August 2006 Archives

Ah, the end of August.  The temperature drops to a comfy, crisp low 70s, and everywhere one hears the pitter patter of little feet getting ready for a new school year.  Where I go to school, what one hears is the pitter patter of feet running back and forth between offices whose computer systems don't talk to each other, making for a confusing, frustrating mess.  As I've just had my most recent jog, let me take a moment to vent. 

This has always been a pain, but even more so since I picked up my masters in May.  Let me be clear: I matriculated as a doctoral student four years ago, have always been a doctoral student.  Apparently however, there is no designation in the system for students who are doctoral students but receive their masters on the way to the doctoral degree.  Therefore, according to the system, I graduated in May.  Except that I still need to register for classes in the fall, get financial aid as a continuing student, etc.  So, that's already problematic, but you'd think that I could go to one place to have it fixed, right? 

Wrong.  I had to visit each and every relevant office (finaid, registrar, etc) and fill out a form saying that I'm a continuing student.  Even this didn't have the intended effect; although last spring I let finaid know that I hadn't graduated, I still wasn't granted aid this year because the system had me down as graduated.  Frustrating!!!  This was fixable, thank goodness, but still.  I'd thought that I'd taken care of this back in the spring.

Another example: my student ID is outdated, and I need a new one.  Because I'm both a student and a part-time professional, I should get a student ID and a staff ID.  So I stop by the ID office this morning, to be told that I needed to see human resources first, because they have two records in the system for me: one with my social security number as my ID, and one with my randomly-assigned ID number (which I opted to switch to after it was clear that everyone and their mother was seeing my soc.  And that's another story in itself - I got blocked out of the computer labs once I switched and had to talk to computing services to get it fixed.).  Anyway, the ID office woman told me that I need to get "a slip" from human resources that will do some sort of magic merge of my two records.  But just for their office, I'm sure. 

Arg.

The frustrating thing is, who knows what other ramifications these entanglements have?  What if I find myself ineligible for grant money because the grant office thinks that I don't exist, even though finaid and the registrar can tell you (finally) that I do?  It's 2006 for crying out loud.  Please please please merge your administrative computer systems already!  Please! 

Great article over on Technology Review that outlines the deterimental effects of DOPA, should it be signed into law.  Chief among them, and of great concern to anyone studying youth culture:

"Already, you have a gap between kids who have 10 minutes of Internet access a day at the public library and kids who have 24-hour-a-day access at home," [Jenkins] says. "...Now we're talking about adding even more restrictions. It exaggerates the 'participation gap' -- not a technology gap, but a difference in access to the defining cultural experiences that take place around technology today."

What happened to leave no child behind?

Given that any site that has chat or social networking capabilities would be banned from schools receiving federal aid, it's not just MySpace that we'll miss.  The edublogging community, for example, is up in arms (scroll down) over the possiblity that blogs might be yanked from the teachers' toolkit.  I know that Internet fear is nothing new, but this type of political fearmongering is so short-sighted and frustrating.

AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

"A federal commission approved a final report on Thursday that ...calls for public universities to measure learning with standardized tests, federal monitoring of college quality and sweeping changes in financial aid." (via NY Times)

Change finaid? Great!  Standardized testing?  standardized testing??!!!  Ok.  So, the panel was convened to see whether or not graduating students are competitive in the global market.  To me, that is based on the underlying assumption that we are educating students solely to be workers, and that a college education is pretty much job training.  As a strong believer in liberal education, my back is already up.  But "job training" or not, to assume that what we aim to teach in higher ed - critical engagement with materials and texts, self-sufficient thinkers, educating the whole person, you know, those lofty goals - can be measured with standardized testing is ludicrous.  Maybe it's just the climate of fear that I've been living in lately, but regardless of the fact that the committee's work remains recommendations for the moment, this is pretty seriously scary to me.

Thank you to the following people and organizations for opposing the recommendations: David Ward, committee member, president of the American Council on Education; the Association of American Universities; the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Interesting piece from Inside Higher Ed: Metaphors We Read By.  Some metaphors that first-year college students offered in Musgrove's Picturing Reading Project:

• "1. Reading is grafting, and the reader connects new text to another text read.

• 2. Reading is dancing, and the reader follows the lead and steps of the text, including its rhythm, music, lyric, genre, and flow.

• 3. Reading is sorting, and the reader puts knowledge and experience and dramatic elements of text into categories.

• 4. Reading is surveying, and the reader examines the territory of the book, its surface, size, structure, scope, distinguishing features, divisions, boundaries, etc.

• 5. Reading is integrating, and the reader incorporates new knowledge into other knowledge; blending and kneading together.

• 6. Reading is counting, and the reader is concerned with the number of pages in the text or how many pages are left until they can escape the text (also envision the image of a prisoner marking off days on calendar)."

A much longer list of metaphors here.  Now, the teaching of reading is not my area of expertise, but the idea of having students explicitly surface their conceptions of reading and then using that on a metacognitive level to move towards a more positive relationship with reading seems like a useful idea.  Actually, might be useful in other arenas as well; having students (or faculty, for that matter) create metaphors that describe their relationship to technology...

Why are staples sold in such large quantities?  The small box of staples in my office contains 5000 staples.  Given its design, the box was undoubtedly purchased in the 1980s, and it's still 3/4 full.  Things that survive a nuclear war: twinkies, roaches, and staples.