As Canadian as Possible... under the circumstances

September 18, 2009

Spotted Cow Press makes history with innovative double espresso book launch

Later this afternoon, Edmonton publisher Spotted Cow Press will make history by launching its latest book simultaneously in two Canadian cities.

What makes this event unique is that Spotted Cow Press will be printing off copies of S. Minsos' novel Squire Davis and the Crazy River in each of these locations on Espresso Book Machines, making this the first "Double Espresso book launch" in history. After a reading by the author, both the University of Alberta Bookstore in Edmonton, owner of one of the very first Espresso Book Machines ever produced, and the Titles bookstore at McMaster University in Hamilton, who acquired their machine more recently, will start printing copies of the book simultaneously for customers to purchase on the spot. Customers at the Titles bookstore will be able to watch the book launch in Edmonton, 3000 km away, via live video.

Spotted Cow Press and the University of Alberta bookstore already made history on this front when it launched (PDF) Twice in a Blue Moon, a new collection of poetry by Joyce Harries, using the Espresso Book Machine on November 15, 2007, which might well be the first launch of a new literary title using the machine. The cutting edge approaches of both Spotted Cow Press and the U of Alberta bookstore are only just now becoming more mainstream with more Espresso machines starting to appear in bookstores such as the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, VT, and with Google announcing just yesterday that it will being to sell copies of over 2 million currently out-of-print book titles via the Espresso Book Machine.

(Here's a PDF link to the Spotted Cow Press press release about this afternoon's event)

If you're interested in following along online, I expect that there will be a few people twittering from each event. Just look for the hashtag #doubleespresso or follow @pjmartin or @MACBookstore on twitter.

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September 7, 2009

Breaking my silence

I've got my head down these days and am working on nothing but my book. I need to take a few moments to say the following:

Even as a non-American, I'm getting a bit freaked out by the rhetoric of the anti-Obama crowd. To me, it's gotten beyond bizarre and is getting plain scary. I would feel even more disheartened if I saw something like this happening in my own country.

This great editorial cartoon makes light of all this, but, really, can people actually think that it's okay to pull their kids out of school so they don't have to hear a message from the leader of their country? That scares me. Of course, those are probably the same people who would be up in arms if they tried to pull the Pledge of Allegiance out of the schools.

I've told my kids that, as non-Americans, they don't need to say the pledge, but that they should be respectful of it. Obama is not their president and this is not their country. I'm happy, though, that they get to watch his speech in school tomorrow. Obama is such a fine example of what is possible when you value education and develop an insatiable curiosity about the entire world. He's the best role model of any world leader that I can recall. I feel very sorry for the children whose parents are removing them from school tomorrow. That narrow-minded action by their parents is teaching them the exact opposite of what education should be about.

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March 10, 2009

Welcome to Canada

Had a wonderful few days in Edmonton where I was giving a paper at the "Transplanting Canada" colloquium put on by the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta. Click here for a PDF of the conference program if you're interested to learn more about what went on there.

It was really great to see such exciting things happening at the U of A these days. There are many new young faculty there and a herd of super-smart graduate students (they travel in herds on the prairies). Meeting many old and new friends from across the country and hearing some really interesting talks made this one of the best conference experiences I have had.

The folks at the CLC who planned the conference thought of everything, by the way, including hiring this guy to greet potential conference goers as they drove in to Canada.

(okay, everything I said above was true except for this last part)

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March 2, 2009

Save Radio 3

Although we don't know for sure what kinds of cuts we'll be seeing at CBC over the next few months, it sounds like cuts are imminent. The mere mention of the potential elimination of CBC Radio 3 by one of the heads of the CBC sent shockwaves through Canada's music scene this past week.

As a Canadian living outside of the country these days, CBC Radio 3 is a lifeline to Canada's music scene. More importantly -- and I speak as a music fan, a scholar and teacher of Canadian culture, and a former musician -- Radio 3 has changed the face of the independent music scene in Canada, allowing people around the world to learn about great Canadian bands and artists to whom they would otherwise never be exposed. CBC Radio 3 makes a contribution to Canadian culture nationally and internationally that far exceeds the investment put in by CBC.

Radio 3 has also been at the cutting edge of podcasting and internet broadcasting for years now and really broke new ground for the CBC. The importance of this cannot be underestimated either. If CBC Radio wants to continue to be seen as current and cutting edge, eliminating CBC Radio 3 would almost guarantee that they would never be thought of in this way again for a long time. Radio 3 really is the success story that the CBC should be looking at as a model for other parts of their operations.

Whether you are a regular listener to Radio 3 or not (if you're not, you should be!!), please take a minute and sign this petition.

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February 23, 2009

Freedom to Read Week

It's Freedom to Read Week in Canada this week. It's interesting to take a look at their list of challenged books to see how many of Canadian literature's most canonical texts are on that list, including Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, Timothy Findley's The Wars, and Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. Censorship at all levels is an ongoing issue. Just this past year, as discussed on this blog, there was a challenge to the presence of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale on the high school curriculum in Ontario.

It's important for us all to speak out against such challenges when they occur, but also to pay attention to the quieter forms of censorship such as when certain books are simply not ordered for school libraries (perhaps we should start protesting when certain books aren't on the shelves!) or even when teachers avoid putting particular books on the syllabus because they don't feel equipped (or paid enough) to handle the reactions that might ensue.

If you start to look through the documented cases of people trying to have particular books pulled from the shelves, you might find your anger and disbelief occasionally turn to laughter. As I was reading through a list of such cases that I found on the Freedom to Read website, I came across this entry:

Gill, John (ed.). New American and Canadian Poetry.

1994—The school board in Sechelt (BC), responding to a parental complaint, removed

this book from student use in Chatelech Secondary School.

Cause of objection—Anthology was said to present an anti-establishment view and to

present sex and four-letter words in a positive light.

Update—The school board decided, following a review, that the book should remain in

the library. The sole copy has since been stolen and not replaced.

These complaints all sound ridiculous to most people and it's easy to dismiss them. But we also cannot be complacent. Our authors deserve to be defended from such actions by all of us. So, the next time you hear of a complaint like this in your town, make sure to call up the school board or library to voice your support for keeping those works on the shelves. And, maybe plan on stopping by the library at a later date just to make sure that book hasn't mysteriously disappeared.

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February 10, 2009

The ultimate economic stimulus, or how to get there from here

As I said on this blog a few weeks back, imagine how powerful an economic stimulus plan this would be for the US:

Bring in a universal health care plan that would

A) have the government, not insurance companies, pay doctors and hospitals set rates for tests and procedures (the "costs" of tests and procedures vary not only from hospital to hospital but depend on which insurance company a hospital or doctor is charging)

B) Provide access to everyone at a much lower cost (due to the huge savings in overhead found by eliminating the middleman)

C) Drastically reduce the crippling premiums that are paid by individuals and employers

Such a plan, though it would bring about layoffs in the insurance industry and hospital billing departments, would free up money currently paid by employers for benefits, allowing them to create new jobs. More importantly, no one would ever hesitate to go into their own business or change jobs simply out of the fear of losing their healthcare coverage. Finally, the worries of tens (hundreds?) of Americans about going bankrupt due to serious illness or injury would be lifted. That would be the stimulus package of all stimulus packages and on its own would radically transform the economy.

This recent article from The New Yorker finds some insight into how Americans might get there from here by examining how other countries moved to universal health care models.

Thanks to Heidi for directing me to this article.

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February 4, 2009

Adam Graves

Working here in the office while watching a video of the Adam Graves jersey retirement in NY last night. He was undoubtedly a great, even heroic player, winning his first Stanley Cup with the Edmonton Oilers before heading to NY, where he helped the Rangers win the cup in 1994. You can see by watching this scene as he entered the rink last night what a fine person he is, too. What a wonderful example for everyone as to what we can and should be giving back to others. A true hero of hockey.

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January 30, 2009

More on the Canadian healthcare systems

As this is a continuing topic of conversation in the US and with Americans who ask me my thoughts on these issues as a Canadian, I'll continue to post here links to resources that I find helpful in explaining these differences. This interview with Princeton professor Uwe Reinhardt, a top American expert on health care economics, explains in a way that I've not heard before in the same detail just why the administrative costs are so high in the United States and why a national health care system could easily save enough money to bring affordable universal health care to everyone in the US. If this is something that interests you, make sure to take the time to read or watch this extensive interview.

This part of the interview, which was featured in this other shorter news story on the Canadian system that I've embedded below, explains it all:

Edie Magnus: We were in a hospital that was affiliated with McGill University, and it was a regional system that had six hospitals that were affiliated with one another, and they annually have some 39,000 inpatients, and they do about 34,000 surgeries and they deliver about 3,000 babies. And managing all of this is a staff of 12 people doing the billing, the administration. What would an equivalent hospital in the U.S. take to run administratively?

Uwe Reinhardt: You’d be talking 800, 900 people, just for the billing, with that many hospitals and being an academic health center. We were recently at a conference at Duke University and the president of DukeUniversity, Bill Brody, said they are dealing with 700 distinct managed care contracts. Now think about this. When you deal with that many insurers you have to negotiate rates with each of them. In Baltimore, they are lucky. They have rate regulations, so they don’t have to do it. But take Duke University, for example, has more than 500,000 and I believe it’s 900 billing clerks for their system.

