their degree plans. Consider the following example, which is representative of graduation at state institutions nationally: June 11, 2012. — Middle Tennessee State University is making efforts to increase its graduation rate, but still just over half its students are completing college within six years. According to ...

Those of us specializing in new media, digital composition, writing technology or whatever we might call our courses and research projects sometimes fall into the same idealistic fad-think as tech prognosticators. Remember interactive fiction? Our students don't. SecondLife? Not a single one of my university students has seen it or cares to see it. The list of gone and forgotten technologies seems endless. This week I made a reference to MySpace, something wildly popular only seven years ago among my composition students. Turns out, the MySpace of today is unpopular and doesn't even resemble the old version I knew. LiveJournal? Yahoo Groups? Don't even try to explain Usenet newsgroups or Internet Relay Chat. Remember AltaVista? GeoCities? Tripod? My students don't. In 1992, I operated a Fidonet BBS, first with WildCat and then RoboBoard. Boardwatch was a thick magazine. Internet meant dial-up at 2400 or 9600 baud. Does anyone say "baud rate" today? ...

This fall, I resorted to using "anti-plagairism" tools for the first time in at least six years. One reason for this is that what I had been teaching at the University of Minnesota didn't lend itself to plagiarism. My technical writing students had to design a new toy or board game, create a prototype, and develop a product pitch. It's hard to steal another person's LEGO project that uses randomly selected bricks. However, teaching a literature class I found that students either had problems with understanding citation norms or they simply assumed an instructor wouldn't check to determine if a passage was a copy-paste effort. I learned this is a great reason to have two mandatory drafts before a final paper, too. My department head and other colleagues were supportive and I'm now working on a reusable lesson module that will address citations. Student don't quite grasp that simply because you can copy-paste doesn't mean it is acceptable. ...

Over on Slashdot, the following question has 165 comments in under ten hours: Ask Slashdot: Is E-Learning a Viable Option? - Slashdot Once again, we should remind ourselves that technology and other materials depend on the teacher's ability to use those tools wisely. Technology alone is never a panacea. Also, technology does come with its issues. Students working online, either at home or in class, can and do get distracted. We all do. It's hard for me not to skip over to check the latest headlines or skim science news RSS feeds. Do you really expect students to be disciplined? Technology, used wisely, offers amazing new potentials. But, I've seen what happens when a teacher doesn't realize Twitter and Facebook have become the favorite topics of the class period. Ideally, we teach students to focus. That might be with a book or with an iPad, but focus matters.

For the last few weeks I have been eagerly waiting to start preparing online course shells related to my new university post. Unfortunately, I still do not have access to the Blackboard servers used by the university. The delay, I am told, has something to do with the HR department. The odd part of that explanation is that I do have access to the other online services to which the university subscribes. As with many smaller colleges and universities, the information technology at this university is contracted out to specialists. I believe the Blackboard services are subscribed to directly via Blackboard, while email and website services are hosted by other companies. Currently, the university email and calendar system is on a Novell GroupWise hosted service, while website and intranet servers running Microsoft SharePoint involve yet another service provider. I don't know if HR and other departments farm out IT to yet more companies, but I wouldn't be surprised. When you create ...

People have asked me (okay, two people) what "Poet Ponders" is meant to be. What is my purpose? I now will attempt to clarify what makes "Poet Ponders" different from my blogs on rhetoric or writing. "Poet Ponders Pedagogy" is meant to address the role technology plays within the science and art of education. This is not a blog for general political rants, thoughts on the latest fiction, or photos of my cats. This blog is a place to explore how teaching and learning are affected by hardware and software. As a teacher, how does technology shape my experiences and those of my students? We have moved beyond the early "Digital Age" and through the "Interactive Web 2.0" trends. Now, our students occupy the "Social Media Age" and the Internet is much more than e-mail and the World Wide Web. Writing has been affected by Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and dozens of other "quick" media. These technologies enforce a brevity wit...

http://chronicle.com/article/Blind-Students-Demand-Access/125695 I have argued that online courses are not equivalent to traditional spaces and often are more of a barrier than an accommodation for students with special needs. I remain skeptical that online spaces can be made flexible enough to accommodate all students. Nor, honestly, do I believe it is right of universities to suggest to many disabled students that online courses are somehow better for them. In the case of blind students, clearly the online spaces aren't working as planned. For students with limited mobility, maybe online is a good alternative, but I found them less engaging and harder to comprehend. Right now, we don't consider the pedagogical implications carefully enough, but I also understand the rush to online spaces is an economic necessity for some institutions. Since I have difficulty with mobility as well as some cognitive differences, my views of online education are biased. I like the conven...