Some of the Facebook discussions on #rhizo14 have taken a theoretical turn, mostly focused on Deleuze and Guattari as you would expect. In and amongst the folks trying to make sense of it I'm coming across the odd comment that D&G's writing (and specifically we're talking about the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus) is difficult. Some people are blaming the translators and some people are blaming D&G. Some folks have suggested that if a reader finds critical theory difficult that it's not their fault. Others are suggesting that this is because all critical theory is unnecessarily and therefore deliberately obfuscatory. Others are suggesting that they can be certain of this because the concepts that are being explained in the theory seem to be quite simple and to be things that they already 'get' intuitively.
I'm afraid there's no kind or easy way to say this but theory is hard. It's not the readers' fault, it's not the translators' fault and it's certainly not the theorists' fault. It just is. This statement is true of all theory not just critical theory.
For example, if I were to try reading some theoretical physics (given I've not studied any physics beyond a four week 'taster' in Grade 10) I doubt I would understand much, if any, of it. Frankly, every time I arrived at a formula I would be completely stumped: I don't know how to read formulae and I don't understand what any of the symbols mean. If I needed or wanted to understand that theoretical physics, I fully appreciate that it is my responsibility to learn what all the individual symbols in the formula mean and how to read the formula. I would never expect the theoretical physicist to have to explain every formula from scratch for me. The physicist is writing for a learned audience who already knows this stuff; she is writing in jargon.
This leads me on to my next point: jargon is useful. All of us who work in a scholarly field carry some kind of disciplinary specialism and goodness knows we do tend to love wallowing in jargon. But we do so because it is useful to us. Jargon helps folks who share common knowledges to efficiently import rich meaning into conversations.
To return to my example of trying to understand theoretical physics: some of the things (but by no means all) these theoretical physicists are explaining are things I get intuitively, like gravity and inertia. Just because I get these things intuitively does not mean that their explaining it (in the detail that is useful for theoretical physics) is pointless or deliberately obfuscatory. Furthermore, much of what they're explaining (such as Van der Waals force) is not intuitive to me and I would be arrogant to suggest that everything in the realm of theoretical physics is stuff that I do or could get intuitively.
The same goes for critical theory. The value of critical theory (from my point of view) is that it exposes things that the vast majority of us believe to be 'true' and 'factual' to actually be constructed and mythic. In other words, it's useful precisely because it is counterintuitive. This is especially true of D&G which returns me to my favourite quotation: 'We are tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees... They have made us suffer too much' (p.15). The point they are making here which is so counterintuitive is that lots of things that we believe to be arborescent are not, but we believe that they are because we have been taught that they are.
I've been reading and teaching critical theory for two decades now. With that experience and prior knowledge under my belt, I can approach most critical theory for the first time and get a pretty good grasp of it after a first reading. After a few more goes, I understand more of it and misunderstand less of it. Even though I can do this, it still requires work on my part. I appreciate that for folks who are new to critical theory this is going to be appreciably harder. But - and this is my first key point - that does not absolve anyone from having to do that work if they want or need to understand it.
This leads me to my next key point: there are very real dangers if we don't do that work. We can't just have a bit of a stab at what theory means and hope for the best. Worse still, we can't rely on someone else's take on theory and presume it is accurate. We also can't just defend our take on theory to be correct because that's what we take it to mean. This runs the risk of us deciding that we are in the business of just making things up.
This gets me back to the discussions on #rhizo14. There are lots of people trying to get their heads around what rhizomatic learning actually is. This is understandable, after all, it's why we're all in this course. But there are also folks who are trying to do this without even having read the theoretical material upon which all of this is based. I really want to encourage everyone who is in this boat to give the theory a go.
So - here's my advice on how to do that. Download it or borrow it from your library. (You only need to read the 25 page introduction not the whole book). Get hold of a good dictionary of critical theory (not just a regular dictionary which will actually be unhelpful): Ian Buchanan's is a good 'un. Give yourself two hours. Go somewhere quiet and comfortable where you're not going to be disturbed. Give it a go. Annotate it as you go. Write yourself questions about bits you don't understand. Celebrate the bits you do understand. Put it down. Walk away. Give yourself a break (24 hours or more). Then pick it up and read it again. Repeat. Repeat again. You cannot expect to understand much of it on a first, second or even third reading. Finally, be kind to yourself: you cannot expect to ever really understand all of it.
