The end goal of education–what do we need, Part 2 of 2

Do the skill-sets of our degrees apply to the real world?

This post is a follow-up to the previous post regarding education and its goals.  A liberal arts education has long been praised for its development of the ethical adult human being and, especially more recently, criticized for its lack of emphasis on career training.  It remains an essential ingredient in debates on education policies and approaches.  What follows is a response to the report recently posted at The Chronicle of Higher Education regarding a poll of hiring decision-makers.  The poll reveals that employers are increasingly skeptical of the value of broad college educations.   To read the article for yourself, follow the link by clicking of the title, below.

Employers Say College Graduates Lack Job Skills, The Chronicle of Higher Education

(To see the results from the actual study follow this link: 
http://www.acics.org/events/content.aspx?id=4718
.)

In a recent study of over 1,000 industry hiring decision-makers conducted by the American Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, employers revealed a lack of confidence in prospective employees.  The study posed the questions to a variety of industries and the results suggested that graduates seeking employment were lacking in areas such as: interpersonal skills, teamwork, problem-solving, job-specific knowledge, written communication skills, work experience, technical ability, education, business savvy, professional references, and math skills.  At the same time, they find the same pool of applicants to be under-skilled in areas such as using new media formats, filtering information according to needs, connecting to others in a deep and direct way, thinking of novel solutions that are outside the box, computational thinking, operating in different cultural settings, and other skills that are projected to be of increasing necessity in the future.

My first thought, considering these lists, is that many of these skills should be addressed and managed in a typical liberal arts education.  The fact that these skills are not developed or are not perceived to have been developed raises some interesting questions.  One thing that is not clear from the study is how the hiring personnel are evaluating these skills in prospective employees.  In my own experiences with career counselors, I have been greatly underwhelmed by the support they give to students who are constructing their first resumes.  Students often have more skills than they know and often do not know how to share these in written formats for would-be employers.  (Many adults are equally incompetent.)  They furthermore have difficulty expressing themselves well in interviews–which may reflect a lack of practice in their classes.  So, the question remains, at what point do HR departments make these evaluations?  Is it after some time on the job or after an interview?  Does the fault lie with the education or career services?

Let’s allow for the possibility that the broad liberal arts educational approach is at fault.  Is it simply the case that these skills are not included or emphasized in curricula?  Do students too often complete a course without having to give an independent oral presentation, present a written case or project, complete group work as a team, use new media for their assignments, filter an excess of information, engage in unfamiliar cultural settings, draw conclusions from data, create novel solutions in problem-solving, or develop their literacy skills across multiple disciplines?  It is possible, of course, that this is precisely the problem and yet I can think back to my own education in which I was required to do activities that covered each of these areas.  But, I should include a caveat to my own experience: I was not always aware that I was developing those skills during those activities.  In fact, it was only later that I realized the dual-effect–that of learning content whilst developing these skills–of many of my assignments and much of that came through training in education or coursework specifically addressing the subject of teaching.  My teachers and professors could have told me about such features in their curricula, and some did, but it is the sad habit of too many students not to reflect much about why an assignment is constructed the way that it is–especially if they are complaining about it.

Is it possible that the fault could be remedied in simply holding a dialogue at the end of a course that reflects on the skills developed?  This was a practice that Close Up developed for its week -long programs in Washington DC, one which I attempted to incorporate in different ways at the community college level.  I think the practice bears reviving or considering at the very least, especially if it is set up in such a way that the students are prompted to identify the value of their own work assigned by the professor.

The answers remain mysterious, but further inquiry is healthy.  ACICS, for one, the organization which conducted the study, thinks a greater emphasis on job skills needs to be implemented into post-secondary education.  Interestingly, the study’s respondents are split on that point.  For my own sake, I wish I had taken advantage of more internships during my education.  These support the development of skills, professional contacts and references, and occasionally stipends during the college years.  They may also educate the student in what he/she does not want to do professionally.  Internships should probably be encouraged and rewarded more often than they are in educational institutions, but students should also know that they serve as their own reward–and, they do not have to wait until college to start interning.

