Week note, October ??? (Oh what the heck—last week!)

This was mentoring week for me: 

• I had two meetings with my mentoring partners, faculty who are new to James Madison University and participate in our New Faculty Academy.

• I co-facilitated, with my colleague Bob Kolodinsky, a new workshop on how to get mentoring relationships off to a good start, on Wednesday and Thursday. I thought it went well: Bob and I (but mostly Bob!) managed to prepare a workshop that combined ideas from the mentoring literature (Bob works on getting certified as a coach) and tips and tricks for mentors with some applied activities. We advertised the workshop a bit late—only two weeks ago—but got good participation from mentors in our New Faculty Academy program, and from department chairs who want to improve their departmental mentoring. It looks like we may be able to repeat the workshop in individual departments!

• To go with the theme, this week’s “reading” (during my commute, read to me by Tom, one of the voices on my iPhone) was Lois Zachary’s The Mentor’s Guide. A good resource, particularly for hands-on activities for mentors. I used Zachary’s four-phase model of the mentoring process in the workshop; I think it is useful for mentors to realize that the mentoring relationship changes.

Music: The New York Times has recently been highlighting the London Jazz scene (with an embarrassing tweet to boot, which turns out to be simply an unattributed quote—or paraphrase?—of Femi Koleoso, one of the featured musicians). In any case, the music is good stuff. Listen to the Ezra Collective (ft. Femi Kolas), Nubya Garcia, and other artists mentioned in the article.

A now a three-month note???

Beethoven in the mountains. flickr photo by AABQ shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Wow, this went by fast. One thing that I’ve definitely learned this year is that I won’t get any research, writing, or scholarship done in August and September, since this is the year’s crunch time for the career planning programs I oversee. Last week I was finally able to sort through the wreckage of partly-finished and barely-started projects and do some scholarship planning. 

Luckily, I’ve been reading Rebecca Pope-Ruark’s Agile Faculty. Pope-Ruark is a writing professor at Elon University who applies Agile project planning approaches, particularly Scrum, to scholarly (and other academic) project planning. I am trying to adapt some of her approaches to my own work and toy with the idea of including some Scrum in my upcoming research agendas workshop for new faculty. (I know that I should probably conserve time and repeat last year’s workshop without modification. In other words, I’ll definitely revise the workshop.)

August and September are definitely the busiest months of my educational development job:

• On August 20, we had our one-day new faculty orientation; I am in charge of the substantive side of the program. This year, we invited not only all new (to JMU) faculty, but also faculty who were newly tenured and/or promoted. The idea behind this change was that faculty who achieve a career milestone may want to re-orient their careers and get to know their institution anew. I should note that our new faculty orientation—we changed its name to Faculty Welcome, considering the presence of non-new faculty—is not your usual Parade of HR PowerPoints (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but essentially a mini conference with poster sessions about campus resources, a plenary roundtable discussion about what’s happening at the university, and two sets of concurrent workshops on a range of topics related to teaching, scholarship, career planning, and institutional questions more generally (this year we had a total of 12 workshops!). The program included workshops that I thought should be of interest to more senior faculty, such as a roundtable of post-tenure faculty about what they wish they had known when getting tenure and my new “How To Say No” workshop.
• In September, we welcomed the fourth cohort of JMU’s New Faculty Academy. This is a yearlong career-planning and mentoring program for new faculty in tenure-track and renewable-term positions. Participants take monthly workshops (mostly facilitated by me) and meet with peer mentors how have extensive JMU experience. Luckily, this year we had “only” 39 academy participants (in the last two years, the numbers were closer to 50) for which I had to recruit peer mentors. Still, I spend the better part of a month recruiting mentors and matching them with mentees, based on forms about mentoring needs, experiences, and interests that we asked everybody to complete.

Reading: I’ve found that I have to use audiobooks—or at least let Siri read things to me—if I want to get any work-related reading done. I commute more than two hours on most days, and while I can’t pay deep attention when I’m driving, I can at least catch up on the gist of what’s in a book or article. That way, I have “read” over the last couple of weeks:

• David Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism. Harvey is a leftie classic; I needed a more systematic introduction to the term “neoliberalism”, which gets thrown around a lot in higher education these days, and this book did it nicely. Occasionally, a phrase has Hitchhiker’s Guide qualities. Nice!
• Burge’s Mapping Your Academic Career, and 
• Johnson/Smith’s Athena Rising.  Burge and Johnson/Smith were recommended by a colleague. Both are useful as starting points for further readings on faculty careers and mentoring. I did not like the tone of Johnson/Smith’s book—the origin of the book is in mentoring in the military, the readers are assumed to be men, all involved are assumed to be heterosexual, etc.—but it is a useful collection of arguments and practical guidelines for men who mentor women, though the authors do not always succeed in their evident (is it really evident?) effort to prevent mentors from being patronizing. I wonder how the book reads in 10 or 20 years.

Music: I am really getting into Schubert’s late E flat major mass, as a listener, not a chorister. Wonderful-weird music. But the highlight of the summer was participating in an ad-hoc choir performing Beethoven’s 9^th in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Wintergreen. Oh yeah!

Weeknotes for March 26-30

What a weird week! No major events, workshop, or the like on my schedule, but no time at all for almost anything. Classes, meetings, and that was basically it! On the positive side, I had a number of good conversations with nice and interesting people (high five to my colleagues!), and I moved a number of projects along: our next cohort of SCHEV Outstanding Faculty Awards nominees is ready to work on their proposals; this year’s Review and Renew Your Career institute has been announced; and plans for a pilot Tenure and Promotion Dossier institute with librarians are on track.

Review and Renew Your Career (R2YC—cute, huh?) is an interesting story. For the last three or four year, we’ve invited Peter Seldin and Beth Miller to hold their one-week Academic Portfolio programs, and last year, we all decided that JMU was now ready to run the program on its own. The Seldin/Miller Academic Portfolio Institute is a weeklong intensive activity in which faculty work with individual mentors to write portfolio narratives that explain their major achievements and how they fit into an overall cohesive career trajectory/theme/mission/set of values. The result is not only that participants achieve clarity about their career purposes—what they have done in the past, what was most important to them, and what they should do next—but also that they gain a deep sense of accomplishment. When I participated in the program two years ago, I was at a point at which I had been promoted to full professor, but with a sense that I didn’t really deserve the promotion. Let’s just say that the portfolio process persuaded me that the opposite was in fact true. 

