Tom and Lorenzo’s analysis of the costumes on Mad Men (the season premiere of which I finally got to see late last night) –

It became quickly obvious to us that there was no way we could examine the female fashion on Mad Men without looking at ALL the females. Costume Designer Janie Bryant deserves every bit of acclaim and applause that has come her way since she started work on the show. Think of this series of posts as a mini-retrospective. We’ll work our way up to Joan and Betty by looking at each of the other characters first.

Here’s the thing – I love the posts for the big 3 characters – Joan, Betty, and Peggy – but in some ways, I love the posts about the secondary characters more.  In the first group, the conversation is very character-driven, what different costuming choices say about different characters, which is fun and interesting.  In the second group, though, there’s just as much about what the costumes AND characters say about the time and place in which they’re set – which is right in my analytical sweet spot.

This digital history project at Stanford:  The Republic of Letters.

Using social networking visualization tools to visualize the letters that scholars wrote to each other way back in the early days of scholarly communication.

Forged in the humanist culture of learning that promoted the ancient ideal of the republic as the place for free and continuous exchange of knowledge, the Republic of Letters was simultaneously an imagined community (a scholar’s utopia where differences, in theory, would not matter), an information network, and a dynamic platform from which a wide variety of intellectual projects – many of them with important ramifications for society, politics, and religion – were proposed, vetted, and executed.

You can check out their case studies, or do a little bit of playing with their tools.

Cryptogram for iPad.

This game is very easy (if you let it tell you when you guess a letter wrong) or less easy (when you don’t), and so, so pretty.

New blog to follow

And last, but only because I can’t believe anyone who reads this blog doesn’t already know this - Barbara Fister is blogging at Inside Higher Ed.

These slides are more text-heavy than my usual, mostly because the talk was less conceptual than my usual, but I’m still not sure how understandable they are to anyone who wasn’t there.

Supplementary stuff, sources and For Further Reading notes after the slides…

For Further Reading…

An idiosyncratic list of Useful Things

The articles from A List Apart, particularly those found in the Project Management and Workflow, and Usability topic sections.

Project Management for the Accidental Project Manager
Gary Chin, XO Consulting & Training

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good
Leslie Wolf, June 2, 2010 (California Digital Library)

Project/ goal definition

Why Project Management Matters
EDUCAUSE

Deb Gilchrist model for developing learning outcomes
Seattle Central Community College workshop

Listening to the users

Bubbl.us

Card sorting: A definitive guide
Boxes and Arrows

User Interviews
Learn by Asking (Aaron Schmidt)

User and Task Analysis for Interface Design
Hackos & Redish (1998)

Task Analysis
(Usability Net)

Paper prototyping
Shawn Medero, 1/23/2007 (A List Apart)

10 Effective Video Examples of Paper Prototyping
6/24/2010 (speckyboy Design Magazine)

Chalkmark
Software option for feedback on prototypes

Planning & Analysis

Working with project constraints: The project management triangle
Joe Taylor, December 2009 (Bright Hub)

Minimise your project management documentation
David Carr (projectsmart.co.uk)

Quick, agile, less is more and 2.0

Amanda Etches-Johnson
Presentation given at Internet Librarian 2008
The One-Person Project Management Team

Leisa Reichelt (coined the term social project management)
Presentation, Enterprise 2.0
Social Project Management

Larry Dignan, February 2009 (ZDnet)
Welcome to Project Management 2.0

Introducing Edupunk
Leslie Madsen Brooks (BlogHer)

Overviews
Project Management. Part 1, What is Project Management (Craig Brown)

While the most famous example of this for instruction librarians is undoubtedly the advertisements for Big Pharma in the form of scholarly journals flying under Elsevier’s flag of convenience, they are apparently and not surprisingly a well-established tool in the public relations toolkit.  They even give awards for them.  In the last round of Bronze Anvil Awards (given by the Public Relations Society of America to “recognize outstanding public relations tactics”) there were two awards given to advertorials — one to InSinkerator for something called InSinkerator Gets Home Builders to Think Green, and one to the Florida Department of Citrus, for their Florida Grapefruit Makes Headlines.

