Thinking of you!

Teaching comics has become respectable lately. The Modern Language Association has published a volume on the genre in its series of teaching guides; elementary school libraries stock graphic novels and non-fiction texts, with the explicit goal of attracting “reluctant readers”; conferences and critical essays debate terminology (comics? Comix? Graphic narrative? Sequential visual. . . . Etc.). Like the novel, like film, this modern medium is emerging into mainstream status, but with the usual blind spots that canon formation in its early stages entails.

When I was in graduate school (cue bad nostalgic source music), literary studies was in the throes of discovering that women other than and prior to Jane Austen had written novels, and film studies was beginning to turn its sights on American movies more recent than Citizen Kane (ok, hyperbole is permitted in blogs). The film canon at that point emphasized alternative or foreign films. This meant that in order to be serious about film, one had to pretend to like Lena Wertmüller, which I found impossible, although I was dutifully swept away by Ingmar Bergman. But the Eighties punk sensibility, with its eye toward England and the Continent, also led to an increasing appreciation for genre films and their aesthetic, albeit with a good dose of irony. We happily wore trench-coats, lamé dresses, and Borsalino hats from thrift shops, sometimes in the art-house-cinema awareness that the French New Wave preceded us. What I at least had failed to notice was that comic books, which I had always secretly loved but had given up as uncool, were following the same trend, and in the process forming the nucleus of a new canon. If you study comics, you know these titles: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen and The Killing Joke, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight, Grant Morrison and David McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, all from the 1980s (all but Miller British writers and illustrators, BTW). The problem at the time, from the somewhat limited POV I inhabited, was that these were superhero comics, and superheroes weren’t cool. Even Batman, whom I had adored and wanted to be when I was five, was kinda square, right?

Wrong.

There is a point to all this reminiscence, I hasten to add: with all the diversity of today’s fiction and non-fiction comics — including a very teachable DC version of the 911 Commission Report, which the Commission commissioned (ok, awkward but accurate) explicitly to attract young readers — and even with the critical acclaim now granted the titles listed above, contemporary comics criticism still tends to act as if superheroes have counter-cultural cooties. Film versions haven’t helped, since they tend to be big on explosions and plastic abs (or worse bits) and lame on plot. But the critical focus on elements like costume, plot, and character is curiously blind to the Big Obvious: what makes comics unique as a genre isn’t any of these things.

It’s that they are drawn.

Like many new media, comics are visual/narrative hybrids. But unlike film, the medium to which comics are most frequently compared, comics are (in the famous idiom of Will Eisner’s 1985 Comics and Sequential Art), well, sequential art objects. Pop art knew this before anyone else outside the field did; just ask Roy Lichtenstein, who appropriated the mainstream style of the romance comic to great effect. The comics panel has a rhetoric all its own, one that can draw on any graphic style, including the dynamic idiom still best explicated in Stan Lee and John Buscema’s 1978 How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. That dynamic idiom speaks strongly to readers, as does hero comics’ continued engagement with issues of power, violence, control, and accountability. And the dynamic hero idiom, with its decades of tradition developed and made nuanced by multiple practitioners, engages students who are visually literate, often eliciting sophisticated analytical readings.

How do students respond to the use of comics in the classroom? After several semesters of experimenting, both in a course specifically on graphic narrative and in regular literature courses, I have found that both genres and all age ranges respond really well to comics of various types, including that heroic-style 911 Report. The title of this blog comes from a female adult student’s response to a question on a research survey (administered by a student, under IRB guidelines) concerning whether or not it was appropriate to use the medium to depict and teach historical events. Her answer: it’s ok as long as the work is “drawn serious.” Apparently the superhero idiom of Stan Lee doesn’t inevitably read as something for over-caffeinated fan-boys.

From my observation, student work and attitudes seem to suggest that if we teach new media on their own terms, outside the stereotypes that inevitably infest the formation of an emerging canon, we will find that they can communicate meaning and engage students in discourse at high levels. The process here matters more than the content, and skills transfer applies: a student who can read a film or a comic for metaphor, allusion, or thematic development can apply those skills to read other types of text. Moreover, the shock of the new, the revelatory dynamics of beginner’s mind, the chimeric interplay of hybrid media, can energize both instructors and students. The gains are worth the risks.