One of the difficulties that we encountered was basically branding. The Seldin/Miller-type portfolio structure does not perfectly correspond to the portfolios our tenure and promotion committees want to see. (In fact, different unit committees expect different formats.) Still, despite our explanations when we advertised the institute, most of the participants were faculty who were about to apply for tenure and who expected to write their tenure dossier. On the first day of the institute, we had to basically play bait-and-switch, and the responses were not exactly happy. Also, some past participants seem to have tried to submit their “institute” portfolios as tenure and promotion packages, to the chagrin of unit heads and tenure committees... 

In response, we are restricting the institute this year to post-tenure faculty (or, for renewable-term and adjunct faculty, to those with extensive experience at the institution). In addition, we renamed the institute to de-emphasize the portfolio product (though this will be the central activity of the institute) and focus more on the career review and mentoring aspects, which we have found are the two most important outcomes of the program. To support faculty who need to get their tenure and promotion dossier together, I am piloting a weeklong institute with library faculty, which will not follow the Seldin/Miller model but will be more focused on writing, peer-mentoring, and informational meetings with senior faculty from the unit.

Writing

I put the finishing touches on my New Directions chapter. It looks like it’ll be out in print of a sorts at some point soon. 

And I wrote a blog post on job searches. I’m trying to be cute, as you see.

Reading

On Saturday mornings, I go over blog posts of the previous week, saving those I’d like to read during the coming week. Like that, I have increasing amounts of reading materials sitting there. And I am one or two weeks behind any discussion that’s happening on the blogs. 

Never mind. This week’s most interesting item (for me) was Danah Boyd’s SXSW talk on, or against, media literacy, which caused quite a bit of debate on the blogs. Bryan Alexander has some interesting thoughts as well as a list of links to other responses.

Boyd’s talk is not that tightly argued and meanders a bit, which adds to its richness but also means that different people will take it to mean slightly different things. Boyd argues (in my reading, at least) that media literacy as she has observed it runs the risk of making students susceptible to radical right-wing narratives. As students learn to question the political biases of media narratives, they will turn that analysis on their teachers, who recommend mainstream liberal media as reliable, factual sources. Conservative students will conclude that it’s “all opinion”  (not Boyd’s quote, I think) and become open to right-wing persuasion.

Read it for yourself. There’s quite a bit more to the argument, of course, but the counter-arguments that you’re likely to think of still apply. One of the benefits of reading one or two weeks behind everybody else is that others have summarized your thoughts better than you could do it. In this case, Maha Bali and Benjamin Doxtdator pretty much say what I would have said if I had been less lazy (blog title!!!). 

One point I’d like to add: One difficulty that contemporary politics, particularly in the US, faces is the lack of a common media reality. Two decades ago or so, an oligopoly of dominant media sources defined the agenda of public discourse: the New York Times front page, the network evening news, etc. With the advent of news aggregators, social media, their algorithms, and the like, this oligopoly is essentially gone. At first sight, this is a good thing, as it may lead to more democratic agenda setting. But it obviously raises major problems as well: What issues the public should focus on is an important coordination problem, and the coordinated media oligopoly was a solution to that problem. Now we don’t have a solution, and it looks like that instead of a national public we have separate, polarized partisan publics. That’s not good. Further, the media oligopoly maintained a basic agreement on what constitutes quality information, what type of empirical support facts should have, and the like. That’s largely gone, too, and that’s not good either.

I think that Boyd’s argument is at least in part about how education can help create a functional alternative to the lost media oligopoly, or how education fails to do so. How can we establish an agreement on standards for establishing facts, how can we determine which media stories to reject, how can we create agreement on common issues to debate nationally, how can we communicate and learn across ideological lines? Or maybe that’s the direction I would like the debate to take.

Music

Every couple of weeks I cannot resist the temptation and stop at Booksavers of Virginia in Harrisonburg. I usually leave with a couple of CDs that I never thought I’d need. Most of my CDs—mostly classical music—come like that from various thrift shops. My most recent find was a CD with symphonies by the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe. It’s the most recent CD in my Arthur E. House, Jr. collection. I don’t know who Arthur E. House, Jr. is, or was, but he used to own a fair number of CDs that I now listen to. I know that he owned these CDs because the booklets all bear a stamp with his name. Mr. House also noted in tidy handwriting, usually fountain pen, where and when he had bought the CD, what the price was, and how much he paid for shipping, if he bought it online (Berkshire Records, of course). Occasionally, he’d also add up the playing times for pieces that were split up into different tracks.

Mr. House had an interesting and adventurous taste in music. Among other composers, he listened to music by Bill Schuman, William Grant Still, and Marion Bauer, besides Vagn Holmboe. I have a number of lesser known works by Rodrigo in my Arthur E. House, Jr. Collection, as well as Elgar’s Dream of Gerontion (Britten and Pears!), as well as a few nice recordings of music by Louis Spohr. And more things that I don’t remember. Here’s to you, Mr. House!

News from Ombudstopia

I recently phantasized about applying for a job in Central Ombudstopia and received the following imaginary letter in my Snoozle mail.

------

Dear Andreas,

Thank you for your application to our open position for assistant professor of Wishful Thinking, with subfield specializations in Fairy Dust and Invisible Unicorns. Since you are applying from abroad, I’d like to explain the search process here at the University of Central Ombudstopia. 

The most important thing to know about our search process is that we will invite only one candidate for a job interview, after we have made a job offer. Over the next week, the search committee will peruse all 100-or-so job applications that we’ve received. Based on the criteria communicated in our extensive job advertisement, we will select a shortlist of five candidates. We will then consider these five candidates carefully, based on the documentation that they have submitted. If you are one of these candidates, we may contact you by email at that stage, to obtain answers to any questions we may have. For example, we may ask you to provide additional evidence in support of qualifications and experiences that you list in your application documents, or to clarify any ambiguities that we may encounter in your application materials.

Based on the review of finalists, we will make a job offer to one of the candidates. If you are that candidate, you will be invited to a campus visit, before you accept the offer. The purpose is for you to decide whether our institution is right for you, and for us to persuade you to come. You can also discuss with us any needs and conditions that have to be satisfied for you to accept the offer. At that point, we are legally barred from rescinding the job offer to you, except under certain rare circumstances (falsification of supporting documentation, misrepresentation of qualifications, legally disqualifying criminal records, and the like).

If you accept our job offer, the campus interview will be the initiation of an ongoing effort to support your success at the University of Central Ombudstopia. We offer development opportunities and support services for faculty community building, professional mentoring, and skill development through workshops, institutes, and learning communities. We are committed to an inclusive work environment that will enable you to combine high-quality teaching with scholarly productivity and engagement in the university planning and administrative process.

Please let us know if you have any questions about this process. We look forward to considering your application.

