An online class session

We held an online class meeting as an illustration of synchronous collaboration.

During a typical classroom session, I present a topic while projecting class notes and doing live demonstrations. Students are free to ask questions and make comments at any time.

For our online meeting, the students and I remained at home, and I conducted the class much as I would have in the classroom. They viewed the notes and demonstrations using screen sharing software (YuuGuu.com) and we all talked using Skype.

There were only ten students in the class, and seven completed a survey afterward. Such a small survey is not conclusive, but the students reported that they were relaxed and less shy when online than in class. They also tended to focus more closely on the presentation, and were less likely to look at unrelated material than in the classroom. (We normally meet in a computer-equipped classroom). The students ranged from neutral to preferring the online meeting.

Click here for the survey questions and answers.

"Academically entitled" students expect good grades for little effort

A recent study by University of California, Irvine professor Ellen Greenberger shows that some "academically entitled" students expect good grades for modest effort and have demanding attitudes toward teachers.

The study asked approximately 400 undergraduates aged 18 to 25 whether they agreed with these statements:

• If I have explained to my professor that I am trying hard, I think he/she should give me some consideration with respect to my course grade -- 66.2% agree
  
• If I have completed most of the reading for a class, I deserve a B in that course -- 40.7%
  
• If I have attended most of the classes for a course, I deserve at least a grade of B -- 34.1%
  
• Teachers often give me lower grades than I deserve on paper assignments -- 31.5%
  
• Professors who won't let me take my exams at another time because of my personal plans (e.g. a vacation) are too strict - 29.9%
  
• A professor should be willing to lend me his/her course notes if I ask for them - 24.8%
  
• I would think poorly of a professor who didn't respond the same day to an e-mail I sent - 23.5%
  
• Professors have no right to be annoyed with me if I tend to come late to class or tend to leave early - 16.8%
  
• A professor should not be annoyed with me if I receive an important call during class - 16.5%
  
• A professor should be willing to meet with me at a time that works best for me, even if inconvenient for the professor - 11.2%
  

She found that students holding these beliefs are more likely to engage in academic cheating, exploit others, shirk hard work and display "narcissistic orientation."

The study found that students who say their parents often compare their achievements to siblings, cousins or friends are more likely to engage in these behaviors, but found no connection between self-entitled attitudes and grades.

If you are a student, do you agree with the above statements? Would other students you know agree with them?

A culture of cooperation or competition?

The Internet applications and skills we teach as part of Computer Literacy 3 often center on collaboration and common interests, but we will fail without a compatible culture and reward system.

Our traditional students may be accustomed to a culture of competition. This point was made in a New York Times article Combat to College, which describes the experience of GI Bill veterans returning to school after serving in Iraq.

These students are different from mainstream students in many ways, but one that caught my eye had to do with their culture of cooperation, which was summed up by John Schupp, a chemistry professor at Cleveland State University, who sees camaraderie in the classroom as crucial to getting the veterans to show up, to stay and to thrive.

“They tell me over and over they wouldn’t have come to college otherwise,” he says. “In the military world it’s the team. The squadron must survive. When you come to school it’s all personal — my books, my grade, my stuff, my notes. They’re isolated, because other students haven’t seen what they’ve seen.”

We discuss willingness to cooperate in my classes, but instilling a cooperative culture among today's students can be difficult.

Collaborative writing by small and very large groups

Wikis are perhaps the simplest collaborative writing tool, but they are best suited to compiled and simple co-authored documents.

For more complex co-authored documents we use network-based word processors. While they are limited and slow today, they will improve as technology like JavaScript interpreters, development tools and network speed improve.

For massively co-authored documents, documents with many authors, we need to add structure and social networking features. This class note discusses two sites for creating massively co-authored documents, PublicMarkup and WePC.

Writing for Internet readers

Writing must be tailored to the medium. You would not publish an essay on a billboard or a short slogan as a newspaper article. Writing for the Internet must be compatible with Internet reading style, and, if we are writing for students, their characteristics.

Jakob Nielsen asks the question How Little do Users Read? in a recent column. Nielsen describes a study by Harald Weinreich and his colleagues. They instrumented the Web browsers of 25 users and collected data on their browsing habits, as shown here:


Even for first time visits to a site, half of the page-stay times were 12 seconds or less.

Nielsen analyzed the same data further. He removed very short pages (probably error messages) and very long views (probably unattended browsers) and found the following correlation between the number of words on a page and the time spent reading it:

Next he asked what percent of the words on a page could have been read by someone reading at 250 words per minute:

As we see, a user might be able to read most of a very short page, but will not typically take the time to read more than a portion of a longer page.

Of course, different users have different reading habits. The posts on this blog may seem long, but they are written for a somewhat scholarly reader. But, as educators, we should probably keep things short and teach our students to write concisely for the Internet.

The Beloit College list of the characteristics of incoming freshmen

The latest version of the Beloit College Mindset list of characteristics of freshman students just came out. The class of 2012

has grown up in an era where computers and rapid communication are the norm, and colleges no longer trumpet the fact that residence halls are “wired” and equipped with the latest hardware. These students will hardly recognize the availability of telephones in their rooms since they have seldom utilized landlines during their adolescence. They will continue to live on their cell phones and communicate via texting. Roommates, few of whom have ever shared a bedroom, have already checked out each other on Facebook where they have shared their most personal thoughts with the whole world.

It is a multicultural, politically correct and “green” generation that has hardly noticed the threats to their privacy and has never feared the Russians and the Warsaw Pact.

A few of my favorites -- regarding technology, US society, and the cold war -- from the list of 60 characteristics are:

• Windows 3.0 operating system made IBM PCs user-friendly the year they were born.
• GPS satellite navigation systems have always been available.
• Personal privacy has always been threatened.
• Employers have always been able to do credit checks on employees.
• Michael Millken has always been a philanthropist promoting prostate cancer research.
• There have always been gay rabbis.
• Schools have always been concerned about multiculturalism.
• Muscovites have always been able to buy Big Macs.
• The Warsaw Pact is as hazy for them as the League of Nations was for their parents.

Does Internet style reading change our brains?

We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.
Marshall McLuhan

Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.
Friedrich Nietzsche


Nicholas Carr published an article entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid? in which he discusses his and other's inability to patiently read long, complex articles and books. Web documents are typically short and linked to other documents, and we often jump away from an article after skimming or partially reading it.

Carr feels that reading this way has altered his brain structure, which explains his impatience when reading long documents. If Carr's hypothesis is true, today's students, who have grown up using the Internet and Web, will not learn well from conventional books and journal articles.

Carr's article spurred quite a bit of online debate and commentary. For example, this Salon article with several pages of comments.

Are our students reading habits really different than their parent's generation? Is this due to the Web or to other media like fast-cutting, MTV-style video? If we are becoming hard-wired skimmers instead of careful readers, what is gained and what is lost?