One of the most telling slides from the .pdf of a PowerPoint provided by ACICS summarizing the key points of the study was the last one provided.  After 68% answered that they expected some post-high school education (requiring a range from trade schools to graduate work), the final question in the presentation asked the following question:  ”And, what, in your opinion, is more more important… The type of degree(s) that job applicants have completed.  [or]  The specific skills and ability that job applicants possess.”  10% answered that the degree was most important and 90% selected skills and ability.  The answer seems to be that a high level of education is expected, but the content is left unspecific outside of skills and ability.  How can content be taught and learned without skills and abilities being developed?  Or, is content really unnecessary so long as students have good written, oral and interpersonal communication skills, good computer and media skills, good problem-solving skills, etc.  Can these things be taught without a liberal arts education?  Doesn’t the field of study suggest certain skills and abilities?

Another question I have to ask is whether or not businesses across the industries have cut entry-level positions and internal job-training over the years.  Is it fair for accounting firms, pharmaceutical companies, tech corporations, property managements, etc., to expect vocational and career competence in all of these desired areas plus professional-level inter-personal skills, new media competency, cross-cultural experience, etc.?  Again, I think more graduates have these attributes than they themselves realize, but I also think there is a desire to hire someone proven, with multiple years of experience, while also paying entry-level salaries.  This factor may be reinforced by a lack of in-house, company-specific, industry-specialized training.

Some of the onus may lie with students who are increasingly addicted to technological means for interaction that may retard the development in other areas or who are disinterested and apathetic about education and their futures.  Additional responsibility lies with schools at all levels.  High schools fail to prepare students for the next level of education.  Universities  over-stuff classrooms, limiting the professor’s creativity, professors take the easy way out, or scholars fail to take the teaching part of their posts seriously.  Having said that, with all the truly excellent scholars and high school educators out there who take a true student-first approach, it is hard to weigh them down with the greatest culpability even with all the duds who “teach” along side of them.

There is one final consideration that I want to share.  The bulk of the poll-takers have been at their jobs for 10+ years: 9% 1-10 years, 28% 11-20 years, 34% 21-30, and 29% 31+ years.  A simple question must be asked about the culture of the generation who is sifting prospective employees: are they too far removed from the younger generations to be able to properly vet them and accurately assess their compatibility with the job requirements?  Is this older generation of hiring managers able to identify the connections between these newer needs assessments and the abilities of this younger generation emerging from academic institutions, today?  I think it is hard to answer that or to develop a study that can assess the necessary qualities, but I will leave it with this thought:  Many of the cutting-edge companies, whose employees and leadership embody the skill-sets covered in this study, who are forging exciting new ground in different industries have been in business for fewer years than many of the individuals who took part in the study.

The questions seem to increase in considering the study.  Assessing job-readiness is more difficult than might be expected and polls are tricky things to use in evaluating the abilities of both employers and prospective employees–although they may accurately take the temperature of HR personnel.  But, regardless, the results or supposed results of such studies will be used to debate and determine education policies and government involvement in education at multiple levels.  So, by all means considerate it carefully, whether you are a voter, educator, or administrator.

What this generation of college students remembers about 9/11

Tuesday (May 3rd), I postponed a lecture on the 12th Century Renaissance and replaced it with a period devoted to reflection in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death.  This was at least partially selfish, or maybe it was just closure.  I was a junior in Washington DC, living on campus during 9/11.  When the first of the Twin Towers were hit I was actually in the Basilica on campus in Northeast DC.  By the time I had made it back to my place, the second tower was hit, and then the Pentagon.  Classes were cancelled.  The phone lines were swamped.  Planes were grounded.  First campus, and then the city shut down.  One of the strongest memories I have is of sitting alone on a picnic table in the courtyard and listening to . . . nothing!  All of the city’s normal background rumbles and grumbles were stilled.  There was no car noise.  Occasionally, you would hear the fighter jets soaring overhead, but you never saw them.