Sincerely,

Yours truly.

-----

I am intrigued by the the Ombudstopian search process. What are its advantages? Where might the Ombudstopians run into problems?

Week note for March 19-23

Winter Office flickr photo by AABQ shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

I stole the week note idea from Doug Belshaw. Thanks, Doug!

Back to the old trot

The jet leg is wearing off! Upon returning from Germany, it was nice that I could go to bed between 9 and 10, and immediately fall asleep, waking up again around 5. This meant that I could get an hour of writing in before breakfast. Unfortunately, this is getting more difficult now, though I try to keep it up. Have to go abroad for another week, I guess!

Snow days!

On Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday, JMU was closed due to snow and ice. This was a welcome opportunity to catch up with some work, particularly on Wednesday, since I didn’t have time for my commute. Of course, this was off-set by some time playing in, er, shoveling, snow.

Sadly, we also had to cancel a committee meeting early on Thursday, since several members were not able to make child care arrangements in time: public schools were closed as well.

Writing

I finally finished my piece on professional identities of educational developers. Even though it seemed to be almost done by late Tuesday, it took me another full snow-day of work on Wednesday to finish it. It’s not a great piece — mainly literature review with theory and discussion — it was an invited contribution, and I was so late that it might get rejected by the editors. If this happens, I won’t be mad, since it’s just fair, and the piece really isn’t great (but I am not one to aspire to greatness).

I always find literature reviews to be hard going: How do you combine summaries of different sources into a coherent argument? That’s tough! I hope I’ve been fair to the sources, have not omitted anything important (but I ran out of the allotted space anyway), and did not misrepresent any author.

Whether the piece gets published or not, I now have much more clarity in my readings. I cannot wait to carefully re-read the sources that I used, and to discover new sources that I coulda/shoulda used.

Reading

On my Germany trip three weeks ago, I finish Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. Plane trips are great to get through thick books. I liked it: beautiful, well-written, entertaining, with interesting narrative tricks. It didn’t bowl me over as, say, Larry Durrell’s first two Alexandria Quartet volumes (but I’m not the same person).

In Germany I started Herman Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf, picking it up from my mother’s book shelf. I am prejudiced against Hesse, partly because of his corny and involuntarily comic poetry. Der Steppenwolf is more readable, but in many respects it confirms my suspicion that Hesse is overrated. More on this at another time, maybe.

I’ve also started Sophia, der Tod und Ich, which I bought on a whim at a bookshop. Worth it! Good example of German humor at its best. I am also giving Captain Blaubaer another try. I needed this combination, I felt: Something serious, interesting, but pretentious; something seriously humorous; and something that’s a bit of a silly romp.

Enough fun, now for some work reading:

Tragically and unexpectedly, Lee Ann Fujii died about two weeks ago. Here is her article on the lack of diversity in political science that all political scientists should read.

The Journal on Excellence in College Teaching has a special issue out on “Coaching and Leadership in Academia.”, co-edited by Jim Sibley and Susan Robison, whose work has provided me with a number of good ideas in the past. Interesting stuff! Coincidentally, a bunch of colleagues at JMU have started a conversation about how coaching and a coaching approach to mentoring can be useful in a number of ways in teaching and faculty support work. Nice!

Music

In the Oratorio Society of Virginia, we’ve started rehearsing a piece that we’ve commissioned for the 50th Anniversary of the choir: A piece by Adolphus Hailstork on a text by Rita Dove. I did not realize how thrilling it is to get to know a piece of music that nobody has every heard. The piece is titled “The World Called” and uses Rita Dove’s “Testimonial.” If you’re around Charlottesville, you can hear the piece on May 25. And here you can read “Testimonial.”

And now for some reading and reference management geek-off

Time for the confessional: When it comes to academic reading, record-keeping, and note-taking, I am a mess! When I find interesting articles online, I may save them to Instapaper for later reading, or if they come in pdf format, I may save them to Dropbox, send them to GoodReader on my iPad, or save a reference to Zotero with the tag “Read” (yea, right!). The result: a sizable Instapaper database, a mess of files in GoodReader, and random references in Zotero. The worst thing: I have a pretty bad memory, and if I don’t underline thoughtfully, take good notes, and use a well-organized database, I could just as well stop reading. So, over the last year I’ve been trying to come up with a way to keep track of academic readings, make note-taking more efficient, and be a bit more organized in my lit databases. It’s not necessarily the best way to do these things. There are other apps, tools, methods to keep track of reading (and read) materials, notes, and the like. But it works for me, and I’ve been able to keep it up for a while. Here’s what I do:

A few thoughts on Twitter chats as course discussion

One of the exciting and fun experiences of the #openlearning17 cMOOC are the twitter chats. I have not been able to participate in all of them, but the ones that I could make it to were energizing, provocative, and – I don’t want to say full of, but they provided their share of ideas and references. Here we are, in different corners of Virginia, the US, and the world, engaging in an intellectual exchange that can fairly easily fit into our schedules, that requires no travel (not even the 20 minutes that it takes me to get from JMU east campus to JMU west campus on the other side of i-81), and that we can pick up at a later time, read again, add new comments to, and so on.

But.

but…

One of the things that makes the chats exciting is the sheer speed with which tweets keep coming in. To me, this feels a bit like being at a party where everybody is talking; in situations like this, I can’t listen to anybody – I simply don’t understand what they’re saying, even if they’re talking to me. Too much confusion, too much firehose drinking. Tweetdeck is therefore an absolute necessity for me in the chats: One column is reserved for #openlearning17 and one column for responses/threads I am engaged in. Still, my sense is that I am slightly lost and don’t know where the conversation is going. I should check the storifies later on (Where are they, by the way? Can't find them!), but I haven’t done so yet.

Recently, I’ve been reminded of the German word Gespräch and the overtones it has for me. The word refers to a conversation, but a Gespräch is a bit more serious and weighty than most conversations (which we might call Unterhaltungen in German – entertainments). It doesn’t have the competitive aspects of a debate (which we call a Debatte); it is less focused than a discussion (which we call – German is sooooo different from English – a Diskussion).

Gespräch flickr photo by Karsten Spin shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

You say something; I listen. There is some silence while we think and take a sip. I respond at length, going on for a while, with a point that seems off topic at first but turns out to be apposite; you listen. You respond. I ask a follow-up question to better understand what you are saying, and you respond. We’re silent again. I add to what you said. You challenge what I say. I take some time to think about this, then offer a qualification. You do not immediately understand and ask me to explain a point. It turns out we understood a phrase I used in opposite ways and laugh, appreciating the humor of the situation. And so on.