So why am I thinking about advertorials today?  Because they are wrecking one of my favorite places to go on the Internet — ScienceBlogs.

In short, ScienceBlogs disastrously, inexplicably, weirdly, agreed to allow a new nutrition blog to join ScienceBlogs – which is an invitation-only type networks of blogs about science and scientific research.  The weird, disastrous, etc. thing about this new blog, called Food Frontiers, was that it was produced by PepsiCo, and the decision to fairly radically change the type of content that was part of the ScienceBlogs network was made in an uncommunicative, opaque, closed way.

Summaries of the fallout – which bloggers are staying which are going, where the going bloggers are now – can be best found here, at Carl Zimmer’s blog (associated with Discover magazine) — Oh, Pepsi, What Hast Thou Wrought.

A Note from ScienceBlogs can be found on the former site of the Pepsi blog, explaining the decision to take it down.

So what does this all mean and why do I care?  Lots of people know that I love ScienceBlogs, or that I have loved ScienceBlogs, as a librarian who teaches – my love for it has only grown.  So now what?

Dave Mosher provides a good summary of what this means for content from ScienceBlogs in the future – which is the issue about which I am really concerned.  I don’t

That effort signals a fundamental change to the way their content is structured:

Before: Blogs.
After: Editorial blogs. | Advertorial blogs.

I type “signals” and not “is” because the transformation isn’t complete.

Because part of this is about reputation – and not reputation in that individual kind of way, but reputation in that authority/publishing/information literacy kind of way that means so much to students struggling to find their way through the scholarly landscape –

From Dave Munger (emphasis added) -

The hypocrisy in handing a nutrition podium to a company that is seriously implicated in the global obesity crisis was astonishing, and even worse, the dozens of bloggers who’ve worked for years to build ScienceBlogs’ reputation were taken completely by surprise.

Former ScienceBlogger David Dobbs nails the key irony here (again, emphasis added), arguing that PepsiCo is “buying credibility generated by others even as they damage same.”

As PalMD and others have pointed out, PepsiCo hardly lacks platform. The only value they can gain from writing here is to draw on the credibility created by a bunch of independent voices engaged in earnest,= thoughtful (well, most of the time), and genuine conversation.

What these (and countless other) commentaries point out is that the reputation of the site matters – that the name ScienceBlogs is supposed to mean something and one of the things it is supposed to mean is no corporate agendas — the fact that just anyone couldn’t write for ScienceBlogs, the fact that ScienceBloggers were writing independently, the fact that their creators, Seed Media, proclaims this lofty agenda (from their About page) all adds up to a set of expectations about what the content on the site was supposed to be.

We believe that science literacy is a pre-condition for progress in the 21st century. At a time when public interest in science is high but public understanding of science remains weak, we have set out to create innovative media ventures to improve science literacy and to advance global science culture.

While those expectations were not always reasonable and there were ads on the site, and whatever else might also have been a little muddy or murky before – there was an idea behind the project that was an important part of why this project was useful to me in the classroom and at the reference desk and in my own work.  It is not that this content was all supposed to be good, or right, or true, or even civil – but the reasons for it being written?  They were supposed to relate to improving the public understanding of science and science literacy.  So what does that mean in a world when that content is either editorial or advertorial?  No matter how easy it is to tell which is which on the site (and the RSS feed?  the Twitter stream??) – that changes things.

Bora Zivkovic hones in on this question of a network’s reputation in his post, explaining his reasons for leaving ScienceBlogs…

We have built an enormous reputation, and we need to keep guarding it every single day. Which is why the blurring of lines between us who are hired and paid to write (due to our own qualities and expertise which we earned), and those who are paying to have their material published here is deeply unethical. Scientists and journalists share some common ethical principles: transparency, authenticity and truth-telling. These ethical principles were breached. This ruins our reputation, undermines our work, and makes it more unpalatable for good blogger to consider joining Sb in the future.