In classes, once they resumed, we naturally talked about the events.  In one class, we were discussing the argument against 1) a God, 2) a benevolent God or 3) an all-powerful God based on the existence of evil in the world.  He had assigned us Elie Wiesel’s Night, because in his experience, modern youth–at least, up to that point–had lost belief of evil in the world.  9/11 fit right in.  In another class, an introduction to archaeology, we tabled the day’s intended course material to talk about what happened and why.  While I was a fairly plugged in youth, I confess that I had never heard of Osama bin Laden before 9/11.  We had a lot of questions about why anyone would want to do this.  I find it interesting that many college students today have the same questions, today, as we did then.

Most of my students who are properly college-aged, 17, 18, 19, 20, recall having a difficult time processing all of it.  I asked them if they related to the images–if they even seemed real or like Hollywood reproductions.  The majority admitted they did not unless they had a personal connection to the catastrophe, such as a missing family member.  Even those on military bases could not really understand what others around them were feeling.  One student candidly confessed that she and her brother were pulled out of school, watched the images on TV at home, but mostly remember playing outside all day while all the grownups were occupied.

I next asked them when bin Laden and 9/11 became events that they understood as real catastrophes and not just global events.  Many could not relate until they were in high school and looked back on the events on their own.  For some, it is clear, they never really became anything more than a background tapestry of distant world events.  To be fair, this is pretty normal for young people.  Most children in tween and young teen years would be very upset if they were told that their parents had accidentally hit an animal with the family car, but relating to the tragic events in Haiti a couple years back, more recently in Japan and even the tornadoes here in the U.S. are too distant and wide to grasp by young minds that have not personally lost someone or something or witnessed the terror firsthand.

The result of this is that many were relatively unmoved by Osama bin Laden’s death, or at minimum less moved then people my age and older.  A student in a colleague’s class was angry about all the attention it was getting–my colleague incidentally was working in the financial district of New York City during the attack and has strong personal connections to the attacks.  That student was far more concerned about a local murder in Baltimore, which my colleague acknowledged was valid, but did not make bin Laden’s death any less relevant.  On the contrary, my colleague argued, bin Laden does matter.  Many of our students clearly felt he had ceased to be relevant by this point.

This is one of the magazines I purchased after the attacks.

What bin Laden’s death did for some in this younger generation was reawaken questions that had existed, perhaps all along, and not yet been answered for them.  Students who followed current events or who had personal attachments to the events, i.e. people in DC or NY, or serving in the military, were clearly more effected and interested.  Perhaps, this reveals a certain failure on everyone else’s part to explain current events.

For me, this class time was closure–almost more so then the actual news about bin Laden’s death.  Or, maybe it is better described as the conclusion of the story arc.  Granted, I was still pretty young then, but 9/11 left me off-balance.  It dominated my thinking for days and I was almost too stunned to be angry.  My memories of 9/11 are inextricably tied to those two classes and professors.  Perhaps it is because I have an academic turn of mind, more likely because it was simply the setting in which I experienced the attacks, but in discussing bin Laden and 9/11 memories with my class I personally put something profound in my life to rest.

It is also sobering to think about how quickly time moves on.  A handful of students saw the second plane hit live and remembered that, while others only remembered the replayed scenes and the pictures in every newspaper and magazine the days after.  Young minds cannot really cope with global events in the same way that they will when they experience similar events as they are older.  I wonder what it would have been like for my students to have written down a journal entry about 9/11 the week it had happened, and then to have sat down and read it this week.  I wonder how many people did exactly that this week.