I think a good seminar discussion has the characteristics of such a Gespräch. To me, Twitter chats lack some of these characteristics: there is no silence; there are more statements than questions; it is hard for people to explain themselves at length. We’re on a short ride in a fast machine.

Trailmix anybody?

Trail Mixes in Vending Machine flickr photo by Pat Guiney shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

OK, I'm pretty late with this. My day job – workshops to give, roundtables to facilitate, assignments to grade etc. etc. – is running my agenda these days. I am kinda following the readings and listen to all of your blogposts on my one-hour commute, read by ... I think the computer voice's name is Alex. Alex breathes electronically, too, though it sounds occasionally more like a gasp. (If you're interested, I use Instapaper to save articles and strip away most gobbledygook, then create a playlist and have the app read it to me from my iphone. After about 53 minutes, the app crashes and I have some time to listen to cheesy music. Yay!)

I haven't said anything about Vannevar Bush yet. Fun article: There's the geeky "Ooh, look, he envisions the internet. No, it's Wikipedia. No, it's Zotero. No, wait..." part. And then there's the microfilm-nostalgic part. (Hey, have you ever tried to read microcards with your bare eyes?) I enjoyed the connection to hypothes.is made by the #openlearning17 cMOOC creators – nifty tool, and the annotations left by fellow cMOOCistas. And I was pleased by the puns – happy trails and the like. Wondering: did anybody joke with trailmixes? Trailmixtapes? The combinations might open actually meaningful connections – mixtapes as metamusic, just like Bush's annotations and trails and the multidimensional links between texts, tags, notes, and annotators are metatexts.

Two thoughts on those metatexts: First, we have known such things for a while as literature reviews. There you have people combing through sources, picking out relevant bits and pieces, creating connections, structures in a literature. This is how we observe the masters' readings (or the doctors', in many areas, if it's not the graduate assistants who write this stuff*). What's the difference, beyond the technology, which is more clunky and inflexible in the case of the literature reviews and more versatile in the case of a shared database? Honest question. I think part of the answer is the open collaborative possibilities of databases like hypothes.is, whose promises are realized only if enough people participate. (We talked about collective action problems on twitter a while back, no?)

Second thought. Metatexts are texts, too: see literature reviews. Who's gotta read all of this? Bush starts off with the observation that modern science (and lets add other types of scholarship to make it worse) produces increasing amounts of text that is not only too voluminous for any person to read, but also too specialized for persons outside of the specialty to understand. With scholarly trailblazing à la hypothes.is or literature reviews, we create additional text: Is this going to be less specialized, more comprehensible for those who aim to integrate knowledge? And if it is, whose trails are we going to follow – will we get specialized intellectual trail makers? (In that case, why not reading literature reviews?) Will we have our personal fellow trail makers whom we trust, whom we know, with whom we work? Will this create new specializations? Will we create our own new jargon among fellow trailblazers? (We talked about collective action problems on twitter a while back, no?)

*This reminds me of the Great Joke of Great Scholars: in the case of some Harvard law scholar who plagiarized the work of some Yale law scholar and excused it with "my student assistants messed up" or the like, it became clear that the Great Scholars don't actually write the stuff that they don't read. The system is unbroken!

Just wandering around

Turtles on Ivy Creek flickr photo by A. Drauglis shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Story time: A few years ago, I was facilitating a workshop on learning objectives. I had given the workshop a couple of times before, and I think this instance was part of the JMUDesign program (these are probably the slides I used). The precise instance doesn’t really matter, though. What matters to the story was that a colleague of mine, a historian, was among the participants. In the workshop, I provided overviews of Bloom’s revised taxonomy for cognitive learning objectives, the Bloom taxonomy of affective learning objectives, and Fink’s wheel of learning goals (see p.9), and led the participants in working through and refining the learning objectives for a particular class that they were teaching. My historian colleague gave me pushback, though. He argued that learning objectives were basically irrelevant, in fact useless, for his course. Instead of defining ahead of time what students had to learn, he wanted his students to experience the close exploration of original sources and the debate over important historical questions. Clearly defined learning objectives would not reflect this experience.

My response was that maybe my colleague was in fact aiming at Fink’s application (critical and creative thinking), integration (connecting ideas and people), and human dimension (learning about oneself and others) goals. He disagreed. And now that I think of it (or have thought more about it), I tend to agree. True, you can formulate learning goals such as, “I want students to become more curious, open to other people’s thoughts, willing to be surprised by unexpected insights,” and I am sure that a skillful psychologist could device some assessment to capture whether these things are happening, and that there are more or less effective class designs that reach these goals. But what if these learning goals are what you want to discover as an instructor? What if you want to be open to unexpected learning goals, surprised by learning goals uncovered by the students that you had not thought of before?

I think about it like this: When I close my little office after a long day of developing faculty and head to the nearest bar for a cold beer or two (yeah, I wish), I take the quickest way that gets me to my well-deserved pleasure. I try to achieve a well-defined objective and take the most efficient way to get there. On the other hand, if I take a walk in the Ivy Creek Natural Area, I may choose one of the convenient trails, so that I don’t have to decide where to go, but I do not plan to reach a particular destination but wander around, possibly decide to take a different path on a whim if it seems interesting today, and am prepared to be surprised by unexpected discoveries or things that look different today for some reason. I may run into an acquaintance, stop to talk, and learn something that I had not expected along the way. OK, I may also get bitten by a tick.

Open Learning, Yeeeee...

toes up flickr photo by popofatticus shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

The #OpenLearning17 MOOC people have said GO! and I’m carefully dipping my toe into the hopefully not too chlorinated water instead of jumping in (full disclosure: whenever I try, I land on my stomach. Wait: didn’t one of you all have a funny gif on all of this?). I am curious about all the new ideas and all that gimmicky stuff to learn (I hope there’ll be some of this), but I have no clue yet where I’m going with all of this. My teaching (U.S. Government, courts, and such) tends to be intramural, and my main role is now in faculty development, with a focus on supporting faculty career planning. I have the sense that there is something in all of this that will be very useful, maybe even inspiring, and at the very least fun will be had. Connection and community is the basis of my work, so yay!

I don’t want to stretch the pool analogy too far, but so far I have only some cold (I’m German, after all) shower thoughts to offer: We’re for Open, but it’s all in English, right? K, Virginia is in the US, where lots of people speak that fair-sounding language, but. So, if we want to be really open, we should think how to include languages (or go within languages?) other than English. This may be particularly relevant these days, with the US threatening to become more isolationist and England going Brexit. (Not to speak of right-wing attempts to defund and de-institutionalized public education in the US.) Will English-language academia continue to play the global role it has been playing? Are we ready for this? Canada and Australia to the rescue? What should be our response? Translation tech? Educational translator-ambassadors? Learning Arabic? Chinese?

