“It was when I was happiest that I longed most…The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
- C.S. Lewis

I’m getting ready to start my month long disconnection from the internet and cell service. I will be serving on the kitchen summer staff at a camp in NY and without the outside distractions I’ll have the whole month to focus on the task at hand. I’m very excited about this opportunity to meet new people and form a community around a vision shared by all those who are serving.

It will also be a time to mull over many ideas and work out problems that have needed closer analysis for some time. I suppose I will be journaling the old-fashion way too, where is that pen and paper?

At this moment I know something is not right and the forces of the universe are nudging me to listen closely for an answer. It is not that I am not happy, in fact I am the happiest I’ve been in a long time and I am learning to find that deep abiding joy - “satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy” - and I have many of you to thank for that.

So what is this post about? Well to be honest, I haven’t a clue and I hope its not just me wanting to hear myself blather on into the vast expanses of the internet. I feel like there are questions I am supposed to be asking, but I don’t even know what they are and that makes it very difficult to find the answers. Maybe I am making an odyssey that will bring me right back to where I started and at the end of the journey Ithaka will hold a different meaning for me. Maybe I’m finally just starting to lose it. In any case I’m about to embark on a month long excursion mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.

Now comes for the random part of the post where I ask a possibly unreasonable response that may lead many of you to believe I am losing it (which again may be true). Below I am going to put my address at camp and if you feel so inclined you can send me something and I will send something back. And while a well written letter is always appreciated I think it would be more fun receive letters that are outside the ordinary. Send pictures, poems, articles, or leaves I don’t really care! Maybe I’ll send you something back that someone sent to me, share the love, ya know? Make it crazy, fun, and playful - I want to see what if anything will come out of this experiment.  Maybe it is stupid experiment, but I feel life needs to be more random and unpredictable.

“No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of the planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar to planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity,
obscurity is not uninteresting.”

Camp Address:
Shannon Hauser
Summer Staff
Young Life’s Lake Champion
247 Mohican Lake Road
Glen Spey, New York 12737

I thought of a question the other day, why don’t students have their own syllabus? Not necessarily a syllabus in terms of deadlines, but a student’s goals for the semester. Perhaps evaluating at the beginning of the semester what they expect to learn and other academic goals (ideas about what other goals?). This would make students actually take a look at the syllabus and encourage professors to explicate their own personal goals for the course outside the basic clichéd lines students see on every professor’s syllabus. This has the possibility of taking students from passive learners who attempt to fit into a mold of a class to active learners who grab a hold of the learning inside the classroom. And if Jeff McClurken’s Digital History class is any indication, students will often set the bar higher for themselves than a professor would expect.

I think this question stems from my frustration over finding relevancy in the classroom. As Jerome Bruner states in his book The Process of Education:

“The first object of any act of learning, over and beyond the pleasure it may give, is that it should serve us in the future. Learning should not only take us somewhere; it should allow us later to go further more easily.”

One of the most common complaints I hear from students (and myself) is the lack of relevancy of what is learned in the classroom. This does not necessarily mean what is being taught is not relevant, but more likely students are unable to see it. This attitude is especially prevalent in gen-ed classes where students are often in courses that they have little interest in. Now I’m not asking professors to make their class pop-culture relevant, although props to you if you can throw in a Simpsons reference, there is pretty much relevancy in everything if you know what you are looking for. Let me throw another Bruner quote at you:

“Grasping the structure of a subject is understanding it in a way that permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully. To learn structure, in short, is to learn how things are related.”

Often I find myself losing sight of this structure or I am unsure of what it even is, so the class becomes “simply the mastery of facts and techniques”. At this stage of the game obviously I have come to learn structure of several disciplines, but I am honestly not sure I could tell you what exactly those structures are. I still need the help from professors, the experts in the classroom, to guide me. All too often people assume that students, both good and bad, have mastery or understanding of the basic underlying structure of a subject.

I think students (and maybe even professors) are afraid to admit this late in the game that they are unsure of the answers to some of these seemingly basic questions. Maybe if we just put embarrassment and pride aside we could talk about these glaring issues with honesty and maybe even reach some answers. And almost as equally important as finding the answers is iterating it again, and again, and again, and again.