FBI Top Ten Most Wanted usama-bin-laden

Cultural Illiteracy and the History Vacuum

I recently read a couple of articles that I thought were poignant and related.  (Special thanks, here, to Gleb_Tsipursky for bringing them to my attention via Twitter.)   The articles come from CNN’s “Subject Matters” column, by Sally Holland, and Insider Higher Ed’s guest editorial, “Sorry”, by Stephen Brockmann.

Read the articles by clicking on the links below:

“Subject Matters: Why students fall behind on history,” Sally Holland, CNN.com

“Sorry,” Stephen Brockman, InsideHigherEd.com

These two articles are both talking about the struggle within our society to engage our young citizenry in history (and the humanities) and the vacuum of cultural illiteracy that has developed in recent years.  The two articles point to different causes, but they are addressing the same effect.

Cultural Iliteracy

Western Civilization has certain traditions and assumptions that inform our society; these influence our legal system, political system, moral and ethical codes and educational approaches.  It differs significantly from other traditions; it has flaws both historically and currently; it often neglects other societies and traditions or looks down upon them.  It is also the culture from which we emerged.  Learning about our civilization’s heritage is also a means for acknowledging its shortcomings and provides a stable platform from which to contrast alternate traditions.

Unfortunately, however, traditions that are not passed on from one generation to the next die. If an entire generation grows up largely unexposed to a particular tradition, then that tradition can in essence be said to be dead, because it is no longer capable of reproducing itself. It does not matter whether the tradition in question is imagined as the Western tradition, the Christian tradition, or the Marxist tradition (and of course both Christianity and Marxism are part of the Western tradition). Traditions are like languages: if they are not passed on, they die. Most traditions, of course, have good and bad elements in them (some might argue for Christianity, some for Marxism, relatively few for both), and what dies when a tradition dies is therefore often both good and bad, no matter what one’s perspective. But what also dies with a tradition is any possibility of self-critique from within the tradition (in the sense that Marxism, for instance, constituted a self-critique from within the Western tradition), since a tradition’s self-critique presupposes the existence of the tradition. Therefore the death of a tradition is not just the death of the oppression and tyranny that might be associated with the tradition, but also the death of progressive and liberating impulses within the tradition.

~ Stephen Brockmann

Teachers in high school and middle school notice the problems at a young age.  Students do not retain material, nor do they make necessary connections between time and space as they learn.  We have moved away from memorization drills, which seems to lead to a greater enjoyment, but, while it opens the door for greater opportunities in developing thought processes, there clearly are problems with retention and cognition.  On top of this, students seem to have a lower common-denominator of shared knowledge which requires more teaching than the curriculum may assume necessary.

At Caprock High School in Amarillo, Texas, teacher Jeff Frazer said he’s surprised by how many of his incoming students know that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 but don’t know that it was a list of grievances against Great Britain.

“I think they learn information by itself, in isolation,” Frazer said of his students. “But putting the big picture together is not happening.”

And during the comparative religions unit at Rutland Middle School in Rutland, Vermont, Ted Lindgren regularly asks students, “What is Easter about?”

He said they invariably bring up the Easter bunny but don’t know the significance of the holiday to Christianity. It shows a lack of cultural literacy, Lindgren said, that they have to compensate for during class.

~ Sally Holland

The field’s potential impact on how we think is itself born out of Western Civilization’s traditions.  This is relevant not only to cultural literacy but cultural fluency and is an important asset for one’s ability to participate in our cultural institutions–not least in our participatory-based political system.  As Brockmann says, we fail to adequately learn even its shortcomings or to understand precisely how this tradition and society contrasts with others.  Without the ability to learn about our own past and its own strangeness and differences we will fail trying to learn about other cultures and traditions.  This also leads to failure in progressive attempts to break from the supposed tyranny of Western Civilization and create a successful inclusive curriculum.  As Sam Wineburg has written in his explanations of historical thinking as a curriculum goal, lacking engagement with our own culture’s foreign attributes will necessarily stunt our ability to deal with the contemporary foreign cultures around us with which we are in ever-increasing contact.

What’s the cause of the current set of circumstances?