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January 9, 2009

The future of learning

As an academic and a parent of young school-age children, I surprise friends and acquaintances sometimes when I tell them that by the time my kids are of age to attend university, I'm not sure that the academic institution as we know it today will be all that relevant. I've just spent a bit of time checking out some of the rapidly growing content on iTunes University and have to ask why, with such great learning opportunities available at the click of a mouse, anyone today would want their learning to be confined to the set of teachers at only one institution? Why not pick and choose from hundreds of institutions and create the type of education that best suits (and better serves) one's interests?

Today I am wrapping up teaching my online course on Margaret Atwood to a great group of UVM students who have taken the course from home over Christmas. Even now, after teaching this course online for about five years, I'm still impressed and surprised by how students in my online courses routinely outperform my students in face-to-face classes. Why is that? One reason may be that they are more responsible for their own learning in that environment. Instead of being required to go to class at a particular place and time, they get to choose where and when they want to learn. I also ask them to write and read a great deal every day. It's impossible to sit in the back of the class to see what the professor or their fellow students have to say; they need to be active learners each and every day of my course.

This ad from Kaplan University inspired me to take a few minutes today to talk about this. The ad sums up my point very well, except for that here it's still an ad for a single, profit generating university that shapes students learning opportunities within parameters generated by that institution. I think that someday maybe (if I live long enough) I'll be paid by the students from all over the world who want to take my class rather than by an individual university. My office might well be an actual office, a beach chair, or Cappuccino U.

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October 16, 2008

Canada makes the debate

A couple of mentions of Canada last night in the US Presidential debate.

First off, FINALLY someone (and unfortunately it was McCain) recognized that America gets a great deal of its oil from Canada. All this rhetoric about eliminating the dependence on oil from foreign countries that don't like America conveniently forgets that Canada is the top foreign supplier of oil to the US. Believe me, despite being an Albertan, I'm all for dramatically reducing North America's reliance on oil. Let's just be clear, though, that the US's number one trading partner has the second-largest oil reserves in the world and it's a friendly place.

The other time Canada came up in a way that really jumped out at me was in McCain's denigration of the Canadian healthcare system. Here's what he said:

"Sen. Obama wants to set up health care bureaucracies, take over the health care of America through -- as he said, his object is a single payer system. If you like that, you'll love Canada and England. So the point is..."

Ummm... so the point is that you don't want to be like a country where everyone has access to healthcare, where employers are not burdened with huge health insurance costs that drive up the cost of production and make them less competitive, where no one will go bankrupt due to medical bills, where drug prices are lower, where people live longer on average than Americans, where the rate of patient satisfaction is HIGHER than the United States, where people still can chose their own doctor and wait times for non-elective surgery are comparable to what they are in the US, where there are no co-pays, and where people can change careers or start their own businesses without ever having to worry about losing their health coverage to do so?

I'm glad McCain clearly knows something about Canada, but he's got a lot to learn about Canada and the rest of the world if he thinks that a single-payer system is inferior to either his proposal or Obama's. Canada's healthcare system needs to be improved, and any Canadian will tell you that. The main problem in Canada, however, that our government only invests about half of what the US government already pays per capita for health care.

Sara Robinson's two-part article on Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare (Part 2 is here) is worth reading for anyone who wants a second opinion on this. For those of us who've seen and lived both sides of the coin, we cannot understand how things could continue to be this bad for so many people in the United States. From my perspective, neither of these candidates has gone far enough in their proposals to make a huge difference in the lives of average Americans. This is something that could be solved for all Americans with the right leadership and vision.

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September 23, 2008

The importance of voting

Things to do today:

1) Vote in the federal election. CHECK!

Being from Alberta, I sometimes feel like my vote doesn't count. Aside from a few ridings in my hometown and a few in Calgary in recent years, the province is a sea of blue (Conservative). And yet, I also once saw an election in my own riding in which the Premier of the province was turfed out of his own riding because everyone thought he'd win and didn't bother to vote for him, while the opposition did a great job of getting the vote out. So, every vote counts.

So, I hope everyone reading this makes certain to vote in your own election this fall, whether you're in Canada or the US. It's worth the effort.

I've not watched it yet, but I'm looking forward to seeing Michael Moore's new film: Slacker Uprising. He's made the film freely available on the Internet so that more people can see it before the election. If young Canadians and Americans voted en masse, they could quickly change the face of both countries. You can tell how much that makes politicians nervous by how little they are actually doing in both countries to mobilize that demographic. Obama, Layton, and May are leaders on this front, but I think there's still a long, long way to go.

One thing Canada could use, for instance, is an equivalent of Rock The Vote.

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March 18, 2008

It is not every day that I wish that I could vote in the US

I still have no plans to become a dual citizen of the US and Canada, but if I could vote in the upcoming election this great speech would have made up my mind once and for all. Wow.

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January 3, 2008

Free online courses getting major audiences

Online university courses big hit (CBC News)

The free online courses offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are getting more than a million hits a month, an example of the burgeoning interest in internet education.

Including translations on MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) site, the total rises to about 1.5 million hits.

MIT math professor Gilbert Strang says having a world audience 'is just wonderful.'

(Steven Senne/Associated Press)

Math professor Gilbert Strang's 18.06 linear algebra course (using and understanding matrices) is the most often downloaded, MIT's website said; users view his lectures about 200,000 times a month.

I love this story for two reasons. First, as a creator of a couple of online courses with many more in the pipeline (hockey and Canadian literature is next on the agenda), I'm excited about how all these developments are going to transform education. Second, I just had to include the photo of Professor Strang to point out how much tidier my office is compared to his. I feel much better now. Back to work!

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November 26, 2007

Cultural guerillas

This is a really cool story...

It is one of Paris's most celebrated monuments, a neoclassical masterpiece that has cast its shadow across the city for more than two centuries.
But it is unlikely that the Panthéon, or any other building in France's capital, will have played host to a more bizarre sequence of events than those revealed in a court last week.
Four members of an underground "cultural guerrilla" movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France's cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.

A "cultural guerilla" movement. I love it. If only more people elsewhere saw the world as they do and took on the responsibility of looking after their own cities, treating them as the cultural treasures that they are: "We would like to be able to replace the state in the areas it is incompetent," said Klausmann. "But our means are limited and we can only do a fraction of what needs to be done. There's so much to do in Paris that we won't manage in our lifetime." How many things do we pass every day and say "I wish someone would finally fix that!"?

Read the whole story here.

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November 4, 2007

The Canadian Experience: A Northwest Passages editorial

In 1995, my best friend Rob Stocks and I co-founded Northwest Passages, the only bookstore in the world to specialize exclusively in Canadian fiction, poetry, drama, and literary criticism. Since then, Rob's partner Sarah Bagshaw has taken over all the day-to-day operations of the store, while Rob and I stay involved on many fronts. One of my jobs that I don't do as well as I would like is to look after the Northwest Passages newsletter which goes out to nearly 1000 readers. It's supposed to be monthly, but recently semi-annually might be closer to the truth. At any rate, here's my editorial for this month's issue:

The Canadian Experience

10/17/2007, somewhere just south of the NY/Quebec border

I’m writing to you today from the front seat of a 54 passenger bus that is taking me, two colleagues, and twenty-nine American students from Burlington, Vermont to Ottawa. In a few hours, our group and the group from the packed bus driving just ahead of us will be sitting in Question Period in Canada’s House of Commons. Our goal in this three-day field trip, run by the University of Vermont Canadian Studies program for more than 50 consecutive years, will be to learn something about Canada, its political institutions, its art and culture, and its national identity.

As I sit on the bus watching the gorgeous fall foliage roll by as we wind our way through Northern New York state, I can’t help but wonder, as I do on this bus trip every October, just what kind of understanding of Canada my students will gain from their time at the National Gallery, the Museum of Civilization, Rideau Hall, and, of course, an Ottawa 67s hockey game. All of the eighty or so students on this trip are taking courses on Canada this fall; some are taking our larger lecture courses on Canadian history, politics, and literature while others are taking one of two first-year seminars on Canadian history and Canadian culture. As few have ever spent time in Canada before, their main knowledge of the country so far comes from what they have learned in class. Will this practical experience complement or contradict the theoretical? Will Ottawa live up to or radically differ from their expectations? How will the sights and sounds of these three days work their way into the students’ overall understanding of Canada?

Questions such as these have preoccupied Canadians for as long as the country has existed; our understanding of ourselves seems all too often to be inextricably tied to how others see us – or, more precisely, to how we believe others see us (or don’t). Think of the popular Molson Canadian advertising campaign in which “Joe Canadian” rants that “I have a Prime Minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American. And I pronounce it 'about', not 'a boot'” before concluding with the exclamation “I am Canadian!”

Although witnessing Question Period in action – something I recommend all Canadians do in person whenever possible – usually reminds me that our Members of Parliament are too busy with what’s happening within Canada to concern themselves a great deal with how Canada is perceived internationally, in every one of the Question Periods I’ve attended with my students we have heard at least one angry exchange between the government and opposition parties about how Canada sets its own agenda and “will not be taking direction from George Bush!” This predictable attempt to make the government look bad in the eyes of Canadians always elicits surprised looks from my students. Although I don’t think my students ever perceive this to be “Anti-Americanism,” they are nevertheless surprised to see the degree to which the relationship between the two countries is never far from the surface of any political debate.