Teaching comics has become respectable lately. The Modern Language Association has published a volume on the genre in its series of teaching guides; elementary school libraries stock graphic novels and non-fiction texts, with the explicit goal of attracting “reluctant readers”; conferences and critical essays debate terminology (comics? Comix? Graphic narrative? Sequential visual. . . . Etc.). Like the novel, like film, this modern medium is emerging into mainstream status, but with the usual blind spots that canon formation in its early stages entails.

When I was in graduate school (cue bad nostalgic source music), literary studies was in the throes of discovering that women other than and prior to Jane Austen had written novels, and film studies was beginning to turn its sights on American movies more recent than Citizen Kane (ok, hyperbole is permitted in blogs). The film canon at that point emphasized alternative or foreign films. This meant that in order to be serious about film, one had to pretend to like Lena Wertmüller, which I found impossible, although I was dutifully swept away by Ingmar Bergman. But the Eighties punk sensibility, with its eye toward England and the Continent, also led to an increasing appreciation for genre films and their aesthetic, albeit with a good dose of irony. We happily wore trench-coats, lamé dresses, and Borsalino hats from thrift shops, sometimes in the art-house-cinema awareness that the French New Wave preceded us. What I at least had failed to notice was that comic books, which I had always secretly loved but had given up as uncool, were following the same trend, and in the process forming the nucleus of a new canon. If you study comics, you know these titles: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen and The Killing Joke, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight, Grant Morrison and David McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, all from the 1980s (all but Miller British writers and illustrators, BTW). The problem at the time, from the somewhat limited POV I inhabited, was that these were superhero comics, and superheroes weren’t cool. Even Batman, whom I had adored and wanted to be when I was five, was kinda square, right?

Wrong.

There is a point to all this reminiscence, I hasten to add: with all the diversity of today’s fiction and non-fiction comics — including a very teachable DC version of the 911 Commission Report, which the Commission commissioned (ok, awkward but accurate) explicitly to attract young readers — and even with the critical acclaim now granted the titles listed above, contemporary comics criticism still tends to act as if superheroes have counter-cultural cooties. Film versions haven’t helped, since they tend to be big on explosions and plastic abs (or worse bits) and lame on plot. But the critical focus on elements like costume, plot, and character is curiously blind to the Big Obvious: what makes comics unique as a genre isn’t any of these things.

It’s that they are drawn.

Like many new media, comics are visual/narrative hybrids. But unlike film, the medium to which comics are most frequently compared, comics are (in the famous idiom of Will Eisner’s 1985 Comics and Sequential Art), well, sequential art objects. Pop art knew this before anyone else outside the field did; just ask Roy Lichtenstein, who appropriated the mainstream style of the romance comic to great effect. The comics panel has a rhetoric all its own, one that can draw on any graphic style, including the dynamic idiom still best explicated in Stan Lee and John Buscema’s 1978 How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. That dynamic idiom speaks strongly to readers, as does hero comics’ continued engagement with issues of power, violence, control, and accountability. And the dynamic hero idiom, with its decades of tradition developed and made nuanced by multiple practitioners, engages students who are visually literate, often eliciting sophisticated analytical readings.

How do students respond to the use of comics in the classroom? After several semesters of experimenting, both in a course specifically on graphic narrative and in regular literature courses, I have found that both genres and all age ranges respond really well to comics of various types, including that heroic-style 911 Report. The title of this blog comes from a female adult student’s response to a question on a research survey (administered by a student, under IRB guidelines) concerning whether or not it was appropriate to use the medium to depict and teach historical events. Her answer: it’s ok as long as the work is “drawn serious.” Apparently the superhero idiom of Stan Lee doesn’t inevitably read as something for over-caffeinated fan-boys.

From my observation, student work and attitudes seem to suggest that if we teach new media on their own terms, outside the stereotypes that inevitably infest the formation of an emerging canon, we will find that they can communicate meaning and engage students in discourse at high levels. The process here matters more than the content, and skills transfer applies: a student who can read a film or a comic for metaphor, allusion, or thematic development can apply those skills to read other types of text. Moreover, the shock of the new, the revelatory dynamics of beginner’s mind, the chimeric interplay of hybrid media, can energize both instructors and students. The gains are worth the risks.