Holland’s article focuses on the perspective that is twofold: on the one hand, the amount of content is overwhelming for teachers and, aided by crummy textbooks, often reduced to trivia; on the other hand, history has been deemphasized in schools at an ever-younger level because it is not part of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing.  Even in cases where state-mandated tests exist, there is often a large gap between the testing and the period of learning.

World history teacher Troy Hammon of Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, said he is constantly weighing how much “trivia” he teaches, like names, dates and places, and when to try to help his students relive history.

For example, Hammon had his students take on the roles of individuals who may have taken part in the Crusades of the Middle Ages. The students then answered questions based on their knowledge of that time. Hammon believes this helps his students better understand the Middle Ages.

“History grows every year, no matter what,” said Jennifer Kravitz, who teaches world history, civics and economics at Rutland High School in Vermont. “So with this ever-expanding content, teachers are trying to balance teaching history content with helping students learn the essential skills they are going to need.”

~ Sally Holland

The resources provided to teachers at the secondary level emphasize “facts” but not thinking.  (I actually open classes by telling my students that we will not be studying facts, but interpretations of sources–hopefully reliable sources.)  Even so, the challenge of retention and engagement remains.

Brockmann opens his discussion much earlier than NCLB with the cultural wars in the 1980s.  He argues that these were not only counter-productive to either group’s goals, they also gutted the humanities of its respectability and dignity in the minds of the general public.  It created the image of the liberal arts as a bastard child in the academic arena, subordinate to more vocational majors such as business, which is a completely topsy-turvy understanding of education and its roots in Western Civilization.

A quarter of a century later, with the humanities in crisis across the country and students and parents demanding ever more pragmatic, ever more job-oriented kinds of education, the curricular debates of the 1980s over courses about Western civilization and the canon seem as if they had happened on another planet, with completely different preconceptions and assumptions than the ones that prevail today. We now live in a radically different world, one in which most students are not forced to take courses like Western civilization or, most of the time, in foreign languages or cultures, or even the supposedly more progressive courses that were designed to replace them. And whereas as late as the 1980s English was the most popular major at many colleges and universities, by far the most popular undergraduate major in the country now is business.

The battle between self-identified conservatives and progressives in the 1980s seems increasingly like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. While humanists were busy arguing amongst themselves, American college students and their families were turning in ever-increasing numbers away from the humanities and toward seemingly more pragmatic, more vocational concerns.

~ Stephen Brockmann

What is lost?   Perhaps it is irrelevant to you that America’s children are limited in their thinking about Easter to a basket full of candy and gifts delivered by the Easter bunny, but it is a tragedy regardless of whether those children are raised as Christians.  This reflects an unfortunate reordering of our values and mores–and I am not insisting on a Christian society, here.  The questions are broader than religion or life viewed through a religion’s perspective.  How do business courses prepare students for the cultural interactions of the modern world?  How do they replace philosophy courses that ask us how to think about how best we should live?  By what means do they teach the next generation to communicate, argue and understand rhetoric?  In fact, business schools must add such tangential courses to their programs because they recognize that their students are not getting a well-rounded education beyond the major.

How is it solved?

Indeed, how?  It requires a re-commitment to our society’s roots, even if we dispute the value of it’s ideals and practices.  It is not necessary to glorify it, but it is necessary to learn it.  We cannot possibly expect students to understand the conflicts that exist today or the necessity for self-education and participation in the community and civics without some grounding in what got us here–and I understand this to extend beyond our Founding Fathers, just as they looked beyond their British heritage in the founding of a new American civilization.  The value of testing-based education has been questioned long before NCLB and the idea that a multiple choice test can adequately evaluate a student’s ability to think historically is, naturally, absurd.

