As Canadian as Possible... under the circumstances

February 16, 2009

The Literary Landscapes of Canada

Here's a list of 40 books or so that I mentioned in a talk given today on Canada's Literary Landscape. This is anything but a complete list, but it's not a bad start for anyone looking to learn more about Canadian literature.

Canada’s Literary Landscape:

A list of suggestions to help you read your way across Canada

Paul Martin, February 16, 2009

Paul.Martin@uvm.edu http://pwmartin.blog.uvm.edu

NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR

Donna Morrissey, Kit’s Law (2001)

Wayne Johnston, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998)

Lisa Moore, Alligator (2005)

PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND

L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908)

NOVA SCOTIA

Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief (1999)

Alistair Macleod, Island: collected stories

George Elliott Clarke, George and Rue (2005)

Lynn Coady, Strange Heaven (2002)

NEW BRUNSWICK

David Adams Richards, Mercy Among the Children (2000)

Antonine Maillet, Pélagie: The Return to Acadie

QUEBEC

Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen Blues (1983)

Mordecai Richler, Barney’s Version (1997)

Anne Hébert, Kamouraska (1970)

Marie-Claire Blais, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel (1964)

ONTARIO

Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (1996), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Blind Assassin (2001), Cat’s Eye (1988)

Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (2005)

Anything at all by Alice Munro

Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (1983)

Timothy Findley, The Pianoman’s Daughter (1995)

Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road (1995)

MANITOBA

Margaret Laurence, The Diviners (1974)

Gabrielle Roy, Street of Riches (1957)

Tomson Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998)

Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness (2005)

SASKATCHEWAN

Guy Vanderhaeghe, The Englishman’s Boy (1997); The Last Crossing (2004)

W.O. Mitchell, Who Has Seen the Wind (1947)

Sharon Butala, The Perfection of the Morning (1995)

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow (1955)

ALBERTA

Thomas Wharton, Icefields (1995)

Robert Kroetsch, The Studhorse Man (1970)

Rudy Wiebe, A Discovery of Strangers (1994)

Richard Harrison, Hero of the Play (1997)

BRITISH COLUMBIA

Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach (2000)

Joy Kogawa, Obasan (1981)

Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel (1954)

Emily Carr, Klee Wyck (1941)

Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief (2006)

Yukon, NWT, & Nunavut

Richard Van Camp, The Lesser Blessed (1996)

Robert Arthur Alexie, Pale Indian (2005)

Alootook Ipellie, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993)

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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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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 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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August 20, 2007

The future of the book....

Wow, so much to say about this topic with the prospect of Espresso Book Machines, higher quality e-book readers, and new models of publishing headed our way. Unfortunately, pending deadlines leave me no time to say it! (how's that for a cop out?)

In the meantime (and please don't hold your breath -- I would hate for anyone to harm themselves while reading my blog), read this interesting article by Jon Evans from this month's Walrus Magazine, one of the finest Canadian magazines we've seen in a long time.

Both e-books and sheaves of paper have pros and cons. Sheaves never lose battery power; you can flip through them quickly, use them as bricks, or take them to the bath; and they are still relatively cheap. On the other hand, digital readers can store hundreds of e-books, including those available for free, and their contents can be updated, searched, and annotated. In the near future, the number of digital readers will skyrocket, and making copies for friends will be simple. All things being equal, you’d expect e-books to have grabbed a significant share of the book market by now. So why haven’t they?

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August 13, 2007

Big Brother is watching, or at least googling

Thanks to my colleague and pal Richard Parent for writing about this story on his blog. This is a chilling story for all of us who depend on crossing the Canada/US border on a regular basis. It's also an important reminder of how cautious we need to be about what we post online.

When Feldmar looks back on what has happened, he concludes that he was operating out of a sense of safety that has become dated in the last six years, since 9-11. His real mistake was to write about his drug experiences and post this on the web, even in a respected journal like Janus Head. He acknowledges that he had not considered posting on the Internet the risk that it turned out to be. So many of his generation share his experience in experimenting with drugs, after all. He believed it was safe to communicate about the past from the depth of retrospection and that this would be a useful grain of personal wisdom to share with others. He now warns his friends to think twice before they post anything about their personal lives on the web.

