Category: Education

Replied to a tweet by Jesse StommelJesse Stommel (Twitter)

When you worry students won’t understand an assignment, the answer is often not to add more instructions, but to take instructions away.

Students get bogged down by all the words and minutiae we clutter assignments with. I think the best assignments are spare and evocative, not weighed down by expectations.

But this also means making sure we don’t have “hidden” expectations — making sure we are genuinely prepared for students to do something novel and unexpected. And prepared to work (or collaborate) with students at any point in the process.

I’ve seen assignment sheets for 1-page papers that were themselves more than a page. I wouldn’t demean anyone using those. As teachers, we care deeply about our work. But I’d ask whether all those words are actually helping get us or students closer to the germ of the work.

The final project for my digital studies course goes to the other end of the extreme. In the syllabus, I call the prompt “deceptively simple.” It’s just 8 words: “do something on the Web about the Web.”

When students ask for clarification, we talk about what’s possible, about all the ideas they have, even maybe imaginatively about the kinds of stuff I might do in their place. I tell them my final project is the course syllabus I’ve been building (with their help) all semester.

I don’t add more instructions. I don’t answer “do you mean,” “can I,” or “are you looking for” kinds of questions. I don’t show examples (unless students get really stuck).

The point of an assignment, for me, is not to create gotcha moments or to point students toward paint by numbers outcomes. An assignment, in my mind, should be like a canvas for students to experiment upon.

Not all assignments can be expressed in just 8 words. Some are more intricate, layering different skills atop one another. I teach with that kind of assignment as well.

As a side-note, I’ve actually stopped using the word “assignment” altogether. I say the “work of the course,” “do some stuff,” or “project” to remove transactional language like “assignment” or “submit.”

I also don’t have students “turning in” their work to just me. By whatever means I (or we) devise in a given semester, students share their work with each other (and also me) or with the world.

Me also, my instructions (across the board) have become more and more spare over the last 20 years. I have 50 students this semester, and I've gotten only about 3 questions all term about instructions or logistics.

I’ve noted before the idea of 10 word answers with relation to politics and complexity highlighting a short video snippet from The West Wing.

Jessie Stommel distills assignments down to a roughly similar 8 words, but then smartly relies on students to fill in the complexity of the idea with their own work. In the West Wing framing, he’s asking students to give the next 10 words and then again and again. Filling out the complexity of ones’ ideas is really where learning takes place.

His idea is closely related to the one I had been making about Trump’s communication style. Though even in the completely made up versions of things like the Turbo Encabulator, teachers will need to be careful about what’s coming back in the assignments.

👓 The 5 college majors American students most regret picking | CNBC

Read The 5 college majors American students most regret picking by Jessica Dickler (CNBC)
English, communications, biological sciences and law were among the most regretted college majors, according to a recent survey. On the upside, students who focused on computer science, business, engineering and health administration felt very good about their choices.

🎧 Tom Woodward | Gettin’ Air with Terry Green | voicEd

Listened to Tom Woodward | Gettin' Air with Terry Green from voiced.ca
Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) is Associate Director of Innovation in the @VCUALTLab. We chat about the awesome things that can happen when great educational technologists like Tom get to work with great educators. A few of those things are anth101.com, photographyismagic.com, and oh the 34,200 blogs at rampages.us!

I feel robbed that Terry Greene only published the first half an hour of what would assuredly been an epic 10 hour discussion. Suppose I’ll just have to be content with reading Tom Woodward’s blog cover to cover and scouring the web for video that features him.

👓 Limits, schlimits: It’s time to rethink how we teach calculus | Ars Technica

Read Limits, schlimits: It’s time to rethink how we teach calculus by Jennifer OuletteJennifer Oulette (Ars Technica)
Ars chats with math teacher Ben Orlin about his book Change Is the Only Constant.

Finally, I decided to build it around all my favorite stories that touched on calculus, stories that get passed around in the faculty lounge, or the things that the professor mentions off-hand during a lecture. I realized that all those little bits of folklore tapped into something that really excited me about calculus. They have a time-tested quality to them where they’ve been told and retold, like an old folk song that has been sharpened over time.