Brockmann believes that we have truly lost something, which is why he entitles his op-ed, “Sorry”.  Holland’s teachers appear to have few answers as well, though their myopic  concern about NCLB and state testing requirements smells like a scapegoat.  Naturally, students‘ lives have changed from the 1980s–not just their habits and activities, but also the way their brains develop as a result.  Will instructors be able adapt as necessary within the systems that exist–those systems born out of Western Civilization?  Probably.  When and what will be lost (and need to be recovered by later generations)?  Good question.  Students of the breadth and depth of Western Civilization will recall that the Romans looked back to the Greeks.  In succession, the Carolingians, 12th Century scholars, Renaissance Europeans and Enlightened thinkers all looked back to the Greeks and Romans following a decline in such interest and remembrance.  Enlightened thinkers looked back to the Renaissance, as well.  So, perhaps we are due for another flourishing in the long history of ideas from our extensive heritage.

The Quandary of the assigned debate in class

One of my favorite units in my 101 class is the week we cover the Hebrews.  I frame the question of the unit around the challenge of how history is affected by the historian’s search and we spend the opening volley looking at the minimalist and maximalist camps in biblical archaeology.  This subject is potentially as emotional for my students as it is for the scholars debating it today.

There are a lot of challenges built into this field of study.  Particularly when considering the early biblical books, it is difficult to assess what should be regarded as history versus religious origin myth.  Abraham came out Ur, but conquered all sorts kingdoms for which we have no evidence at all.  It is a considerable hurdle that the stories were written down well after the events supposedly happened. In my opening workshop where we considered the question about how a historian’s beliefs effect his/her research, I used the example of the Exodus story and the maximalist arguments by James Hoffmeier (“Out of Egypt”, Biblical Archaeological Review, Jan/Feb 2007) and Meshel Ze’ev (“Wilderness Wanderings”, Biblical Archaeological Review, Jul/Aug 2008) to explain how one side answers a lack of archaeological evidence.  Maximalists argue for authenticity in biblical texts to demonstrate plausibility.  Minimalists argue that biblical texts comprise a collection of religious documents–not historical documents.  So, I decided to introduce the debate into our classroom with one of the fairly recent flash points in the field.

Broken in antiquity and reused as building material, the stela lay in a wall beneath the eighth-century B.C.E. destruction debris from Tiglath-pileser III’s conquest. The inscription’s 13 partially preserved lines in the Early Aramaic language, written in paleo-Hebrew script of the ninth century B.C.E., uses dots to separate the words.

A heated question in biblical archaeology, today, is the question over King David.  Did he ever exist?  Is he part of an origin myth story?  In the mid-1990s, excavations at Tel Dan revealed a shard of a stele that had been torn down, stuffed into a wall and used as filling.  The writing on the fragment is perfectly clear, but the artifact is only a chunk of a larger piece.  It made so much news because the lead excavator, Avraham Biran, announced that it provided proof of King David’s existence.  On the stele, the proto-Hebrew letters BYTDWD, Bethdod, which Biran translated as HouseofDavid.  I have deliberately run the letters together, because the written language 1) has no vowels, and 2) uses dots to indicate a separation of letter groupings into separate words.  Minimalists argue that DWD can be translated as David, or uncle or kettle, the lack of written vowels opening the door to various possibilities.  Also, there is no dot between BYT and DWD in the inscription which leads Biran to suggest the likelihood that DWD should be translated as David, but others to point out that this is not the only or most logical possibility.  Biran hypothesizes that the shard comes from a victory stele erected by an invader referenced in the biblical record.  Critics argue against both the translation and the use of the Bible as a historic source to prove that the Bible is a historic source.  (Some scholars who believe the fragment says House of David, are critical of some of Biran’s explanations.)

In the Biran translation, the material in brackets represents suggested reconstructions. Fortunately, the phrases “House of David” (the dynastic name of the kingdom of Judah) and “king of Israel” (often used without a specific name in the Books of Kings) need no reconstruction.

