Student team spirit!

I discovered yesterday that the students on my Print Culture class have set up a Facebook group for themselves, and are sharing tips and swapping frustrations about the research project I set them on the history of the book. It’s the end of semester, the reports are due this weekend, and I’ve only just discovered the existence of this group… but I think it’s brilliant! I had wondered if the project would be better done as a group project rather than individually, but in fact, the individual projects have managed to become at least something of a group experience.

Tags: small group teaching, technology

Marking with hard copy, or soft?

I can’t make my mind up, I really can’t. I have been a strong supporter of marking student coursework in hard copy, even though I’m perfectly well aware that other people mark an electronic copy using Turnitin’s marking tools, or their own statement banks, or electronic ‘sticky notes’. I’ve been doing more marking on-screen recently, but I’m still not totally converted. (I should perhaps say that the majority of the coursework I’m marking is in the form of essays.)

On marking an electronic version:

• my comments are legible
• I can upload a copy to our VLE, for the student to read ahead of our feedback meeting
• our administrator can use the uploaded copy to double-check my data entry into the VLE gradebook
• we have a saved copy of the comments to show to the external examiner or in case of an academic appeal
• having an electronic copy of my comments makes my filing (and retrieval) system easier
• the students don’t need to submit a hard copy as well as their electronic copy (which is required for the record, and for running through Turnitin)
• thus, the students don’t get into a panic when the computer room printer runs out of toner at 2 minutes before the deadline
• If I get at all suspicious of the authorship of a particular piece of prose, it’s very easy to paste the sentence into a Google searchbox, just to check – rather than putting it aside to do later, and then forgetting
• I can cut and paste certain comments between feedback sheets, but I don’t do this anything like as much as I expected – only for certain exercises is my feedback rather standardised, and it usually takes me as long to find the sentence I want to copy, as it would have taken me to re-type

On hard-copy marking:

• I still find that the sorts of literary style comments that I want to make on many student essays are easier and quicker to make if I’m annotating the hard copy (they involve underlining, circling, arrows…)
• Some of my assignments involve the students submitting supporting material that is difficult to combine with their essay in a single electronic file for the VLE (e.g. lengthy tables of data, in landscape orientation; pictures of rare books; graphs). These things are much easier for them to submit in hard copy, and thus I have to mark hard copy.
• My current (and previous) department supplies carbon-copy feedback forms, in triplicate, thus providing a hard-copy means of keeping file copies for me and for administration. But the third copy of the form was almost always illegible (and certainly couldn’t be photocopied for an external examiner, as I discovered earlier this year)
• I can mark hard copy just about anywhere: in airport departure lounges, on trains, in an armchair, in the garden or at my desk. By choice, though, I will not be at my desk, but will be in a comfy armchair with a heap of essays, a red pen (yes!) and a heap of feedback forms on a clipboard.
• Even if I’m annotating the hard copy of the essay, I could still type up my comments (and get many of the above-mentioned benefits), but it’s only efficient to do that if I’m marking at the desk where my computer is
• I’ve been trying an in-between option, of part-filling the electronic form (e.g. with module, date and assessment details) and then printing out multiple copies to complete by hand; it saves some time during marking, but I then have to photocopy it (or scan it), so I think the total time may even be increased.

So, I really like the storage, retrieval and distribution possibilities of having electronic copies of my feedback. That doesn’t have to involve making electronic comments while reading an electronic copy of the work, but that would certainly be the most time-efficient way of doing it.

But the killer issue for me is still the one about the ergonomics of marking: I want to do it in my armchair, by the window, not at my computer desk. Being at my desk means being physically in a different posture, being crowded by my computer equipment, and risking being distracted by my computer equipment. I prefer marking elsewhere (and sometimes, to make best use of time, e.g. when travelling, I have to).

So what I’m trying to work out is a way of combining the two. I’m sure someone will tell me that what I need is a nice slim tablet computer, but right now, all I’ve got is a smartphone (too small for serious composition) and a netbook (small and cute, and I have taken it to my armchair for typing up comments while marking hard copy – but the screen is too small for happy typing of comments while reading electronic copy).