(True story: A few years ago I gave a paper at a conference in Germany, in my native language. It was a complete umh-and-ah fest. I'm not ready to go non-English myself, even if it's in a language that's fairly close to English.)

(Oh, hey, Camille used the toe-dip metaphor as well in her wonderful post.)

Is the absence of grade inflation a problem?

Grade inflation is commonly seen as a problem. An average grade between B+ and A in an undergraduate class is typically viewed as an indicator that instructional rigor is missing and that grades do not properly reflect student learning (or, rather, the lack of it). To avoid this problem, instructors are frequently admonished by academic departments to aim for an average class grade somewhere in the C-range. I’ve been thinking a bit about this and have a question that requires a bit of backup.

Let me start by stating a couple of rules that I think most people would agree with:

1. Graded assignments should measure students’ knowledge and skills in the subject matter of a class. A more sophisticated–or at least more Benjamin-Bloomsy–version of this rule would state that graded assignments measure whether, and to what extent, students attain the learning objectives that the instructor has set for the class.
2. Learning goals, assignments, and grading criteria should be transparent, so that students know what to do in order to succeed. In other words, instructors should tell students what they want them to learn and how that learning will be evaluated.
3. Readings, class activities, and the like should provide students with opportunities to learn the things that graded assignments evaluate. This implies that assignments should actually test what students can learn in the class.
4. Teaching should generally be effective in that students who participate in the class can learn the skills and knowledge that the class is meant to teach them. This means a number of things. Of course, it implies rule 3: the class should teach what it tests. But it also means that students should receive the support, inside and outside the class, that enables them to be successful. It also means that instruction should be able to address the learning needs of a diverse set of students, giving all the same opportunity to learn.
5. Instructors should continuously improve their teaching.
6. Students should be reasonably motivated to learn. This is connected to rule 4 in that effective instruction should include effective efforts to motivate students to learn.

If all of these rules are followed, or if all these conditions (if we want to think of them as such) are met, I don’t see how we cannot see grades go up over time. In addition, if a letter grade of B indicates that a student has achieved a learning objective, and an A indicates that the student excels in that objective, I don’t see how a course average can be below a B in the long run if all six rules are met.


Assume that a class has an average of a B or a B+ and the instructor is asked to lower the grade to a C. What can the instructor do?

Okay, here I go...

I've decided to sign up for the AAC&U Faculty Collaborative's Open Learning Connectivist MOOC, which starts this Monday. Let's see if I can convince myself that this is a type of procrastinating...

See ya, with more blog posts on open learning and such.

Edit: The RSS feed for Blogger that the friendly people at http://openlearninghub.net/the-stream/i-have-a-blog/specific/ suggest doesn't work for me. Instead of

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/openlearning

I have to use

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/?q=label:OpenLearning

Just as well.

Learning activities with laptops

In The Great Laptop Debates, I have been firmly in the pro-laptop camp. I don’t think it’s a good idea to ban them from classrooms. Many students need them to take notes, with or without official disability accommodation. It’s a waste of my time to police whether students use electronic devices, pass notes among each other, or roll their eyes. If I was a student, I would leave any class that would force me to shut down my laptop if I wanted to use it: Good bye and go bless your heart! 

Be my guest, you might say, but what about those studies that show (correction, I’d say: claim) that students learn less in the presence of electronic devices? 

Now, I could go on a rant about why I don’t buy those claims and why the evidence is weak, lacks validity, etc. This might be fun – in fact, it is fun: see The Tattooed Professor’s epic but not always accurate rant. But it wouldn’t show you how laptops can actually increase learning. It’s not enough that laptops don’t hurt students if used properly: we have to use them in a way that actually improves learning. 

This is the time for full disclosure: I have not studied laptop use in classrooms in any systematic manner. I have not tried a wide variety of learning activities with laptops, haven’t collected data, haven’t published analyses of those data in SoTL journals. But I can do two things: point to literature and make some suggestions. 

Avanti dilettanti! 

Publications: I am sure that I’ve found only a small portion of all there is, but a good starting point (at least chronologically) is a 2005 issue of New Directions in Teaching and Learning edited by Barbara Weaver and Linda Nilson. The different articles report on intentional laptop use in a variety of classes at Clemson University. Weaver and Nilson’s introduction (pdf) summarizes a number of activities that are explained in more detail in the individual articles of the volume: using laptops to gather immediate responses from students, to conduct in-class online research and source evaluation, to deliver multimedia material such as videos, to engage students in simulations, or to take laptops on field trips for mobile classwork. 

The open-door syllabus

A couple of weeks ago, my CFI colleague Ed Brantmeier and I ran two workshops about the Inclusive Courses review tool that we’ve been working on with Carl Moore, who currently runs the Research Academy for Integrated Learning at UDC. I am calling the survey or whatever it is a “review tool” because we are not sure what it is: partly reflective writing prompts, partly standardized survey, partly rubric. I suspect we’ll develop it in a couple of different directions. Feedback appreciated! (You can get a copy on Academia.edu or by emailing me at my broschax gmail.)

But that’s not the point here. My point is about syllabi. For our workshops, we had focussed on a subset of questions in our tool that dealt with the course syllabus, and in preparation, I looked at a bunch of syllabi that I could find online.

Shout-out to all those who post their course syllabi online: Much appreciated! It’s really instructive and humbling to read the syllabi that people write – so much good work out there.

What struck me was that many syllabi read like rulebooks, long lists of instructions and prohibitions that start right on the first page: attendance policies, deadlines, points subtracted for late submissions, margins and font requirements for papers, and and and. Sometimes it seemed that the professor had added another rule whenever there was trouble with something students did the previous semester. (Someone submitted a paper in 28pt font to meet the page requirement? I’ll put a font requirement on the syllabus!). Sometimes it simply looked like students were sinners in the hands of a wrathful professor.

What type of documents are such syllabi? Rulebooks (in fact, some approach booklet length, so rule booklet would be the right term). A code the professor can point to if a student complains about a grade, wants an extension, a makeup exam, or the like. Maybe a contract in which a professor tells the students what they’ll get from the class and what they’ll have to do to get it.

I want my syllabi to be open doors instead of rulebooks or contracts.