"I didn't heed the ancient Alchemists' dictum, 'Do, dare, and be silent,'" Feldmar says. "And yet, the experience of being treated as undesirable was shocking. The helplessness, the utter uselessness of trying to be seen as I know myself and as I am known generally by those I care about and who care about me, the reduction of me to an undesirable offender, was truly frightening. I became aware of the fragility of my identity, the brittleness of a way of life.

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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 9, 2007

Staying under the radar, or trying to....

After a great time and successful presentation at the EdMedia 2007 conference in Vancouver and a few days off with family in beautiful Montreal, I'm back at the office today and focusing on making July my most productive month in a long time. So, I'll be blogging less frequently than usual (I hope) and keeping my eyes on the clock and my growing book manuscript.

That said, it's always hard to turn down opportunities that tie in with my teaching and research interests. The morning after my return to Montreal last week, I had a chance to stop by Charlie Rathbone's great grad course on "Current Directions in Curriculum and Instruction" (you can check out the course wiki here). I was there to talk to the students about my use of blogs and podcasts in my teaching and I was impressed by the students' comments and questions on these topics.

One of the things I talked about was the importance of modeling the use of these technologies. It helps tremendously when trying to persuade others of what great tools blogs and podcasts can be if they can see you using these media at the same time. Little did I know that Charlie himself was planning to create a podcast about my visit there. What a great example of how we might think about using podcasts in the classroom!

Take a quick listen to the resulting podcast, created simply by passing around an iPod equipped with an iTalk microphone and a bit of post-production by Charlie using Garageband. I think I'm going to have to try this with my upcoming freshman seminar, English 005: From Pucks to Parliament: Exploring Canada's Cultural Landscape.

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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 24, 2007

Espresso book machine

It's not often that you hear the New York Public Library, The University of Alberta Bookstore, and The Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont mentioned in the same breath. What they all have in common, though, is that they're all purchasers of the first few Espresso Book Machines to roll off the assembly line. Personally, I can't wait to try this thing out, and I think I'll be making a pilgrimage to the Northshire Bookstore as soon as they have it in place (the U of A bookstore would normally be the top of my list but I won't be getting back home to Edmonton anytime soon).

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June 14, 2007

Blogging at UVM gets some more media attention

Virtually academic:
Students in Paul Martin's course on Colonial and Postcolonial World Literature at the University of Vermont start discussing Canadian authors in class and then continue their conversations online, thanks to the class blog.

"You've now had some time to sit with 'Kiss of the Fur Queen,'" Martin writes to his students in a blog entry dated Feb. 26. "What are your reactions to the novel? What surprised or struck you most about Highway's novel? Have your thoughts about the book changed as we've spent more time discussing it in class?"

In their 26 responses, his students elaborated on the classroom discussion and further explored the book's themes.

"It really does encourage students to reflect on what they are reading and to write something about it often," Martin said. "Often we don't know what we think about what we've read until we write about it. They learn something about the book from the exercise."

Lots of discussion in this Rutland Herald article (May 13, 2007) by Susan Youngwood about how colleges and universities in Vermont are using blogs.

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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)

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 29, 2007

Teachers who inspire (and not just the students)

One of the most inspiring teachers I've heard speak is Dr. Frank Robinson from the U of Alberta's Faculty of Agriculture, Forestry, and Home Economics. He's just won one of Canada's prestigious national 3M teaching fellowships (faculty from the U of A, by the way, have won more than any other university). Were I back at the U of Alberta, I think I'd be wanting to sit in on his course on a regular basis just to watch him teach.

This part of the article about the 3M winners in Macleans magazine made me smile...