Education through cartoons. These links demonstrate a nice way to deliver scientific information through the use of  drawings and animations..

• Higgs Boson particle Explained
•  Dark Matter Explained
• PhysicsQuest Spectra Comic

I thought it might be interesting for the group to see what sorts of technology assistance our students are asking for at the Reference Desk.  These are some of the items I pulled from our March/April log:

• How do I get back to the normal view in PowerPoint so I can see my slides and notes?
• How do I get out of the header part of the paper?
• Patron needed assistance using the scanner
• I need to print something that is on my flash drive. Do I need to transfer the document to the computer first?
• How do I save this Microsoft Word file to a flash drive?
• Wanted to know how to get started on scanner
• Wondered whether certain brands of laptop worked better with the campus network than others
• Student has different operating system/version of Word at home. Her paper had a different format than what she had created.
• How do I get rid of this border around the main text on my PowerPoint slide (around text itself, not entire slide)?
• I haven’t used the library before. (I usually go to the Resource Center, but it’s not open yet.) How do I print an essay?
• Student asked for help with printing a Excel list for his class as it was cutting off the very long sentences.
• How do you change the legend label in an Excel chart?
• Student asked for help printing class notes and exams from D2L.
• I need to send this document as an attachment.
• Student couldn’t get a PDF article to print.
• Student asked for help with opening files from her flashdrive
• How to get title and page number into header on a paper
• How to use scanner
• How do you print a PDF?
• How do I make everything in this outline appear the same (numbering, indentation)?
• How do I print this PDF?
• Student asked for help with sending a Word file as an email attachment to her professors.
• Student wished to print a 90-slide PowerPoint using as few pages as possible.
• Does the library ever offer tech classes? If so, what?
• Student said her professor asked her to send her assignment as an email attachment using that paper click button. She wasn’t certain how to do this and asked for help.
• How to use the scanner
• Student had just finished typing a paper in Word and she asked for assistance in sending her file to herself via her email.
• Student opened up a Word document that she had created at home. The section titles and the justification were different and she asked for help.
• Student asked how to delete a file from our computer.
• Patron needed assistance using the scanner
• What settings do you use to print a 2-sided document?
• How do you get rid of a pop-up blocker?
• Wanted to know how to get started on the scanner.
• How do I send a document to my instructor?
• Multiple patrons needed assistance using the scanner.
• How do I print a document that’s on my flash drive?
• What are the shortcut keys I can use in Word to write chemical equations in my paper?
• Student already had a Header inserted into her Word document. She wanted to also add page numbers. Microsoft would allow one, but not both.
• Student wanted to bring back the Toolbar in Word. For some reason, it wasn’t there when he first opened Word.
• Student asked how to change font size in Word.

The last decade has made it abundantly clear that, as much as we may desire stability, new and emerging technological media are profoundly postmodern: as soon as they stop moving, they’re moribund. If it’s on the syllabus, it’s already dated. Company’s got an IPO? Biggest new market is overseas? Congratulations, “new” tech — you just maxed out your Hot New Thing account, just took the first step in that great American mass media success journey that ends with your private physician gibbering on the witness stand and you on a gurney in the morgue. Sure, your greatest hits will stay in rotation — especially on that soft-rock station Mom always leaves the radio tuned to when she uses the car.

So instead of trying to determine what toys and tools our students should be using, or what they might currently be twiddling with under the desk when they think I’m not looking, I would like to start playing to these expectations:

Upon successful (or at least non-catastrophic) completion of an undergraduate degree, the student will be able to:

1) know when a tech tool or toy is appropriate, fun, helpful, or being used to innovate, and when it isn’t. No PowerPointlessness, no credit just for using the stuff unless the point is to experiment.

2) know what the tech tool or toy (hereafter TTOT) really does and how it works, how to make it or make something with it. This means read the manual, go to the developer’s web page, or whatever. If you don’t know what a gigabyte is, time to learn, no matter what your major. And if you’re just twiddling, switch to something real.

3) know how to choose precisely the right TTOT, not just whatever came with the device, came up first on a search, etc. Favor the app model over the suite (so 1990s). This will ultimately lead to better products and more consumer choice.

