Did I just step in some Technology?

If you take the @ train to downtown Paragraph City sometime, duck into the Toffler building and elevator up to the observation deck. If you drop a quarter in one of the View-Masters up there, you won’t be able to see the cutting edge of instructional technology, but you’ll see – in 3D – colleges who can see it.

IT is like that at my college, distanced by cost and a lack of IT people from what’s new, but not entirely out of sight. At a small college where we worry about keeping the tuition attainable for our over-jobbed students, that’s probably appropriate. Still, I often wish the IT jungle were a little more lush here.

Two events bring the instructional tech topic to the fore.

Item one: an occasionally heated discussion of the “don’t push tech on me” – “you’re such a Luddite” variety that University Diaries points out here: http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=3740

Item two: the 2008 Horizon Report (http://connect.educause.edu/Library/ELI/2008HorizonReport/45926), which tries to forecast the IT weather coming our way over the next five years. It has seemed to me that most crystal balls are about as predictive as bowling balls, but the Educause & New Media people who publish this report have a pretty good 5 year record built up. I recommend the report.

Both items put instructional technology’s relationship to learning up for view, and there are a host of questions, like these

• How does the faculty keep up with the tech du jour? Should we?
• Just because we can learn a new dance step, should we? It remains, after all, the same couple dancing: just me and milady composition.
• How do we know learning happens better with tech than it did when chalk used to stutter across a blackboard?
• Is a higher tech presentation what students want? The follow-up to that is often this: Why give students what they want when what they want is often not that good for them? But I’d rather ask this: Is there any reason to not teach students with the sort of presentation that they would prefer?
• Will the tech dumb down the material, for instance by putting it into sound bites or making an engaging discussion unlikely?
• Do our students have the companion tech necessary, or are we digging the digital divide ever deeper?
• Can we afford to have the necessary tech, and can we afford not to have it?

Both item one and item two above address some of these, and so will I in upcoming morsels. One point more, right now.

PowerPoint is often raised as an example of technology everyone, Luddite or not, is familiar with, and the argument is often made about how dreadful PowerPoint presentations are. But it isn’t the PowerPoint, it’s the lecture. Lectures by incompetent lecturers have always been dreadful, and they continue to be dreadful in PowerPoint. But it’s not the fault of the tool, and if I let the tool change the way I think about how I communicate to my class, it’s possible what results is an improvement.

That “if” however, is not surmountable by all faculty, for better or worse. And there are bigger monkeys in the jungle than that old PowerPoint grouch.

4 x 4 Chasing Dust Bunnies

If you take the cloverleaf onto Apostrophe Blvd. South from downtown Paragraph City, you’ll soon be in “over”. This is the over that bloggers use to talk about in other blogs, as in: Over in Joanna Young’s fine blog, Confident Writing (http://www.confidentwriting.com/2008/03/4×4-sources-of.html ) you can find her 4 x 4 challenge on sources of writing inspriation. I know you can find it there because I did, with a thank you to one of my regular reads, Community College English (http://cce.typepad.com/cce/2008/03/caught-any-shee.html)

Joanna’s challenge is to list four blocks of four sources of writing inspiration. I cringe at the word “inspiration” because it suggests a magnificence that doesn’t exist in my blundering way of finding things to write about. “Dust-bunny chasing” would be closer to the truth. At any rate, here are my four bundles, with a thank-you bow to Joanna for the idea.

Work Out

1. Walk to find what you are thinking about. Thoreau, in Walden and again in “Walking” speaks of how walking stimulates reflection. There’s a left-right, one step-next step, this idea-that idea, on this hand-on that hand process to walking, (especially walking unpaved places with roots and marsh and hummocks that require your attention) that pumps blood into our thinking — Thoreau’s and mine, that is.
2. Go outside and find three things, tossed aside things, manufactured artifacts. Assume they are all related, and invent the connections. Or three things from the natural world, all tied to one common thread that is in my mind, that I must find.
3. Find analogies in the outer world that explain me and the inner world. The rocks in the stream below my kitchen window are all uniformly brown and wet. But later this spring when I re-set the stepping stones that get me dry-shod to the other side, I will discover that some are rust-red beneath the steam scum, others pink granite, others black shale. We all look pretty much the same on the outside, but only on the outside.
4. Build a rock wall or try to dam one of the streams or divert the spring run off. It’s so much like writing — fitting the words together so they stand up in a serpentine contour line, or holding firm and shaping the liquid force that would move them.

Work In

1. Writing with only the conscious mind is like bowling in scuba gear. I reach into a rich idea and wonder about it a little and then take a nap. Connections are there when I wake up.
2. Ken Macrorie speaks of oppositions, of always wondering what there is opposing the things I think. If the tone is pleasant, what would the unpleasant sound like. If it’s hot, what would the cold be like. If this is what I believe, what would doubt be like. And if I’m feeling the way I’m feeling, what would the opposite of that be?
3. “What If” is the name of one of my favorite creative writing texts. If I am thinking about something and I can write forty “What if…” statements about it, maybe I’ve thought about it enough to have something to say.
4. Make metaphors. Metaphors are the root of all good fiction, all good poetry, and probably all great thinking. Metaphors leap out of the ordinary world and hook into a new view. Emily Dickinson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers…” and suddenly we understand hope new plumed.

