Accidental Pedagogy

Music - Vienna Teng

I went to listen to and see Vienna Teng last night at the Birchmere in Alexandria Va. First up, what a privilege it is to have such a great venue just down the road from me. I feel really spoiled.

Vienna Teng herself did not disappoint, either. For those of you who haven't heard her, you should go on over to her home page or MySpace page and give her a listen. Or if you're really keen there is a streaming version of a concert she did in Cleveland at Folk Alley.She is of course a computer science grad from Stanford who worked for a while for Cisco before going into music full time. In honor of her past employment my colleague Danny and I spent the week making up (very bad) songs from the perspective of a network engineer ("You DNS'd the router of my heart").

Teng is one of those artists whose speaking voice I really love. I could listen to her all night. But her singing doesn't disappoint. There is a luminous sort of quality to her songs and her singing that really draws you in. She is backed up by, of all things, a viola, a violin and some pretty nifty and unusual percussion. From where I was sitting it looked like the percussion player was playing alternately a small bird cage and a cardboard box. Whatever it was it was used to great effect. And I never thought I would want to give a standing ovation after an extended cello and violin duet riff but I did.

The highlight of the concert was Vienna's performance of her apartment hunting song 1 bed/I bath in the middle of which she launched into a very jazzy sampling of Simon and Garfunkel's Cecilia (the good bit) which they then carried on through the song in a round. The CD version of that song is unfortunately much less fun.

My one criticism of Teng's music flows out of that somewhat. There is obviously huge potential there but she needs to cut loose a bit more and add those layers of depth and variation that will make her music so much more than just pretty. Part of the symptom of this, and probably part of the cause , is her songwriting.  Her songs don't really hit you upside the head in the way that I really think they should. I really look forward to her working on communicating the stories and emotions better, to the point where her writing matches the huge talent of her singing.

Harvard report on valuing and improving teaching

Theda Skocpol (a pretty darn impressive sociologist whose work on revolutions and the welfare system I cut my teeth reading) is now Dean at Harvard and is on a quest to improve undergraduate teaching there. She is focusing on changing the institutional culture so that it offers greater rewards for better teaching. The committee that she heads put out a report this last January which makes for some interesting reading.

I especially liked the way that they refer to the "civic culture" of teaching. And some of it is pretty heady stuff. The report makes a pretty blunt argument for example that leadership matters and that the President and Dean need to get out there and lead the change. The report also says that tenured faculty should lead by example and show the same commitment to teaching and teaching excellence that they ask of junior colleagues and graduate students.

The report lists 18 initiatives or activities that the college should undertake in order to improve teaching. They are a fairly familiar list to those of us in faculty development or academic technology. The ho hummness of this list is a bit disappointing, it would have been nice to see some more creative sorts of activities (given their endowment they have far fewer of the limitations that we that toil in the provinces struggle under). There isn't a great deal about technology either. Perhaps we shouldnt ask too much too soon.

But despite all this its a very impressive goal that they are setting for themselves and it will be an interesting process to watch. If they succeed it will also be an impressive precedent. My hope is that they will asses their progress with the plan with the same degree of frank honesty that they appeared to have in developing the plan. This to my mind is too often what higher education lacks. A friend of mine in higher ed in North Carolina often jokes that the motto of all university administrators is the inverse of the NC motto "it is better to seem than to be." Harsh criticism but with more than a ring of truth to it.

Non-use of podcasts

Even though I am on the editorial board of the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT) I got the link to this article on podcasting from Stephen Downes. The authors look at a single geoscience class where lectures were supplemented by audio podcasts of the lectures being made available afterwards through the course management system.

They found that relatively few students made use of of the podcasts mostly because they didn't see the need to do so. When they did they did so because events such as a transportation strike meant that they had missed lectures. Although it is a small case study this confirms my suspicions that students don't listen to podcasts. In this case there also seemed to be a fairly high degree of confusion among the students about how they could access the recordings. A third of the students in the class didn't know that you could download the recordings either to a player or to a computer or flash drive.

In general terms I think that there is a real problem with using technologies like this simply as a delivery mechanism. It's ok as far as it goes and it does add to convenience but its certainly not innovative and doesn't do didley for student learning. If we really want to get serious about podcasting as an innovative and transformative medium (and maybe we don't) we need to explore creative ways to do it. This could include:

• Students creating podcasts themselves as a meaningful part of the curriculum
• Podcasts replacing lectures or simple content transmission (with seat time being used for more interactive activities)
• Podcasting being used where audio is important rather than text eg language instruction or music based courses
• Podcasting as part of a larger multi-media essay produced by students
• Podcasting or making digital audio as part of a research methods course and creating digital audio of interviews

Even at Oxford, you aren't safe on Facebook

One of the things I have been thinking about for a while is how we can educate students better about privacy and how best to manage their participation in social software sites like MySpace and Facebook such that what they post there they doesn't cause them long term harm eg losing them a place at graduate school or a potential job. A lot of sororities etc are starting to offer seminars on this but it would be cool to get a larger conversation going, a conversation that might include broader discussion of what sorts of expectations of privacy we should have and how technology constantly blurs those lines.