4) know what’s a rip-off, whether it’s grabbing data, time, money, or level of complexity. Then decide what you are willing to exchange for the TTOT. And remember: when it comes to art (music, video, real information) compression is for losers. Demand lossless when it matters.

5) know that all mass media, from newspapers and novels to apps and tweets, work better as a system rather than as exclusive choices. We need all formats to form a robust and inter-referential system of literacy.

If our students learn these things, they will be ready to use media wisely, playfully, and well.

All week I’ve been contemplating the discussion we had at the end of the NMFS seminar last Monday.  I’ve been going back and forth in my mind about how I feel about intellectual property and what would I be comfortable with sharing. And I still don’t know.  I’m impressed by people like Chris Birks who posts his lectures for the world to see.  I can think of so many positives about doing that, but then there’s this dark inner voice saying, “But you don’t know what this could be used for.” Maybe I’m too distrusting. Maybe I should give it a try and see how I feel.  Perhaps this is the future of academia. I guess we’ll find out.

What I found amazing about the research study of ownership, use, and value of technology for personal and academic purposes were the student voices and the statistics indicating the usage of technology. One comment mentioned that the tools are available but not used. I would suggest that student voices become part of the discussion when it comes to what types of technology should be delivered to provide value and quality education. It appeared from the study that the resources available to students online is what they are missing or seeking in some cases. How do we meet the needs of students that are looking for resources and tools to connect them with their institution of higher learning?

Last week’s New Media Faculty Seminar reading was “Reinventing Discovery” [Chapter 1 in Michael Nielsen's Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. Information on the book may be found here http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/reinventing-discovery/.

The notion of using online tools for collaboration is not a new one. Employees in many organizations use collaborative tools as part of formal or informal knowledge discovery/knowledge sharing activities.

Knowledge management at Buckman Laboratories is perhaps the best-documented. Information on their efforts which date back to the 1980s may be found here http://www.kmbestpractices.com/buckman-laboratories.html, http://www.ikmagazine.com/xq/asp/sid.0/articleid.44FF64FD-A164-44D2-AC71-6668AA61E195/eTitle.The_knowledge_Robert_H_Buckman/qx/display.htm, as well as on their own Knowledge Nurture site http://www.knowledge-nurture.com/.

Another well-documented case goes back to 1997: "KMPG Peat Marwick U.S.: One Giant Brain". It is Harvard Business School case 397108-PDF-ENG; a brief description is found here http://hbr.org/product/kpmg-peat-marwick-u-s-one-giant-brain/an/397108-PDF-ENG.

What is critical is employee buy-in and organization strategies to support the effort. What Peat Marwick found is that a reward system based on individual performance was at odds with knowledge sharing. Similarly, the strategy at Buckman is “we should use our systems for communication to share our tacit and explicit knowledge as widely as possible so that no individual will stand alone in the face of competition, but will always have the full global force of the company behind them." [http://www.kmbestpractices.com/buckman-laboratories.html].

What Nielsen is proposing is collaboration across all boundaries. What about intellectual property?

This week’s reading for our New Media Faculty Seminar is the ECAR “National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology 2011″ found at http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERS1103/ERS1103W.pdf.

The several College of Business faculty who are working on a Technology Initiatives Task Force met this week. What is interesting is how we think we might help our colleagues become more effective users of instructional technology coincides with several of the recommendations in the ECAR study.

For example, Recommendation 1 is to “Investigate your students’ technology needs and preferences and create an  action plan to better integrate technology into courses and help students access institutional and academic information from their many and diverse devices and platforms.” Our NMFS and Technology Initiatives Task Force has the same approach to help our faculty: we need to ask them how they want to use technology in their courses.

Recommendation 2 is to provide professional development opportunities for faculty. We are planning brown bag lunches and/or seminars, early evening workshops followed by dinner, and an ongoing Desire2Learn course for all faculty and staff.

Recommendation 6 is to nail the basics: “Help faculty and administrators excel at supporting students’ use of core productivity software and applications for academic use, including, e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, content or learning management systems, library sites, and bibliography tools.” Exactly what we said; we want to help our colleagues comfortable with these tools so they can make their students comfortable as well.