Wednesday, 22 January 2014
Tuesday, 21 January 2014
Rhizome Poster
As part of my contribution to #rhizo14, I've bashed together a poster which for me distills the key points that Deleuze and Guattari are making in their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus. I hope that others find it helpful.
Monday, 20 January 2014
Cheating is learning
The topic for the first week of Dave Cormier's #rhizo14 course is 'Cheating AS Learning' but I've called this post 'Cheating IS Learning' because that's what I say to students all the time in the classroom. When I chuck a question at them in the classroom, I often (well in the first few weeks at least) find them staring back at me blankly. This is, plainly, because they don't know the answer to the question. Pretty much every single one of them has some kind of mobile device on their person that they can whip out and use to cheat but they're all so well trained in standards of teaching and learning that they believe that unless they can pull the answer out of their memory banks then it's not valid as an answer. As soon as I suggest that they can 'cheat' (i.e. they can look up the answer on their phone) then suddenly they are into it. It often becomes a bit of a race to see who can get to the answer first.
The phrase 'cheating is learning' became a kind of catchphrase in that class alongside another one that I picked up from Lindsay Jordan: "No one knows as much as everyone". Lindsay explains it as: 10 people working together on something will always achieve more than one person competing against the other 9. These two principles are, of course, linked; I'll get onto that link in a bit.
There are lots of ways students can cheat: they can look stuff up online (invariably they google it which often gets them to wikipedia), they can look stuff up in a book (usually their text book) or their notes, they can ask someone else in the room or they can ask the teacher. The point is that I want it to be clear to my students that the whole principle of learning has to work from the assumption that there is a whole pile of stuff they don't yet know; not knowing it isn't a big deal, but not finding out is.
The link between 'cheating is learning' and 'noone knows as much as everyone' is, of course, that learning collaboratively (and by extension working collaboratively) is a very productive approach. The principle I offer is that I don't expect them to come to an active learning session with the complete picture, but I do expect them to come with at least some of the jigsaw puzzle pieces. It's likely that not everyone will come with the same pieces so the job of work to be done in the learning session is for each student to declare which pieces they've brought and do what they can to piece them together with the pieces that others have brought. It's still highly likely that at the end of that session they they'll have that annoying charity-shop jigsaw scenario of missing pieces, but the picture should at least be starting to form.
The student reflective responses to these types of classes are always positive: that they feel they've really learned something because they've had to figure it out for themselves rather than simply being told it. This is, of course, heuristic learning at its best.
The first thing that I want to reflect on in this post is that after my confident declaration that 'cheating is learning' I routinely find myself muttering 'don't tell my colleagues I said that'. There's something deeply iconoclastic about saying these things and believing them to be true. That's especially the case for someone who, as I do, also sits on academic misconduct panels. So the first reflective question I pose (to myself and others reading this) is: what are the limits we might want to or be required to impose upon collaborative learning within the academy? What role might rhizomatic learning play in 'loosening the regulatory bolts'?
The other thing I want to reflect on is how this approach I've described fits within a rhizomatic model of learning. It still very much works from the 'arborescent' assumption that the principle of good learning is finding (whether through cheating or not) the right answers to questions. This is, of course, all well and good for things that are arborescent, but, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, 'we're tired of trees... they've made us suffer too much' (15). So the second reflective question I ask (again of myself and others) is how might the 'cheating is learning' principle apply in a rhizomatic context and, particularly, a context in which I want to value and reward students not for answering questions to which we already know the answers, but instead for asking questions we've never thought to ask before (even if we don't yet have any answers)?
The phrase 'cheating is learning' became a kind of catchphrase in that class alongside another one that I picked up from Lindsay Jordan: "No one knows as much as everyone". Lindsay explains it as: 10 people working together on something will always achieve more than one person competing against the other 9. These two principles are, of course, linked; I'll get onto that link in a bit.
There are lots of ways students can cheat: they can look stuff up online (invariably they google it which often gets them to wikipedia), they can look stuff up in a book (usually their text book) or their notes, they can ask someone else in the room or they can ask the teacher. The point is that I want it to be clear to my students that the whole principle of learning has to work from the assumption that there is a whole pile of stuff they don't yet know; not knowing it isn't a big deal, but not finding out is.