A compact, wiry man with a police officer’s moustache, Robinson could be called slight were it not for a quiet, off-the-wall kind of charisma—one that finds expression in asking the sorts of questions that, initially at least, appear to come from the absurdist end of agriculture. “Why do cattle eat their placenta? Do they like the taste or is it peer pressure?” Or try: “Can horses fake pregnancy?” Or: “How many cows would it take to power your home theatre system?”

Congrats, Frank!

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March 13, 2007

Podcasting at UVM

Caught this article today about students producing podcasts as part of Heather Schell's freshman writing class at George Washington University and in Nanette Levinson's International Relations courses at American University.

I've had great success over the last couple of years with my English 005 students' podcasts and group blogs and I'm looking forward to doing more of this next fall. You can hear my Fall 2006 English 005 students' podcasts at our test UVM iTunes University page. Just follow the links until you wind up in iTunes.

If you also look at the Canadian Studies lecture links in iTunes U, you can also download a video of Eden Robinson's terrific reading she gave here in October. Her book Blood Sports has just come out in paperback in Canada and my English 182 course will be reading it about a month from now.

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March 7, 2007

Jean Baudrillard 1929-2007

I've not read anything close to all of Jean Baudrillard's considerable oeuvre, but I find it nearly impossible to teach almost any course without referring at some point to his work, in particular his notions of the simulacra and hyperreality. Still feeling like a stranger in a strange land, I also find his various looks at the USA to be especially compelling.

The news of his death yesterday saddened me, as it's rare that we find such an original thinker, someone whose work is truly, as Le Figaro referred to it in their headline about his death, "inclassable."

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February 28, 2007

This made me laugh...

On a day when I'm truly mourning the loss of Ryan Smyth, I caught this snippet from a USA Today article on Brett Hull that Paul Kukla posted on his excellent Kukla's Korner blog:

“You need to have some sort of pregame or postgame show so we can sit down and talk about the trade deadline — or the Buffalo-Ottawa (brawl),” Hull says. “I have a lot to say. But in 20 seconds, you have to be some sort of English lit professor to do it with any style or bravado.”

Uh, gee Brett, thanks for that. Well, um, I don't know, I think most all of my students would tell you that, more often than not, it usually takes me more than 20 seconds to say... What? Time's up?! Darn.

On a more serious note, Smyth deserved way, way better than this.

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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 22, 2007

Plagiarism

I'm in the process of writing up my own statement on academic honesty and plagiarism to include in all my future syllabi. In the meantime, here are some links to the relevant UVM policies and to some external sites that have good information on how to avoid plagiarism.

UVM's Code of Academic Integrity (pdf)

UVM's Center for Student Ethics and Standards

The UVM Cat's Tale Student Handbook

Plagiarism: What it is and How to Recognize and Avoid it ( a resource for students from Indiana University)

Plagiarism and Intellectual Honesty (an excellent resource from Dalhousie U)

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January 9, 2007

Whooooeeeeee!

How cool is this thing?

1/17 Follow up: sigh.....

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My token MacWorld keynote prediction

I expect the "one more thing" will be an Apple phone ringing in Steve Jobs' pocket. I can't see him being able to resist that.....

I'm also hoping for a new 802.11n base station today, given that my old one gave up the ghost over the holidays.

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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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December 8, 2006

A few stats on my blogging efforts here at UVM

I was happy to notice a few minutes ago that the comments on my English 180 blog have surpassed the 700 mark, with close to half of these coming this semester. I'll be the first to point out that I require that my students respond to the prompts and comment on each other's prompt, but I think that the level of "discussion" that has gone on there has helped my students get a better handle on the novels we've looked at this semester. I've been really impressed with many of the observations they've made there.

Looking at how much I've posted in the last couple of years, since I began blogging here at UVM, the total combined number of posts I've made currently sits at 463. That's not bad, at all, though I'd like it to be higher. Then again, I'd also like to be publishing more, so maybe I should be regretting it wasn't lower.

Regardless, I'm enthused to see such great work on the part of my students. I also highly recommend that you check out the great blogging work my English 005 (Canadian Culture) students did this semester with their group blogs. They really impressed me and are all now bloggers, at least for the time being.

