Shadow Week

In recent weeks, there have been a couple of articles talking about

shadow work.

Shadow work is the unpaid work that that is done in a wage-based economy. It has been suggested that the increase in modern digital technology has increased the workload for people, as tasks normally done by others has been added to their workload. An article in the Profhacker column addressed the issue of shadow work in academia. As I head into break week for Thanksgiving, I realize that I have a lot of work to catch up on and that much of it could be classified as shadow work. While I do not see this work going away or lessening in quantity, I need to find a way to better organize both my time and work. I expected the iPad to help with this, (don’t get me wrong, the iPad has been fantastic in many areas), but really have not made a lot of headway in this direction. Maybe I can use this week to do some investigation into this arena.

RSM

OpenClass?

About a week ago, articles started appearing about a joint venture by Google and Pearson to create a new learning management system. The Chronicle reported that the new LMA will be:

• “a free LMS that combines standard course-management tools with advanced social networking and community-building, and an open architecture that allows instructors to import whatever material they want, from e-books to YouTube videos. The program will launch through Google Apps for Education, a very popular e-mail, calendar, and document-sharing service that has more than 1,000 higher-education customers, and it will be hosted by Pearson with the intent of freeing institutions from the burden of providing resources to run it.”

At IUP, we have made recent transitions from WebCT to Moodle and are now making the change to D2L. It has been a very hectic and trying experience to make these transitions. I wonder if there is any chance for IUP to take advantage of this?

RSM

Planning for the Future

My department is undergoing a5 year review, and so we are having a meeting to discuss the department’s future in many areas: curriculum, distance education, campus activities, etc. I have always found that while historians research the past and live in the present, they are not great at looking to the future. This is important because, at least at my university, we are facing a shortage of resources in the future and the competition for the remaining resources will be even more fierce. One recent article that a faculty member suggested that my department read is “The Education Our Economy Needs” in the Wall Street Journal on 9/21/11. In it, the writer (Norm Augustine) says that:

• “Now is a time to re-establish history’s importance in American education. We need to take this opportunity to ensure that today’s history teachers are teaching in a more enlightened fashion, going beyond rote memorization and requiring students to conduct original research, develop a viewpoint and defend it.”

Is this possible? Or is it too late?

RSM

PKAP and Google

Well, the PKAP senior staff (Bill, David, and myself) had our annual fall planning meeting. Over the years we have used a variety of methods to hold the meeting. Our very very first one was at my house and involved Bill and David driving over. Once Bill took a position at the University of North Dakota, we had to find another way to hold a meeting. We first used a simple three-way telephone conference. Then we tried holding a meeting in Second Life. That was interesting and allowed us to keep a transcript of the chat. One year we tried Adobe Connect, but had lots of feedback issues. This year we used the video hangout feature in Google +. This actually worked quite well. The video and audio were clear, and we looked at documents and spreadsheets in Google Docs. Having more than one monitor was a big help here, since it allowed me to keep the chat up on one screen and the Google Docs on another. It certainly seemed to me at least, to be the best way that we have held our annual PKAP planning meeting so far.

RSM

Preparing for Monday

My classes start on Monday and I am still trying to finish up my syllabi and make sure that everything is correct on them. In recent years, my section on classroom etiquette has become longer as I attempt to cover more and more issues. The biggest issue I seem to face is the distractions caused by cellphones, laptops, and tablets. There has been a lot of discussion online about ways to handle these issues. If you are interested, see:

• Developing an Electronic Communication Policy
• 5 Tips for Dealing with Gadgets in the Classroom
• Developing a Digital Etiquette Policy

RSM

Preparing for the fall and cheating

As I work on the syllabi for my fall classes, one of the topics I always try to incorporate into all of my courses is information on IUP’s  academic integrity policy. I created a quiz a few years ago that I require all of my students take until they score a 100 on it that addresses issues of academic integrity. I don’t necessarily believe that it deters cheating, but it helps eliminate students later claiming that they were unaware that what they were doing was wrong. A recent article in Wired Campus addresses this issue by relating how an experiment on cheating run in a Duke economics class seems to indicate that cheating in that class might have been as a high as 30% – a depressingly high percentage.

RSM

Vacation Thoughts

My kids love to visit aquariums and zoos on our vacations, but as a historian I feel an obligation to sneak in history whenever I can. On this trip, before visiting the NC Aquarium at Roanoke, we stopped at Kitty Hawk, NC to visit the Wright Brothers National Memorial. I have to admit that I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the sights since I had been there before, but one exhibit caught my attention. It said that in 66 years we went from the invention of flying to a flight to the moon. This really struck me. For each of my History 195 classes (History of the Modern Era), which is a required course for non-History majors at IUP, I try to explain to them how fast things are changing for us, especially compared to people living centuries ago when change was much more gradual, if at all. I have been using the example of the development of the cell phone to make this point. I explain to my class how my first cellular phone in the early 1990’s was the big bag phone that only worked when plugged into my car’s cigarette lighter, and that now cell phones are everywhere, very small, and able to surf the internet. I am not sure if this has been working, since I feel like my students look at me like I am some old geezer. [This year my freshmen were born in 1993, so that might explain the looks.] This fall I am going to use the 66 years between flight and the moon to see if it works better.

RSM