Random Thoughts

Well, I didn’t write a novel this month.  But I didn’t intend to.  Instead, I wrote a 12-page “Strategic Vision” for my program.  It was only 3798 words.  But I was happier to finish it than I would have been to finish a novel, I think.  As happy, at least!

I have also finished one article that I am going to send off to try to get published this coming week. The article is actually a distillation of the two I wanted to get written this month, but I decided they didn’t need to be two separate articles.  We’ll see what the journal I send them to thinks!  I have also started another piece.

The only thing I said I wanted to do this month but haven’t really done is blog on a nearly daily basis.  I am short about a dozen posts to have the number if posts I wanted to have.  And the posts I made weren’t always one a day.  But I have posted a fair number of times this month.  So I am not too unhappy about it.

What’s up for December, you ask?  Well, little things like the end of the semester,  of course.  And I hope to complete the next article I am working on.  It will be a little more theoretical than the last couple, so it will probably take all month to get a first draft done.  But it will happen.  I also hope to post every day in December.  I tried to do that last year, and I think I was pretty successful.  There might have been one day I missed.  But anyway, that is what the goals are for this month.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Stephen has a great list of education blogs.  There are many blogs on the list that I haven’t seen before, and this is a great way to find some new blogs to read.  This is not an attempt to plug my own blog since it isn’t on the list, but I am sure you can find something of interest on the list.

I was taking with someone the other day about the whole “Sage on the Stage” / “Guide on the Side” question.  He said that he felt it made light of his knowledge and expertise.  At the time, I didn’t have any good response, I don’t think, but Darren Cannell’s post on the subject has given me what I need.  He quotes a 1998 article by Jamie McKenzie, who says that a ‘Guide on the Side’ will be:

circulating, redirecting, disciplining, questioning, assessing, guiding, directing, fascinating, validating, facilitating, moving, monitoring, challenging, motivating, watching, moderating, diagnosing, trouble-shooting, observing, encouraging, suggesting, watching, modeling and clarifying.

… the teacher is on the move, checking over shoulders, asking questions and teaching mini-lessons for individuals and groups who need a particular skill. Support is customized and individualized. The ‘Guide on the Side’ sets clear expectations, provides explicit directions, and keeps the learning well structured and productive.

It seems to me that it is more challenging to be the guide on the side than the sage on the stage.  Anyone can get up there and deliver a lecture which provides little opportunity for students to ask questions.  Anyone can hand out an assignment and then sit back and let students work on it by themselves.  But it takes real expertise to be able to give each individual student what she or he needs, to help each student learn.

What interests me about this discussion, though, is not whether or not my expertise is being denigrated but rather whether or not I am meeting the needs of my students.  I think that there are times when it is appropriate for the instructor to instruct, to dispense information to students.  But those times have to be followed by students using that knowledge — or attempting to.  And that is when the teacher switches from sage to guide.  After circulating and assisting individual students, the instructor may see a pattern in the problems that students have had and may need to offer clarification to the whole class, going back to the sage role.    I guess I don’t think either role should be the only role of an educator, but I definitely think it is important for the guide to be the predominant one.

So now I think I will have a better response the next time someone raises the issue.  But I hope no one ever does again.  I hope it is becoming so accepted and commonplace that no one would think to question it.

At the NWP annual meeting, I met Art, who writes View from Room 125.  He is a 10th grade English teacher in Alabama.  You might enjoy reading what he has to say.

Well, the NWP’s annual meeting is over for me.  I fly out tomorrow morning.  It has been wonderful to meet new people and see old friends. 

One of the highlights for me was sitting at a table waiting for the session to begin, and a guy came and sat next to me.  He introduced himself and looked at my name tag. Then he said,  You blog, don’t you?”  It turns out he has actually read my blog.  His name is Charles Nelson, and he is the tech liaison for The Kean University Writing Project.  Small world!

And then this evening I met a woman.  Turns out she is from Marquette Michigan.  Her department head is my very, very old friend, Rod Clarken. 

And then I got to see old friends from Louisiana.  All in all, it was a wonderful 2 days.  I’ll write more in a day or two.

As I prepare to leave tomorrow for the National Writing Project’s annual meeting in San Antonio, I am overwhelmed with things to do.  I think I have finished almost everything I need to do here at work.  I still have to pack and go to the bank, and all those kinds of things, of course.  But I also have a number of things I want to write about.  So I will start by mentioning several of them here.  As time allows, I may follow up with longer, more meaningful posts on these items.