One thing that always strikes me during our class visits to Ottawa is that, for the most part, the entirety of my students’ knowledge about Canada has come from a single course on Canada and, for some, the three-day trip to Ottawa. If one’s goal is to give one’s students a solid grounding in Canadian history, politics, or literature, then, the stakes when planning a course or a class trip are significantly higher than when one engages in similar activities back in Canada. If one doesn’t get a chance, for instance, to spend much time with the paintings of Tom Thomson or Emily Carr at The National Gallery, or to include Margaret Laurence or David Adams Richards in one’s Canadian literature course, someone in Canada can hope that his or her students will be exposed to this content at another point in their lives, if they haven’t been already. When working outside of Canada, where the works of Margaret Laurence aren’t even available and most art history professors have never heard of The Group of Seven, one can’t help but think that if one doesn’t include something in one’s course that there is virtually no chance that the students will ever encounter that idea, historical event, or work of art anywhere else.

The design of my curriculum (and field trip itinerary) is something that weighs heavily on me, but then again it always has, long before I ever imagined I’d be teaching in the US. It’s clear to me, and is to many of my colleagues back home in Canada that, even if students may encounter other books, paintings, or arguments in other contexts, the weight that one places on something by including it in a course is hard to overcome. Regardless of how many other works one encounters outside the classroom the content we have been taught (and teach) in the classroom will almost always seem to be more “important” than what we find on our own. Even though I regularly attempt to disabuse students of this notion by suggesting alternate choices I could have made, by having the students themselves help design the curriculum of my contemporary Canadian literature course, and by requiring them to do research and report on things that I’ve left out of the picture of Canada I’ve created for them, the impact of the “official” curriculum is hard to match.

One can apply this same argument to the effect that shortlists for literary awards like the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award have on the literary landscape of Canada. As much as we might try to argue that any shortlist is simply one jury’s take on the books from that particular year, the choices that jury makes have an an impact on the recognized books and authors that can last for years to come. For many people outside of Canada especially these lists serve as a snapshot of the Canadian literary scene for that particular year, whether or not these books are truly representative of what was published in Canada during that time. Take a look at the shortlists included below. What picture of the literatures of Canada do these lists paint?

Unless you’ve read all of these shortlisted books and the many books that didn’t make the cut, it’s hard to pass much judgement on the merits or shortcomings of these lists. Awards season, though, never fails to excite readers, booksellers, and publishers (me included). And for that alone, I find it impossible to find much wrong with the whole process of literary awards or, for that matter, an intensive field trip focusing on the “most important” sites in our nation’s capital. If these create an enthusiasm that the intended audience will continue to explore in the future, then that alone makes the exercise well worthwhile.

Postscript 10/30

The trip was a huge success and since our return I’ve also hosted the Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees, Matthew Mukash, at UVM where he spoke to an audience of over 200 students, many of whom were with us in Ottawa. This great opportunity to have the Grand Chief here provided a valuable supplement to our Ottawa experience and, I hope, will mark the beginning of a long-term relationship between UVM and the Quebec Cree.

The students came back from Ottawa deeply impressed by what they saw and experienced; everyone who met them along the way, I’m equally happy to report, was just as taken by the group of American students who could tell them things like which four provinces were the first to join confederation or converse about everything from the Throne Speech to Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

At the same time as this experience gave us all hope that these students will go on to become goodwill ambassadors for Canada as they go about their lives in the USA, we were also met with a sober reminder not only of the ongoing tensions between the two countries, but of the challenges these students will face in a world not currently enamored with the policies of the US administration. As we boarded our bus to head back to Vermont, we noticed that someone had taken a marker and written “America sucks” over the small American flag beside the bus door.

Perhaps more than all the other class trips I’ve been on, the students headed home with a different perspective of Canada, but also of the United States.

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September 24, 2007

Some inspiration for a Monday morning

Yesterday, I came across this incredible "Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University professor of Computing Science. Moving and inspiring stuff. My favourite line from this is that "brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things." That's an important reminder for all of us about how we should look at what might seem to be setbacks.

You can watch a good story about his lecture in the video below, and the whole thing online here. Good Morning America also had a nice interview with Dr. Pausch on Friday, which is worth watching.

To me, one of the amazing things about the internet is to be able to find and hear the stories of other people in the way that other traditional forms of media do not permit. Randy Pausch's courage in the face of his battle with cancer is a lesson from which we can all learn. I wish him and his family the very best.

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September 10, 2007

Conquering Canada, with coffee and donuts

From this weekend’s NY Times:

OAKVILLE, Ontario — Tim Hortons conquered Canada long ago. The doughnut chain boasts one outlet for every 12,700 Canadians — by comparison, one McDonald’s exists in the United States for every 21,000 Americans and one Dunkin’ Donuts for every 56,000 Americans.

A survey this summer by a group promoting Canadian historical literacy found that 40 percent of Canadians under 34 consider Tim Hortons’ miniature doughnuts, the Timbits, a national symbol.

Tim’s, as it is affectionately known, sells 78 percent of the nonsupermarket coffee and baked goods sold in Canada.

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September 7, 2007

What is a single-payer healthcare system?

This online presentation does a great job of quickly explaining what a single-payer system is like and how it would work here vastly better than the current system. Want to help? Go to the Healthcare-Now! website and sign their petition. Thanks to Dana for sending me this link.

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August 22, 2007

Speaking of brain drain...

From today's Globe and Mail:

TORONTO — Internationally renowned urban thinker and best-selling author Richard Florida was formally welcomed to the University of Toronto's business school last night - and he plans on jumping straight into his research next week.

Prof. Florida, whose arrival is a coup for the university, will lead the newly established Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management.

"The institute is up and running ... In the next week, we'll be going like gangbusters," Prof. Florida told a room full of politicians, business leaders and scholars gathered at the university last night.

The 49-year-old has often cited Toronto as one of his favourite places and one of the more "creative" cities with the potential to be one of the top 20 research and economic hubs in the world.

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August 21, 2007

Some good advice for the first day of school....

Michael Leddy has some great words of wisdom today for students about how to read:

My advice: slow down. Here’s what the poet Ezra Pound says about reading literature: “no reader ever read anything the first time he saw it.” Or consider this exchange between Oprah Winfrey and the novelist Toni Morrison: “Do people tell you they have to keep going over the words sometimes?” “That, my dear, is called reading.”

[. . .] Taking the time to slow down — marking a passage, pondering a detail, looking up a word, writing down a question, changing your mind, looking at the page in a way that allows you to begin to notice what’s there — might change, for keeps, your idea of what it means to read literature. Slowing down will also help you begin to understand how it is that some people seem to see so much in what they’re reading. They know that reading well sometimes means taking your time.

I say much the same thing on the first day of class every year, but I don't think one can reiterate this enough. I love the quote from Pound, and I think I'll be using that one for years to come.

(Here's something interesting, too: when I looked at this article on lifehack.org, a google ad appeared saying "Take an English class: Learn about English and literature at the University of Vermont." The link took me here to Continuing Ed's list of fall English courses.)

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August 2, 2007

More on the Espresso Book Machine

From an article in today's NY Times:

Mr. Neller’s firm is pitching the book machine, which may eventually sell for $20,000 or more, principally toward the nation’s 16,000 public libraries and 25,000 bookstores. A 300-page book costs about $3 to produce with the machine. A bookstore or library could then sell it to customers or library members at cost or at a markup.

Why bother? The machine, Mr. Neller said, is for the “far end of the back list,” those books that are out of print or for which there is so little demand that it would be too costly to print a few hundred copies, let alone one.

With the machine, Mr. Neller said, anything available in a portable document format, or PDF, including Grandfather’s memoirs and Ph.D. dissertations, can be printed in minutes as long as a computer can read it.

Books that are copyrighted and require royalties would need a negotiated fee before they could be published, he said.

“But think what this means,” Mr. Neller said in an interview yesterday. “It’s not just bookstores and libraries. This is small. It could go into a Kinko’s, or a coffee shop, or a hotel or a hospital or a cruise ship.

“A rare book available only to scholars, let’s say, would now be available to anyone,” Mr. Neller said. “Let’s say you want a book in Tagalog, a book in French or a book in Spanish. Think of the implications for universal knowledge!”

I'm dying to see this machine in action! This could be a really cool solution for professors who typically use course packs etc. The thought of creating one's own anthology just for a particular course is something that really appeals to me. Not to mention being able to print off copies of long out-of-print books.

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July 18, 2007

This I Believe, by Michelle Gardner-Quinn

The power of this caught me a bit off-guard this morning. I was thinking about Michelle just yesterday as I walked past the fountain on the college green and saw her picture and fresh flowers there for her. She will not soon be forgotten here at UVM. It is inspiring to see the words of this remarkable young woman reaching a much, much larger audience through this moving short film shown at LiveEarth. It's also a great reminder of how some of our students may well go on to change the world, as Michelle continues to do.