The link between 'cheating is learning' and 'noone knows as much as everyone' is, of course, that learning collaboratively (and by extension working collaboratively) is a very productive approach. The principle I offer is that I don't expect them to come to an active learning session with the complete picture, but I do expect them to come with at least some of the jigsaw puzzle pieces. It's likely that not everyone will come with the same pieces so the job of work to be done in the learning session is for each student to declare which pieces they've brought and do what they can to piece them together with the pieces that others have brought. It's still highly likely that at the end of that session they they'll have that annoying charity-shop jigsaw scenario of missing pieces, but the picture should at least be starting to form.
The student reflective responses to these types of classes are always positive: that they feel they've really learned something because they've had to figure it out for themselves rather than simply being told it. This is, of course, heuristic learning at its best.
The first thing that I want to reflect on in this post is that after my confident declaration that 'cheating is learning' I routinely find myself muttering 'don't tell my colleagues I said that'. There's something deeply iconoclastic about saying these things and believing them to be true. That's especially the case for someone who, as I do, also sits on academic misconduct panels. So the first reflective question I pose (to myself and others reading this) is: what are the limits we might want to or be required to impose upon collaborative learning within the academy? What role might rhizomatic learning play in 'loosening the regulatory bolts'?
The other thing I want to reflect on is how this approach I've described fits within a rhizomatic model of learning. It still very much works from the 'arborescent' assumption that the principle of good learning is finding (whether through cheating or not) the right answers to questions. This is, of course, all well and good for things that are arborescent, but, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, 'we're tired of trees... they've made us suffer too much' (15). So the second reflective question I ask (again of myself and others) is how might the 'cheating is learning' principle apply in a rhizomatic context and, particularly, a context in which I want to value and reward students not for answering questions to which we already know the answers, but instead for asking questions we've never thought to ask before (even if we don't yet have any answers)?
Rhizo14
I've just signed up (albeit a squeak late) to Dave Cormier's Rhizomatic Learning course (#rhizo14) for two main reasons: a) because I want to explore the concept of rhizomatic learning in more detail and b) because I want to experience some collaborative/conversational open online learning to get some of the design principles into my head. I'm going to be firing this blog back up to engage with some of the ideas on the course and to contribute my responses to the course activities each week.
Friday, 1 June 2012
Social Reading
At the moment I'm playing with a couple of social networking apps to see if I can find a way of supporting students in developing social reading strategies to support their engagement with English Literature texts they are studying on their modules. I'm particularly interested in finding ways to make the behaviours and engagements that high-achieving students have with the primary texts they're studying more transparent to students who do less well. This kind of 'folksonomic' approach to learning is usually only visible in seminar interactions and that is only ever going to be a very small sliver of a glimpse. Social reading apps are always going to be partial as well, but I can't help thinking that they may offer new ways of supporting peer, social learning in Higher Education.
The apps I'm looking at are as follows:
Lemon Tree is our fabulous library game. It links to students' library use (both physical and virtual) and allows students to see the library engagement of their student colleagues. It allows students to share which books they've borrowed, how frequently and when they visit the library, they're use of ezproxy and many other things. It also allows them to review books and comment on them and to see who else has borrowed the books they have. It links to Facebook and rewards students with virtual badges and growth on their personal lemon trees.
Benefits: it allows students to see library behaviour clearly and to share thoughts and responses to texts.
Goodreads is a social reading app that allows people to share the books they have read, are reading and want to read in the future. It allows people to rank their readings (by five star value) and to join groups, sort their reading on shelves, engage in polls. I've built a private space for people who are keen to join my experiment over the summer, but there is also a facility for student groups to be formed. It's clear to me that this app is already widely used and it's highly likely that students of English Literature are already using this to support their learning and engagement with texts. I'm keen to support this more formally by embedding it into the teaching and learning design of a module.
Benefits: this is more text focussed and allows students to engage in discussions and other types of interactions around the text(s) they are reading in common. Again, reading behaviour is more visible and obvious to others.
Readmill is a social reading app that is more granular than those already described. It allows people to share highlights and notes that they have made within a text and to comment on or like the highlights made by others on that same or other texts. Like the other apps you can 'follow' like minded folks and friends (so therefore student colleagues). It allows you to synch with an eReading device (I'm using a kindle touch) but also operates as an eReading device in its own right and has an iPad and iPhone app for this purpose.