Maybe the next generation of hardware will solve most of my problems, and the next generation of software may solve the problem of submitting non-textual supporting materials. Meanwhile, I’m continuing to try out a variety of techniques (but I’ve given up on the carbon-copy forms!)

Computers in the classroom

It’s only been this year that I’ve noticed significant numbers of students bringing laptop computers to class: I find it a bit disconcerting to be at the bottom of a raked lecture theatre looking up at a sea of apple logos with the occasional face in between. I’m not sure if it really has only happened this year, or if this is one of the other differences between my old and new institutions.

I think I don’t mind students taking notes in lectures on computer, though the experience is better for me in a flatter room, where I can see their faces as well as the lids of the laptops. I can’t help but wonder what else they might be doing when they ought to be concentrating on what I’m saying, but doodling and day-dreaming were always possible distractions in any case.

I like the opportunity that it offers for students to use my handouts as the basis for their notes. I’ve always given one-page handouts that are outlines of my lecture (with section headings, and key names/dates), with the intention that students could either scribble on to the handout itself, or use its headings to guide their own note-taking. But now that I’m putting my handouts on our VLE in advance (technically, that’s for the various students with special learning needs, but they might as well all get the benefit), a student can have the electronic copy open on screen during the lecture, and potentially type directly into it. I don’t know if anyone is actually doing this, but one student has told me that she is using the electronic handout during class.

Some of my students have chosen not to purchase the printed course reader (containing the historical documents we discuss in our weekly tutorials), opting instead to download the documents from the VLE. Although some of my colleagues fear that this will lead to less engagement with the texts (compared with the usual ‘attack of the highlighter pen’ scenario), I’ve seen students with ‘sticky notes’ over the PDF and Word files. In fact, when I set an essay-marking exercise, and emailed the sample essay files to them, I was impressed to see the level of engagement from students using (variously) track-changes, comments, and highlighting.

It was only this week, however, that the potential for incorporating the computers into my teaching came home to me. It all started when I wanted to show my Print Culture students the Open Library project, and suggest they might like to contribute. The classroom PC was running slowly, and this particular classroom PC has no monitor of its own, so you have to use the projected image, which is behind you if you’re at the keyboard… So, it was rather awkward, and several of the students started looking the site up on their own computers, and could search for their own project topics faster than I could try to show them on the main screen.

Subsequently, I’ve taken advantage of the fact that over half the class have network access. For instance, we were talking about how government decisions affected the book trade: taxation, specifically; and someone mentioned modern-day VAT, and the privileged VAT-rating of books. But had that been one of the things changed recently? I didn’t know for sure (I’m a Victorianist, not a contemporary historian, after all!) – but it was easy to ask someone to look it up for us. By encouraging the students to make use of their computers, I can be sure of getting answers to all those throw-away questions I  like to scatter through my seminars – but which would too often turn out to be unanswered. Not any more! (Which, of course, brings home the point that a History degree is not about learning historical facts – all of which can be found by Google within seconds – but about learning skills of analysis and evaluation of historical material, which Google cannot yet do.)

That’s all sounding very positive, I know. Any disadvantages?

Well, when I teach the very small-group classes in my office, my teaching table is barely big enough for 8 of us, let alone 8 with laptops (fortunately, I’ve not had more than 3 laptops at once, so far).

More of a concern is that only some of the students have (or choose to bring) computers. I can make my teaching more interactive, but not everyone can participate in those activities. So for now, I think I have to be careful about how much I ask the students to use their computers in class, to ensure that all students have an equivalent chance to learn effectively.

From student to teacher

Three years ago, I was part of a group sitting in a seminar room learning about curriculum, learning outcomes and student-centured teaching. Yesterday, I was at the front of the room, leading a workshop about curriculum and module design… So far, so quickly…!