Regarding Recommendation 10 on moving “strategically toward blended/hybrid learning environments to meet students’ preferred styles of learning.”, here, too, we want to encourage our colleagues’ use of technology to engage students between face-to-face meetings.

One of my classes is being taught at the Morton Arboretum. It’s offered through ACCA (Associated Colleges of the Chicagoland Area) and the Arboretum’s College Botany program. The class is Plant-Animal Interactions.

There’s a post that will come that looks at some of the assignments the students are doing (a mix of high and low tech), but that’s not what this post is about.

Today I was there with students to look for herbivory. Given the early spring around here (blooms are at least a month ahead), they found a fair bit from the reports I heard. (They have a week to write up and submit the lab report.) I was armed with a digital SLR and a macro lens (105mm), and spent most of the lab time looking for things to take pictures of (mostly birds and flowers), and continued for a few more hours.

Some pics are below. More are on Facebook, if you’re there and have friended me. And yes, this is an excuse to post something to this blog again… (I did post some of these to the class blog as well.)

After reading the national survey of students and technology administered by Educause, I was glad to learn that students were interested in technologies that would create convenience for their themselves.  This is exactly the same reason that I would like to use technology-to create convenience for myself as an educator.

One of the outcomes of the survey was the importance of instructors using technology effectively, frequently and with seamless integration into their classroom activities.

I am definitely interested in using technology that fosters participation and interaction in the learning process, whether it be simulations, games, video creation, etc. because I believe this is the most effective way for students to learn.

It was amazing to learn that instructors were not utilizing email enough in the students’ opinion.  This is such as simple tool for us to use!  I agree that it adds the element of a personal touch to each course.  I hadn’t realized until this semester that it would be so easy to email our students through D2L, especially because they input the email address that they are currently using into the site.

I don’t know if this is new media for you, but it was new media for me. Have you heard of the Sansa Clip Zip?

I was looking for an inexpensive little MP3 player to keep me company while gardening, so I did a little research and discovered the Sansa Clip Zip.

Maybe it is because I don’t own a smart phone or because this is my first MP3 player, but I’m just amazed at all this tiny little device can do.  One reviewer called it “an audio Swiss Army knife”.  It plays music, podcasts, and audio books (even bookmarks them for me). Tracks can be downloaded directly from the computer with no need to visit iTunes (unless you want to).  In addition it can serve as a stopwatch, a voice recorder, and an FM radio.

The nicest feature is the 1.1″ full color screen.   Not only does it colorfully display album art and book covers, but it also allows you to easily search and retrieve the items stored in the unit.  You can search by book title, album title, artist, song title, playlist, A-Z, folder, or genre plus other options I’ve not explored yet.   It even includes a power save and sleep feature to conserve the battery power.

The price was nice, too – $29.  For a few dollars more, I could have purchased one with more memory but I didn’t think this was necessary since the device contains a slot for a memory card to extend the storage capacity.

So I’m enjoying my new little toy – and not just while I’m gardening.   It is such a luxury to have some of my favorite tunes, books and poetry right at my fingertips wherever I may go.  So if you are looking for an inexpensive, tiny player/recorder, I highly recommend this amazing little clip.

Play is a thing by itself. The play-concept as such is of a higher order than is seriousness. For seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness. — Huizinga, Homo Ludens

As has become the new normal, something interesting is happening in Brooklyn: what the New York Times describes as “underemployed polymaths” (is there any other kind? Maybe Steve Jobs was the exception that proves the rule) have started their own post-graduate school. The Brooklyn Brainery, currently occupying a space for which the rent was crowd funded using Kickstarter, seems from the Times article to straddle the crucial educational space between the very serious human need to learn and the equally important human instinct to play. More relevantly for the purposes of this blog, it reminds me that the collaborative, anti-competitive processes that new media can facilitate aren’t unique to any particular technology or practice. Rather, they reflect something real about our prosocial nature, something that materially-complex societies often obscure: we really work better when we play with others.

