Dissertation News

This should have been a slow week, and I had expected to do a good bit of blogging, but it didn't work out. The best part of the week, though, is that I submitted my dissertation. I should be defending in the next couple of weeks.

Let's hope that works out okay!

Teaching First-Year Students

Dr. Nicole Carr (Sociology) led a wonderful roundtable discussion today on Teaching First-Year College Students. Over a dozen USA faculty participated in the discussion, covering a variety of issues from attendance to strategies for identifying at-risk students to determining where to draw the line between nurturing and nannying.

The best indicator (to me) that things were going well was that the time for the session to end came and went, but the discussion never lost steam. About fifteen minutes later, one person got up to leave and another followed, but the conversation still continued for at least another five minutes.

As the organizer of the event, I kept wondering if I should announce that regrettably our time was up, and that we must now end this wonderful discussion. But instead I decided that this useful and valuable conversation should not be thwarted by something so mundane and artificial as a clock. I also decided that after it did come to an end, that I would use this space to try to continue the conversation.

Teaching first-year students is very important to the success of this (or any) university, and it is an important conversation that needs to involve more than the dozen or so faculty members whose schedules allowed them to attend this particular session.

Therefore I invite anyone who reads this post to reply using the comment button below and then return later and view others’ comments and possibly even respond to them. And who knows, we might even be able to start a larger conversation that will help us all improve our success with first-year students.

Bakhtin, Dialogism, and This Week’s Theory Tuesday Discussion

This week I had the distinct pleasure of giving the Theory Tuesday talk at USA’s College of Education. The title of my talk was “Bakhtin, Dialogism, and a Novel Approach to Interaction,” and it focused on how Mikhail Bakhtin’s thought can be applied to how we think about delivering instruction online. And while my research deals mostly with Bakhtin’s concept of novelness, the majority of my talk dealt with his better known concept of dialogism.

The term “dialogism” is often misunderstood to simply mean “concerning dialogue.” It certainly does have many similarities with “dialogue,” and you could say that most forms of dialogue would be considered dialogic. However, when the word “dialogic” (or “dialogism”) is used in most academic/theoretical discussions, the Bakhtinian sense of the word is usually invoked, and it is important to point out that dialogism goes well beyond two people talking and essentially includes any form of two-way semantic interchange so that it can be between speakers, but also between texts or even within texts, as well as between readers and texts.

One way to think about it is as a kind of interactive textuality, and by that I am invoking Roland Barthes's concept of "Text" (as opposed to a "work"—a work sits on a library shelf, whereas a Text comes alive in the mind of the reader), so that, in this sense, dialogism happens when there is interaction between the reader and the text. Of course the marks on the page don't change, but the play of signifieds generated by those marks does change in the experience or consciousness of the reader. I should also note that we should be thinking of "texts" here in the Derridean sense that any collection of signifiers is a text: it doesn't have to just be words on a page.

The important thing, however, is that a strong understanding of dialogism can help us rethink how we deliver the “texts” that constitute our teaching practice that can fundamentally alter and improve how we teach and how students learn.

More on Michael Wesch’s Video Work

A week or two ago, I posted links to three videos by anthropologist Michael Wesch that examine issues regarding how computers and the Internet have fundamentally altered how we handle and confront information, and are therefore fundamentally altering how we think and even know. One of those videos, A Vision of Students Today, directly addresses the effect this has on today’s college students.

This week, Wesch has written a blog post that addresses some of the criticisms he has received about the film. His response, Clarifications on “A Vision…,” is well worth the brief time required to read it.

Also on his blog this week is another response to the video that was originally posted as a comment to his clarification post. It is entitled “A Vision of Professors Today (by Sandra).” It too is well worth the read.

Thoughts on Using PowerPoint

When most people think of learning how to use PowerPoint, they want to learn about how to use it with a “bang,” how to make people marvel at their ability to do the fancy things, almost as if their presentation is about the coolness and spectacle of advanced PowerPoint rather than whatever it is they are actually there to talk about (of course, no one in the audience will know what is being said because of being so distracted by the bangs…).

My take on PowerPoint, however, is a bit different. I believe that PowerPoint is a tool that should be used to help keep your lecture or presentation on track, both to you as teacher and to your students. Presentations should be straightforward and simple with as few bells and whistles as are necessary to communicate your message. Beyond that, the bells and whistles are at best distracting and are, more commonly, annoying.

PowerPoint is just a tool. It won’t magically make you a better teacher. And if you get too caught up in its bells and whistles, it could well make you worse.

There are several drawbacks to PowerPoint, and I’d like to briefly discuss one of those here (I will discuss the others at a later date).

The first drawback of using PowerPoint is what I like to call “PowerPointization.” This phenomenon first pervaded the business culture around ten years ago, and now it is taking over academia. It is the tendency to reduce everything to bulleted points. Of course, that is probably a good thing for advertizing, but in academia, we are supposed to value the complexity, the wonder, the nuance of knowledge and ideas. But our students (and often our administrators) want things in bullets so that they can read them quickly, just get to the main “point.”

The problem is that very little in the real world that is worth teaching or learning at or above the college level is fixed or objective or reducible to bulleted lists or translatable to PowerPoint. Yet we do it every day in our classes because this little software tool practically forces us to do it.

One of the best takes on this phenomenon was done several years ago by Peter Norvig, who took the liberty of putting “The Gettysburg Address” into PowerPoint. Norvig also has a nice companion essay about the making of the presentation that is well worth reading.