The Biblical Archaeological Review (BAR), admittedly a maximalist publication, is often conscientious in giving voice to detractors and published a critical paper by Phillip Davies, who was particularly unimpressed with the translation Biran provided–especially given the gaps in the tablet.  So, the Davies article was paired against the write-up based on Biran’s report and written by BAR’s editorial staff.  Students, during the practicum phase of class, met in small groups to discuss the Biran perspective and the Davies perspective which had been assigned as homework.  They were tasked with analyzing both sides and then we came together and each side of the room was assigned a position to take.  They were given time to prep their arguments and asked to write them down, including their own position at the bottom.  Something curious happened next.

The debate grew heated (though always respectful and friendly) almost immediately.  As students were preparing for the debate, some acknowledged that they supported the opinion I assigned them to

argue against, others said that they were undecided.  By the end of the this debate, some of the students had strongly allied with the position that they were assigned.  What did I do?  Had I created an emotional attachment to the side that they were developing an argument for?  Were they fully listening to the other side of the aisle?  Why had they flopped?  I am adamant when I assign a student a position in an argument that they will always be able to supply their own opinion at some point.  My brother-in-law thinks such assignments are immoral, forcing a student in to a compromising situation.  I have never thought that, but last night seeing students switch their position post-debate got me worried.  The reason I do this is to insure an equal representation of each point of view–I always tell the students that I know some people will be arguing against the position they believe in, so they will always have the opportunity to clear the air and state their actual point of view.  At least two of my most active debaters switched their point of view.  So, was this a successful exercise because their point of view evolved?  Or, had I created a circumstance that swayed them artificially?  Not all students flip-flopped, and a couple remained undecided, so perhaps it is just that, an evolution of thought, but I am not really sure.

I would love to hear ideas or comments–I can also direct you to some more information about the controversies.

Using student-written blogs to prompt historical thinking

Student blogging

A blog (a blend of the term web log)[1] is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites.[2]

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

(Wikipedia entry)

Teaching at CCBC, I have access as a professor to the WebCT/Blackboard hybrid as a resource.  There are many features–not all of which I have explored!  One thing I do use it for is posting student blogs for comment.  In truth there are other options for setting up student blogging that do not require using the types of programs that colleges have available, but in my case there are many advantages–tech support, instructional help (usually!) and a site students are already expected to use.

I suppose the first thing to do is to justify to students and the reader why we are using blogs.  I have several reasons:

1. Improve student writing skills
2. Force students to write about material in a short snippet, which eliminates summarizing and demands prioritization
3. Ask students to write about class material we just covered and upcoming material by blogging on assigned reading
4. Spur discussion and more thought about subjects by requiring participation through comments

Students write two blogs when their turn is up: the first on the previous week’s material and the second on the assigned homework reading.  This means that students are asked to continue to think about material after we have wrapped it up in class (barring connections that require us to look back and reflect) and before they have ever heard me talk about the next subject.  I laid it out for my students with the following instructions:

For our class, we will be using blogs as a way to practice writing, ruminate on material, continue discussions and hold debates.  The responsibility to write blogs will fall on a rotating basis for each small group in our class.  When your group is on the (blog ) deck you will be required to write two blogs: one about class material and discussions to end the first week and one about the homework reading to kick off the next week.  If your group is not blogging that week, then you are commenting on the blogs that have been posted.  You will need to write (at least) one comment on one of the blogs (and, it can be in response to someone else’s comment) at the end of the week and one comment at the beginning of the next week—in other words, you follow the same timeline as the bloggers, but write less.

In our case, a blog should run from 250-300 words in length.  A comment should run from 100-150 characters in length (so, much smaller than the blogs!) and be in response to the content shared by the blogger you selected.  To give you a sense of perspective, the first two sentences in this paragraph have 40 words and 183 characters (not including spaces).  I am able to check this quickly in Word by going to Word Count under the Review tab.  The comments should be meaningful so it should take you some time to craft a response that is on point but not terribly long.  What we want to avoid are statements such as, “I agree,” or, “good point.”  Rather, I would like to see comments that reflect the thoughtfulness and goals we seek to improve on in our course this semester.