One key element in the promotion of education as play is that it requires educators to do something that comes hard to us: not simply to share our authoritative role with students, but to see it as a role rather than the core of our identity. On reflection, it seems to me that the reason group work was initially a revelation in the classroom was that it represented a new recognition of the student as participant rather than consumer (thanks, Paolo Freire!). Ceding conversational control was difficult, because we had been trained to think that our expertise was the main reason for us to be there at all. But once educators assimilated group work as an authorized activity, part of that sphere of expertise, it lost its edge. Teaching, after all, is not a static system but a dynamic process, part of personal and political history, and as such it has an Imaginary aspect. When group work became, in Roland Barthes’ term, “on the right,” that is, no longer avant-garde, its unconscious allegiance changed. It was last year’s game, in the rule book, and it wasn’t much fun any more. That doesn’t mean we can’t use it, but it does mean it’s not going to produce the sense of a shared secret that according to Huizinga characterizes play.

Given this historical trend towards recapitulation (although Barthes is a little bit of a leftie pessimist), crowd-sourcing may in turn become as “old media” as group work, and the Brooklyn Brainery may either vanish or become the new New School. Right now, however, creating a disciplinary expectation of crowd-sourcing may, as Michael Nielsen suggests in Reinventing Discovery, tear down some existing walls.

By the way, which one’s Pink?

I’m actually quite embarrassed about how little blogging I’ve been able to do in recent months.  It’s easy to tweet articles and information, no matter how busy I am, but blogging–at least for me–is a “slow things down and reflect” kind of activity, perhaps contrary to how many others perceive blogging.  Well, a cup of Alterra coffee this morning helped to jump start my day–to be exact their Delta Mud blend, which to me is a perfect balance between smokiness and richness in flavor (not too dark but still very robust and full-bodied).  Alterra Coffee from Milwaukee is environmentally conscious and roasts expertly, producing many blends and types of amazing coffee.  I think it’s fair to say that Milwaukee is a severely underrated coffee city, and my favorite spots there are Alterra, which are throughout the city, and Cedarburg Coffee Roastery, which is in the Milwaukee Public Market.  (If you like dark roasts, definitely try Cedarburg’s Nicaraguan Segovia!)

The highlight of my weekend was catching the skateboard films featured as part of the Asian American Showcase at the Siskel Film Center in downtown Chicago.  These were short films about skateboarding in both the U.S. and Asia, and the program, “Animal Style,” was curated by Martin Wong of Giant Robot magazine.  This was actually the world premiere of these films, and Martin Wong, director Wing Ko, producers, writers, and many featured skaters were on hand to answer questions and talk about their work.  I loved the films about Los Angeles and Chicago!  Never having really skateboarded myself, I found it so fascinating to see city architecture (and the entire urban, concrete, built environment) from the perspectives of skateboarders.  Here is a trailer for one of my favorites from the festival, The Working Man, set in L.A.:

Isn’t L.A. so incredibly beautiful in this film?  Major props to Tadashi Suzuki, Wing Ko, Thy Mai, Carlos de la Garza, Chin Yi, and many others (don’t mean to leave folks out) for producing such a stunning visual and aural experience!  The soundtrack and the visuals worked perfectly together.  The Working Man will also be screened as part of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival in May.  You can find details here.  Also, those interested in Chicago or skateboarding or both should definitely look out for Wing Ko’s The Brotherhood:  Chicago, which tells a moving story about Chicago skateboarding history through the lives of Jesse Neuhaus, Steven “Dread” Snyder, and Eric Murphy.  Again, I had the privilege of seeing this at the Asian American Showcase, and I really, really hope they eventually have film screenings across Chicagoland.  It’s a great story and a part of Chicago cultural history.  I’m thrilled I was among the very first to see it at its world premiere.  Many thanks to Martin Wong for curating these films and bringing this collection to the Chi!  And thanks to Tim Hugh for his remarkable work in coordinating once again the Asian American Showcase at the Siskel Center!

Last week we discussed many aspects of grading, standardized tests, and how we measure learning in students.  Cathy Davidson wrote about “crowdsourcing” her grades and I really kind of liked the idea behind it.  But, I’m not sure if it would be relevant for the courses I teach, which for the time being are mainly intro to statistics, statistics II, or some form of research methods (I teach both at the undergraduate and graduate level).

