Technology and Caring: One “Digital Immigrant” Crosses the Border

Guest Blogger:  Catherine DeCourcey

The role of caring in higher education appears in conversations regarding student retention and satisfaction – think of the Academic Advising workshops with Mrs. Kenner, or administration’s urging faculty to mentor students. For over a decade, researchers report that today’s students value relationships with faculty; they perceive accessibility as an attribute of caring (Mangold, 2007; Thomas, 2002). Concurrently, these students who populate our classes expect, even crave, immediacy. Prensky (2001) observes, “They grew up on ‘twitch speed.’ … They’ve been networked most or all of their lives.” How do we, as faculty members, communicate caring to this generation of students in a manner meaningful to them?

Previously in Teaching Matters, Leaman(2009) noted removal of phone access in class to maintain a sanctuary of sorts.  More recently, the question was posited regarding cell phone policy for the university (Kwame, September 21, 2013). However, the use of technology has also been lauded. Donohue (2014) discussed the use of Jing to promote communication with students. Snider (2013) highlighted technology available for students and teachers. These blogs might provide insight into the generational differences in perceptions of technology. 

Like many other professors, I have policies regarding technology use in class. I am a digital immigrant, as described by Prensky (2001:technology is an add-on that occurred after I was an adult. However, I recognize that my students live, sleep, and eat with their technology, most notably their mobile phones. I decided to take advantage of that resource. 

Thus, I shared my mobile phone number with my classes. Aware that boundaries are an important consideration, I provided a few guidelines: No phone calls between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m., emergency calls only please. Conversely, they were welcome to text me as needed.

After the first month, I had to change my mobile plan to include unlimited texting.

Freshmen who were adjusting to university life would reach out with questions – clarification on content, guidelines, procedures, and such. Sometimes they just seemed to need to know that someone was there. More experienced students would check in regarding assignments. Students who were going to be late or absent would let me know. (I strive to make attendance about knowing students are well and engaged, thus request the courtesy of being informed in advance should they be late or absent.) In return, I would respond – providing academic and/or affective support.

As the semester progressed, small conversations would be shared. For example, a freshman texted late one night about a doctor’s note and missed class.

CD: “Did you read your Lincoln email?” [It included a reminder about times for phone use.]

Student: “I just read it sorryyyy! [sic]”

CD: “Not a prob. Am up listening to the DNC speeches.:)“

Student: “LOL so am I, I have to write a paper on it”

That seemingly inconsequential conversation provided a faculty connection for the student outside of the immediate classroom setting. Those connections are key to retention, key to student success. Face-to-face conversations with students reveal that the accessibility afforded through technology makes them feel cared for, which enhances the probability that they will remain at the institution.

Of course, one might worry that texting fails to provide documentation of communication. There’s an app for that! Yes, there are applications available that log and record text messages. The application that I use sends logs to my gmail account. Thus, the communication with the chronically late student—it’s documented. The texts exchange regarding assignment deadlines – it’s documented.

Over the two years that I’ve implemented texting as a communication tool, students have used it for academic and affective support. 

Finally, from my personal experience I feel compelled to acknowledge that caring is not a one-way street, even in higher education, at least not with our students. Last fall, when my father was dying, students used texts to check in, share prayers, well wishes, and finally condolences during that difficult time. Those texts were gifts for which I remain grateful.

Technology indeed can be a tool to demonstrate caring. Even “digital immigrants” like me can use it to cross borders to communicate effectively with our “digital natives” - today’s students.

References

Donohue, W. (2014, January 17). Teaching with Jing. Teaching Matters at LU.

Kwame, S. (2013, September 21).  The use of cell, mobile or smartphones in the classroom. Teaching Matters at LU.

Leaman, M. (2009, October 2). Cell phones and chatty students. Teaching Matter at LU.

Mangold, K.(2007). Educating a new generation: Teaching baby boomer faculty about millennial students.  Nurse Educator, 32(1), 21-23.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9 (5). Retrieved from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

Snider, B. (2013, November 23). Tech tools for students and teachers. Teaching Matters at LU.

Thomas, L. (2002). Student retention in higher education: The role of institutional habitus. Journal of Education Policy, 17(4), 423-442.