In my current institution, the training in teaching and learning is provided through a range of one-off afternoon workshops. So when I was asked to stand in for a colleague, the prospect was hardly daunting. I do, after all, know something about teaching and learning (even if the diploma certificate that proves it has yet to arrive!). But when I started to think about what I actually wanted to say, it became much more difficult.

I’ve taken 60ECTS of modules over the last few years on teaching & learning issues. ‘Curriculum’ alone was three hours, and another three hours on ‘learning outcomes’. We had an entire module on course design and planning. But all we had yesterday was two and a half hours, in which we wanted to fit:

• a practical guide to our own institution’s procedures and forms for new module approvals;
• a case study from an academic colleague, to illustrate just how far it is possible to stretch the format of a module (doing archaeology via Second Life! two-week intensive field trips in Greece!);
• and an overview of the more theoretical side of module planning

We decided to do theory before coffee, and local practice after coffee; so that meant that I had just half an hour to cover the key points in educational theory, before handing over to my classical archaeology colleague. And they say challenges are good…

Actually, I think it went quite well. The feedback, as ever, proved that you can’t satisfy everyone all of the time (one said there was too much theory, another that there was too much practice…) Here’s what I decided to cover:

• Starting points (the module vs the curriculum; hard constraints vs local traditions)
• Teacher-centred vs student-centred approaches to teaching
• Bloom’s taxonomy of learning; and those categories as sequential stages
• Surface vs deep approaches to learning; and how module design affects them
• How do we help our students get themselves to where we want them to be?
• Where…? Learning outcomes
• How can we help…? Teaching methods
• How can we know if they have…? Suitable assessment
• Constructive alignment
• Why use learning outcomes? To help your own planning, and to help students understand, not just because you’re required to!
• What is a learning outcome? Useful verbs from Bloom’s taxonomy
• [Not much on teaching methods - there's another workshop on them]
• Assessment: importance of formative; and importance of fair, valid, reliable assessment

I’m sure those of my readers who were responsible for the Galway courses where I first encountered these ideas will find it most amusing to see how I’ve cadged and condensed what they said. For everyone else, that’s my take on what to say if you only have 30 minutes and 26 slides to convey the gist of module-planning theory.

I don’t know how much of what I said sank in yesterday, but my hope is that the attendees will take the ideas away (or at least, the handouts…) and will return to them  when they come to do module planning for themselves. When I designed my first modules, over a decade ago now, I had no prior experience and no theory. I did it in a rush, amidst the excitment of getting my first job and finishing my PhD, and then had to live and teach with the consequences for the following years. It wasn’t a disaster, but it could have been so much better, if had known just a bit more about the theory.

The index experience

I sent the index off to the Press today. You may recollect that I decided to undertake it myself as an educational experience, that might prevent me complaining about future indexes done by people who aren’t me. So, how did it go?

Here’s what I did:

1. Run the entire book MS through concordance software, to generate a frequency list for all the (non-trivial) words in the book
2. Go through that top end of that list, to create a list of keywords for the index. This was a free-form exercise, in that I used the frequency list entries as prompts to generate as many related keywords or sub-headings as I could.
3. Go through the list of keywords, adding plausible sub-headings wherever possibly relevant (I ended up with some that I didn’t use, but it’s easier to delete them afterwards than not have them in the first place).
4. Alphabetise the list of keywords. What I had at this stage had the structure of an index, but without all the page locator numbers. Mine was 8 pages long (for a 260pp book).
5. Then I read the proofs, filling in page locators as I went. I initially thought this would mean pausing at the end of each page to put in some page numbers, but it usually required pausing after each paragraph, else I forgot what keywords I’d been intending to apply.
6. Sometimes I had to add extra keywords to the index: e.g. proper names which were only mentioned a couple of times (and thus came so far down the frequency list that I didn’t bother finding them); and sometimes concepts  that I hadn’t thought of when compiling the keyword list. But I was pleased that there weren’t too many of that latter category: I really did seem to have got the original list of keywords pretty close to right. There was some restructuring later, as I realised some things could be grouped together as sub-headings under a keyword, but not as much as one might have feared.
7. Searchable PDFs are great… On the handful of occasions when I realised, midway through my task, that I really ought to be indexing something I hadn’t been, it was pretty painless to start indexing it from them on – and use the ‘search’ function to fill in the earlier gaps.
8. When I got to the end of the book (a working week plus a few evenings later), I tidied it up: deleted any keywords that I hadn’t actually felt the need for; reorganised some of my sub-headings (e.g. the complex ones under the entry for the main actor in my book); and tried to ensure that my formatting (commas, semi-colons, italics) and form of page ranges matched Chicago style (123-46, but 103-5).
9. Then I sent the whole document (which had now grown to 19 pages long) off to a copy-editor to give it another going over, and a second eye to the organisation and structure. This was well worth doing, since it turned out I’d missed some of the page ranges, and even got some of the alphabetisation wrong (!!). She also rearranged a few of my more complex entries. (Also worth noting: this may be the first time that this blogging has actually led to any practical benefit, since one of my readers introduced me to the person who was willing to copy-edit the index – thank you!)
10. And a few days after that, the file came back to me; I checked it over; and sent it off.