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June 25, 2007

The Edmonton Model, and how it might apply to Burlington

[I've had this blog post waiting in unfinished draft mode for some time, as I'm hesitant to appear like I'm saying something like "Oh, if only they did things here like they do back in Canada." It's hard not to be aware constantly of the differences between the place you are and the place you are from, and I have many days where I'm thankful for all the great things that Vermont has to offer that I never would have experienced back in Edmonton. So, this argument goes both ways most of the time. In the case of the public school system in Edmonton, and Canada's health care system, though, I hope that people here take a serious look at these examples of how we might be able to do things differently here in Vermont.]

It's funny sometimes how you don't value something fully until you don't have it anymore. With all the debates about school funding here in South Burlington and the school system's inability to fund any second language learning at the primary school level, I seem to wind up talking about the Edmonton School system on a fairly regular basis. I didn't quite realize until I left Alberta (and as a parent of kids just entering the school system I sometimes lament what might have been had we not left) just how remarkable is the Edmonton Public School Board.

All you need to do is do a Google search on "Edmonton model" +schools and you will find articles from all over North America about school districts looking to Edmonton as model of how they might reform their school systems.

This 2006 article from MacLean's magazine explains a few of the key differences with the Edmonton system:

Principals in the Alberta capital receive unheard-of autonomy and budgetary control, as well as the right to draw students from anywhere in the district. Once system-wide expenses for things like transportation and debt service are removed, Edmonton's central board controls just eight per cent of revenue. The rest - 92 per cent - is spent by principals, based on priorities set by staff at each school. "You don't have to be getting anybody's permission down here to do stuff, you know what your level of authority is, and that's quite a load off your back," said McBeath, during one of his final days at the Centre for Education, the board's electric-blue headquarters building. "In the old days - and in Canada, in most districts - the principals have to be on their knees begging somebody for something." In exchange, principals have the responsibility to deliver the goods, as both managers and instructional leaders. That means doing what it takes to attract students, to keep them, and to graduate them at higher levels of academic achievement.

[. . . ] In Edmonton, for all its reputation as Alberta's bastion of anti-corporate liberalism, there isn't much taxpayer debate. The experiment in site-based budgeting and decision-making has evolved to the point where parents expect nothing less than the right to comparison shop. Even with Edmonton's brutal winters, almost half of all students attend schools outside their neighbourhood catchment. That compares with about 20 per cent in a national survey published this November by the Kelowna, B.C.-based Society for the Advancement of Excellence in Education. That survey found that 89 per cent of parents and 77 per cent of teachers want the right to select schools - a demand, it seems, most Canadian boards aren't meeting.

In Edmonton, families pick from a stunning array of products: schools specializing in arts, sports, sciences, advanced academics, Aboriginal culture. There are traditional schools, an all-girls school, bilingual schools from Arabic to Hebrew to Ukrainian. There are Christian schools, including three that gave up private status to join the public system. Edmonton Public has more than 81,000 students and sees itself in competition with private institutions, as well as the smaller but highly innovative Catholic board. It wants every last student, and their blessed provincial grants. Such rapaciousness has critics accusing the board of a hidden privatization agenda. "Not in Edmonton," McBeath insists. "We absorb private schools here."

Here are few more links to stories about the innovative "Edmonton Model," including coverage from US states ranging from Delaware and Massachusetts to California and Hawaii.

In today's Burlington Free Press, there is a story about ongoing discussions of creating several "magnet schools" within the Burlington School System. Those both in favour and against this possibility, might want to take a closer look at the effectiveness Edmonton model in creating a system in which "public schools can provide a choice to every parent."

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June 20, 2007

"The Power of Literature," by Andrew O'Hagan

One of the great things about the Internet, and podcasting in particular is the opportunity to listen to some of the great, great radio being produced around the world. Every time I hear a program from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, I wonder why I haven't spent more time on their site. Their program "The Book Show" is one of the best radio shows about literature that you'll ever hear. If you've got some time today, check out this inspiring talk by Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan on "The Power of Literature" from the June 17th episode of the Book Show.

You can also read the transcript of his speech here.

This is just a taste:

Literature is not Lifestyle – it is Life. It is the news that stays news. For his demonstration of man’s intricate lust for power and war, Homer’s Iliad is the news that stays news. For his wild jokes at the expense of man’s seriousness, Rabelais is the news that stays news. For his insight into vanity, history and the state, Shakespeare is the news that stays news. For her intuition about the threat of industry and science, Mary’s Shelley’s Frankenstein is the news that stays news. For his knowledge of character and his love of the human heart, James Boswell’s great biography is the news that stays news. For the scope of evolution and the nature of our genes, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is the news that stays news. For his sense that each man is more than one person, Robert Louis Stevenson is the news that stays news. For his feeling that illusion is a sad and romantic and persistent force in our lives, F. Scott Fitzgerald is the news that stays news. For the struggle of man in the face of the unknowable pressure of totalitarianism, the novels of Franz Kafka are the news that stays news. For her beautiful and expensive evocation of the fragility of the human mind and its imaginings, the writings of Virginia Woolf are the news that stays news. For their sense of modern man in the face of the absurd, Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus are the news that stays news. For their bids for sexual freedom, Oscar Wilde and Tennessee Williams and Janet Frame are the news that stays news. For their love of argument and their vivid passion for the soul, Saul Bellow and Joseph Brodsky and Gunter Grass and David Malouf and Seamus Heaney are the news that stays news. The hundreds of writers here in Sydney this week are busy each with the news that stays news. In their company we have what we need, for they help us to live our lives. That is what literature does – it not only makes experience survive, but it makes life itself surviveable and most beautiful.

I believe it is a failure of the imagination that allows famine or terror to reign in the world. A man who throws half the contents of his fridge into the trash on a Monday morning fails to imagine, next time he visits the supermarket, that whole villages in Eritrea have children gasping for a droplet of milk. The politician or the general who orders a solider to release cruise missiles from 5000 feet does not imagine the innocent men playing cards in the teashop below. He does not imagine their loss or the grief of their loved ones. The terrorist at the controls of a plane cannot imagine the dreams of the secretary on the 102nd floor, planning her wedding and making a bid for life. Failures of the imagination are behind the conduct of our woes – and so we as we gather here to salute literature and the imagination we also come to denounce those failures of the imagination that harm and betray and destroy life.

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May 23, 2007

Teachers who blog, or is it bloggers who teach?

Earlier this month, I led a workshop at the wonderful Teachers Who Write (PDF) conference in Montpelier. Sponsored annually by the Vermont Council of Teachers of English Language Arts, The National Writing Project in Vermont, and the Vermont Department of Education, the conference brought hundreds of teachers together to attend workshops and network. It was a fabulous event and I hope to go back next year as an attendee.

I'd hoped to get this post online in time for my presentation at the conference as a sort of virtual handout, but grading and other end of semester chaos got in the way. Finally, though, here are links to some of the things I told the two groups of interesting teachers who came to hear what I had to say about blogging and podcasting.

I frequently give a short presentation at the UVM Center for Teaching and Learning's "Blogging Your Course" workshop at UVM and this 2005 post summarizes what I usually talk to them about.

As I've said on this blog before, starting to read blogs and creating your own personal/professional blog, to me, will have a far greater impact on one's daily academic life than creating course blogs. Blogs are a great teaching tool and these days I can't really envision myself teaching without a blog for each class, but if I had to choose one or the other I'd probably ditch my course blogs and keep my own one running.

One of the things I always tell faculty from UVM, and I repeated this at the Montpelier workshop, is that it's not at colleges and universities where we're seeing the most cutting edge uses of blogging in the classroom. It's actually in the k-12 classroom, and sometimes right in those earliest grades. I had a great chance last year to help lead the month-long summer writing workshop put on by the National Writing Project in Vermont and, after spending all of July working alongside teachers from across the state, I found myself more enthused about teaching than I've been before (and I have always loved that part of my job).

As part of that summer 2006 workshop, I gave a presentation called "The text in the machine: Writing, publishing, and the blogosphere" in which I talked about blogging and talked about some of the best practices I've seen in the k-12 context. My virtual handout for that presentation can be found here, and it encompasses a lot of what I had to say a couple of weeks ago in Montpelier. For this latest presentation, I also found a number of new examples of some great blogging work going on in the K-12 context and you'll find those links below.

What follows are some of the links I showed everyone in my latest workshop.

Creating a blog

Externally hosted services:
Blogger
Typepad ($)
Vox
edublogs

Server-based solutions:
WordPress
MovableType

Key Resources for educators

weblogg-ed, the blog of Will Richardson.
WIll Richardson's book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms is an invaluable resource

EduBlog Insights

supportblogging.com (lots of great info and links to class blogs)

Best practices

Blogical Minds (5th grade)

Excellence and Imagination (grades 7/8)
Joseph H. Kerr School, Snow Lake, Manitoba

AP Calculus
Darren Kuropatwa

Room 9 Nelson Central’s Blog (Ages 6-7, Nelson, NZ)

Podcasting Tools

Audacity (a free sound editing tool for all platforms)

garageband (Apple's amazing audio software has some great features specifically designed for recording podcasts)

iPods with microphones attached or any other mp3 players with recording capabilities

A few more links worth checking out:

Blogging 101--Web logs go to school | CNET News.com:

David Warlick's thoughts on School 2.0

Stay on top of your field with feeds

Weblogg-ed: It's the empowerment, stupid

Posted by pwmartin at 12:13 AM | Comments (28)

May 19, 2007

Sicko

Speaking of the healthcare system in the US, I've been eagerly anticipating Michael Moore's new film, Sicko, which I think has the potential to have the greatest impact of all his films so far. It's just premiered at Cannes after an earlier private screening in New York for many of the people whose stories he presents in the film. The response so far has been excellent and the articles on the film are just starting to come out. I really liked Andrew O'Hehir's piece on the film from Salon over the weekend, for instance:

Still, there is no mistaking the passion and political intelligence at work in "Sicko." It's both a more finely calibrated film and one with more far-reaching consequences than any he's made before. Moore is trying to rouse Americans to action on an issue most of us agree about, at least superficially. You may know people who will still defend the Iraq war (although they're less and less eager to talk about it). But who do you know who will defend the current method of health-care delivery, administered by insurance companies whose central task is to minimize cost and maximize shareholder return? Americans of many different political stripes would probably share Moore's conclusions at the press conference: "It's wrong and it's immoral. We have to take the profit motive out of health care. It's as simple as that."