I wonder if we'll see a "Great White North" alumni blog appear? HINT HINT, you intrepid English 005 bloggers...

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November 29, 2006

Blogging in the English department

Blogging continues to flourish at UVM, as Meg Thomas discovers in a nice article in today's issue of UVM's The View. This blog gets some good exposure there, but I'm lucky to be in a department that is pretty blog savvy. Last night Philip Baruth (the mastermind behind Vermont Daily Briefing), Huck Gutman, and I attended a great talk on "Why Read Blogs" by our colleague Richard Parent, whose blog Digital Digressions also deserves a spot on everyone's blogroll. Our colleagues Lisa Schnell and Andrew Barnaby have also been using blogs for some of their courses. Thanks in great part to the fine work of UVM's Center for Teaching and Learning, this is a pretty exciting place to be these days.

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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 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 9, 2006

This is what we're up against....

Just about to send out essay topics for my Can Lit course. Then I saw this.... I feel the same sometimes :)

(via Steven D. Krause)

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September 19, 2006

If I can't be a serious academic or renowned critic, at least I can be....

an international expert on the cultural impact of Tim Hortons! You think I'm joking, don't you?
Oh well, at least my sister's proud of me!

I'm feeling more like Homer Simpson every day....

But seriously, doesn't my freshman seminar sound like fun?
I don't have Tim's on the official itinerary for our Ottawa trip, but I think it just might wind up on there.
After all, if a little "double double diplomacy" is good enough for Condi, it's good enough for my students, eh?!

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September 11, 2006

A worthy reminder of what we're really up to... or what we should really be doing...

Just took a few minutes to watch "Did You Know?," an interesting powerpoint presentation by Karl Fisch. The powerpoint really puts a few things into perspective, namely how much the world is in the process of shifting more rapidly than we realize. For teachers and professors, as Karl points out, we're actually in the process of giving the students the tools they will use (I hope) to solve problems that don't yet exist, with technology that people have not even dreamed of yet.

Darren Kuropatwa did a great "Winnipeg Remix" of the powerpoint and put it up on his blog as a movie file, which is much easier way to see it than downloading the powerpoint. I see that his daughter, like my own, started Grade One (or First Grade as they call it here in the States) this week. Thinking about that in the context of the facts Fisch reminds us of really blows me away.

This also brings up the question of how my kids will be learning in the future. My father Jerome Martin's ebook Cappucino U (a free download from Spotted Cow Press) talks about learning in third spaces and the huge shift already underway in the ways that we learn and work. This post from Christopher D. Sessums' blog really opened my eyes as well about the ways in which "information and communications technologies (ICT)" have the potential to completely move us away from the model we're desperately clinging to today where Universities are the holders and bestowers of academic capital (i.e. a degree) to one where people might be just as well off to get their credentials from a variety of sources. As Sessums writes:

And the locus of control should be ours to negotiate as long as accreditors provide the opportunity to do so. Accreditation can be more than what’s issued by universities. It could be issued by Microsoft, the BBC, Apple, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, Toyota, etc. A person’s c.v. could be more organic, assembled from courses taken in a variety of settings, from a variety of providers. The university’s monopoly on accreditation will soon be a thing of the past as other players enter the tertiary education market and offer the skills and training that meets the needs of employers globally.

This takes me back to something I read over the summer in Peter Elbow's book Writing Without Teachers. Elbow writes of how his perspective shifted when he came to "notice a fundamental asymmetry: students can learn without teachers even though teachers cannot teach without students. The deepest dependency is not of students upon teachers, but of teachers upon students."

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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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August 9, 2006

More on teaching and blogging

This article on "E-learning 2.0" is a great follow-up to my post in July about using blogs in the classroom.

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August 6, 2006

Links roundup for August 5th

As some of you may know, podcasting is, I hope, about to take a big leap forward at UVM. We've been approved to join the iTunes U program and my courses this fall will be part of our official test of the system. I just need to get the University to sign off on the whole thing which hopefully should not be too difficult.