Hedgehogs, foxes, and academic portfolios

This week I am participating in an academic portfolio institute facilitated by Peter Seldin, Beth Miller, and a number of faculty members at my institution. Good stuff! Together with several colleagues, I am now revising my academic dossier, re-writing my teaching philosophy, description of teaching innovations, summaries of research projects, highlights of my service work, and the like. The point is to find common threads in one’s work, the overall purpose that drives what we do, and use this to guide the next steps of our careers. You can read about it in Seldin and Miller’s book. Since I am starting a new position this summer, as assistant director for career planning at my institution’s faculty development center, I see the institute as a welcome opportunity to think about what’ll come next.

So I’ve been busy writing my way through my past career, working on the common vision behind it all. And it got me thinking, which is a good thing: Does there have to be one overarching vision, a common purpose, a grand plan behind all the different things I’ve been doing? Honest question! I can see the ayes as well as the nays. (And, yes, I know that voice votes use “ayes” and “nos”, but I think this text needs more “y”s.)

Aye: It is good to know that I’m doing what I’m doing for a purpose, and that the purpose is one that I agree with. (Maybe even one of my choice!) It is good to be able to say yes to things because they belong to what I’m doing and no to things because they don’t belong to what I’m doing. It’ll make life easier. Also, knowing my professional purpose will make it easier to decide what the things are that I want to do before retiring (yeah right, retirement!), and to get them done. Maybe I’ll even become a peak performing faculty!!

Nay: This is so not me. I’m an empirical political scientist who has specialized on U.S. courts, and do you know the topic of the article that I recently read and found really exciting? Comparative political theory! On my commute home, I listened to Philippe Jaroussky’s recording of Verlaine songs, and that was the most important thing I think I came across today (sorry, Seldin, Miller, and colleagues ). Actually, the most important thing wasn’t Jaroussky but something I’m not going to write about beyond the note that it overshadowed everything else. And that’s how life is: it is not streamlined according to purpose or plan, it is multi-centered and whirling apart!

But then. We need meaning. We want to see connections. Scientists value parsimony. Religions seek the unifying vision, force, or deity. We like consistency in our ethics and politics.

Isaiah Berlin, in an essay on Tolstoy, cites the poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” (Here is the first section of the essay, which states its premise.) According to Berlin, “hedgehogs” reduce their view of the world to one system, a few central principles, while “foxes” accept the variety, confusion, and contradiction of life. Berlin puts it much more nicely than I can summarize:

For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. (p. 2)

Berlin clearly sympathizes with the foxes and distrusts the hedgehogs. Ronald Dworkin, in one of his last books, Justice for Hedgehogs, provides a counterpoint and argues for a liberal perspective that establishes a philosophical foundation connecting ethics, justice, and law.

I don’t really have a conclusion here. No big picture that connects everything and makes meaning here. Sorry!

Computer use reduces average grade from C- to low C-

The higher ed internets and social medias are positively abuzz these days with the Carter et al. paper on the effects of computer use in introductory econ at West Point. I've finally gotten around to reading the paper, and I like the study! It is extremely well-designed: it is situated in a real-life classroom setting, not a lab like other computer use studies; it uses real-life exams, not some ungraded quiz that students could care less about; it randomly assigns computer use policies in small course sections of large classes that use a common textbook and a common final exam; it compares course sections taught by different instructors and course sections taught by the same instructor; it includes important controls, does robustness checks with different types of standard errors, and covers almost any objection that I could think of. It's exactly how a quantitative, outcome-focused study in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning should be conducted. It should be required reading in SoTL workshops.

But I don't buy the substantive conclusion drawn by the authors: that they have shown that the use of laptops and/or other electronic devices had a substantive impact on learning. Here is why.

Well, first, here is why not: I don't have a problem with the whole correlation/causation thing in this study. Sure, correlation is not causation, but the authors do a good job (including the use of 2SLS) to exclude alternative causal stories to the extent possible. I also don't have a problem with the conclusion that the authors found a statistically significant effect of computer/el.dev. use. I'm as critical of significance tests as anybody who has used Bayesian analysis, but I buy that Carter et al. find an effect that is clearly significant according to econometric practice.

My problem is that the statistically significant effect is small. (Yes, I know that the authors go out of their way to argue that it's large - more on that below.) Carter et al. present various versions of their analysis, most with a pretty consistent effect of around -0.2. Since the dependent variable is standardized, this means that permitting laptop or electronic device use was associated with a ceteris paribus reduction of the final exam grade (multiple choice and short answer portions) by .2 of a standard deviation. On a 100-point scale, that standard deviation was 9 points. In other words, the possibility of computer use in class reduced the average exam grade by less than two points out of 100 hundred.

Let's put this in grade terms. The average final exam score in the classes under observation was 72 in the multiple choice and short answer portions. Electronics use in the classroom was equivalent to reducing that score to a 70.2.

News flash: computer use in the classroom reduces a C- to a low C-.

Significance is not substance. This looks pretty insubstantial to me. But the authors make the argument that the effect is in fact meaningful, even large, and they do so by comparing it to changes of other factors identified in other studies. The currency of comparison is the standard deviation: Carter et al. point to the fact that "Aronson, Barrow, and Sander (2007) find that one standard deviation improvement in teacher quality increases test scores by 0.15 standard deviations" in a study of high-school students; as a result, they conclude, permitting laptops in class is worse than reducing teacher quality. This assumes, of course, that a standard deviation in a West Point intro to econ test is equivalent to a standard deviation of a high school test score. What's the apple and what's the orange here?

There's another aspect of the Carter et al. study that makes me wary of its conclusion that it shows a reduction of learning due to laptops in the classroom. What worries me is the 72-point average that I mentioned above. You put highly motivated young people who were selected on the basis of academic merit and test scores into a small class taught by an expert with a graduate degree - and at the end of the semester the average score is a C-? That's puzzling! But it's not uncommon (I should take another look at my own classes!), and I think, based on my own experience but no actual data analysis, that there are three likely explanations for this. First, the final exam may not be well-aligned with what was taught in the course. Most frequently, this happens when the exam questions are about material that was not emphasized but mentioned somewhere in the class material, or when exam questions are not about the core of the facts and concepts but about marginal details associated with them. A popular type of such questions asks about the precise value of some number that was used to exemplify a course concept in the textbook. Such exams measure not only to what extent students have understood and can use the course material but also to what extent they can memorize the details. A second reason for such a low final exam score could be that the exam consists of a large number of questions, so that a fair number of students lose points because they don't get through the exam. In that case, the exam measures to what extent students are skilled at working quickly with a particular exam format, in addition to measuring learning. A third possibility is that the instructors aim for a particular grade curve. It could be that they want only a certain percentage of top students to continue in the major, or they may want to identify top students for particular honors or other outstanding treatment. These reasons are not mutually exclusive and, depending on the goals of the instructor and the educational program, they may be legitimate. But they suggest that the exam scores may have limited measurement validity as indicators of learning. In other words, computer use may (slightly) reduce something, but it is not necessarily learning, or not all learning.