Zivkovic goes on to discuss the ways in which the existence and influence of the ScienceBlogs network makes the people who blog there de facto science journalists – whether they are aware of (or willing to embrace) that fact or now. It is not surprising in this context (the context of how important science blogging has become to science journalism) that some of the first reactions to the Pepsi blog controversy came not from quick-on-the-draw bloggers, but from mainstream media outlets and watchdogs.

• The Guardian, UK proclaims, ScienceBlogs, we have a problem.
• MIT’s watchdog site Knight Science Journalism Tracker‘s headline suggests that the remaining bloggers’ credibility was damaged by association – “Science Blogs trashes its bloggers credibility.”
• A little later, the Columbia Journalism Review provided an outline of the controversy.

I don’t blog at ScienceBlogs (not many librarians do) and it’s not a crucial part of my everyday professional knowledge building because most of the content on the site isn’t directly aimed at my professional needs — it’s more the idea of the project that is important to my work than the reality of what is posted there on a day-to-day basis. That’s not true for everyone.  But as a libriarian, particularly a librarian working with first-year students making the transition to academic thinking, reading, and writing, ScienceBlogs was (and probably is) a go-to site for me.

A lot of the reason for this is the authority/credibility/reputation issues discussed above.  Not that my students could or should automatically trust any of the content on that or any site, but because I felt like I could tell them (quickly, in a 50-minute one-shot) why and how that information had been created in a way that could guide their critical and effective use of the site as a tool — an incredibly valuable tool – that would help them navigate expert research and academic writing.

But another part of the reason is good old fashioned findability.  As Zivkovic says in his discussion of the network effect at ScienceBlogs, most people don’t track blogs using RSS readers or other tools – they find the content when they search for it.  And when they search for it and find it on one blog in the network, all of the blogs in the network are made stronger.  I don’t expect my first-year students to really figure out yet what pieces of the dynamic web they want to track for scholarly or professional purposes – most of them, at 18, are still figuring out what those purposes will be. They may want to track stuff for a particular class, or a particular term, but yeah – for most of them the searchability and the browsability of this site was key to its being useful.  ResearchBlogging is good for that too, and there are other collections of resources that I can point indivdiual students to – but nothing else out there does what ScienceBlogs does (did?) as a place to illustrate the importance and utility of science blogging and academic blogging.

Carl Zimmer puts his finger on one of the main issues for me – if the bloggers leave ScienceBlogs that may be (probably will be) good for the quality of the content but bad for the findability of the content, and those things are not totally unrelated.

What I find particularly galling about this whole affair is that bloggers who don’t want to associate themselves with this kind of nonsense have to go through the hassle of leaving Scienceblogs and setting up their blog elsewhere. The technical steps involved may be wonderfully easy now (export files, open account on WordPress, import), but the social steps remain tedious.

Munger picks up the theme -

If they want to continue to have the kind of influence they used to have at ScienceBlogs, I think the bloggers who have left the site need to do something more than just start or restart their old, independent blogs. They need to form a new network — perhaps built around different principles, but a network nonetheless.

I think so too – I think if they lose the network effect, individual blogs and bloggers and small groups of same will be able to connect with one type of reader, and an important type of reader, but they’ll lose the true neophyte who stumbles on to new ways of talking about evidence and knowledge coming in through a Google Search — or because a librarian says “browse here for a while” when they’re stuck looking for topics.

Ira Flatow (NPR’s Science Friday) offers to talk about hosting departing ScienceBlogs bloggers’ blogs on the Science Friday site instead. And again here.  I suspect that even the benign oversight of NPR might seem too much to the gunshy bloggers who left ScienceBlogs, but I hope they do find each other again somewhere, or that they build new somewheres elsewhere.