And this is roughly how memory and teaching has always worked. Stories and repetition.
–November 11, 2019 at 09:56AM

👓 Using Hypothesis Groups in the Classroom | Hypothesis

Read Using Hypothesis Groups in the Classroom by Jeremy Dean (web.hypothes.is/blog/)
A couple of weeks ago, we quietly released a new feature here at hypothes.is: the ability to annotate websites and PDFs in groups. Previously, all annotations created using hypothes.is were either public or private (“only me”). Now you can create a hypothes.is group and invite others to join you in annotating a text or set of texts amongst yourselves–here’s a tutorial to get you started.
Replied to a tweet by Tom WoodwardTom Woodward (Twitter)
All the credit really goes to Ryan Barrett and the huge open source crowd in the #IndieWeb who provide a truly magic tech layer for adding onto the and space. If you haven’t tried it, step on in and say hello! 👋

🎧 @hypervisible | Gettin’ Air with Terry Green

Listened to @hypervisible from voicEd | voiced.ca
Gettin’ Air with @hypervisible Professor of English at Macomb Community College. Self described as the “The Beavis of Twitter”, we chat about how he works to raise awareness of the absurd and abusive tech practices of various platforms and companies and how he helps his students navigate this increasingly dystopian world. “There’s always material to talk about how something sucks if you’re in the ed-tech space”.

The description far undersells the great conversation here. I almost wish it had been recorded just after Halloween so we might have gotten some discussion about Ring Doorbells recording millions of children and then promoting that scary fact in their marketing and social media.

Somehow @hypervisible blocked me on Twitter, which is a painful shame–at least for me. He’s one of the few researchers to have done so and one of the few people it’s worth having a separate account just for reading his content. I’m glad that others like Terry help to get his message out in other ways!

Chris also mentions a great list of recommended reads at 11:30 into the episode including:

👓 For-profit, faux-pen, and critical conversations about the future of learning materials | Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D.

Read For-profit, faux-pen, and critical conversations about the future of learning materials by Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D. (Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D.)
I remember the first time I heard the term “free riders” being used in the context of the open education movement. It was at the Open Education Conference in 2015 in Vancouver when, dur…

Of course the Open Education conference is just an open education conference and it certainly isn’t the only place to have these conversations. Regional events such as the Northeast OER Summit, the Cascadia Open Education Summit, Wisconsin’s E-ffordability Summit, the Statewide Colorado OER conference and others are wonderful options. Further afield, the OER conference and the Open Education Global conference are both events that welcome critical conversations. As do other events like Digital Pedagogy Lab and the many virtual conference hallway conversations facilitated by Virtually Connecting.

Nice list of open education and OER related conferences and communities.

Expanding Ekphrasis to the Broader Field of Mnemotechny: or How the Shield of Achilles Relates to a Towel, Car, and Water Buffalo

If Lynne Kelly‘s thesis about the methods of memory used by indigenous peoples is correct, and I strongly believe it is, then the concept of ekphrasis as illustrated in the description of the Shield of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad (Book 18, lines 478–608) is far more useful than we may have previously known. I strongly suspect that Achilles’ Shield is an early sung version of a memory palace to which were once attached other (now lost) memories from Bronze Age Greece.

The word ekphrasis, or ecphrasis, comes from the Greek for the description of a work of art produced as a rhetorical exercise, often used in the adjectival form ekphrastic.—Wikipedia

While many may consider this example of Homer’s to be the first instance of ekphrasis within literature (primarily because it specifically depicts an artwork, which is part of the more formal definition of the word), I would posit that even earlier descriptions in the Iliad itself which go into great detail about individuals and their methods of death are also included in a broader conception of ekphrasis. This larger ekphrasis subsumes all of these descriptions in an tradition of orality as being portions of ancient memory palaces within a broader field of mnemotechny. I imagine that these graphic, bloody, and larger-than-life depictions of death not only encoded the names and ideas of the original people/ancestors, but they were also quite likely to have had additional layers of memory encoded (or attached) to them as well. Here I’m suggesting that while an actual shield may or may not have originally existed that even once the physical shield or other object is gone or lost that the remembered story of the shield still provides a memory palace to which other ideas can be attached.

(I’ll remind the forgetful reader than mnemotechny grows out of the ancient art of rhetoric as envisioned in Rhetorica ad Herennium, and thus the use of ekphrasis as a rhetorical device implicitly subsumes the idea of memory, though most modern readers may not have that association.)

Later versions of ekphrasis in post-literate history may have been more about the arts themselves and related references and commentary (example: Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn), but I have a strong feeling that this idea’s original incarnation was more closely related to early memory methods at the border of oral and literate societies.

In other words, ancient performers, poets, etc. may have created their own memory palaces by which they were able to remember long stories like the Iliad, but what is to say that these stories themselves weren’t in turn memory palaces to the listeners themselves? I myself have previously used the plot and portions of the movie Fletch as a meta memory palace in just this way. As the result of ritualistic semi-annual re-watchings of classic and engaging movies like this, I can dramatically expand my collection of memory palaces. The best part is that while my exterior physical location may change, classics movies will always stay the same. And in a different framing, my memories of portions of history may also help me recall a plethora of famous movie quotes as well.

Can I borrow your towel? My car just hit a water buffalo.—Irwin M. Fletcher