Anyhow, from Graham Attwell's Wales Wide Web a link to a newspaper article about how students at Oxford are getting busted by university authorities for indiscretions (eg being drunk and partying) the only evidence for which seems to be on Facebook.

And talking of Facebook. They are being sued by another company who claims that the founder (who used to work for them) stole the basic code and business model. Should be interesting. If the case is successful, or even a bit successful, it should have a pretty big impact on Facebooks market value.

Creative podcasting

Last Friday I went to a Technology Across the Curriculum workshop being run in the Composition Department here at George Mason University. I heard about a number of cool things going on. One of these was a reminder of the wonderful work being done by Jessica Matthews here in the Comp Department. Last year she did a great project with students writing scripts for podcasts and then producing those podcasts as part of their comp course. She talked about one especially good one where the students did a podcast of a mock trial for a student accused of plagiarism. They did it in a mock Judge Judy sort of format with the "faculty" accuser and the student "defender" and lots of crowd noise.

A great way also to teach students to think critically about plagiarism plus her whole project is a neat example of a way to do podcasting that is creative and not just faculty dumping content into a podcast which seems mostly to be what happens.

Music - Michelle Malone

I went to see Michelle Malone at Jammin Java in Vienna. The audience was a little flat (me included, I cant go see music on a school night) but she was wonderful. She sure can play that guitar. I would have preferred more faster bluesy numbers but it was still an amazing display. And her occasional Georgia tinged comments were and additional treat. After one especially lively song she told us very matter of factly in her lovely drawl that her guitar needed tuning as she'd "spanked that gal right out o' whack."

The problem with the "nothing to hide" argument about privacy

An interesting (and mercifully short - unusual for law reviews) article by Daniel Solove of GWU about the  faulty assumptions underlying the "I have nothing to hide therefore its ok" response to invasions of privacy.

Abstract

In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: I've got nothing to hide. According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

Gapminder and Hans Rosling

This has been all over the Internets and I finally took a look. Wow. This is a video of Hans Roslings talk at TED in Moneterey this year. The point of his talk (packed into an informationally dense but very enjoyable) 20 minutes or so was that we need a good understanding of statistics and a way to display them in ways that tell stories and that show whats going on underneath. Often this involves questioning some assumptions we have.

Its a great talk and Gapminder is a great tool. I played around with it a bit which depressed me thoroughly as I mapped out changes in Zimbabwean life expectancy between 1975 and now. Zimbabwe is the country in which I was born and grew up. The decline is nothing short of precipitous. Life expectancy for women is currently at 34 years and they expect it to drop into the 20s before the end of the decade.Its really awful and sobering.

Trying to shift gears.

The Gapminder tool is pretty exciting and it will be great to see how this and other sorts of data manipulation and visualization tools can really change the way our students use and understand data.  I am especially interested in this as one of the things I am currently working on is thinking about ways to integrate technology into research methods courses. In the Technology Across the Curriculum program at George Mason we will likely be starting a new TAC cohort  focused on research in the Fall. We will have a group of faculty from a range of departments, all of whom teach the mandated research methods course to undergraduates. Over the Fall and Spring we will have fortnightly lunch seminars, each of which is focused on a kind of technology used in research and how this can be integrated into the course. We will also have a few sessions focused on rethinking methods courses and  pedagogies that might work well.

So far the list of technologies I have for us to look at is the following:

• New search and bibliographic tools (eg Zotero)
• Time and task management software  (eg GTD or Basecamp)
• Datasharing (eg DIVA)
• Content analysis tools (eg NVIVO)
• New frontiers in data analysis – guest from ICPSR or Cyberinfrastructure Commission
• Social software and research (eg CiteULike, del.icio.us)
• Using digital video in research
• Online survey tools
• Mind maps

Any additional suggestions are always appreciated.

DRM Tee Shirts

Via Boing Boing. I already ordered one of these

Choosing a good chart

From The extreme Presentation Blog a nifty chart on how to choose a good chart type depending on what data you have and what you're trying to do. Available in nifty pdf download. Also available elesewhere on the site, said chart translated into Japanese, Portuguese and other languages.