So, tonight I started out at Cole Camplese's blog checking out his posting on the new Belkin TuneTalk microphone for the iPod. I've been waiting for months for a recording solution for the latest generation of iPods, so nice to see that finally on its way. Cole's blogroll led me to an interesting blog I've not yet seen before called Podagogy. Lots of interesting stuff on that site, but I was especially glad to discover the NCQ podcast and a great site called Geek's Guide to Teaching. All of these sites are places where I expect I'll be spending more time soon...

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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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July 23, 2006

The NEH Digital Humanities Initiative

Wow, this is really cool. I can think of a pile of uses for this kind of money. I think I foresee another grant application in the works.... Once I finish the books I'm working on right now, that is. My hockey article is coming along, too, thanks to my kind writing group at the NWP Summer Institute. They're coming in each day with great poetry and narrative essays and I walk in with "guess what? Here's another page or two from my hockey opus!"

NEH has launched a new digital humanities initiative aimed at supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology. Digital technologies offer humanists new methods of conducting research, conceptualizing relationships, and presenting scholarship. NEH is interested in fostering the growth of digital humanities and lending support to a wide variety of projects, including those that deploy digital technologies and methods to enhance our understanding of a topic or issue; those that study the impact of digital technology on the humanities--exploring the ways in which it changes how we read, write, think, and learn; and those that digitize important materials thereby increasing the public's ability to search and access humanities information.
Digital Humanities Initiative

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July 19, 2006

Yes, I'm still alive. Barely.....

I guess a few people have been wondering where I've been lately. Readers?! You mean people read this? Cool.

I've been super busy of late helping to lead the National Writing Project in Vermont's annual Summer Institute. I've had a great time with these folks and am learning a ton, much of which I hope to bring into my own classroom in the fall. It really amazes me sometimes how little we actually talk about pedagogy in higher ed. It's been a revelation to me.

Here's a picture of the group taken the other day.

The only downside (and it's also an upside) to the whole gig is that it runs from about 8:30 to 3:30 four days a week, for the entire month. On top of all that, there's my new job directing the Canadian Studies program (and we're in the midst of huge changes that have to happen in the next few weeks for budget reasons) and there's also my day job to consider.... I'm beat! I've not worked this hard in a long time. Needless to say, there have been days of late where I've been wondering about changing my line of work so I can actually get work done. I wonder if there's an opening where this guy works....

More from me very soon....

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May 9, 2006

More on e-books...

Today's Telegraph has one of the better articles of late on the imminent arrival of the iRex iLiad and the Sony Reader. The only question I have is who do I need to convince here to let me order one for, um, testing purposes. Seriously, though, find me a scholar who wouldn't see any appeal in having a portable library of hundreds of books?

For the next generation, a library will mean a virtual library, and paper books will seem as quaint as the Ten Commandments chiselled out of stone tablets. The digital seems as sure to eclipse pulped wood and ink as the codex replaced the scroll. The advent of e-ink means the book industry is about to encounter its greatest tempest since Gutenberg, as one technology, viewed suspiciously at first, gives way in a torrent to another. So, which would you choose if you were forced into desert island exile beyond the reach of Amazon or Waterstone's - a ship full of salt-stained, hide-bound tomes, or the exceptionally portable e-Reader? More important, which will eventually enjoy supremacy? If you are reading this online you will have answered that question already.

Posted by pwmartin at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)

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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March 16, 2006

Just when you thought you knew everything that was going on at UVM... there's UVMrocks.com

This website and battle of the bands that Continuing Education has created is very cool. Who knew they were up to this?!

Anyhow, check out uvmrocks.com. You can listen and vote every week and the then the top bands play a showcase at Higher Ground. This part of their site explains the details.

I was pretty impressed with the bands this week. My vote went to Video Pigeon, whose tune Bunny Ears is very, very cool. Loved it.

If only professors were allowed to enter....