It was all fairly painless, and I think (I hope!) I’ve got an index that fairly represents my book – which was my complaint about the index of my first book. Incidentally, the index for that first book (published in 2004) cost me about $1000; and, to my amazement, she had to work from hard-copy. I presume that now, indexers get PDFs, which must help a lot.

This way of generating an index meant that reading the proofs took longer than it otherwise would. But the discipline of thinking about the index meant that I didn’t glaze over, and start skim-reading, as it is so easy to do when one is reading one’s own prose for the Nth time. And I remain convinced that it is a huge advantage to know the book you’re indexing. Maybe authors should always do it. (But I know that, had those proofs arrived in the midst of the teaching semester, I probably wouldn’t have done it.)

So now, with proofs and index done, and catalogue entry approved, all I’m waiting for is the final cover art… I’ve even got an ISBN, so it’ll even be on amazon some time soon!

Juggling

A month or two ago, I felt quite relaxed about being in the calm between the end of a major project (a book) and the start of a new one (yet to be determined). Now, it looks as though I’m about to be juggling several projects simultaneously. Let’s hope this is stimulating, rather than disastrous!

• Right now, I’m nearly finished the proofs and index of my book Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the business of publishing, 1820-1860 (Chicago, next spring).
• Meanwhile, I’m in on-going discussions with another publisher about a trade book (that holy grail!) about paper-based information systems. This should be an exciting project, to write something that might actually be read by more than 5 people in the world; but also rather different from my past books, because it would not be based on new archival research. It ought to be something I can do from my own university desk and library, without requiring lengthy trips away from home. And that has its attractions right now.
• And meanwhile (again), I’m supposed to be drafting a grant proposal for a research project with the Royal Society, about scientific publishing, particularly in learned journals. Usually, I work on more popular forms of scientific publishing, so this will also be a change for me – but it should be a really exciting project to work on. Fingers crossed that someone stumps up some money for the research staff…

In theory, the trade book should be done by 2013, while the other project would run from 2012 to 2015, with a big book at the end of it. So in theory (again) the two should complement each other quite well, in terms of workload. Right now, though, while I’m planning both of them, it seems like I might be juggling too much at once. We shall see…

Feeling youthful

I got some good news the other day: I’ve been selected to be one of the 68 founding members of the Young Academy of Scotland

Quite what this will actually mean in practice, we all wait to find out! The academy hopes to contribute to Scotland’s economic, social and cultural vitality by being stimulating, invigorated, creative and talented (see the mission statement!) Hopefully, it offers a chance for me as an historian of science and technology to engage with issues of public policy. Like many of my disciplinary colleagues, this is something I feel we ought to do more of, but it’s often tricky to see how.

Regardless of how it turns out, it’s nice to be officially recognised as ‘young’. It makes a contrast to the experience of attending conferences these days, when even young-ish tenured staff such as myself start to feel ‘old’ in comparison with all the bright young things desperately hunting for the few academic jobs.