In Praise of the Humble Comma

As we return from midterm break, not yet ready, perhaps, to think deeply on difficult pedagogical matters, I thought that that you might enjoy the following brief essay by Pico Iyer, first published in Time Magazine June 24, 2001, entitled "In Praise of the Humble Comma."  (And if you want to comment on why it seems to be so hard for our students to keep that simple "red light, yellow light, stop sign" concept straight, or share ways you've developed to help them control punctuation, by all means please do!)  --Linda

The gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said -- could it not? -- of the humble comma. Add it to the present clause, and, of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respect. It seems just a slip of a thing, a pedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kind of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially in the age of the microchip). Yet what is so often used, and so rarely recalled, as the comma -- unless it be breath itself?

Punctuation, one is taught, has a point: to keep up law and order. Punctuation marks are the road signs placed along the highway of our communication -- to control speeds, provide directions and prevent head-on collisions. A period has the unblinking finality of a red light; the comma is a flashing yellow light that asks us only to slow down; and the semicolon is a stop sign that tells us to ease gradually to a halt, before gradually starting up again. By establishing the relations between words, punctuation establishes the relations between the people using words. That may be one reason why schoolteachers exalt it and lovers defy it ("We love each other and belong to each other let's don't ever hurt each other Nicole let's don't ever hurt each other," wrote Gary Gilmore to his girlfriend). A comma, he must have known, "separates inseparables," in the clinching words of H.W. Fowler, King of English Usage.

Punctuation, then, is a civic prop, a pillar that holds society upright. (A run-on sentence, its phrases piling up without division, is as unsightly as a sink piled high with dirty dishes.) Small wonder, then, that punctuation was one of the first proprieties of the Victorian age, the age of the corset, that the modernists threw off: the sexual revolution might be said to have begun when Joyce's Molly Bloom spilled out all her private thoughts in 36 pages of unbridled, almost unperioded and officially censored prose; and another rebellion was surely marked when E.E. Cummings first felt free to commit "God" to the lower case.

Punctuation thus becomes the signature of cultures. The hot-blooded Spaniard seems to be revealed in the passion and urgency of his doubled exclamation points and question marks ("¡Caramba! ¿Quien sabe?"), while the impassive Chinese traditionally added to his so-called inscrutability by omitting directions from his ideograms. The anarchy and commotion of the '60s were given voice in the exploding exclamation marks, riotous capital letters and Day-Glo italics of Tom Wolfe's spray-paint prose; and in Communist societies, where the State is absolute, the dignity -- and divinity -- of capital letters is reserved for Ministries, Sub-Committees and Secretariats.Yet punctuation is something more than a culture's birthmark; it scores the music in our minds, gets our thoughts moving to the rhythm of our hearts. Punctuation is the notation in the sheet music of our words, telling us when to rest, or when to raise our voices; it acknowledges that the meaning of our discourse, as of any symphonic composition, lies not in the units but in the pauses, the pacing and the phrasing. Punctuation is the way one bats one's eyes, lowers one's voice or blushes demurely. Punctuation adjusts the tone and color and volume till the feeling comes into perfect focus: not disgust exactly, but distaste; not lust, or like, but love.

Punctuation, in short, gives us the human voice, and all the meanings that lie between the words. "You aren't young, are you?" loses its innocence when it loses the question mark. Every child knows the menace of a dropped apostrophe (the parent's "Don't do that" shifting into the more slowly enunciated "Do not do that"), and every believer, the ignominy of having his faith reduced to "faith." Add an exclamation point to "To be or not to be . . . " and the gloomy Dane has all the resolve he needs; add a comma, and the noble sobriety of "God save the Queen" becomes a cry of desperation bordering on double sacrilege. 

Sometimes, of course, our markings may be simply a matter of aesthetics. Popping in a comma can be like slipping on the necklace that gives an outfit quiet elegance, or like catching the sound of running water that complements, as it completes, the silence of a Japanese landscape. When V.S. Naipaul, in his latest novel, writes, "He was a middle-aged man, with glasses," the first comma can seem a little precious. Yet it gives the description a spin, as well as a subtlety, that it otherwise lacks, and it shows that the glasses are not part of the middle-agedness, but something else. 

Thus all these tiny scratches give us breadth and heft and depth. A world that has only periods is a world without inflections. It is a world without shade. It has a music without sharps and flats. It is a martial music. It has a jackboot rhythm. Words cannot bend and curve. A comma, by comparison, catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table. 