For an example of how we used the Flip video camera we bought — we didn’t use it to demonstrate research processes or to show things in the library.  Or, I should say, we did do some of those things but not in the project I am describing.

But we did use the videos in tutorials.  Basically, my colleague Hannah and I had to do some work revising a set of tutorials.  And as is the case with all tutorials, we had these context-setting pieces that had to go in, pieces where the tutorial explains why the student should take an interest in the process or tool the tutorial will teach them to use.  We didn’t want to write up a set of “here’s why you should care” pages to include in the tutorial, but we weren’t sure where to go from there.

And then one of us – I don’t remember who – had the idea to ask our OSU students to talk about research, with the hope that we could then pull out “clips” that would illustrate what it was we were going to talk about.

It turned out to be a fantastic project – so much fun to work on.  We worked with our office of Student Leadership and Involvement to identify students who were here in the summer and willing to participate.  Then we did a quick 15-30 minute interview with each one.  We recorded the whole thing with a Flip camera, and then used iMovie to pull out useful clips.  The clips are stored on YouTube, so all of our librarians can use them in tutorials, course pages and elsewhere.

This one is one of my favorites – Emmanuel on how librarians are helpful!

See the videos in action

OSU Libraries YouTube channel.  http://www.youtube.com/user/osulibraries

OSU Libraries tutorials pages. http://ica.library.oregonstate.edu/tutorials/ (look at the tutorials for Written English courses)

Our Campus Partners

Student Leadership and Involvement, OSU
http://oregonstate.edu/sli

Associated Students of Oregon State University (ASOSU).
http://asosu.oregonstate.edu/

International Students of Oregon State University (ISOSU)
http://oregonstate.edu/groups/isosu/

Legal Stuff

Model Release Forms (ours were adapted from these at the OSU Extension Office).  http://extension.oregonstate.edu/eesc/how-to/permission-people-pictures-model-release

Using the Flip Camera

EDUCAUSE: 7 Things You Should Know About Flip Cameras
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7043.pdf

Flip Video Camera User Guide (New Mexico State University)
http://brand.nmsu.edu/webnation/flip-video-camera-user-g.html

How to Use a Flip Video Camera
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh6s9gNoFro

I really liked these choices that were made at the AMNH.  They presented a strong point of view on an issue about which there is some controversy (the relationship between dinosaurs and birds), presented it as a point of view, but also didn’t suggest that any opinion on this issue is therefore equally valid – awesome dinosaur bones plus an expectation that viewers are smart enough to consider questions of evidence in a sophisticated way.

I clicked it, thinking it would give me the chance to email results to myself (which is something my students sometimes ask for, though not nearly as often as they ask why Google Scholar won’t format their citations for them).  But instead, it’s a chance to set up an alert for this search.

I don’t actually know that I’ll use this because I don’t really want anything else coming to my email — an RSS feed would be nice.  But has this been around for months and I’ve just noticed it?  That could definitely be true – we’ll see how it works.

I’ve had an iPad, like many others, for something more than a month now.  I haven’t talked about it much because I just haven’t been interested in justifying the purchase, or answering questions about whether it was worth it.   Like the first post I just linked to says, I’m think the answer to that question is still evolving even as I notice myself doing familiar things in new ways.

But I went to a conference last week, which was not only my first iPad travel experience, but it was one where I decided to see if I could get by with just the iPad, even though the presentation wasn’t done when I got on the plane and I had a bunch of resources I wanted to bring with me.

….Probably someone had investigated the phenomenon; no doubt she could look it up on the wrist.  She tapped out the code for the Journal of Areological Studies, typed in Pavonis: “Evidence of Strombolian Explosive Activity Found in West Tharsis Clasts.”  “Radial Ridges in Caldera and Concentric Graben Outside the Rim Suggest Late Subsidence of the Summit.”  She had just crossed some of those graben.