The last point raises an interesting question about an intriguing detail of the Carter et al. study: While computer use in the classroom had a significant effect on multiple choice and short answer scores, this effect was missing with regards to the essay portion of the exam; instead, the instructor effect was much stronger. The authors, in response, dismissed the essay grade as a bad indicator of student learning. Could it be, though, that the opposite was true and that at least some instructors used the essay grade to correct for the low standardized scores of students that they knew, from classroom experience, office hours, and the like, were bad test-takers but had learned a lot?

In any case, I am generally happy about the results found by Carter at al.: Once you control for all the other factors that influence student performance, it barely matters whether instructors permit electronic devices in the classroom or not. Considering the many problems associated with prohibiting computers in the classroom, this is good news! Of course, the results do not tell us how instructors and students can use all the tools, electronic and otherwise, at their disposal to actually increase their learning, but that's the next conversation to be had.

Discussing discussions

Over the last year, I noticed in several of my classes that students were more reluctant than usual to participate in discussions. Sure, there had always been students who were more willing to voice their thoughts than others, but this time the silences were more frequent, in small classes as well as in large ones. This may have been a fluke – and one class proved the exception to the rule – but close listening to how students responded to my prompts for more participation gave me the impression that something was actually going on: Students were more afraid than usual of exposing themselves intellectually to the scrutiny of others.

It makes sense that (not only) students have become more reluctant to speak up: Over the last years, the most visible forms of discussion have become cesspools of hostility and public shaming: The insults hurled at Reddit OPs have become proverbial; Twitter blowups are ugly and personal even among people who are nominally adults; and a thoughtless post on a semi-private forum like Facebook may end up making the rounds as a screenshot. As smartphones are only inches away from student hands, a comment in a 10-student class may very well go around the world.

I don't think we could ever expect class discussion to come easily. After all, Karp and Yoel's work, which found that the majority of students delegate participation to a small number of their more engaged fellows, is almost 40 years old! If most students refused to participate in the staid social environment of 40 years ago, how can we expect them to jump at the opportunity today? At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that effective learning requires active engagement with what we learn. How can we create a classroom climate that fosters student participation, that makes it more easy and desirable for students to interact? And how can we make sure students learn how to engage and interact productively?

I don't have it all figured out yet. Luckily there's a bit of literature out there; among freely available resources, I found Blunt and Napolitano's paper on "Leading Classroom Discussions" useful, as well as Todd Finley's piece for edutopia. The Faculty Focus resources on class discussion (which are mainly by Maryellen Weimer) are very useful as well. For those with access to JSTOR or other subscription services, there is Goodman's excellent 1995 College Teaching paper on "Difficult Dialogues".

What I have found important and useful is to start the semester with a class discussion on discussions. Luckily, since I am teaching political science, this discussion usually fits into the course topic, as deliberation is central to many political processes.

The central prompt for the discussion on discussions looks somewhat like this:

Many learning activities in this course involve critical discussions that ask you to exchange ideas with your fellow students. This being a political science course, many of these ideas can be controversial and may lead to disagreement. Disagreement is a good thing, because it helps us learn. However, if disagreement is expressed in ways that upset us and that just leads to fights, we are likely to learn very little. Therefore, we need ground rules that make sure our discussions remain civil and focused on the things we want to learn.

To create discussion ground rules for this course, list three rules that you find important to create civil discussions.

In a small class, I let students write their proposed rules, then collect them on the board and have students discuss the rationale for the rules, which rules are most or least likely to be effective, and why they might work or not. At the end, I'll propose additional rules that I find important and that are missing from the list (here are some possible ground rules, proposed by the good people at Carleton College). I type up the list and circulate it among the students. In a large class, I first break up the discussion into small groups, then have the groups report to the whole class on giant post-its, whiteboards, or the like. Online, I require students to post their lists and respond to at least one other student's list by highlighting what they think are the most and least effective rules.

While this type of discussion on discussions is only a fairly small step, I find it useful, as it usually goes beyond how-to rules on discussion. A recent instance was a discussion in which students quickly agreed that class discussion should be purely rational and arguments should only be based on facts and data. This, in turn, led to a discussion on the role of affective elements in human interactions as well as the question whether the class objectives (or any important objectives, for that matter) could be addressed on a purely factual basis.

But there are more things that need to be done to foster widespread and productive class discussion. The actual substantive discussions later on have to be on important and engaging questions that help students learn; students need activities to reflect on the discussion, to debrief themselves, and to draw conclusions about what they've learned, and they need instructor feedback on whether they are on the right track. They also should have opportunities to break the discussion rules and be called out for it, since otherwise the rules are quickly forgotten. I'm not sure how to get all of this to work, but I think I'm partly on the way. The resources linked to above provide some useful starting points.

Write an inviting syllabus, not trigger warnings

The debate on trigger warnings seems to have run its course for now, with many thoughtful (if you agreed) or outrageous (if you disagreed) contributions. While I agree with many of the thoughtful contributions (see, for example, Ari Kohen, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and David Perry), I'm not too happy about the overall frame of the debate, it's focus on warning students:

Some of the (thoughtful) debate contributors have pointed to the learning hurdles encountered by students with invisible disabilities such as PTSD and the fact that we have to help them overcome these hurdles. While trigger warnings might prevent the encounter with unexpected triggers, the triggers constitute only a portion of these hurdles. Another thoughtful point in the debate is that we should not exclude students who experience discomfort and stress with difficult and conflictual course topics, even if this discomfort does not rise to the level of trauma or other psychological distress. But trigger warnings can very easily exclude those students ("You have been warned: Take this course only if you are worthy of hard questions!"). As a result, trigger warnings are only a partial solution to one problem and make another problem worse.

Instead of adding a trigger warning to the lengthy (thanks, accreditors!) list of rules, instructions, penalties, grading scales etc. that we have to include on our syllabi, why not write a syllabus that helps create an open and inviting course climate? Instead of warning students off, why not invite those who fear conflictual or difficult course material to talk to you about ways to handle the difficult material and succeed in the course? Such a conversation, hopefully at the beginning of the course, is more likely than a trigger warning to encourage students to face the questions that they find threatening and to work with the instructor to do so successfully. In addition, instructors can encourage students to contact disability services and possibly get an access plan if they suspect that their fears are connected to a disability that should be accommodated.