[. . .] When Moore interviews Tony Benn, a leading figure on the British left, his larger concerns come into focus. Benn argues that for-profit healthcare and the other instruments of the corporate state, like student loans and bottomless credit-card debt, perform a crucial function for that state. They undermine democracy by creating a docile and hardworking population that is addicted to constant debt and an essentially unsustainable lifestyle, that literally cannot afford to quit jobs or take time off, that is more interested in maintaining high incomes than in social or political change. Moore seizes on this insight and makes it a kind of central theme; both in the film and aloud, at the press conference, he wondered whether some essential and unrecognized change has occurred in the American character.

"I hope this film engenders discussion, not just about healthcare, but about why we are the way we are these days," Moore told us. "Where is our soul? Why would we allow 50 million Americans, 9 million of them children, not to have health insurance? Maybe my role as a filmmaker is to go down a road we might be afraid to go down, because it might lead to a dark place."

Rose Ann Demoro's column on Sicko from the Huffington Post is also worth a read:

"Sicko" is not just an indictment of an indefensible healthcare industry in the U.S. It's a rejoinder for those who think we can fix the soulless monster by tinkering with an unconscionable system that puts us further in thrall to those who created the crisis.

Following the screening, Moore put it as simply as possible: the private insurance companies "have to go."

Unlike too many of our friends in the progressive community, Moore did not go for the easy way out.

There are no calls here for forcing individuals to buy unaffordable, junk insurance. Or handing over ever more tax dollars to those who profit by denying care, and whose biggest accomplishment, says Moore, "is buying our U.S. Congress" to protect their wealth and stranglehold over our health.

To me, it sounds like this is exactly the debate that really needs to happen here instead of looking for ways to provide insurance to the 50 million (50 million!) people who have no insurance at all. Getting rid of the insurance companies altogether for most health needs seems to be the only real -- though it's also the most radical -- solution.

As some Canadian reporters pointed out in the press conference at Cannes, the picture Moore paints of Canada in this film, as he did in Bowling for Columbine, doesn't fully reflect the reality of the challenges faced by the Canadian system.

As in Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore uses Canada as an example of a more humane social system. When a Canadian reporter suggested the portrait of the Canadian medical system was unduly rosy, and wait times for care were long, Moore asked the reporter if he'd trade in his health card to join the American system.

"No," said the reporter promptly, earning a laugh from the audience.

"Right," Moore said. "When I look at Canada, the only long line I look at is that you get to live three years longer than we do. ... Why does a baby born into Toronto have a better chance of living to his first birthday than a baby in Detroit?

"I would hope you're a country that's not offended by a compliment."

Not at all, Michael. Not at all. Before any Canadians start to gloat, though, it's important to remind ourselves that these relatively good life expectancies do not apply to Canada's indigenous peoples, who typically die at a much younger age than the non-native population. We have a long way to go before everyone in Canada gets equal benefits from our medical system. Hopefully, one of the results from the increased dialogue about these various healthcare systems will be more action in Canada to improve accessibility to medical care. We can always do better. And we should be doing a better job than we are in Canada.

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April 19, 2007

Media coverage and the Virginia Tech tragedy

Like many people, I was really disappointed to see the mainstream American news last night fill hour after hour of screentime with the image and words of the man who murdered so many earlier this week.

I thought that we all had learned our lesson years ago and would have decided against giving someone all the publicity they craved and more. Yes, we all want to understand the actions of the killer, but how could we lose our focus on the victims in just a day? And how could anyone possibly think that showing those pictures over and over again while they pore over the man's incoherent ramblings would be of help to anyone except future copycat killers? NBC, to my mind, set a new and remarkably dangerous precedent this week in irresponsible reporting and I'm glad to see some of the victims now refusing to speak to them in response.

I was very glad to see that some media outlets have taken a higher line than NBC, CNN, and others by choosing not to show any of the pictures or footage. If you're reading this, please take a minute to read this editorial from the Editor-in-chief of CBC News. Definitely read the whole article, but here's a brief excerpt that I thought says it all:

On its evening newscast, NBC ran several minutes of excerpts, and this video has been rebroadcast by a multitude of other networks. At the CBC, we debated the issue throughout the evening and made the decision that we would not broadcast any video or audio of this bizarre collection. On CBC Television, Radio and CBC.ca, we would report the essence of what the killer was saying, but not do what he so clearly hoped all media would do. To decide otherwise - in our view -would be to risk copycat killings. Speaking personally, I have long admired NBC News and I am sure my admiration of their journalists will endure. But I think their handling of these tapes was a mistake. As I watched them last night, sickened as I'm sure most viewers were, I imagined what kind of impact this broadcast would have on similarly deranged people. In horrific but real ways, this is their 15 seconds of fame. I had this awful and sad feeling that there were parents watching these excerpts on NBC who were unaware they they will lose their children in some future copycat killing triggered by these broadcasts.

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April 11, 2007

Professor Gutman goes to Washington

An inspiring article on my colleague Huck Gutman in UVM's The View today. I miss his enthusiasm around the department these days... Like my Dad, Huck's too busy having fun to even dream of "retirement." That's a great lesson for all of us.

Gutman has altruistic goals for his work in Washington, to be sure — “I love the sense that we might actually change the world” for the better, he says — but more personal forces are also at work. While many of the colleagues he began teaching with are winding down, Gutman is not remotely ready for retirement.

“This is a chance to grow, to move onward with your life,” he says. With any luck, he’ll return to teaching in a year or two “more vibrant, with a renewed sense of how wonderful” being a college professor can be. To make his point, he paraphrases a favorite line from Normal Mailer: “A law of life is that we all have to grow or pay more for staying the same.”

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April 10, 2007

For my students

Michael Leddy, whose blog Orange Crate Art is well worth reading regularly, also write a great monthly column on writing at lifehack.org. His most recent column on "How to Punctuate a Sentence" is something you all should read. Mastering proper punctuation is a must for you at this stage, especially if you're an English major. If you're unclear about how to use commas or semicolons, there's no better time in your life than right now to figure those out once and for all.

I also recommend Leddy's columns on "How to unstuff a sentence," Granularity for students, and "Beware of Thesaurus." The latter is especially helpful. Take, for instance, how he ends the article:

What student-writers need to realize is that it’s not ornate vocabulary or word-substitution that makes good writing. Clarity, concision, and organization are far more important in engaging and persuading a reader to find merit in what you’re saying. If you’re tempted to use the thesaurus the next time you’re working on an essay, consider what is about to happen to this sentence:

If you’re lured to utilize the thesaurus on the subsequent occasion you’re toiling on a treatise, mull over what just transpired to this stretch.

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April 5, 2007

Perspective...

from the cool site I just discovered: teachertube.com

If you haven't seen the original video by Carl Fisch that inspired this one, make sure to watch it. I'm also rather fond of the "Did You Know?" Winipege remix

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March 7, 2007

Here's one of the reasons I love Vermont....

Yesterday was Town Meeting Day, when most people get the day off and many show up to their town meetings. Now this is democracy in action. Very cool.

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February 26, 2007

Al Gore for President

Didn't you just love Al Gore on the Oscars last night? I might be one of the only people around yet who hasn't watched An Inconvenient Truth, but you just have to think he'd be a vastly superior president than any current candidate.

I like what Kathleen Reardon writes today in the Huffington Post:

Why would Al Gore become a Presidential candidate under such circumstances? Would he do it for glory? Unlikely. Would he do it for a place in history?

The reason that could pull him into the race is patriotism - love of country - the need to step forward to undo what has been done so horribly to so many in its name. And this would take inordinate courage for a man once burned so badly by a system that clearly can be, repeatedly, rigged.

Whether you'd vote for him or not, it's hard to deny that he'd extricate the Democratic Party from silliness by insisting that candidates grapple with issues of enormous importance to the world. Al Gore has the focus, humor, credibility, and good intentions to make that happen. His candidacy could raise all boats by raising the level of debate.

[. . .] Once too practiced in his responses, his current public demeanor suggests he'd likely be far less so this time. From him we'd likely get the truth. That would be a breath of fresh air in these times of constant maneuvering. Even if he entered the race to advance environmental concerns, that would do just fine. We need him there. We need someone driven not by what sells but by what matters.

I have to think that as president he'd be great for Canada, too, and would help push us further in the right direction on the environment front.