Punctuation, then, is a matter of care. Care for words, yes, but also, and more important, for what the words imply. Only a lover notices the small things: the way the afternoon light catches the nape of a neck, or how a strand of hair slips out from behind an ear, or the way a finger curls around a cup. And no one scans a letter so closely as a lover, searching for its small print, straining to hear its nuances, its gasps, its sighs and hesitations, poring over the secret messages that lie in every cadence. The difference between "Jane (whom I adore)" and "Jane, whom I adore," and the difference between them both and "Jane -- whom I adore -- " marks all the distance between ecstasy and heartache. "No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place," in Isaac Babel's lovely words; a comma can let us hear a voice break, or a heart. Punctuation, in fact, is a labor of love. Which brings us back, in a way, to gods.

Re-thinking My Teaching: A Midpoint Assessment

Guest Blogger:  David Royer

Last week, Dr. Kwame posed the question “Have you flipped your classroom?” which is a great lead-in to my blog because I am in the process of doing that for my General Biology II course, and while I have not completely flipped it, I have certainly rearranged it. It began when I attended a workshop last summer at NYU titled "Evidence-Based Teaching: Just the Facts or Thinking Like Scientists?"  Diane Ebert-May, the workshop leader, is from Michigan State where she uses active learning, inquiry-based instructional strategies to teach introductory biology to classes of 200 students. She does very little traditional lecture in her classes, instead relying on having the students work in groups to solve problems during class time after which the groups present their results, often using poster paper taped to the classroom walls, which is followed by whole class discussion. She describes what she does as teaching biology using the same methods that biologists use to conduct research so that students can develop higher-level cognitive skills and build conceptual connections within biology and across the curriculum. Another aspect of her work is to use a backward design to construct courses in which objectives, assessments and instruction are aligned. Diane conducted the workshop in the same way she does her classes – we worked in groups discussing educational issues followed by presentation of results and general discussion. 

I came away from the workshop enthused and ready to plunge into my sabbatical semester, the purpose of which was to redesign my General Biology II course in a way that promoted active learning on the part of the students and less lecture from me. My reason for applying for sabbatical was to explore alternative methods and design of instruction; over the past several years, I realized that, while I enjoyed delivering lectures, it was not producing enough positive results in student learning and problem-solving skills. From what I read during my sabbatical, it appears that many faculty are experiencing the same misgivings about the way that we teach. So I spent most of my sabbatical redesigning the way I would teach my course, and now that we are approaching the halfway point of the semester, I have some results to share: 

1. The students are more engaged working in groups. While I still need to occasionally remind a student to put the cell phone away, the students are working well in groups and staying on task. 
2. The students are helping each other. As I circulate through the classroom, I can hear students explaining concepts and methods to each other, and sometimes explaining it in better terms that I would use, a humbling but exciting realization. 
3. There have been positive results in student performance. Compared to last spring when I taught the course with traditional lecture methods, the average on the first quiz was nine points higher this semester as was the average on the first exam by six points. 
4. It is easy to fall back into old habits. One student group had a question recently that required more explanation than a short answer, and as I thought the entire class would benefit from the answer, I threw up a PowerPoint to illustrate the explanation – the result was that I lectured for 15 minutes and it felt completely comfortable like a pair of old slippers that fit perfectly after years of wear. 
5. Some material is challenging in terms of developing meaningful group assignments. The first part of the course covers genetics at the level of organisms, and it was easy to come up with genetics problems for the student groups. Now that we are moving into molecular genetics, the material is more challenging as is coming up with group assignments. I am beginning to feel the need to lecture, but resisting it so far. 
6. It is okay to occasionally throw in a mini-lecture (10-15 minutes) when needed. Sometimes there is a topic that requires explanation that is best delivered in lecture mode, but even then it can be interactive, forcing the students to be involved. 
7. It takes much preparation to design good group assignments and the overall flow of the class. My biggest error so far is planning too much for each class which then requires the redesign of subsequent classes. 
8. Most importantly, the students seem to enjoy the new design. I overheard one student say that she felt that she was learning more with this format, and the early assessment results support her statement. 
9. I am getting to know the students better. There is more interaction with the students using the new format, and I feel that I am more aware of each student’s strengths and weaknesses compared to when I taught this course with just lectures. 