Benefits: this gets us to a deeper level than the apps in that we can see not just what others are reading and their reactions/responses to the text(s) as a whole, but we can also see how they are reading it: which aspects of the primary text they consider to be valuable and why.
Kindle is of course an eReading device that allows social highlighting which can operate in a similar way to Readmill but is device specific. I've recently purchased a kindle touch and am enjoying the hardware and software (although it's not as intuitive as I had hoped at times). The fact that so many literary texts are available very cheaply or even free means that an eReading device is a good investment for English Literature students (buying a Kindle and getting the texts so cheaply has got to be better value than buying all the set texts for a degree second hand I would have thought). I've been disappointed at the lack of availability of some texts (there is no eCopy of Said's Orientalism for instance which I found astonishing) but that will improve with time.
As I say - I'm pretty confident students are already using these social reading apps regardless of whether we know about them or not. I'm keen to develop my social reading skills over the summer so that I can use them in a more proactive way in my modules in the future. I've gathered together a few like-minded English Lit and librarian types and we're going to do some social reading experiments over the summer. I'll keep you posted on how it goes!
The apps I'm looking at are as follows:
Lemon Tree is our fabulous library game. It links to students' library use (both physical and virtual) and allows students to see the library engagement of their student colleagues. It allows students to share which books they've borrowed, how frequently and when they visit the library, they're use of ezproxy and many other things. It also allows them to review books and comment on them and to see who else has borrowed the books they have. It links to Facebook and rewards students with virtual badges and growth on their personal lemon trees.
Benefits: it allows students to see library behaviour clearly and to share thoughts and responses to texts.
Goodreads is a social reading app that allows people to share the books they have read, are reading and want to read in the future. It allows people to rank their readings (by five star value) and to join groups, sort their reading on shelves, engage in polls. I've built a private space for people who are keen to join my experiment over the summer, but there is also a facility for student groups to be formed. It's clear to me that this app is already widely used and it's highly likely that students of English Literature are already using this to support their learning and engagement with texts. I'm keen to support this more formally by embedding it into the teaching and learning design of a module.
Benefits: this is more text focussed and allows students to engage in discussions and other types of interactions around the text(s) they are reading in common. Again, reading behaviour is more visible and obvious to others.
Readmill is a social reading app that is more granular than those already described. It allows people to share highlights and notes that they have made within a text and to comment on or like the highlights made by others on that same or other texts. Like the other apps you can 'follow' like minded folks and friends (so therefore student colleagues). It allows you to synch with an eReading device (I'm using a kindle touch) but also operates as an eReading device in its own right and has an iPad and iPhone app for this purpose.
Benefits: this gets us to a deeper level than the apps in that we can see not just what others are reading and their reactions/responses to the text(s) as a whole, but we can also see how they are reading it: which aspects of the primary text they consider to be valuable and why.
Kindle is of course an eReading device that allows social highlighting which can operate in a similar way to Readmill but is device specific. I've recently purchased a kindle touch and am enjoying the hardware and software (although it's not as intuitive as I had hoped at times). The fact that so many literary texts are available very cheaply or even free means that an eReading device is a good investment for English Literature students (buying a Kindle and getting the texts so cheaply has got to be better value than buying all the set texts for a degree second hand I would have thought). I've been disappointed at the lack of availability of some texts (there is no eCopy of Said's Orientalism for instance which I found astonishing) but that will improve with time.
As I say - I'm pretty confident students are already using these social reading apps regardless of whether we know about them or not. I'm keen to develop my social reading skills over the summer so that I can use them in a more proactive way in my modules in the future. I've gathered together a few like-minded English Lit and librarian types and we're going to do some social reading experiments over the summer. I'll keep you posted on how it goes!
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
Grademark's new features
One of the fantastic (albeit slightly unnerving) aspects of using
Grademark to do my marking is that when new features are added, they
simply ‘appear’ in the inbox of the document viewer, ready for me to
use. I’m lucky in that I get alerts to some of these changes, but
sometimes they feel like they’ve turned up unannounced. This is a great
thing in that you always get the new features as soon as they are
available without having to wait for an upgrade. But it can be, as I
said, unnerving: especially if you are in the middle of conducting some
training and there is a new feature there that you’ve not encountered
before!