So, this picture has always sounded pretty good to me.  The ability to carry everything I might need and get at it whenever I have a question – that’s a type of heaven that connects me back to my very first smartphone purchase in 2005 which was justified by my desire to access IMDb from any pub in America.

Though, I have never been able to picture what the displays on the units in the quotation above (from Blue Mars) must look like that they let you read any kind of document, ever, on a unit you wear on your wrist.

Now I didn’t buy the iPad thinking that it would bring me into the world of ubiquitous scholarship – but as I started to prep for this conference I decided to see how close it would get me.  I brought a pretty big folder of articles and other documents along with me and found myself able to use them as much and as easily and I wanted to thoughout my five days on the road.

For articles, I was using this app – Papers.  I don’t have the desktop client installed.  When I first installed it on the iPad, I did so because the description said that the desktop client wasn’t necessary to use it – but that wasn’t true then and given that this app is definitely not free, I wasn’t happy.  A recent upgrade changed things, though and while I think this application would be a lot easier to use if I did have the desktop client, my experiment in using it without was successful.

You can add PDFs to your library in a couple of ways – using iTunes, or by emailing them to yourself.  I tried both and found myself leaning towards the email option:

Here’s the PDF waiting in my email on the iPad.  Click the icon to open it, and within the email client, I get button with the option to open the document in Pages.

Once in Papers, it gets a little clunkier.  If I had the desktop client, it would move everything over with metadata intact.  As I don’t – to add this I need to add the metadata myself — if I care to have it.  I don’t use this program (nor, I suspect, will I) to manage my citations so I haven’t figured out yet if I care about having the metadata beyond a descriptive title.

The journal name is easy to add, especially if you already have articles from the journal.  I can see the utility here, if I wanted to browse articles from a particular journal maybe?

I bought and installed the Keynote application on the iPad right away.  I use Keynote all the time – even when my documents are going to end up as PowerPoint, I create them in Keynote and convert – that’s how much I love it.  Pages, on the other hand, I have never warmed up to.  I hardly ever use it.

But, at the last minute, I decided that I also wanted to bring along several dozen interview transcripts.  I installed the Pages application as an experiment to see how this would work, and opened my email.  I was pretty surprised when the documents (which were Microsoft Word documents) displayed a Pages icon as soon as I had it installed.  Click the icon, open in Pages and I had access to all of my transcripts with practically no effort.

And it’s fun to browse through the documents -

So neither of these are free applications – Pages costs $10 and Papers $15.00.  For that $25, though, I was able to carry about twenty transcripts, a couple of dozen research articles and the full scan of a dissertation that I really didn’t want to carry.  Plus the movies, books, photos and music I need to survive the hours and hours of airplane time it takes to get back to Oregon from the east.  It’s not a research library on my wrist yet, but I can see the way there.

Brookfield is one of the more useful authors I’ve come across on this journey through the reflective practice literature — where useful doesn’t necessarily mean “provides stuff I can adopt and use as is” but instead means “makes me think of things in a new way/ gives me ideas for how to move forward no matter whether or not those ideas were what the author I’m reading actually had in mind.”

Which makes it cool that Brookfield himself suggests a similar role for the literature about teaching:

Embedded as we are in our cultures, histories, and contexts, it is easy for us to slip into the habit of generalizing from the particular.  Reading theory can jar us in a productive way, by offering unfamiliar interpretations of familiar events and by suggesting other ways of working (p. 186).

(Note: I would argue that writing theory can serve the same purpose, or that it should.  That research done to illuminate practice should produce results that jar you in just that way – that make you think in new ways about the thing that you are investigating — but that’s another post for another day.)

So, what Brookfield does is argue that reflective practice is the process of finding out what your assumptions are as you practice – what assumptions are guiding your decisions about what you should be doing, shaping your interpretations about what you see your students doing, and coloring your beliefs about how you will be held accountable by others.  He argues that there are three types of assumptions:  paradigmatic, prescriptive and causal.

