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June 28, 2005
moo in mormonville
from dooce:
“You volunteered to do this,” I said back to him, nodding, because that seems like a logical way to spend a Saturday afternoon, volunteering to dress up like a cow to hand out free cheese to strange, religious white people.
it might be that one has to see for one's self.
Posted by ttobryan at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)
June 27, 2005
(& i picked this one b/c it's what the nerds would say. & sometimes i are one, or at least once in a while i know what they're talking about)
Posted by ttobryan at 10:30 AM | Comments (1)
June 22, 2005
CSS week 5
all day yesterday i wore my teacher-hat (okay, it's invisible, metaphorical, etc.) & graded summaries & bibliographies & wrote margin- and end-comments & calculated grades & e-mailed invididual students & e-mailed the class & updated my roster (again) & planned out their weekend peer-review activity & wrote out patient instructions for using features on the site & typed "commas & periods go inside quotation marks" a good thousand more times & reviewed heaps of good paper topics & a few that look like they'd really like to crash in a firey tangle of half-formed intentionality, but there's only so much listening you can ask of them when they never, ever, even once in their entire lives, will hear you. maybe i should record an audio hello and post it somewhere, link it to the site so that at least i have a voice. maybe they'd like me better speaking in the one that they invent inside their heads. the picture's small, obscure, uninformative. i wonder if i look grandmotherly in their heads, or hippie-lesbian, or 24 and inexperienced? i don't suppose it matters much; they take me seriously or suffer the consequences.
::swings power around like a spiked ball on a heavy chain:: <-- ::is far more likely to hurt self this way than any long-distance course participants::
next lesson: how does peer review & commentary work between peers who've never met each other either & don't have gradebook clout to make their suggestions externally-validated as consequential? 15 out of 20 have posted the drafts due 10 hours ago. i've just sent a nagging note out to the delinquent 5 (2 of whom have been delinquent for enough assignments lately that i'm starting to wonder why i'm bothering to keep nagging, since currently i seem to be the only one in these particular exchanges bothering with much of anything at all). we'll see, we'll see.
in the meantime, juggling: i must convince myself that ths writing i'm supposed to be doing for the last of my graduate courses (eeek!) is both relevant & possible; skirting one possibility or another has drug this out for months already & it's starting to make me sick of myself, frankly.
Posted by ttobryan at 07:49 AM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2005
"stop talkin' about golf or i'm gonna kick somebody's ass."
--cgb
Posted by ttobryan at 01:50 PM | Comments (0)
June 17, 2005
CSS week 4
so how's the online class going?
it's ambiguous, actually, in the true sense of the word: i like it, and it still makes me uncomfortable. i'm having some great communication with some of my students, and feel like i've lost/am totally not here for others. i'm becoming even more dependent on expressing myself in text than i was before, which in my real life is starting to feel like a serious handicap, but it's a writing class. if not here, nowhere. i'm asking a lot of them, and feeling bad for pushing and good for challenging. i'm still not sure i'm asking enough; it's hard to gauge time when the class is always "in session" but there's no face-time, no casual conversation, no chance for them to overhear each others' great and crap ideas if i don't announce, direct, assign their attention (and even after doing so i have far less of an idea whether they've actually gone than i'd have about whether they were listening or not when they're before me in the room).
i get enough e-mails and IMs to feel useful & teacherly, but not nearly enough to feel burdened at all; i'm always thinking of things i want them all to know and then forgetting again before i've managed to add yet another e-mail to the baragge. i was smart enough to figure out early on that if i was going to be e-mailing frequent updates and instructional moments, i should archive those on the site so they could check back and keep up with whatever might get lost, without having to all depend on their own organizational skills in that capacity.
i'm starting to learn who's who and what sort of things to expect, at least from some of them; i have some frequent contributors and semi-frequent AIM-pingers, some worriers who e-mail me long, twisted questions about what seem to me like simple things. i like when they do this: it's a chance for me to be more articulate, to address them individually, to be a person out here with ideas and questions too, not just the Source of Assignments and Grades, which is what i too-much feel like, especially in what i project as the minds of the ones who aren't talking, aren't consistently doing the work, are checked out even while their names still on the roster swear that they're signed in.
i've managed to annoy dustin 2 or 3 times already, but after i scolded him for sounding like a whiner in the first e-mail he sent me about it, i've gotten nothing but polite inquiries and comments from him, and we've engaged in a productive discourse about some of his questions and concerns; i figure if he comes out of this not entirely thrilled with me, but has learned to think twice about the tone he's sending when he sits down to send e-mails, especially in a professional capacity, which at the moment he's doing and i hope he remembers to keep, then this has already been valuable for him, and i'm a success. i screwed up yesterday, failing katie on an assignment i'd forgotten i'd agreed to extra time on because she'd been having trouble getting a copy of the textbook, and she was perfectly kind about reminding me of what i'd said, which of course i remembered as soon as she said it, and i changed the grade at once.
overall, i'm a little out of the rhythm of it--sometimes i'm a few days later in getting back to them about work than would really be most helpful to guide the next thing they're supposed to be doing--but i'm getting there. i'm learning, they're learning: i just hope some of what they're learning is about research. if teaching a research class is a classroom instead of a computer lab or library is hard (and i kvetched about that a lot last semester when i did this course in real life), teaching it online to a group of students whose resources i can't imagine--i have a few in town, a few in NYC, one in jersey, one in colorado, one in france, one in turkey, and a few whose locales they've never shared--is a little bit ridiculous. all i'm really doing is gathering online writing-resources for them, outlining assignments for them to test those suggestions on, and commenting, always feeling like i'm doing so belatedly, on the ways they haven't really done what i'm not sure they had any way of knowing they were supposed to do. but i'm giving them lots of graded chances to contribute ideas-only with no formal constraints, and the ones who are leaping in there will do pretty well even if they never do get their MLA citations in order.
the ones who aren't doing it, though... i don't know why they're not doing it; that's what bothers me. it could be that they're slackers, or that they just don't care. it could be that they have more important things to do with their summers, and are planning to re-do this for credit later; it could be that all they need is a graduation credit and they've already calculated out the minimum-contribution they need to put in & that's all they mean to do. but it could be that they don't know what they're supposed to do, and aren't doing it not out of laziness but because they're unaware. and if that's true, it's my fault for not finding a way to make it more clear... even though without them here to talk to, if they don't ping me via one medium or another to ask, i have no way of knowing what's clear and what isn't.
to that effect, i'm trying to put together an early midterm-grade for everybody to hand out early next week (since i'll be away all weekend and the last assignment i'm planning to reckon in is due tonight at 10, or 12, for dustin, since i wasn't awake enough to argue with his bad math when he asked for extra time). maybe seeing ugly letters will spur a few to action. maybe seeing nice ones will relax the others. i feel like it has to have been longer than 4 weeks already, like we've been doing this forever, like we're going to run out of time, and at the same time like we've barely started. a few of them have nothing to their credit on the list at all--but i've talked to all of them. intentions are gliding and soaring, flapping madly about, limping a little--they're all over the globe. we can only wait & see.
Posted by ttobryan at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)