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March 15, 2006

More on podcasting at UVM

It seems like every day now there are new articles about podcasting in schools and at colleges and universities. These are really exciting times on the technology front. As I start to prepare for my fall semester's courses, I can really see podcasting becoming a more integral part of what I do. On July 1, I'll officially become the new Director of Canadian Studies here at UVM, and I can anticipate us creating podcasts of future Canadian Studies events. The same goes for the English Department. We have great writers coming through here every week it seems. How great would it be to make their public readings available for others to hear? Maybe we could also start to interview each of those writers when they come through and podcast the results. The opportunities here are limitless....

Here are some links to some excellent articles I've seen over the last few days:

• This article from THE Journal, entitled "In iPods We Trust" is a must read.
• From USA Today, "iPods now double as study aids" gives some good examples of podcasting in action.
• iTunes U making an impact at Duke gives a great example of how podcasting can be used for language teaching.

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February 23, 2006

More on iTunes U

Well, it sounds like universities are signing up for iTunes U in droves, in Canada as well as in the US. Many people I talked to are enthused about the possibility, though many of us also have some reservations.

My colleague Richard Parent and I had an interesting chat the other day about whether or not universities will want us to lock up our content to make it exclusive to our students. I like the option of being able to have most content open to everyone and some closed to everyone but students in a particular course, but only so long as I am the sole person to decide which file is freely distributed and which is not.

The other concern many people have is Apple's connection to all this. I'm an Apple fanatic, as most people know, so I am not all that bothered by this. But what if it were Dell, for instance, offering a solution that only synched automatically with their players?

No word on when (I won't say "if") UVM will be signing up. I figure that if I keep blogging about this, eventually it will happen.

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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 16, 2006

Teaching Carnival V

Teaching Carnival V is now online here.

These regular Teaching Carnivals are an excellent resource and a great example of how blogging can help us to have meaningful conversations about what we do with people outside of our own institutions.

Technorati Tags: Academia

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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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January 11, 2006

"Internationalizing" UVM

I just came back from an excellent workshop where many of us at UVM working in the areas of International Studies and other fields discussed the internationalization of UVM. Our focus was on how we could make UVM more connected to the rest of the world and the world more connected to UVM. What we envision must go much beyond simply sending students out on study abroad trips and should focus more on having students graduate with more of a global consciousness. Of course, one of the ways we can do this is by making more concerted efforts to have them study other cultures and languages (a certain country to the North of us immediately springs to mind).

Most of us were caught a bit off guard by this week's move from the White House to promote the study of foreign languages in schools and universities. It seems on the surface to align itself perfectly with what were talking about this afternoon. Then, I caught this posting on Laila Lalami's fabulous Moorish Girl blog. She sums it up far better than I can.

Wow--we're actually going to teach kids here about other languages?!! What a great way to tell them about the rest of the world. But I should have known better. Because the goal isn't to teach kids another language, but rather:

Bush portrayed the enhancement of foreign-language skills as a way of enlarging U.S. capacity to spread democracy. "You can't convince people unless you can talk to them," he said. (...) "When Americans learn to speak a language, learn to speak Arabic, those in the Arabic region will say, 'Gosh, America's interested in us. They care enough to learn how we speak,' " Bush said.

So the goal of learning the language isn't to learn something about a different culture, but merely to communicate well enough with the rest of the world to convince them to get on with the program already.

Sigh. Just when you think that guy might finally have a bright idea....

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Blogging takes off at UVM

What a nice surprise today to walk into a packed blogging workshop here at UVM's Center for Teaching and Learning. It wasn't that long ago that few people other than Steve Cavrak had done anything at all with blogging. Now, we have faculty, students, and staff creating blogs and looking at ways to use them in their work. Very cool to see.

I had the opportunity to speak to the group a bit about how I use blogs for my courses and in my own work and directed them to the links I posted in May, the last time I spoke to one of these workshops. It's great to see blogs really starting to take off here. With the addition of Richard Parent to our department and my colleagues like Andrew Barnaby and Lisa Schnell starting to blog, I can really see blogs a regular part of many English courses as well.

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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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