Work Back

1. Old photographs make connections outside of the present skin I’m in, often what I need to write. Old photos of Civil War battlefields, of rugby teams from 1950, of my kids, of old barns, whatever.
2. My own old words sometimes take me to writing material, especially if I can translate genres: a journal entry into a poem, a letter to my daughter into a scene description, an old poem into an essay.
3. Start a list of things I don’t know, or can’t know, or won’t know, or have forgotten. To write about what isn’t there fascinates me. I think of Wallace Stevens’ “The Snowman”.
4. Busy myself with my hands, washing dishes or shoveling snow or mowing grass. When the machine begins to run warm in one of its familiar routines, the mind can step back and do its unconscious work. A neighbor walking by waves and asks how it’s going and I plunge the shovel into the snow pile by the driveway’s edge and push against the small of my back and grin at her and say “Fine, fine. It’s a good day” and I will have things to write about.

Work Words

1. I start with words, or a curious word, or a phrase that sticks with me for no particular reason. Lately I’ve been wanting to use the word “recumbent” but I haven’t got the right other words to go with it yet. “Recumbent” came when I saw a mailbox the snow plow had bent back so it was looking straight up into a blazing blue sky, mouth agape, recumbent. I’m waiting for other like-minded words to arrive.
2. I go looking for words, when I’m impatient. I will browse a dictionary, maybe, or a thesaurus. I love my Facts on File Word and Phrase Origins for this.
3. Words can be nervous, skittish things, though. Sometime I just write anything, like putting a duck decoy out on an empty marsh pond. Eventually the decoy draws in a flock of mallards and I’ve more to say than I know how to.
4. Looking at other writer’s words is fine, too. Depressing, often, if a competitive mood develops, but reading for phrases in the King James Bible or Emily Dickinson it’s hard to feel in the same league, so where’s the competition?

Writing Cover Letters for Community College jobs

I was thinking the other day of someone I never met, a candidate for a job at Paragraph City, in the English department, more or less. It was a dreadful search experience, in retrospect doomed to failure. Through a series of poor decisions — the sort of compromises that occur in committee when we really want three people but can only afford one — we wound up attracting mainly people who had fallen off the usual ladder and were showing up at our door in order find their way back on.

Imagine, for example, a person who had been working for 25 years but never longer than four years at any one institution (and thus never received tenure), or someone who had bounced through a variety of related positions but in different departments in different colleges and suddenly gone to Korea to work in a university there for a year. Or think of someone who taught for three years, sold textbooks for two, chaired a Communication department for a year, taught high school for three, enrolled as a student in a Creative Writing program for two years, didn’t work at all for a year, then directed a writing center for four years.

We on the committee read cover letters, scanned vita, and groaned. The writing was horribly boring and uniformly lacked that primary trait of good writing: sounding as if it came from a human being. It was all defensive writing, intended to cover up gaps, smooth over odd job choices, and repeat the same old cliches. Mostly the cover letters just repeated what the resumes said — right down to job titles and dates of service — as if reading the information in the read-at-a-glance resumes wasn’t enough punishment and we were sentenced to trudge through sentences. And all the candidates pretended it didn’t matter why they were leaving their current positions. With every candidate we knew they were hiding things, and often we could tell what they thought they were hiding.

Then one candidate came through and all five of us wanted to talk to him immediately. Here’s why:

• He had a personality. Without being casual, he spoke comfortably to us in his cover letter and responded directly to our ad.
• He didn’t waste words in formal circumlocutions and 19th century expressions. His cover letter was just over a page.
• His tone had a familiarity and an ease suitable to the community college, and his interest in teaching was assumed in his expressions.
• He told us his reason for seeking a new position, why our position interested him, and something of who he was.
• He didn’t seem to be hiding anything.

So we had one candidate for the job and maybe two others we ought to talk to. But before we could meet him, our real candidate sent us an email saying that he had taken a job at another college, thanking us for the opportunity, telling us why he had been looking forward to meeting us, and explaining why he had taken the other job. His note turning us down was easily more appealing than the cover letter any other candidate had sent.

So the search failed and we completely re-designed and simplified the position, opening it up to people with little experience and assigning it the duties of just one job (instead of combining partial duties of the three different positions we really needed). But we ought to learn from our mistakes. So I tell my careers English classes this: the resume should open the door for an interview, but it’s the cover letter that makes the employer want to meet you.

How powerful it can be when a piece of paper carries a lively personality into a tableful of cautious, deceptive, generic cliches.