Because I will have multiples writing samples from my students, even if they are not terribly long, I can address specific problems that students maybe having with their writing.  On the downside, I am not assigning a research project with this.  Students are required to write two take-home exams, which ask them to demonstrate some of the skills necessary in research–such as reading primary sources and drawing conclusions from evidence in them about an event–based on in-class practicums, but there is no step for going into a library or archive and finding the material you need.  As this is an introductory course, I do not think that it is the end of the world, but part of me pines for written papers based on student research.

In order to help students who might be faced with writer’s block I came up with the following prompts:

BLOG PROMPTS

FOR CLASS-INSPIRED BLOGS

• (Provide an answer to one of the questions we considered during the week)
• (Provide further insight into a discussion/conversation/debate carried out in class)
• Does the class material this week remind you of something else we have looked at already in class (from a prior week)?  (I.e. how familiar or foreign is it?)
• Did the material in class prompt more questions?  Why are these important?
• In what ways is this material and history important to us today?
• (Other prompts that move/motivate/excite you . . . )

FOR READING-INSPIRED BLOGS

• How does this text help us understand this historical period?
• After reading this text/document what gaps do you want filled in—either based on the content or the author’s methodology?
• What questions does this author’s approach to the material raise?  Does the author appear biased?  What assumptions are made by this author?
• Does this text/document remind you of any others we have read in this class?  How so?
• How does this text answer the upcoming question of the week (on syllabus) in your opinion?
• What sources does the author use (if any) and how does he use these sources?
• (Other prompts that move/motivate/excite you . . . )

I also provided a list of Perspectives of Past and Present, as I call it, which sets up various ways for which history may be relevant, even essential to someone today.  Previously, I had set this up as a short paper assignment in which they would compare events from their textbooks to current event articles, but I felt in many cases there was not a strong enough base knowledge for this to be truly fruitful in the way I had set it up.  So, at present I use it exclusively as a part of my blog prompts, although I expect it will find a new life in future manifestations of my Western Civilization II class.  (I had not used them with the earlier class, because I felt it would only distort student perspectives.)

Some Perspectives of Past and Present:

1.  History as a moral or strategic example.  In this perspective, the observer sees in the past lessons that can be applied to the present.  History has often been used as a teacher by providing moral or strategic examples which can be applied today.  This is the idea that we can use history as a laboratory for human experiences.

2.  History as an exploration of change.  In this perspective, the observer identifies a break with the past that will be long-lasting with far-reaching consequences.  History is a record of change and its study provides tools that best help us understand change.  This type of inquiry, triggered by the questions, “Why now?” and “What has changed?”, teaches us a great deal about human nature and societies before ours, which in turn help us understand our own culture and others.

3.  History as an exploration of continuity.  In this perspective, the observer identifies a continuation from the past to the present.  Continuity in history provides us with a very tangible connection to the past, revealing links to those who came before us.  It is possible to see some of the constants in Western Civilization.

4.  History as cause and effect—the present emerging from the past.  In this perspective, the observer determines an initial beginning point in the past that leads to a specific consequence in the present.  The present conditions are very much the consequences of the past.  In some instances, the causes lay deep in our past, but nonetheless are responsible for both positive and negative effects.

5.  History as it helps us understand peoples, cultures and societies, today.  In this perspective, the observer recognizes past events that explain certain features of people, culture or society, today.  Certain current characteristics of different peoples, cultures and societies are shaped by past events.  Knowledge of these events improves our understanding of people today.

There are other great ways to introduce students to 21st century skill-sets.  I refer often to the following websites–which also appear in my sidebar–for great ideas to introduce students to technology (more necessary than you might think as my young guns in college this semester were by and large unfamiliar with the concept of blogging!):

History Tech:
http://historytech.wordpress.com/

The History Channel this is not . . . :
http://nkogan.wordpress.com/