Paradigmatic assumptions are those huge world-view type assumptions we might only be hazily aware of, but which serve as the structure by which we make sense of the world.  They’re the hardest ones to identify and the hardest ones to change, but when we do change them everything else changes too.  In our case this might be something like “information literacy leads to critical thinking” or “information literacy empowers people.”

Prescriptive assumptions are those assumptions about what we think we should be doing – about what good practice is.  When I think of this one with library instruction I think of active learning – the assumption that information literacy skills are best taught/learned with active learning techniques, or that active learning improves students’ engagement with learning information literacy.  This assumption even shows up in our conference proposal forms, doesn’t it?

(Am I the only one stymied sometimes by having to articulate learning outcomes and “how I will engage the learner” in every conference proposal I submit?  Non instruction-librarians aren’t doing this, right?)

Causal assumptions are our assumptions about how things work, and by extension, how we can make things better (or worse, but we’re probably mostly interested in making things better).  If X causes Y, then some alteration (more or less) of X can change Y the way we want it to.

{So, this is the point in this post where WordPress stopped saving it – and I lost almost 500 words.  I find it very suspicious that this happened just as I was talking about hegemony and dominant power structures.}

So what I like about this book is that it doesn’t just locate the value of reflective practice and reflection in the individual teacher’s practice, but pushes beyond that to recognize that we teach because we want to make the world better, and that some of the assumptions we carry with us are grounded in the power structures already there in the world we want to change.  That’s the critical part of “critically reflective teacher.”  It’s not enough to find the assumptions and think about them as they relate to us, and to our practice, but we need to go beyond that and locate them in all of those things outside the classroom that also affect how we approach, understand and evaluate teaching and learning.

One thing that pushes this past regular reflection into critical reflection is attention to hegemonic assumptions — these are those assumptions teachers carry around that make them complicit in their own oppression.  That sounds dramatic, doesn’t it?  That’s how I learned to define hegemony back in the day.  I wrote this oral history paper which I loved (and which I still have) that ended up being about the strategies used by the Democratic party machine in a small rust belt city and how they traded favors for votes.  The TA was taking a class that was all Gramsci all the time, and wrote something like “… how people are complicit in their own oppression.  I’m sick to death of this topic, but you’ve given it a fresh twist here.”  Then she gave me some Gramsci citations and I’ve remembered the phrase ever since.

So those assumptions that we embrace because they seem to capture something important or noble or good, but which lead us to do things that are against our own best interests.  Brookfield gives four examples for classroom faculty:

The idea that teaching is a vocation — the idea that people are called to teach, and that like any calling, it should consume them or they’re not doing it right.

The perfect 10 syndrome — this is the idea that we should strive for perfect evaluations, and that good teachers get perfect evaluations from everyone.

The last two are the two that had particular resonance for me, thinking about instruction librarians –

The belief that the answer must be out there somewhere — This is the idea that someone, somewhere has already solved the problem you’re facing in your practice and that if you can just find them or find their book or their article, you will know what to do.  The aspect of this that I hear a lot from instruction librarians is this one — “we didn’t have a course in teaching/pedagogy/assessment in library school.  This way of thinking devalues our practice knowledge, and keeps us from understanding it as expertise — keeps us feeling like frauds and dilettantes in the classroom.  If a real teacher is one who has the answers, and we don’t feel like we have the answers (and really, who does?) then we’re not real teachers.

The idea that teachers meet everyone’s needs — this is visible in the focus on learning styles, on active or experiential learning, in all of the “how to teach the netgens stuff” or in the constant “meet them where they are” refrain.  Like all hegemonic assumptions, every action it inspires is not bad.  But one problem with this one for us as instruction librarians is the same as the problem Brookfield identifies for classroom faculty:  “Students who define their need as never straying beyond comfortable ways of thinking, acting and learning are not always in the best position to judge what is in their own best interests.”