However, reading this book has really made take a good hard look at if I believe the grades my students receive actually reflect their learning.  And if they do not reflect their learning, what do their grades reflect? It is the ability to spit back the information I perceive as important? It is the ability to follow directions?  Is that learning? I’m not sure, but I think I might be on the verge of an existential crisis as a teacher.  Unfortunately, there is too much thinking to do and not enough time.  Sigh.

I have a confession: I have become disillusioned with group work. Not because I don’t value collaboration or peer learning, but because my students don’t — especially the smart ones.

It wasn’t always this way. When I first started teaching, back around — oh, let’s not talk about that. Suffice it to say that group work was relatively new to the academy, and was entirely new to most undergraduates. They seemed to find it very exciting, being asked to come up with ideas together, and went to work enthusiastically to impress each other with their insight. But the millenials have a different attitude: they have been exposed to group work since middle school, and they are sick of it. They roll their eyes as they drag tables into new positions, they smirk knowingly at prompts, and they breeze through the work and then quickly Balkanize into pairs and singletons.

Recent research may give us insight into this phenomenon: group work functions effectively when critical comments and debate are built in, and when the group members are similar or familiar with each other, but not too much so (see two recent articles, Jonah Lehrer’s “Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth,” in The New Yorker for January 30 2012, and Susan Cain’s “Rise of the New Groupthink” in The New York Times Sunday Review of January 13 2012). What this suggests is that group work bores different sets of my students for different reasons: the prompts may be too obvious and open for the majors, who know the material and each other, while the less comfortable students find the social aspects of the exercise daunting. Seminars are the right setting for the exercise, but then a good seminar is already a work group.

Why didn’t I figure this out sooner? Probably because like many teachers I forget that my work and study ethos is not necessarily the default setting. I am lucky enough to work with colleagues whose Q level is fairly ideal: we know each other, share many values, but also can disagree. But I have also worked with colleagues who did not play well together, with predictable results: nothing ever got done.

The good news is this: the online environment appears to do away with some of the problems of FTF group work. We know that people are much more willing to be critical online, and apparently this freedom can be channelled constructively and productively through large-scale collaboration and critical debate. At the same time, there is evidence that shared space and proximity increase the productivity and quality of group ideas.

So here’s another argument for the hybrid classroom, one that exploits the best of both FTF and electronic, that builds groups in real space but also virtually. It may give groupthink new life.

One of the outcomes of the March 5 brown bag seminar “The Reluctant Technologist” was the idea for a Technology Initiatives Task Force within the College of Business at Benedictine University.

A few of the issues identified at the seminar as obstacles to faculty adoption of new technologies were time, trust, teaching, and training. To clarify some of the issues: Time…who has extra time to explore something new, with no guarantee of success? Trust…what about the faculty member who tries something new and does not meet with success? Teaching…how does a faculty member identify a new technology or a new application appropriate to his/her discipline? Training…just-in-time and directly applicable to a course.

The objective of the task force would be to address these. We have done a bit of brainstorming and hope to organize our thoughts in the next couple of weeks. We would like to kick off our work with a brown bag lunch during April or May in which we would like to pose these questions to interested faculty:

• What kind of help would you like from us?
• Should we help with instructional technology, social media, and/or Office software?

We have identified at least two strategies:

• Technology tips of the week to include something of general interest, something related to instructional technology, and something related to the use of social media.
• Periodic brown-bag seminars where we might do some show-and-tell and/or have a question-and-answer session.

Cathy Davidson discusses the use of games in Chapter 5 “The Epic Win” of her Now You See It.

As readers may already be aware, I am director of a master’s degree program in management information systems at Benedictine University.  The capstone MBA course, MBA671, Strategic Management, includes a large-scale business simulation game, where teams of our students compete against thousands of teams across the globe. In the last few years, M.S. in Management and Organizational Behavior students have participated along with MBA students. Beginning with Fall 2012, my M.S in Management Information Systems, students will also participate.

Some years ago, this capstone course was shared among several programs: MBA, M.S. in MOB, and M.S. in MIS. We did not have an integrating experience like the business simulation and, eventually, MOB and MIS Programs went back to offering their own capstone courses. The business simulation has made us reconsider. Why not include information technology and management students along with business administration students in teams running a company? The benefits to all students should be significant; different groups of students bring different talents to the experience. How should these different talents be leveraged to make their virtual company more successful than other students’ companies?