This year is my second time attending Faculty Academy and once again I am not disappointed. There is always so much information to synthesize and I find myself wanting to integrate it all and not lose any of it. I took copious notes from the various sessions and now I find myself swimming in a sea of information, where do I even begin? That is a good question so I think I’ll start haphazardly typing and see what happens. I have that feeling there will be multiple blog posts, especially once others start blogging their experiences there will be plenty to talk about.

In order to really understand how things have changed for me from last year I will have to talk about the year in between so bear with me while I recap, give some thanks, and reflect a little. As I began the fall 2007 semester I was excited (really really excited) for my new job at DTLT. I had no idea what I was getting into, I just knew that it was where I wanted to be. I learned a lot about myself that fall semester as I frantically tried to keep up with the pace of school work, my campus job, extracurricular activities, and my own personal demons. One place I could always go to to recharge my batteries was DTLT and I feel beyond lucky that they haven’t gotten sick of me yet. I don’t think many people can say that work is the place they get to feel re-energized and again I am blessed to work with some of the best people I have ever known.

Over the year I have often had that feeling of being the little kid dressing up in their parents wardrobe, wearing clothing and shoes many sizes too big. I have also felt like that younger sibling who likes to tag along with their cooler older sibling. I work in an environment where I get to “dress up” and “tag along” and not feel foolish for being unsure or not nearly as knowledgeable. During Janet Murray’s keynote lecture at Faculty Academy she discussed the importance of imitation as a means of connecting and the pleasure found in shared pattern imitation. I know how valuable this has been for me as I watch the people I work with and see how they approach the world. It is not just seeing them perform their jobs and their demonstration of the skills they have, but how they live out their lives. In many ways I try to model myself after them and learn from them in whatever way I can, they have been an invaluable part of my growth as an adult this past year. I genuinely look up to the people I work with and as I am sure I have said on many occasions I am beyond blessed that I have the relationship that I do with all of them. I’m not just learning skills at my job, I am taking away life lessons. Have I mentioned how lucky I am?

Academically speaking it has not been an easy year, although the spring was much better. My freshman year I had the benefit of being relatively anonymous so making mistakes was mostly mine to dwell on, but as the year has progressed and my academic life has become more exposed, my failings and mistakes have become more visible. I have often been left feeling embarrassed and ashamed of my poor performance. I’ve had those moments of ‘impostor student syndrome’ where I feel that I am really not quite as good as people would like to think I am and by practically proving myself right in the fall semester I’ve taken a few knocks to my self-esteem. What has not changed though is my underlying faith in learning and “real school”, it has been a constant thread over the last year and has helped me keep focus when I got caught up in the dispair of performing poorly in a class. There is also many other people to thank for helping me not completely recede into the corner I am rather fond of and I hope I have made it clear to them their importance in my education and life.

I could give a lengthy dissertation on all the small and big things that have happened that have molded me this year, but this post is already getting long enough and it isn’t necessary to know it all in order to understand my mindset. Certain things have become clear to me over the past year and one of the most important (if not the most) is the community, the shared sense of play. Another is the importance of having the scaffolding of knowledge to build to greater heights and play in those really cool sandboxes. Third, is to “go boldly” and address those underlying fears that prevent me from being adventurous. Lastly, the importance of having the imagination and the readiness to be imaginative and make connections so that we make the best use of our community, build well in those sand boxes, and boldly take on our fears.

More to come of course and I suppose I will actually talk about Faculty Academy in those future posts.

I have been thinking about this for awhile now, but one thing I have wanted to do is have students fill out a survey about higher education and their feelings towards it. I’m not really even sure where to begin on this. So I am going to ask my blog readers to give me and hand on this.

What questions would you ask of students about their feelings towards higher education? I’m not looking to make this a survey where someone would take up a whole page writing a response, so concise questions would be good. What kind of format should this be in? Should there multiple choice, a scale (1 to 5, agree or disagree), some open ended questions?

I don’t see a problem with getting a students to fill it out, especially if you are offering free candy if they complete the survey. Maybe some of you professors would be interested in having students fill it out too, I don’t know.

So let me know what you think. Is this a good idea or bad idea? And if you like it what kind of questions and what kind of format would you like to see this in?

    Now that Joseph has stirred up the pot, and it is a pot that definitely needs to be stirred, I thought I’d do a little bit of a response at this late hour.