But I think there’s also another dimension to this needs meeting one that is unique to us – and that is because when we think of meeting everyone’s needs, the classroom faculty is included in that.  A lot of librarians take it as a given that we can/should support everything the classroom faculty want us to do — I hear this when I hear people complaining about having to teach things they know to be pedagogically unsound.  I also hear it when I hear librarians taking full responsibility for everything about a class session, even for things that are entirely outside their control.

So what are the other hegemonic assumptions we have as instruction librarians?

Brookfield also offers a model for reflection that adds an element of concreteness to these big questions.  As teachers, we should examine our practice through four lenses:

• Our own (autobiography)
• Our students
• Our colleagues
• Our literature and theory

I didn’t want to list the name of the book in question before because I hadn’t read it yet, and didn’t want to answer questions from people who might have found the post by googling the book title.  Especially if they were people who really liked the book, because I didn’t know yet if I liked it.   And there are people who really, really, really like it –

Best book ever on how to prepare students for college (Jay Mathews, Washington Post blogs)

I don’t really agree with the title there – the point of this book didn’t seem to me to be about preparing students for college so much as it is about preparing college for students.

Citation:  Cox, Rebecca D. (2009).  The College Fear Factor. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

The book is based on 5 years of data gathered from community college students.  The author herself did two studies examining community college classrooms.  One was a basic writing class and the other looked at 6 sections of an english composition class.  Each lasted a semester, and gathered qualitative data about the classroom conditions that had an impact on a student’s successful completion of the course.  She also participated in a large scale field study of 15 community colleges in 6 states, and another national study of technological education.

The argument in the book comes from research on community college students, but it is still of interest to those of us who work with students managing the transition to college at any institution.  It is perhaps more relevant to those of us at institutions that attract a significant number of first-generation college students.

I am not sure entirely what I think of the book – on the one hand, it was a quick easy read and I enjoyed it as I usually enjoy well-reported stories drawn from qualitative investigation.  On the other hand, it struck me as one of those books that reports on an important conclusion, but one that could have been well-covered in an article-length treatment.  The conclusion is drawn over and over again in this longer work, so sometimes chapters go by without me feeling like I had really encountered anything new.

What is that conclusion?  I said to Caleb earlier that I wasn’t sure where the fear factor part of the title came into the book (becuase at that point I was on about page 17) and I have to say now that the title is good insofar as the real point of this book is on fear, and how that emotional state affects student success.  (Insofar as it evokes a really awful reality show, on the other hand, not so good).

And in this, I think the book is valuable.  We don’t think and talk about the role of affect enough in higher ed – at least not on the academic side – nor about the intersections between affect and cognition and affect and everything else we do, and this book is an important corrective to that.  Basically, Cox argues that students can be scared away from completing college – not because they are not capable of doing college-level work, but because they have not been prepared to do it before they get to college, and they are not helped to do it once they arrive.

The many students who seriously doubted their ability to succeed, however, were anxiously waiting for their shortcomings to be exposed, at which point they would be stopped from pursuing their goals.  Fragile and fearful, these students expressed their concern in several ways: in reference to college professors, particular courses or subject matter, and the entire notion of college itself — whether at the two- or the four-year level.  At the core of different expressions of fear, however, were the same feelings of dread and the apprehension that success in college would prove to be an unrealizable dream.

Cox argues that these fears are exacerbated when one doesn’t come in to college knowing how to DO college.  And that most first-generation, non-traditional and other groups of our students don’t come to college knowing what the culture and mores of academia are.  They have expectations, but those aren’t based on experience (theirs or others’) and when those expectations are challenged, their reaction is to think they can’t do it at all or to convince themselves that it is not worth doing .

