Monthly Archives: June 2008

Reading Sophomore Portfolios

By IRIS Posted on by

This morning was the first of three that I’ll spend sitting in a room with 35 or so faculty members reading portfolio after portfolio.* Or rather, the faculty read through portfolio after portfolio while I gave up on ever reading that quickly and just got through as many as I could. And now my legs are sore from being tense all morning…. nerves and all. It’s rather intimidating to join a group of faculty and participate as a novice in an activity they do all the time, and to know that every portfolio you read will be read again by one of them, and to wonder how you can possibly say something constructive to a student in a couple of sentences especially when you’re struggling to come up with a cohesive sense of why you think they should pass or not, and to sit there wishing you’d brought a dictionary because spelling just isn’t your thing and there’s no spell-check built into these pens and sheets of paper and you’re critiquing writing, for goodness sake, so the students are likely to be really ticked off if the person evaluating their writing can’t even spell…

And so, my legs are sore.

So why did I volunteer for this? I mean, I’d done it once before. I knew I’d sit there with pen poised over the blue evaluation form and dread having to write to the student who’s academic career will be shaped in some small part by what I write. I knew I’d read at half the speed of my fellow portfolio readers. I knew all these things, but I also knew that if I chickened out, I’d kick myself. This is, after all, one of the only times I get to see the results of the work I do with students. Even more than that, it’s one of the only ways I’d ever get to read enough of my students’ work to get a sense of the patterns of successes and failures in underclassmen’s writing, use of outside sources, and argument structure. It’s also a rare opportunity to learn about faculty standards as they’re applying those standards. And you know, it’s a beautiful thing to watch experts glance over a random sample of writing and pull out patterns of writing indicative of the student’s writing ability over all.

So, as we all sat there norming our reading by evaluating some sample portfolios as a group, I also began the process of recalibrating my expectations for student work at the Sophomore level and listening for clues about what might be expected at the Junior level. For example, I learned again what a difficult project it is for college students to learn what a conclusion really is in a paper, and how to manage it effectively. I saw students learning to negotiate tone and voice and just how, exactly, to manage other people’s words in with your own.

And so I’ll be going back tomorrow and the next day as we plow through another 400 or so portfolios together. I’m not looking forward to the aching legs by the end of the week, but I am looking forward to coming through the experience with a better sense of what students can do by their second year in college. As I said to one of my co-workers, I hate reading the portfolios, but once I’m finished I love having done it.

* More info on the portfolio.

Hey Look! Things Look Different Around Here

By IRIS Posted on by

I’ve been royally tired of my blog theme for a long time. So tonight, to distract myself from various things I didn’t want to be thinking about, I decided to choose a new theme and apply all my theme tweaks to it. So here it is, my first draft. Things might change for a while, and I still have to test the tweak that I’ll always think of as “Walt’s tweak” (the one that Dorothea and Steve worked so hard to help me apply to my last theme), but I already like this a whole lot better.

One thing that confuses me is my sidebar. Every once in a while it refuses to sit in its natural spot off to the left and migrates, for no known reason, down to the bottom of the page. I don’t think it’s far enough south to have warmer weather down there, so I’m at a bit of a loss. If anyone has any ideas, I’m open to hearing them.

Update: Reducing the sidebar width from 25% to 20% seems to have done the trick. Yay! But I’m still open to suggestions for other things to change. This is still pretty much an out-of-the-box theme.

Update 2: Grrr… Walt’s Tweak kills the blog in IE. Will have to investigate sometime when better coding minds than mine can help me.

Glad to have gone – Glad to be home

By IRIS Posted on by

I’m just home from a NITLE workshop on Moodle that was held in Tacoma, Washington. For being off the beaten path compared to other conferences and workshops I’ve gone to (I took notes on everything from upgrade paths and sysadmin tools to statistical analyses of pedagogical approaches and web 3.0), this workshop was surprisingly enjoyable to attend. Of course, a lot of that had to do with the hotel NITLE arranged for us to – er- experience. It’s the first time I’ve stayed in a hotel that operated under the impression that it was a modern art museum. (I’ve got more pictures in my Flickr stream.) The University of Puget Sound is also a beautiful campus, so going there for meeting every day didn’t feel like a chore at all.

I was a little less thrilled with the fact that NITLE sent out directions that landed us all on the wrong street as we hunted for the hotel, and that they kept promising more detailed information about parking that never came… but the hotel, university, and food were all top notch. Oh, and most of the sessions were pretty good, too.