That said, I still don't expect we'll see him run; I think that he rightly sees that he might well have a bigger impact on the world doing what he's doing now. The world's gain will be the USA's overall loss, to be sure.

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January 23, 2007

How the internet can make the world a lot smaller, in all the best ways...

As an admitted Internet addict and news junkie, it's easy to get caught up in the minutiae of things like the unveiling of the iPhone or the new NHL jerseys or to want to read more about the inspiring play of Sidney Crosby or the progress of the Tragically Hip's North American tour (they're coming here in April!).

This truly remarkable video by Robert Thompson about some people in the US getting together to buy a poor family in China a water buffalo, to me, really puts into perspective some of the things we could be doing a lot more of on the Internet. I'm sure there are lots of companies out there who would rather we not realize that for the cost of an iPhone we could buy a water buffalo for a Chinese family or change the lives of people on the other side of the world in equally remarkable ways. The internet is turning out to be a remarkable tool in doing just this. Look, for instance, at what KIVA is up to...

Take a look at this informative page from Heifer International's website to see lots of small things we can do at home, too, to start helping the world.

(I found this video today via Tim Lauer's great Education/Technology blog. I've now subscribed to the feed from Robert Thompson's blog as well.)

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January 3, 2007

A visual representation of my current state of mind....

Need I say more?

(Update: Heidi asks if I mean "drunk and nutty." Not drunk, though I wish I had a Guinness right now....)

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December 25, 2006

Podcasting for $

This is a cool story. I took a quick look at Don McAllister's podcasts and they're really impressive. Looks like a great value. I'm definitely going to check out the free version on iTunes, but don't think anyone could go wrong paying for the extra content. I just might become a member myself.

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A little Christmas day blogging

Kids and I are in the office right now for an hour or so to give their mother a break from the considerable noise of two kids on Christmas morning (and me putting together a rather large Playmobil castle). I hope everyone is enjoying a happy holiday. We attended a great Christmas eve service at church last night and are having some friends over for dinner in a few hours. If only there were a bit of snow here. That said, being from Alberta, I'm hard pressed ever to complain about a mild winter.

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December 14, 2006

Blog and participation grades

Just posted the following grading guidelines on my English 180 blog and thought it might interest those of you who visit this blog from time to time. The blogging assignment is new for 180 this semester and so I'm only now thinking about how to assign grades for the mostly great work the students have done. I've also never clearly laid out my expectations for the participation grade. So, these are first stabs at outlining my expectations for these components of the final grade. I welcome your feedback as I hope to include something like this in future course outlines.

Blog grade:

A: To earn an A on the blog component of the course all assignments must have been completed and comments posted by the assigned deadline. Comments are thoughtful, fully answer the question asked and, if specified, include responses to the comments of other students.

B: All assignments completed, mostly on time. Thoughtful comments, though perhaps briefer and less engaging than those that merit an A.

C: Most assignments completed, primarily at the end of the semester and/or comments are short, perfunctory answers to the blog prompt with little consideration of the comments of others.

D: Only partial completion of the assignments and comments show little commitment to making a contribution to the discussion.

F: Failure to complete more than 50% of the assigned blog questions.

Participation grade:

A: Nearly 100% attendance, unless due to illness or family emergency AND active participation in class. Clearly on top of the reading and regularly speaks in class. Always engaged in the discussion, whether vocally contributing or not.

B: Missed very few classes (2 or 3 max), unless due to illness or family emergency. Participated in class vocally on a fairly regular basis, but, more importantly, is always listening and attentive to the ongoing discussion. Unprepared for class occasionally, but usually caught up on the reading and willing to contribute.

C: Misses more than three classes for reasons other than illness or family emergency. Clearly behind in the reading on at least several occasions. Mostly attentive and speaks in class several times over the course of the semester. Makes a good effort to stay involved in class discussion and appears interested.

D: Regularly missing from class and/or frequently appears disinterested. Routinely behind on reading and fails to bring books to class. Leaves class from time to time to take phone calls thinking that the professor thinks they are using the bathroom, continually passes notes back and forth with someone else, works on other homework, reads the newspaper during class, checks e-mail or text messages while instructor or classmates are speaking, all of which, I should add, are apparent to the instructor and your classmates and immediately qualify you for a D. (Wow, that felt good to make a list of all my pet peeves. Fortunately, this only applies to very few people this semester.)

F: Unable to earn even a D in participation....

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November 27, 2006

Podcasting at Canadian universities

CBC News takes a look at podcasting at Canadian universities

In the coming days, I'll have an announcement about a new podcasting initiative at UVM....

Update: More on what Queen's is up to here and here.

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Caffeine fix

The queue at Cappuccino U seems to be getting a bit longer each day.... Great to see that happening.

Update on 11/28: The lineup continues to grow. Soon it will be out the door...

Posted by pwmartin at 12:42 AM

November 20, 2006

George Monbiot, Global Warming, and Canada's obligation to the world...

"You (Canadians) think of yourselves as a liberal and enlightened people, and my experience seems to confirm that. But you could scarcely do more to destroy the biosphere if you tried." - George Monbiot

I caught the As it Happens interview with George Monbiot the other day via the CBC's excellent Words at Large podcast. Listening to it on the bus, the predictions of what could be just around the corner due to global warming gave me, um, chills. (You can download the Monbiot interview here. You can also hear him interviewed on Alberta's Wild Rose Country here.)

It's clearly time for major action from all of us. I'm looking forward, sort of, to reading Monbiot's book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning.

Here's what Monbiot had to say about the "Clean Air Act" my students and I heard so much about a few weeks ago on the floor of the House of Commons during Question Period:

"Oh!" he says, his disgust clear in that single syllable. "It seems, to a complete outsider, to be a misreading of the national mood. That bill was treating people like idiots, both lumping together local pollution with carbon dioxide pollution, and talking about the intensity of carbon emissions. It's almost like putting up a sign saying 'I think the people of this nation are suckers."'

The Harper government, he says, is becoming an international embarrassment because of its environmental policies.

"That Canadians are living in a fool's paradise, that they picture themselves as being environmentalist but their carbon emissions show they are as damaging to the planet as the U.S. and Australia," he said.

They have to act quickly or "have on their conscience a major contribution to what could turn out to be deaths of hundreds of millions of people."

Just to play devil's advocate, perhaps Monbiot's book would have an even greater reach, and far less of an environmental impact, if he'd released it solely in e-book form. Regardless, after hearing the interview I think I'm going to stick to taking the bus or the bike to work.

Top 10 Things You Can Do For The Environment
from George Monbiot, author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning

1. Cut your flights. Nothing else you do causes so much climate change in so short a time.

2. Think hard before you pick up your car keys. On average, 40% of the journeys made by car could be made by other means - on foot, by bicycle or on public transport.

3. Organise a "walking bus" to take the children to school.

4. Ask your boss to devise a "workplace travel plan" which rewards people for leaving their cars at home.

5. Switch over to a supplier of renewable electricity. You don't have to erect your own wind turbine, but you can buy your power from someone who has.

6. Ask a builder to give you an estimate for bringing your home up to R2000 standards.

7. Ditch your air conditioner.

8. Turn down your thermostat: 18 degrees is as warm as your house ever needs to be. You just have to get used to it.

9. Make sure every bulb in your house is a compact fluorescent or LED.

10. Do NOT buy a plasma TV: they use 5 times as much energy as other models.

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November 17, 2006

A good piece of advice, if you ask me...

Will Richardson's weblogg-ed is one of the best around, especially if you're interested in the role of blogs in education.

Overlooking for the moment that I'm currently an assistant professor at a great school, I can't say that I disagree with Will's advice to his children. Maybe my kids will go to Cappucino U. Maybe we'll go together!

More blogging to follow in the coming days during the WEEK-LONG American Thanksgiving Break here at UVM. After a super-long week of grading and teaching, I can only say "God Bless America, eh?"

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October 26, 2006

The Hour

I'm so glad that CBC has started showing The Hour on their main network, which we get on local cable here in Burlington. It's too bad they don't get CBC on the UVM network that runs through the dorms. I expect that students would really enjoy this show. Tonight's show for instance had interviews with Bob Geldof, Margaret Trudeau, and The Killers. I'm still kicking myself for missing Sunday's special show with The Tragically Hip....

Fortunately, from The Hour website, you can watch the most recent episode and also clips from previous shows. (This clip cracked me up, by the way) The archives of previous clips and interviews is one of the best you'll find on any website. Just look at all the clips here in the interviews section alone, including George's chat with Gord Downie from The Hip. How great is that?

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October 13, 2006

"Skepticism: The antidote to 'truthiness' in American government and media"

Citizens must want to be smarter about how to interpret the messages we encounter every day in government, in media, in the workplace, in business and advertising. - Roy Peter Clark

If I had to choose one thing that I hope my students take with them when they leave my classes it would be the ability to think more critically about the world in which they live. On his Writing Tools blog, I came across Roy Peter Clark's fifteen steps that he suggests citizens of the USA in particular might follow to start to take their country back. (I'd argue that this applies to any country just as much as it does to Americans).

I particularly like steps six, seven, and eight:

6. Recognize the power of framing as a communication device. People may be telling you the truth, but only a part of the truth. They may be framing events to focus on some themes, but not others. In the immigration debate, for example, the "safety of our borders" is a frame, but so is "America opens its arms to immigrants," and so is "there are jobs in America that Americans will not do."