First of all, someone recently mentioned JiTT.  I don’t remember who, and I can’t seem to find it in my Bloglines account.  I haven’t taken time yet to read all the way through the website, but what I have seen has caused me to think hard about what I want to do in my classes next semester.  Their “What is JiTT?” page starts off with the following quote:

Learning technologies should be designed to increase, and not to reduce, the amount of personal contact between students and faculty on intellectual issues.

(Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education, 1984)

The website, as I said, has made me look at things differently.  I am going to delve into it more as I am preparing for next semester.

Another thing I found really interesting but haven’t taken time to really write about is Will Richardson’s post Get. Off. Paper.  I have really loved not getting a single one of my students’ “papers” this semester on paper.  I can read from a screen.  They can read from a screen.  So why print it out?  I have been doing writing classes this way for a long time, and it seems so logical that I am amazed when colleagues talk about stacks of papers!  Like Will, though, I haven’t had as much luck making presentations without handouts.  A couple years ago I gave out a little business card with the url of the wiki that had links to all the sites on it.  People looked at me as if I were crazy.  They would have agreed with the woman who told Will,

“It’s a wiki,” I said. “You can’t click the links on paper!”

“I know,” she replied. “I just need to have paper.”

Another really interesting post I would like to talk about more is D’Arcy Norman’s content is not enough.  He said:

Content is the least important part of education. What is far more important is what takes place between and among the students. The activities of the community of learners. What they actually DO with the content and with each other.

I couldn’t agree more.  What we teach them in terms of content can easily be obtained in other ways.  What can’t really be duplicated is what learners do with the content.  Yes, we can duplicate the activities (and quite likely will next semester or next year), but the product of those activities will never be exactly the same.  And what the students get out of the activities will be different, too.

There are other things I would like to write about.  And there is more I would like to write about these topics.  We’ll see if it happens or not.  But for now, I hope I have made you curious about the posts and site I have mentioned.  If you haven’t yet, why don’t you check them out!

Almost a year ago now I switched my now dead Acer laptop from Ubuntu to PCLinux because I couldn’t get some things to work properly in Ubuntu. And several months later I made the switch on my old Compaq, too. Well, lately, a lot of things were going flaky with this, now my only computer. Last night I finally put Ubuntu back on it — erasing my Windows partition in the process. I had kept that partition because there were a few things that I felt I needed it for, but now it has been more than a year since I have even looked at it. So I decided it was time to wipe the slate clean.

So far am happy to be back with Ubuntu. 8.10 sure installs easily. And everything works — my wireless card, my reluctant printer, everything. So I will stay with Ubuntu until something goes wrong and I decide to switch — or until I get a little netbook with some other variety of Linux on it!

Well, I turned my strategic vision in to the dean yesterday, and she was going to pass it on to the Vice President today. So that is one big thing off my to-do list! Hooray!

I’ve sent one article I wrote off for publication, and it is going to be published. I have to get another couple articles written and sent off before January. One is pretty well written already — just needs to be pared down and tightened up a bit. So I should be in pretty good shape come time to turn in my Faculty Evaluation portfolio in early January. At least I hope so!

I couldn’t resist Stehen’s link to Typalyzer, which does a Myers-Briggs evaluation of your blog to discover who you, the author, are.  I think I was attracted to it because Stephen said he always ends up testing INTJ, and his blog did, too.  I usually test INTJ myself, so I was intrigued.  But when I typed in the URL of this blog, I discovered that I am:

ESTP – The Doers

The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

Now, that doesn’t sound like me at all.  So I tried it again, and the results were the same.  Does this mean that my blog and I are doomed?  Can I really exist in cyberspace as an ESTP and in the “real” world as an INTJ?

While I took the test and began this post as a joke, it has made me think about how I am someone different online from in real life.  I can’t really explain it but I can see that I am an ESTP here,  I know this has something to do with writing, which has always been a very liberating experience for me.  But I find this all really interesting.  I am going to have to think about it some more.

To find your own food for thought, check out Typealyzer yourself.

The Edjurist has a post about the death of the blogosphere.  The point he makes is not that blogging is dead but that it is maturing.  He says it is currently a teenager and will soon be an adult.  He says:

I think blogging is getting more professional while much of the personal realm of blogging is going to alternative outlets like Twitter and Facebook.

While I accept that blogging is becoming more mainstream, I have trouble thinking I as a personal blogger should be moving to Facebook or Twitter.  Those will never do for me what blogging does.  But obviously I will never be a professional blogger, either.  WIll there be a place for me in the mature blogosphere?