In the last few months a fair few new features have appeared and having just undertaken two rather significant blocks of marking, I thought it was worth reflecting on my experiences and uses of them. These are considered in no particular order.
Response column: This is a new feature in the assignment inbox which
shows if and when students have collected their feedback (image right). Of
course it can’t tell us if they’ve engaged with their feedback,
understood it and/or addressed it, but at least we now know if it’s been
collected. I’ve been amazed at how quickly students have accessed their
mark and feedback. For instance, a bunch of assignments were released
at 1pm today and by 1.05pm, eight students had collected their feedback.
Given I’d only sent the email alerting them to the release time having
been moved forward 15 minutes earlier, I was pretty amazed by this! I
checked an hour or so later and the number was up to 27 students:
roughly a third of the total.
Rubric viewer: In
the move to Turnitin 2, one of the things that a lot of people missed
was the ability to see the rubric clearly. The new version of the rubric
required you to mouse over each segment in order to see the words. A
recent adjustment means that with the click of a single button (the
four-arrow button in the image to the left) the whole rubric can be
opened out into a full view and can be moved to a second screen. I tend
to use two monitors (I dock my laptop to a screen whenever I can) so
I’ve now got into the habit of opening the rubric straight away and
moving it onto my second screen. This means I can adjust it as I go
rather than having to remember everything at the end of the paper. It
also means that you can put a lot more detail into the rubric segments
and still see it all clearly which is a vast improvement on the old view
of the rubric.
Strike through: when you highlight text in the document viewer and click the ‘delete’ or ‘backspace’ key a red strike-through line appears. This is really handy for correcting spelling errors (I type the correct spelling above the word using Text Comment, but it’s also really useful to show students how they can simplify their language by eliminating unnecessary words or turns of phrase. I’ve done this several times with sentences or whole paragraphs and left a comment next to it saying to students that I have ‘deleted’ words to show how many unnecessary words they are using.
These three new features are pretty simple but I’ve been amazed at how quickly and easily I’ve been able to incorporate them into my marking practice.
In the last few months a fair few new features have appeared and having just undertaken two rather significant blocks of marking, I thought it was worth reflecting on my experiences and uses of them. These are considered in no particular order.
Response column: This is a new feature in the assignment inbox which
shows if and when students have collected their feedback (image right). Of
course it can’t tell us if they’ve engaged with their feedback,
understood it and/or addressed it, but at least we now know if it’s been
collected. I’ve been amazed at how quickly students have accessed their
mark and feedback. For instance, a bunch of assignments were released
at 1pm today and by 1.05pm, eight students had collected their feedback.
Given I’d only sent the email alerting them to the release time having
been moved forward 15 minutes earlier, I was pretty amazed by this! I
checked an hour or so later and the number was up to 27 students:
roughly a third of the total.Rubric viewer: In
the move to Turnitin 2, one of the things that a lot of people missed
was the ability to see the rubric clearly. The new version of the rubric
required you to mouse over each segment in order to see the words. A
recent adjustment means that with the click of a single button (the
four-arrow button in the image to the left) the whole rubric can be
opened out into a full view and can be moved to a second screen. I tend
to use two monitors (I dock my laptop to a screen whenever I can) so
I’ve now got into the habit of opening the rubric straight away and
moving it onto my second screen. This means I can adjust it as I go
rather than having to remember everything at the end of the paper. It
also means that you can put a lot more detail into the rubric segments
and still see it all clearly which is a vast improvement on the old view
of the rubric.Strike through: when you highlight text in the document viewer and click the ‘delete’ or ‘backspace’ key a red strike-through line appears. This is really handy for correcting spelling errors (I type the correct spelling above the word using Text Comment, but it’s also really useful to show students how they can simplify their language by eliminating unnecessary words or turns of phrase. I’ve done this several times with sentences or whole paragraphs and left a comment next to it saying to students that I have ‘deleted’ words to show how many unnecessary words they are using.
These three new features are pretty simple but I’ve been amazed at how quickly and easily I’ve been able to incorporate them into my marking practice.
Getting started with Grademark
Tabitha from Turnitin has just sent through this fantastic interactive guide to Grademark. This is a really handy tool for anyone who is keen to find out the basics of this tool.
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