If feel like I must get less email than pretty much everyone I know. Like most of the time when people talk about how much email they get in a day I nod and commiserate and hope they don’t notice that I don’t say “Oh me too!” Maybe something’s wrong with me? Maybe I’m not on enough projects? MAYBE MY STUDENTS DON’T NEED ME??
Not that I want more email, of course. Then I’d never be able to keep up.
Basically, I’m impossible to please.
My Facebook Network
The first week of this MOOC I’m taking has been fascinating. I’m in a class of about 1,000 people from all over the world and (it seems) all levels of experience with Social Networking Analysis, with computers, and with standard English. We watch short video lectures, complete homework assignments (graded by computer programs), and talk to each other on the class forum (where there are also “Community TAs” — I’m not sure how one becomes a Community TA).
Nothing about this format or topic is anything like previous college or graduate school experiences for me. I’ve never done online courses before, I’ve never done computer science or social sciences, I’ve never taken a class with more than 30 people in it, and I’ve never been in a situation where I couldn’t just ask my professor for clarification or help. As it turns out, all of these put together mean that I spent a good portion of the week feeling pretty lost. The lectures and homework were fine. I’ve done those two things before. But really, if I weren’t very used to self-directed learning (I was home schooled until college) and very used to the way college courses work, I’d be really at sea. And, indeed, it looks like several people in the forums are very much at sea.
It seems like this course, at least, requires some pretty firm previous knowledge about how to navigate a course. Knowing to look at the syllabus (and find useful things like the existence of homework, for example…), knowing to pay close attention not just to the blurb instructions of the assignment but to read the entire full assignment, reading about how the assignment was going to be graded, etc.
It also seems to assume quite a bit of technical knowledge, most of it pretty basic, but not all of it. Knowing that it’s possible to change file extensions, or that the “#” sign at a beginning of machine-readable text means that the machine isn’t reading those lines, knowing that if you don’t know how to change config files Google will probably be able to tell you, etc. As great as the Community TAs are, they haven’t been very attuned so far to the differing levels of the people asking them questions.
And finally, it turns out that I answer questions for a living, and that I can’t seem to turn that off. If someone’s lost and gets “you’ll need to update the config file to fix that bug”* and the person is still lost, I swing into full librarian mode and write out all the steps in layman’s terms. If they’re still confused, I make a little Jing video. It’s pathological, I know, a hazard of the trade.
*All of us Mac users are having real problems running the software that does the network analysis. We’ve labeled it the Grey Screen of Death, and I spent a couple of hours today trying to figure out what causes it so that we can stop having it happen.
So, I’m taking a MOOC in social network analysis. Last week when I signed up and saw that it started in March I thought “whew, in a while then.” Turns out, this week is March. Who knew?
Anyway, the class started yesterday, and I started being behind yesterday. Today I watched the Day One lecture, which had two quiz questions embedded. And I got them both wrong. So this is going really well so far.
Why am I doing this to myself? Well, three reasons. I want to see what one of these things is like from the inside, I’ve always been kind of fascinated by social network graphs, and I’m curious to see if it’ll help me help students evaluate scholarly work. English scholars are a network, so where are the communities within that network? Interdisciplinary work would also be interesting to be able to graph. Seems like I should be able to find especially influential or well-linked nodes within those graphs.
Who knows if I’ll be able to do that kind of thing by the end of one course (probably not), or if I’ll even make it to the end of the course! But I’ll give it a good ol’ college try.
One of my favorite metaphors for humanistic inquiry is “unpacking.” Sometimes it feels like an over-full suite case springing open, scattering previously unseen clothing and toiletries all over the place and revealing that present that grandma brought for you nestled there in the center. Sometimes it feels like carefully and laboriously picking the infinitely delicate locks on a briefcase, not knowing if what you’ll find inside will be precious or just some long-forgotten trash.
Unpacking means finding and reveling in richness and awe-inspring reality. Facility with unpacking is a tantalizing scholarly goal.
Little wonder, then, that my students balk a bit when I force them away from that goal. During one session where the professor and I were trying to get students to plot the interrelationships of some articles by finding their commonalities (either topic or approach or theoretical underpinnings), one student complained that “it seems like we’re reducing these articles down to their least interesting, most simplistic components.”
And we were, in a way. We were doing the opposite of unpacking. We were packing them carefully into suitcases, shirts on one side and pants on another, with no thought to the color, weave, or provenance of the individual pieces.
Focal Flexibility – by Iris Jastram
It hadn’t occurred to me before that moment how important focal flexibility is — the ability to see a given work in all its richness and unpackable complexity, and also see it as one of a constellation of other works — to be able to plot it dispassionately amongst its peers, and also gaze at its internal universes.
There’s a recurring character in my dreams about work. He’s an independent researcher/hobbyist who’s obsessed with a particular artist. Both the researcher and the object of his obsession are fictional, as far as I know, but the fact that the artist doesn’t exist doesn’t seem to deter this non-existent researcher from being incredibly passionate about the research.
Often in my dreams the researcher is at a microfilm machine. Every once in a while in my dreams he comes to plead his case that we should acquire the definitive index of the artist’s work and of related criticism: Baker’s Index, or just “The Baker’s.” How can we consider ourselves a real library with out The Baker’s? Of course it’s expensive and unfortunately it’s out of print, but that shouldn’t deter us. His own work is crippled without it, and he’s sure many a student has turned away from important research paths for lack of ready access to The Baker’s.
Last night in my dream, I was working at a microfilm machine, and he stood beside me until I finally asked what he needed. He launched into his familiar plea, and I countered (as usual) by reminding him that this is a curricular collection and that we don’t have any course-work related to his beloved artist. Important as the work may be, objectively, it simply doesn’t fall within our collection development policy. He brought over an encyclopedia that had an entry on his artist and showed me how pathetically inadequate that entry was, and the images of the artist’s work were so small that it was impossible to investigate them closely. I showed him ARTstor, and he railed against the fickleness of search.
“Search for ‘Is,’” he instructed.
“Really? Just the word ‘is?’” I asked, but did as he wanted.
Predictably, the results weren’t to his liking.
“What were you hoping for?” I asked.
“I was hoping it would bring back a famous photograph entitled ‘What is he doing, anyway.’ But your stupid search box is just completely unequal to the task, apparently.”
Since it turns out that he knew a lot about that photograph, I showed him the advanced search options only to look over and find that he was sketching out the various search boxes in red pen into the entry for his artist in the reviled encyclopedia.
At this point I stood up and said what I think I’ve been wanting to say to him in all previous dreams: “You are no longer welcome here. Please leave.” He had tested my patience through countless dreams, refused to listen to reason, and was so dismissive of our services and collection that he would rail at me while drawing in our encyclopedias. I’d had enough.
Such a feeling of righteous indignation, of spurned patience ending in entirely justified consequences that, in my dream at least, I had the authority to dispense on the spot. It was wonderful.
I wonder if I’ll ever dream of him again.