I am excited about what I am doing as well as challenged by it. I now realize that the transition to newer methods is not a one-semester job; it is ongoing, and I will probably never be completely satisfied with the methods or results, but it does feel that I am headed in the right direction. I have not completely flipped (the classroom, of course) yet, but I am pleased with the experience so far.

Have You Flipped Your Classroom Yet?

Guest Blogger: Safro Kwame

Have you flipped your classroom or, rather, class – not physically, by rearranging the furniture, but conceptually -- yet? If not, why not; if you have, what are the results? I would like to know.

Here are some news reports on the flipped classroom:

Flipped Classrooms Provide a New Way of Learning, by Dean Reynolds, CBS News, January 19, 2014

There’s a new way for school kids to do their homework -- and perhaps, a ray of hope for the parents who frequently get called on to help. Check out the flipped classroom. At Warren Township High School in Gurnee, Ill, science teacher Collin Black helps kids do homework in class and sends his lectures home. Black and others who've embraced what's called the flipped classroom condense their lectures into a brief, homemade and often light-hearted video.  Students can digest the information outside of class whenever they like. The next day, they get their questions answered and apply the lesson with the teacher in the room. Educator Jon Bergmann, along with partner Aaron Sams, came up with the flipped classroom concept. It was originally designed for football players who missed class while on the road. Three percent of teachers are flipping classrooms now, 18 percent have expressed interest and 28 percent of school administrations want to do it, according to Project Tomorrow, a national education nonprofit group. (read more...)

The Condensed Classroom:"Flipped" classrooms don't invert traditional learning so much as abstract it, by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic Monthly, August 27, 2013

 This year, more university students and professors will encounter a trend that has come to be known as "flipping the classroom." It's been largely associated with massive open online courses (MOOCs), that edu-tech vogue committed to delivering classes to large numbers of students all at once via video lectures and automated assessments conducted over the Internet. (read more ...)

Turning Education Upside Down, by Tina Rosenberg, The New York Times, October 9, 2013

Three years ago, Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit, became a “flipped school” — one where students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates. Clintondale was the first school in the United States to flip completely — all of its classes are now taught this way. Now flipped classrooms are popping up all over.  (read more...)

Flipped Schools:Homework At School, Lectures At Home, by Tom Ashbrook, On Point, NPR, November 5, 2013

Some teachers, even whole schools, are now “flipping” their days — doing homework in class, watching lectures at home. Is this the future of school? (read more...)

More Teachers 'Flipping' The School Day Upside Down, by Grace Hood, NPR, All Things Considered, December 7, 2012,

Welcome to the 21st century classroom: a world where students watch lectures at home — and do homework at school. It's called classroom flipping, and it's slowly catching on in schools around the country. (read more...)

Using Groups to Introduce Black History and Reading in the Classroom

Guest Blogger:  Jean Waites-Howard

Last fall I taught Social Policy.  I always want to introduce relevant Black Historical events that impact on Social Policy. I had recently learned about The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. This is a very long text which chronicles the Great Migration from the South to the North from 1915 to 1970. The book focuses on the adventures and trials of three migrants: Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.  The book includes individuals and families seeking a “better life,” as well as those who played a major role in the transformation of America’s landscape. I really wanted the students to have an opportunity to read this well-documented, informative report of our history.

My Social Policy class was very large (37 students). I divided them into six groups. I divided the text into six sections. Each group was to read their section and respond to seven questions about the text. The students had to prepare PowerPoints for their group presentation and a two-page summary.

The student presentations were excellent. The students shared equally in the presentations. They worked together and really covered their assigned material. Several students encouraged me to use this book again for this course. Leaving the “Jim Crow South” and confronting racism in Chicago was eye opening for our students.

For instance, Ida Mae Gladney had attended a neighborhood watch meeting in Chicago where she had the opportunity to hear a young state senator named Barack Obama.  That led to the question of what the impact of the Great Migration was on Obama’s presidency. The students could connect this history with current events, as they could the fact that “the first black mayors in each of the major receiving cities of the North and the West were not longtime native blacks but participants of sons of the Great Migration.” (p. 529, The Warmth of Other Suns)

Group projects can reinforce learning and build our students’ skills. This is a creative manner to introduce important subject matter.