I’ll write something substantive about the sessions later, but for right now, here’s an overview of my flights there and back. I got to the Minneapolis airport only to find that the parking ramp was full, so I had to park at the out-lier terminal that’s a mile or so away. Getting back main terminal involves lots of walking, a train, a tram, and lots more walking. In fact, it takes so long that the flight was delayed by nearly an hour as we waited for most of the passengers to make their way from their cars to the gate. Once in the air, I was treated to a most unusual family dynamic behind me. The family was made up of two kids (3-ish and 7-ish), two parents, and two grandparents (the mother’s parents). The kids behaved just fine. The mother, though, must have asked 4 or 5 times how much longer we’d be in the air. She also wondered, repeatedly, what time it was, and what time that would be in Seattle time, in Minneapolis time, and Seattle time again… She also did that thing that kids do where she’d say “Mom… mom… mom… mom” until her mom would respond. As icing on the cake, she turned to her 7-ish daughter and said (and I quote), “You’ve had a long turn with the iPod. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it at all yet. I think it’s mommy’s turn now.” Excuse me while I go find my jaw…

The flight back was much better, and even arrived 2o minutes early! This was greeted with much joy by my near neighbors on the flight, as we had been treated to the non-stop chatter of a 13-year-old kid flying without the benefit of parents. I didn’t mind so much. I grew up with lots of siblings and can pretty easily tune out chatter and read a book. My neighbors, though, were a little less skilled at that, and a little more amazed at the capacity of a 13-year-old to talk for 3 hours, absolutely non-stop.

Oh, and because I find this amusing, here’s how I spent my time since leaving the hotel today: 45 minute drive to the airport, 45 minute walk to the gate (including the time it takes to check in and go through security), 1 hour wait for flight, 3 hour flight, 1 hour trip from the gate to my car (which, you’ll remember, is a walk, a tram, a train, and a walk away from my terminal… thank goodness I didn’t have any checked luggage), 45 minute drive home, finished off by a half hour cuddle with my neglected kitty and then a half-hour session spent writing this over-long account of the least important aspects of my trip to Tacoma.

I promise, my next post will say something substantive, like maybe a discussion of community and how I’ve come to see that as Moodle’s main challenge.

Wikipedia Angst Still Alive and Well

By IRIS Posted on by

I was reading The Sheck Spot this morning and thinking “Yes! My thoughts almost exactly!” when I remembered the surprising and recurring sub-theme at the Midwest Library Technology Conference:* Wikipedia angst. Wikipedia was mentioned in the first keynote and then became the dominant discussion theme during the question period. Then it resurfaced as a discussion topic during the question period after the second keynote. And it wasn’t that the discussion about Wikipedia was bad or inappropriate, it’s just that I was surprised at how little I’d expected that, of all things, to be the recurring theme after talks centered around how to leverage the power of millions of social web participants, how to develop systems that learn from and supplement user behavior, and the future trends in technology.

Part of my surprise stems from my own views on the tool, which go something like this: a) Students will use it and telling them not to won’t help because b) it’s not all bad, and students know that so they’ll disregard other things I say if I say that. What they don’t know is c) how it fits into the wider world of reference sources and d) how reference sources can and should be used appropriately in scholarly work. And inasmuch as e) reference sources are best used to point you to other sources, f) Wikipedia is becoming a better and better source as more links to authoritative sources end up in its citation lists. Sure, there’s always the caveat that g) vandalism and flat out stupidity still exist there. But if you’re using Wikipedia as a reference source, with the idea that it should point you to more authoritative sources, then these things won’t have a huge effect on your learning anyway.

Another part of my surprise probably exists because of the company I keep. Libloggers seem to have gotten bored with writing about Wikipedia some time ago, which isn’t to say that there isn’t still good stuff to write about it. It just fell out of vogue as a blog topic. So in an environment where I don’t hear much about the tool every day, it’s easy to think that people in general don’t talk about it, which just isn’t true. Libloggers are only a sliver of the profession, and it’s a sliver that gets bored with some topics very easily.

So while I was a little surprised at the force of Wikipedia Angst in evidence at the conference, I’m still unclear about whether I’m uncomfortable with that theme for good reason. Is it glib to say that we should just get over it already? Is it dismissive to wonder if this discussion is a little behind the times? Have I just decided that this is one of the many things I can’t change and must therefore work with, and has this caused me to effectively throw up my hands and decide not to worry about it? If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s that if the majority is worried or fearful, it behooves me to take that seriously and see whether my lack of worry is, in fact, founded. And on this issue, I still haven’t decided.

* And yes, I realize I haven’t written that conference up, which is a shame because I learned really cool things. I hope to get to it sometime… I really do.

New Phone!

By IRIS Posted on by

I arrived this morning to find a brand new phone on my desk at work. Or rather, I found a new phone manual on my desk, wondered why somebody would leave me a manual, paged through it for a bit, and then realized that the phone sitting there was not my old phone, but a new one, complete with caller ID, conference calling, and the ability to go hands free!

Finally, I’ll be able to tell if my in-coming calls are likely to be questions, random calls from people not affiliated with the college, my co-workers, or (horror of horrors) a vendor. Finally, I’ll be able to pull more than one person in on my calls. Finally, I’ll be able to participate in those webinars that make you call in and participate online without choosing between full participation and a spasm in my neck.

This kicked me out of my Monday Mood for the rest of the day. Well… this and the first sunshine in weeks, and a glorious walk with co-workers to lunch, and the fact that it’s the last day of finals here. All in all, I guess it was a pretty good day.