7. Learn to recognize the manipulation of language and images. Read George Orwell's famous essay, "Politics and the English Language," which argues that language abuse leads to political abuse, and vice versa. Be skeptical of any speaker or writer who calls into question a critic's loyalty to the country.

8. Learn the differences between forms of political persuasion that appeal to your reason as opposed to those that appeal to your fears or passions. Beware of slogans. They are a substitute for critical thinking.

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August 20, 2006

Blogging and academia

I had a nice chance earlier this week to give a brief presentation to the latest round of faculty and staff taking the UVM Center for Teaching and Learning's "Blogging Your Course" workshop. One of the main things I always try to get across is that if the participants are only thinking about using blogs for their course(s) they're missing out on what i think are the biggest effects blogs can have on their academic lives, something Fred Stutzman summed up really well this past week in a post called "Blogging: Academia's Digital DIvide".

I talked on Wednesday about the importance of reading blogs, something I've talked about before when speaking to new bloggers at UVM, and we also got everyone started using bloglines so that they could understand how feeds work and see some of the great potential of RSS.

Starting to read blogs and creating your own personal/professional blog, to me, will have a far greater impact on one's daily academic life than creating course blogs. Blogs are a great teaching tool and these days I can't really envision myself teaching without a blog for each class, but if I had to choose one or the other I'd ditch my course blogs and keep my own one running.

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July 25, 2006

The text in the machine: Writing, publishing, and the blogosphere

Here's much of the content from my presentation today for the National Writing Project in Vermont's Summer Institute. I've had a great month of July watching teachers from all over the state give great demos of lessons or projects they use in the classroom. I head back to classes this fall full of ideas as to how I might integrate more writing into my literature courses. Thanks everyone!

As I am not positive that the computer lab we're in today has a projector where I can hook up my laptop, I decided simply to put all the links and resources we'll be looking at up on my own blog. We've required everyone of the fellows from our Summer Institute to print out a packet of materials for each of their demos. As I'm going to mention today my thoughts on using blogs to help avoid using a lot of unnecessary paper in the classroom (handouts with the syllabus, essay topics, bibliographies etc.), it would be hypocritical of me to print out all that follows.

So, fellow fellows (and other interested parties), here's your handout. Feel free to add to it by commenting on this post. I'd love to get your feedback online rather than on paper. You can also bookmark this page via its "permalink" so that you can come back to these resources whenever you like.

the text in the machine

One of the reasons I wanted to do my teacher demo on blogging in the classroom is that I've been using the Internet as a teaching tool since the first time I began teaching in 1993. At first, I used e-mail and listservs, but in 1994 I was the first instructor at the U of Alberta (that I know of) to create webpages for all of my courses and use the web as a crucial component of my teaching. Back then, I had to bring all of my students into a lab, arrange for them all to get an official U of A e-mail address (I don't even recall any of that first bunch of students having one yet), and showing them on their computers the World Wide Web for the first time ("You may have heard reports on the news over the past little while about this thing called the World Wide Web. Here it is!"). It's hard to believe how much things have changed in twelve years.

One of the things I don't know that I would have predicted twelve years ago is the degree to which interacting text (and texts) is a fundamental part of lives today. Thanks in great part to e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, and the extraordinary and sometimes suspect wealth of information available to us online, we are always transforming our ideas into the written word and finding ourselves having to interpret and act on the written words of others. More than we've ever been perhaps, we're still a text-based culture. Students today at all levels are writing, texting, and chatting online ALL the time. Yet, they often don't connect this with the work they're doing in the classroom. What I think blogging has the power to do, is to connect these two parts of their lives, these two types of writing they are doing. Blogging can help them to think more critically about all the content they are producing and turns each student into a publisher, with an audience that might well exceed the walls of their classroom and school.

so what is blogging anyway? Or, "whose bright idea was it to put the Canadian in charge today?"

Coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, the term weblog, popularly shortened as "blog" is now immortalized in the Oxford English Dictionary and can be used as both a noun and a verb. There are lots of helpful definitions of the term "blog" online, but one of the best attempts to define it that I have seen is by Sébastien Paquet of the Université de Montréal (there go those Canadians again...). He argues that five defining characteristics of a blog are:

• Personal editorship
• Hyperlinked post structure
• Frequent updates, displayed in reverse chronological order
• Free, public access to the content
• Archival

This definition from the quite good Encyclopedia of Educational Technology is also very helpful.

Let's get blogging!

There are lots of different ways to create your own blog, some of which (typepad, for instance) cost a bit of money, and others, like blogger.com, that don't. A great resource for teachers of every level is edublogs.org, which offers free blogs to teachers. To keep matters simple, though, today we're going to try to create a blog via Blogger.

So, head over to http://www.blogger.com and follow the instructions at blogger on how to create an account and start your first blog!

Once you get your blog up and running, I'd like you to take ten minutes to write your first post. In it, I'd like you to reflect a bit on what you think some of the applications for blogging might be in your classroom.

Once your post is up, give your blog address to two of your classmates and ask them to post a comment on your blog.

Best practices

We're going to take a bit of time now to visit some other blogs that I think will give you some great ideas as to the potential for using blogs in the k-12 classroom.

Will Richardon's Weblogg-ed blog is a great place to start your exploration of the world of education blogs. He has a great list of reasons to use blogs as a teaching and learning tool, as well as a short but significant set of links to best practices from a variety of levels and areas of study.

Let's take some time to go through some of those great examples of K-12 blogging identified by Richardson:

Blogwrite: a class weblog from J.H. House Elementary School in Conyers, GA. If you look around, you'll see that there's lots of blogging going on all over the school, including in the principal's office. Take a special look at the entries from August 2005 as teacher Hilary Meeler gets her class rolling with the blog. Clearly, at the end of the year, the fifth grade students were really taken by blogging. Look at what Derek had to say about having to leave his blog and his school behind upon leaving for Middle School. The school worked closely with Anne Davis at Georgia State University to get this project going. Davis' blog EduBlog Insights also makes good reading for anyone interested in this field.

Here's a site that features kindergarteners PODCASTING (!) and a good seventh grade (or Grade 7 as we call it in Canada) Math blog

I've long thought that this website from Mabry Middle School is a great example of how schools might use blogs and podcasts. The Principal, Dr. Tyson, is leading the way here at his school and also around the country, I'd imagine. There's lots to learn from spending a bit of time at their school site.

One of the principal's blog posts to the parents offers a great explanation of how blogs can be used effectively school-wide, and also gives a great explanation of something else I want to touch on today: RSS feeds.

Overview Information About Our New Website

MabryOnline is our new web presence. The site is really a collection of nearly 100 blogs designed with a front end that appears to be a web page. We have done this in the hope that our staff will more easily be able to keep information on the site current. Posting to a blog is substantially easier than having a web master who knows a lot about html, xhtml, css, asp, js, and blah, blah, blah. We don't. And even if we did, then the webmaster has to track everyone down to get their information to post it.

So, what is a blog? The term is an abbreviation for weblog and can be most easily understood as an online journal. Teachers post journal entries (or posts) to their site (or blog). The teacher assigns each post to a category that s/he has already created. When the post is published on the site, it is automatically linked to the category (listed in the sidebar on the right), to the date it was posted (via a little calendar in the sidebar on the right), and also is placed in a monthly archive (which, you guessed it, is also listed by month in the sidebar on the right).

Finding information in a teachers site could not be any easier. To read everything that has been posted to this blog about the Film Festival, simply click on the name of that category in the sidebar on the right. To read everything related to the Beginning of the Year, click...you have the idea. You could also go to the archive links for July and August to read things that were posted in those months which might relate to the beginning of the year.

Aside from having a powerful organizational structure for content management, a blog also has a very powerful search feature. Each teacher's site (or blog) has a "Search this site:" area in the sidebar on the right side. Simply type in the string for which you wish to search, and the script will bring up everything in the teacher's site that matches your search parameter--powerful, fast access to content.

Every time the site is updated, the blogging system is programed to update the syndication files. You can setup an RSS/Atom feed reader to automatically notify you when new content has been posted to the site. Most feed readers provide you with a quick summary of the new information, which, if you find relevant to your need, can serve as a link to the entire post of new information.

We will find that RSS/Atom feed readers are going to have a huge impact on learning and research. Rather than going out to find current, relevant information, you can set up a RSS/Atom feed reader to have the most current information about a research topic come to you. Software is now coming available that will even automatically annotate in a bibliography the source from the major online libraries . This is cutting edge and very powerful! The digital divide between those who know information literacy skills and those who do not is going to grow exponentially in the next few years. And who thinks students do not need laptops?!

Conclusion

There is, of course, tons more that I could say on this topic. I hope you've had a chance to see some of the ways in which students and teachers might benefit from using blogs. We've talked a lot over the last two weeks about the students writing for others and publishing their work. Imagining an audience beyond their classmates makes a huge difference in their writing. Promoting blogging also might help to get some students writing outside of class. They will wind up connecting writing to their lives in a new way. Blogging makes them active producers instead of moderately passive consumers of culture (I think kids are the least passive of all consumers)

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April 10, 2006

It's the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine.