Right off the bat I think Joseph is right in saying that students don’t use what they don’t think they need. I see this apply to blogging a lot, if a student doesn’t see an intrinsic value in it they will not use it. For those skeptics it takes a lot of convincing that blogging is not really like writing a paper in a word document. I would also say what they have to blog about may make it harder or easier for somebody to write. I will even admit that I have been behind on my blogging for my Digital History Seminar because a lot of what I am doing for that class involves technology and I don’t really like writing documentation. But sometimes you just have to suck it up and do it. I am really looking forward to the idea of talking about solutions for these kinds of problems at Faculty Academy, like really excited. I see this also be connected with something Martha recently blogged about, along similar lines with the FSEM. Basically, I am excited hah.

Jeff also responded to Joe’s post with a lengthy comment/post, there is one particular part that stuck out to me:

Yes, I’m asking students to do something new, or to push themselves, or to think about doing something in a different way, and yes, that potentially takes away from their time to read (or learn) about those darn battles, but that’s a choice I’ve made as the creator of the course. That choice is based in my desire to balance the skills and content portions of my class (that’s an over-stated dichotomy here) to provide the best possible experience for the students going forward, not just in that course, but hopefully in others as well.

This goes back to something I have been thinking about lately. What exactly is the purpose of higher education? Is it about content or is it something more? I would like to think that it involves more than content, in fact I can’t stand the thought of purely a content driven education. Personally, at this moment I am not planning to teach history (my major), or work at a museum, or necessarily do something along those lines. I am investing in a college education because of the experience and the skills, the content is more a coating on the pill to make it go down easier. This is just my opinion, but I am guess that the majority of students are traveling down this same road.

There is more I want to say, but its is too late and I have to get up early. More to come.

I ask this question, “What is a student’s job?” Besides the obvious answer of “to be a student!”, I am curious to see what others think.

It seems such a fundamental question, but one that is hard to answer, or perhaps has varying answers.

There are some things that came to mind when pondering this question. What is college preparing student’s for? Is it to be academics? Skilled people for the work force? Contributing members of society?

For the most part it feels like college is training us to be academics, but I don’t think the college is really aiming for that, or should be aiming for that. Of course some people will go on to be educators and work in a highly specialized area of their major, but most likely the vast majority won’t. I will also say that besides content there are goals and themes that carry through college, being able to critical think, speak well, write well, etc. But at times college can really seem like k-12 redux where the content is just more in depth and the papers about the content are longer.

So is a students job to study a lot and pass tests? Or is it be creative and do something productive for society?

Don’t get me wrong though, students who don’t study all day long (har-har) are still being productive and creative. You know where it is happening though? Outside the classroom! Mostly in the form of clubs. At Mary Washington we have an active chapter of Students Helping Honduras that has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, a Young Womens Leadership Program that mentors middle school girls, and various other groups that get things done. And where is there for the most part a lack of interesting ideas and productivity going on? Inside the classroom! I see a disconnect here.

Of course everyone needs some base knowledge to actually be able to play in the “sandbox” and I am not saying every class on campus is useless. For example there is an Economics class that deals with philanthropic ventures and actually gives away money to a deserving organization. The students in the class obviously need some background in what the class entails and an instructor to help them too. I am also not saying that students don’t put hard work into their papers and other class projects, but for the majority of students, only the professor and the class will see their hard work. And what they accomplished might have little value for the future.

Student’s go to class after class, filling their heads with content, but seldom dealing with real world situations. There is so much untapped talent and creativity waiting to be unleashed on campus. Say for instance Admissions wanted to have a promotional video for Mary Washington, how easy would it be to have some students on campus do it? Maybe give them some credit for it or even money towards tuition! It would probably be cheaper than having a professional do it and it would be better because a student who understands the school would be working on it. It also feels more personal when you know a student worked on it and I wouldn’t be surprised if prospective students liked it more than what a professional could come up with.
Right now in my Digital History Seminar we are building projects that can be useful to people outside or class and even institution. It is exciting to think that what we are doing now could last well into the future. In these project we have encountered problems we couldn’t have foreseen and it has made us think and evaluate. It has been a learning experience more than a paper on digital history ever could be.