Making your class inviting opens a number of boxes, particularly if you think in terms of inclusive learning, so here are just a few pointers to things that can be done fairly easily. Harnish et al., in an article on Creating the Foundation for a Warm Classroom Climate, focus largely on the type of language instructors use in their syllabi and how they frame the rationale for assignments and explain their own interest in the course topic. They provide a useful list of things that instructors can check when they create their syllabi.

Related to this, with a stronger emphasis on the disciplinary focus of the course, is Ken Bain's Promising Syllabus model, which he summarizes in a short paper (pdf) as well as in his book, What the Best College Teachers Do. Bain's syllabus model encourages instructor and students to enter into a conversation about what students will learn, why they should do so, and how they can document success. If this is successful, the exchange between instructor and student should include a conversation about possible affective and psychological hurdles that the students face.

Among the suggestions most applicable to trigger-warning style situations is one by Christina Petersen, David Langley, and Cheryl Neudauer, in a presentation at the 2013 PODNetwork conference. Petersen and her colleagues propose the inclusion of a paragraph that explicitly invites students to talk to the instructor when they feel overwhelmed and promises that the instructor will try to find a solution with them that helps them succeed. The presentation material used by Petersen and her colleagues, which includes example text for such a paragraph, can be found at the wikiPODia website.

Will filibuster reform lead to more partisan judges?

Observers agree that last week's filibuster reform was a big deal, but nobody knows yet in which way it is going to be big. Speculation abounda - a good example is Judge Wilkinson's argument that collegial interaction in the courts will suffer as future judges do not have to gain bipartisan approval (his column, by the way, includes a beautiful invocation of collegiality in the courts, which all should read).

I am skeptical of this conclusion, for a number of reasons. While the filibuster has been abolished for all practical purposes, there are other mechanisms for minority party involvement and obstruction. As a result, presidents still have incentives to nominate judges that gain at least some bipartisan approval.

First, the Senate's rule change is not a complete demise of the filibuster – it merely reduces the number of votes needed to invoke cloture. As a result, the majority party can now invoke cloture whenever almost all of its members support a nomination. It does not need Republican votes to do so. But according to Senate rules, a successful cloture vote does not necessary lead to an immediate vote on the nomination: it can still be followed by up to 30 hours of debate. In other words, the filibuster has been turned from a block to a delay that can still be costly to the majority's political agenda. If the president can reduce Senate debate to under 30 hours by appointing judges that accommodate minority party concerns, he is likely to do so, at least in many instances.

Second, the "end" of the filibuster for presidential nominations is not the end of the blue slip process, as several commentators noted in recent days (see here, here, or here). When the president nominates a lower-court judge, the chair of the Senate Judiciary committee sends blue forms to the two senators of the nominee's state. If the two home-state senators do not return the blue forms, or return them with negative comments, the Senate judiciary chair traditionally blocks hearings on the nomination, particularly if the objecting senator is from the president's party. Judiciary chairs have differed on whether they let blue slips from opposition senators block nominations; the current Judiciary chair, Patrick Leahy (Vt), has vowed to honor Republican blue slips and requires positive blue slips from both home-state senators before he proceeds with hearings on the nominations.

This begs the question why Senate Democrats, now that they got rid of the filibuster, wouldn't get rid of the blue slip process as well. I think the answer lies in who controls the blue slip process, compared to the filibuster. The cloture vote, which is the tool to end a filibuster, is controlled by the Senate as a whole – 16 senators have to request cloture, and the president pro tempore then holds a cloture vote. The blue slip process, on the other hand, is in the hands of the Judiciary Committee chair. And the Judiciary chair may have institutional incentives beyond those of the majority party leadership, or even the average majority party member. Leahy may find that he can do his job much more effectively if he has a minimum level of goodwill from the Republican members of his committee, with whom he interacts more closely than with other Senate Republicans. As a result, it is at least thinkable that Leahy will continue to honor negative (or missing) blue slips from Republican home-state senators, particularly if the objections raised by those senators are reasonable.

So I think that it is quite likely that judicial appointments will be less partisan than some of the doom sayers expect, and they will not be more partisan than previously appointed judges: The appointing president's and the home-state senators' ideologies have been pretty good predictors of how federal judges will decide in cases with politically definable outcomes &ndsh even before the filibuster change.

Preface questions, ctd.

More responses to questions that incoming freshmen had during the Preface session at the beginning of the semester (Preface is JMU's program to welcome incoming freshmen and -women; it includes a first-year reading program). I asked them to leave me note cards with their questions. Here are some more answers.

Respectful and ethical minds - what's the difference?

This is a good question: the two ideas that Gardner talks about are clearly related. The respectful mind points to the habit of showing respect to people with different beliefs, traditions, perspectives, etc., while the ethical mind points to the need to "act on the basis of responsibility." Obviously, one could argue that being respectful is an ethical requirement and that these two types of mind are closely related (or the respectful mind is part of the ethical mind). Gardner wrote an entire book on his idea of different minds, so I suspect that he goes more in-depth on these types of questions.

I have to admit that I find it dangerous to over-emphasize respect. True, I think it is important that we learn to be respectful towards people with different perspectives, beliefs, opinions, ways of thinking, etc. etc. Particularly as a student of American politics, I find that the respectful mind is too little exercised in many public debates. But ridicule has its place in public discourse as well. Sometimes ridicule is more effective to expose lazy reasoning, stupidity, or bad taste. And in many dictatorships, respectful criticism is prohibited, while ridicule can often slip undetected through censorship.

I think that, when it comes to respect, the important thing is to learn when to be respectful and when to ridicule what deserves to be ridiculed. That's to a large part an aesthetic question – a question of good taste, of proportion. Interestingly, that's something that Gardner does not mention in his article.

How important is the Preface class, compared to other classes?

For me, the main importance of Preface, JMU's first-year reading and discussion program, is to prepare incoming students for their work at JMU. I suspect that the way we learn at JMU is quite different from learning in many high schools – students are expected to be more responsible for their own learning, they have to develop their own interests and pursue them, they have to understand what constitutes a good and fulfilling education and make sure they get it. Professors, librarians, and other people working with students provide many opportunities for students to learn and grow, and students have to figure out how to take those opportunities. The readings and discussion in the Preface class meeting were designed to let students reflect on what is learning, what is knowing (and not knowing), what is part of a good education, and what are the reasons for seeking an education. We hope that the readings provided students with ideas about learning that help them achieve their goals in a variety of disciplines. In this sense, the Preface class is very important, even though it may not provide any specific knowledge about particular classes that students are going to take, say, in their majors later on.