David Warlick's blog always gives me a lot to think about, but with his notion of "flat classrooms" I think he's moved to a new level. This is a great post that should give us all a lot to think about.

What about an education system that is challenged to prepare children for their future — and it’s not their father’s future. So what about a flat classroom? Traditional education has been an environment of hills. The teacher could rely on gravity to support the flow of curriculum down to the learners. But as much as we might like to pretend, we (teachers) are no longer on top of the hill. The hill is practically gone.

[. . .] In many cases, students communicate more, construct original content more, and more often collaborate virtually with other people, than do their teachers. Those teachers who pretend to stand on higher ground, appear, to many of their students, to be standing on quicksand.

I wax hyperbole, but the point is that our times require a different kind of classroom, one that can no longer rely on gravity. We must invent a perpetual learning engine.

It's such an appropriate metaphor. I, for one, wish my classroom was flatter. When you do hit a flat patch from time to time, it's completely liberating for all concerned. Or maybe it's just that I miss the prairies! It's only there that you can truly see the horizon and get some perspective as to where you really stand. The problem with the hills and mountains, from a prairie perspective, is that they obscure the view. I think David Warlick would agree.

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April 8, 2006

Why can't you pay attention anymore?

This interview with Dr. Edward Hallowell hits home on a number of levels, first because I'm the king of multitasking for better and, more often, for worse. Second, because it's an issue we deal with in the classroom all the time.

Students today -- and this could simply be my misperceptions of some sort of pre-Internet golden age, when I went to school (haven't we all heard that one before?) -- seem to have a harder time getting big chunks of reading done for our classes, or wrapping their minds around some of the big theoretical concepts we discuss in our core "Critical Approaches to Literature" course here at UVM. Did I complain as much about having to read large novels or difficult works of literary theory? Probably... but I think that our attention spans (mine too) have changed significantly over the last 10 years.

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April 3, 2006

"Our home and native blogs" at cbc.ca

cbc.ca/arts continues to be the best site online for stories on Canadian culture. Last week's feature on academic satires was really good, and today they've got a great feature on Canada's best arts and entertainment blogs. Sure, I have some quibbles with their choices, but on the whole it's a great list.

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February 16, 2006

The imminent arrival of iTunes University at UVM

This posting from Michael Feldstein's e-Literate blog discusses some of the reasons that I'm excited about the imminent arrival of iTunes University at UVM. For me, this will be a perfect way of distributing content to my students. I'm not sure yet how I might use this to distribute copyrighted material to my TAP students next fall, but in any case they will all have iPods where they can receive anything new that I add. iTunes U will also provide the perfect way for the students to share with each other the podcasts they will be creating. I can't wait!

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January 22, 2006

Will e-books finally take off? I hope so.

Terry Teachout's WSJ article about the upcoming Sony Reader and what this might mean to reading and publishing renews my enthusiasm about having an ebook reader that's separate from my computer. For one thing, having most everything I need with me at all times would be great. I've got a zillion academic books that I'd prefer to have in digital form, which would save shelf space for all my different editions of Ulysses. :)

I can also see subscribing to magazines that way in the same way I now subscribe to podcasts. Wired has also just published a good article on the Reader, with a few pictures. Am looking forward to holding one of these in my hand.

Hmmmm... it seems like Mac users will be left out in the cold with this device. I wonder if Steve Jobs has something even better up his sleeve or if Sony is going to do anything to accomodate Mac users. :(

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January 13, 2006

La Bibliothèque nationale du Québec soon to surpass the 2 million visitor mark

After opening a mere five months ago, Québec's amazing new Bibliothèque nationale will soon have had more than two million visitors. I've been eager to go for some time, but hopefully should have some more time to get up there this spring to explore. Being so close to Montréal is one of the many great perks of living here in Vermont.

Source: CBC Arts: Quebec mega-library set to welcome 2-millionth visitor:

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January 12, 2006

A few thoughts on teaching online and the future of hybrid courses

Earlier today, I dropped by the office of a colleague and was telling her how wonderfully the students in my current online class on Margaret Atwood are performing. Each student, and many of them are not English majors, is posting extensively on a daily basis and the level of the analysis that each of them is producing exceeds what I typically get out of students in the face-to-face learning environment. The question that immediately springs to mind, of course, is "What am I doing wrong in the classroom?" I joked to my colleague that maybe I should just set it up so that all of my classes start meeting online and that we get together in a "real" classroom once every week or two to have some less formal discussions about the books.

Tonight, just as I'm about to sit down and read the 27 new posts from my students today -- I got smart today and only asked a single discussion question so that I didn't get 76 new posts like I did yesterday! -- I came across this intriguing article by Ron Bleed in the new issue of the Educause Review.

Bleed's vision of "Twenty-First-Century Hybrid Courses" is exactly what I was talking about! I started to imagine what might happen if I told my students and department that I would be only meeting with my classes in person once every week or two. When Holly Parker introduced me at the blogging workshop yesterday, she jokingly referred to me as the "troublemaker" who came into the CTL one day and asked when UVM was going to start supporting blogging on campus. This might be one of the things I want to save doing until I have tenure, if I'm lucky enough to publish enough before I perish.

Of course, I come by this honestly. When my dad was teaching a communications class for the U of A's Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry in the early 1990s, he had his very large class meet twice a week and do the third class of the week as an online lecture and discussion. I think that's the farmer in him, perhaps. They're always the first people to figure out the most effective ways to do things. Of course, growing up on the Saskatchewan prairie might make it a bit easier to see the forest for the the trees.

Here's a bit of what Ron Bleed has to say. LOTS to think about here:

If we in higher education are to be student-centered, we must overcome college and university traditions and move toward a course-schedule redesign that gives greater time flexibility from the student’s viewpoint. The Agrarian Age concept of a nine-month school year consisting of two semesters is not the most effective way to deliver instruction in the nonagrarian twenty-first century. Likewise, the Industrial Age paradigm of fixed-seat-time courses moving through an assembly line of specific curriculum requirements, creating uniformity for the sake of common accreditation measurements and mass production, presents serious obstacles for many of today’s students.

Research I conducted shows that replacing some of the fixed seat-time with technology-delivered content and having physical spaces for socialization lead to improved learning, higher completion rates by students, lower costs to both the student and the institution, and greater convenience for students who are not “captured” on a campus. A 2004 Maricopa Community College analysis of the course-completion rates of our students shows that the course schedule is a significant factor in student retention/attrition rates. Because our students are not “captured,” the type of course scheduling they experience affects their completion rate. The type of course with the lowest successful completion rate was the traditional, daytime, full-semester course with multiple fixed seat times per week. As Diana Oblinger stated before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 2004: “One of the best ways of ensuring that students succeed is to remove the barriers to their success. For many, the greatest barrier is the fixed time schedule of a traditional course.”3

A strategy to overcome this barrier to student success is creating hybrid or blended courses. I consider a hybrid or blended course to be one in which a chunk of on-campus classroom time has been replaced by technology-delivered instruction. The advantages of the classroom learning and online learning are combined and the disadvantages of each are minimized.

Ron Bleed "The IT Leader as Alchemist: Finding the True Gold"
EDUCAUSE REVIEW | January/February 2006, Volume 41, Number 1:

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November 10, 2005

Podcasting chat today

Here are a few links to some of the articles, podcasts, and software I referred to in a talk I gave today on podcasting as part of the Center for Teaching and Learning's new Colleague Teas series.

Podcasting how-to:

Podcasting DIY is a great new podcast that is part of Canada's new Rabble Podcast Network.
Audacity

Garageband
iPod + iTalk

What people are up to around the continent:

Here's a great conversation with Middlebury College's Barbara Ganley about her use of podcasting and blogging in her teaching. This is part of a regular podcast series called EdTechTalk. Recently Ganley posted a really interesting entry on her blog about Podcasting as Part of the Learning Process

Stanford podcasting
Mabry
Chronicle article on podcasting

My English 005 class

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September 29, 2005

David Allen follow-up

Had a great day on Tuesday attending David Allen's Roadmap seminar. What luck to find myself in Vermont these days, where the Green Mountain Coffee Foundation sponsored his seminar here and opened it up to the public. I've wanted to hear David in person since I discovered his work way back in 1997 and it was great to finally get that chance.

At a point where my semester is quickly becoming extraordinarily busy, it was very enjoyable and worthwhile to spend a day as a student for a change. David's a master teacher and I left there feeling that getting things done will be less of an issue for me this fall.

I've spent part of the last week trying to close the gaps in my system and to make a complete list of all my projects and tasks at hand. I even discovered a few that I'd forgotten about while I was sitting in the seminar! It was a great refresher for me in the nuances of David's system. The greatest part of the seminar for me, though, was in getting a better sense of how the horizontal axis of his system (clarifying, organizing, and engaging with your "stuff" to transform it into actions) connects to your ability to focus on the vertical horizons which takes us beyond projects and actions to things like one's goals, vision, and purpose. I have to say that over the last three years I've been so consumed with dealing somewhat inefficiently with my stuff that I've not thought much about the larger picture.

Already in the last couple of days I am feeling more relaxed because I am more certain that my system has caught all the open loops. It's given me time here and there to think a bit more about that vertical horizon. And that has been a great thing for me.

Sounds like David had a great time, too.

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