There are endless possibilities if people just took the time to think and dare to be innovative. Mike Caulfield blogged a few months ago about what would happen if students stopped working in silos and started working on real world situations, it has inspired me ever since I read it. Mike says, “In a networked information economy, failure is cheap. Production is cheap. And if you produce something worthwhile, distribution is free. “

So again I ask, what is a student’s job?

I was away this weekend, I’ve been busy, and I am tired. I have a whole bag full of excuses. Until I return I leave you with every cynics favorite comic, Calvin and Hobbes:
(click to get larger image)

I also choose to blame Bill who recently blogged about Calvin and Hobbes so I now am going through the complete archive.

When I take a second to put down the kool-aide every now and then I can see reality a little better. Lately I have been thinking about the culture I live in where school is not really cool and learning is great as long is its not taking place in a classroom (boring!). I would even argue that there is such a strong culture of anti-school among my generation. We are brainwashed to dislike school and sometimes for good reason. There just seems to be inherently a negative connotation built in with the word school. Rewinding my brain to just a year ago (it seems to be getting harder) I can remember the feelings of discontent with school, its lifelessness and boring tradition.

Lets be honest the University is competing for student’s attention and it is really an unbalanced fight. For freshman that are getting their first taste of freedom away from parents and the identity they have been living with most of their lives, it is a time to explore new ideas. There are also friends, clubs, parties, etc. Academics are going to take a back seat to these things most of the time. Combine this with the anti-school sentiment and it is plain to see that for most students being a student isn’t really the most important thing. And here is what I am really getting at, when there is no community built around learning, students will not be interested. I don’t believe cool tools or awesome professors could fully convince someone of the importance of learning. It would just be a blip on the radar screen in a sea of tradition, non-controversial, and rote schooling.

People have been trying to take steps towards building a better community through new emerging technologies, but they still face that same culture of anti-school. Even then you just aren’t going to get through to people and sometimes people aren’t that interested in “real school”. This doesn’t mean we should stop trying because their are people out there that do care and some people who don’t even realize yet that they care. A connected community of student learners has the ability to bring people in, but until this happens there will just be little silos of education surrounded by fields of “plain old school”.

I would not say this is a call to arms, a post to point out successes or failures, or even saying that this is an impenetrable wall. It is merely a social commentary of one student on the state of the learning community at an institution.

I started to take Physics in the fall of ‘07 as part of the gen-ed requirement for the school. I am not inherently a science/math person, I can do it, but its not what I am naturally good at. As the semester went on I found myself more and more fascinated by physics. The class is not a conceptual class really, we do a lot of math (mostly algebra not calculus, thank goodness), but still I felt compelled to commit time to actually learning what we were doing in class. It seems kind of silly of course because what else would students be doing in college if they weren’t learning (not that you’d really be surprised that some/most students aren’t).

This has carried on into the spring semester and as I reflected on this strange new love of science, I realized a part of it was the process. The way physics challenges me because it does not necessarily come to me naturally and the fact I have to spend time on it to really understand it. Even though not everything I am learning is applicable to what I will be doing in the future I know that there are connections being made and that science/math part of my brain that usually goes malnourished is getting some good attention.

Now, it might be because I am kool-aide drinking real school fiend that I’m starting to appreciate process (and dare I say using my brain heh). For me, the problem is explaining it to other students. I had a conversation with a friend a few months back and she was saying that a specific equation she learned in physics could not help her in her social science major (she also challenged me to directly connect it). I argued it is not always about making those direct connections. The problem with process is that is often an invisible process that is going on in the brain, making it hard to measure. It is not about knowing F=MA, but being challenged in class to remember back and say, well this is how I can also get to F.
Pushing the brain to make connections.
The brain is that much richer for having being pushed in a different direction. By taking the time to learn these things as you go along as a process, your brain is getting better at making connections. Cramming for the test the night before does not train your brain for much good at all.

I see I have rambled a bit from where I started. Not that ever really have a specific point to make to begin with, but I hope what I have said makes some sort of logical sense.

By way of CogDog, I heard about Al Upton’s miniLegend project. He is currently asking edubloggers to be mentors for his year 3 students (8 and 9 year olds I believe). Being the geek I am I think this is the coolest thing so I went over to sign up to be a mentor.

As it currently stands I will be mentoring a girl named Emili. I’m really looking forward to commenting on her blog and just seeing what she learns over the year. Something about these connections, ya know?