Professors too have their own set of expectations about how good students approach their education, and when faced with student behaviors that are different than those expectations would suggest, they make some faulty assumptions about why students are behaving the way they are. A student who attends class every day but never turns anything in  — that’s incomprehensible behavior to the professor who doesn’t understand how that student possibly thinks they are going to pass.  After reading Cox’s book, you consider the possibility that that student doesn’t think they are going to pass, but are just playing out the semester in a depressed

I still feel like I am missing from this book much of a sense of why professors have these expectations  –  besides “that’s the way we’ve always done things.”  In other words, it doesn’t really work for me (nor do I think Cox is really claiming) that there is no value at all to the way that professors were trained, and that that they are hanging on to methods that don’t work simply because they went through it so others should have to.  Yeah, yeah, there are professors like that.  But my sense as a person engaged in higher ed is that a lot of professors think that there is value in the way they look at learning, meaning-making and knowledge creation and the joy they get from teaching comes from working with students who can share that joy.

Cox does a good job arguing that many of the students they have are not ready to do that, but I don’t get the sense from her book that she doesn’t see the value in that view of education.  I have a much clearer vision from this book what the students Cox interviewed value –  mostly the economic benefit they connect to the credential — but because her research didn’t extend to the teachers, I don’t have that same sense from them.

Here’s the thing – universities aren’t just about the teaching. They’re not going to be just about teaching and it’s not a really hard argument to make that they shouldn’t be just about the teaching.  A lot of professors were hired for their research, and the research they do makes the world better, and connecting students to that kind of knowledge creation is cool.  And even when they are about teaching they’re not just about the teaching of first-year undergraduates making the transition into college.  Even those students in a few years, immersed in a major, are going to need something different than they need when they first hit campus.

Just as it is not useful to sit in meetings about teaching and spend all your time discussing the students you should have (and yeah, we’ve all heard those discussions).  I’m sure I’m not the only one to say that at some point you have to put your energy into the students you have.  But when I say that, and when a lot of people say that, they don’t mean – the students we have can’t learn how to participate in academic culture.  We don’t mean that – academic culture has no value to these students.  Which is the really valuable point in this book – unprepared does not equal incapable.   I don’t want to say the book offers no solutions, because it does.  I guess what I do have to say is that I don’t find those solutions convincing in a research university environment.

All of this, of course, goes well beyond the scope of Cox’s book and Cox’s research, which is about particular students in a particular setting where teaching, and the transition to college, is paramount.

It’s a long way of saying that while the book has value to those outside the community college setting, that value only  goes so far.  There is more work to be done figuring answers to the questions she raises in other environments.

Which is why the chapter that was probably the most interesting to me is chapter 5 – which examines the work being done by two composition instructors – instructors who by most accounts are doing everything “right” in their classrooms  — right by the Chickering-type standards of active learning and engagement and right by what we are constantly told these hands-on, tech-savvy experiential-learning-wanting students today need.  In other words, they’re doing the things we think we should be doing in the research university to connect the students to what it is that scholars do – and they’re failing.

The idea that students have to be forced to be free is not a new one, but it is a point that gets lost sometimes in discussions about what is wrong with higher ed.  We hear that lectures are dead, that students can’t learn that way, that they hate lecturing, they tune out, they want to learn for themselves, and … it just doesn’t always reflect my experience. They may hate lectures, but that doesn’t mean that’s not what they think higher education should be.  They have their expectations that they bring with them, and professors that try to turn some control over the classroom and over learning to their students can be shot down for “not doing their job.”  That’s what Cox found, and I’ve certainly seen it happen.  The assumptions that these professors are falling victim to aren’t assumptions that students are going to be unprepared, or ignorant, or unwilling to learn – they’re more the opposite.  They assume that students will be curious, will have a voice they want to get out there, will have learning they want to take responsibility for.

So, I’m glad I didn’t bail – but I’m also glad the book didn’t take more than a couple nights to read.

I am going to try and read this book on the student/faculty culture divide, but the first line says:

Small, private universities like Harvard, Columbia and Stanford…

I’m still gonna try – they are all private at least?