Bloggin and Teachin, Rhymin and Stealin

A few weeks ago, I posted the following statement over at a new collaborative history website organized by a fellow historian, Katrina Gulliver -- Transnational History: Cultural History Discussions -- in response to a query about people's experiences with Web 2.0 technologies in teaching. Since it's a nice summation of my experiences and failures with my blog project in Fall 09, I figured I would post it here as well.

Maybe not so much inspiration as a cautionary tale, but hey...

I did a blogging experiment in my two World History to 1500 classes last semester (cap 33, nearly all HST or ED majors/minors). Students were divided into groups and had to manage their own group blogs that nominally dealt with the various themes of the course (certain weeks they had to make postings relating to a theme, while other weeks they could do what they wanted; in total the assignment ran about 8 weeks in length). Without a doubt, the experiment was an abject failure, but the reasons were almost entirely because me and certain choices I made (or didn't make) in structuring the assignment. One problem was that I found, much to my surprise (and why I didn't already *know* this is baffling to me, but eh...), that my students being digitally tech savvy when it comes to their gizmos and social networking dross does not necessarily translate across into other aspects of the Internet or internet conventions. In other words, most if not all of them had little understanding of what blogging was. And while I did offer some primers in what blogging was and why people did it, it was rather superficial because, well golly gee, they all *must* know, right? (All me.)

Another problem was the sheer scale of the commentary and criticism I had to engage in; with two classes of 33 students each were talking about 66+ blog entries a week for 8 or so weeks. In a normal semester, I could probably handle this just fine, but last fall was my first semester at GVSU, and it just became too overwhelming for me, which meant my interaction and grading pace declined. And this kind of assignment needs some fairly consistent, regular feedback, or else the students will simply keep churning out regular doses of crap.

The last main problem I found was a combination of my fault/their fault. Often times, students did the bare minimum in terms of crafting coherent, engaging blog posts, exhibiting a level of intellectual laziness that I see in a lot of my current students (i.e the can't-be-bothered-to-work-it-to-find-the-answer phenomenon). This meant that much of their early output read like warmed over encapsulations of Wikipedia entries, not blog posts. Again, not crafting assignment guidelines that were more clear on the purpose of the exercise was all me, but I only had a few students actually come to me in person for more specific help on what they should be doing, and I'm pretty sure that most students never even bothered to look at the HST group blogs I pointed them towards to see how others were using blogging to talk about history. They did have a rubric of sorts that explained what kinds of blog posts they could engage in (I believe there were eight on the list, from a larger group of twenty blog post types I found on the web), but nearly all the students did maybe only two of those eight kinds of posts.

Some students did seem to enjoy the experience, letting me know both in the course evals and in private discussion. And some students really took to the project, producing interesting, engaging, well-crafted blog posts about world history topics that interested them. But the overwhelming response was "This is pointless; don't do it again." Alas, I'm stubborn, and will most certainly inflict this on another class in the future, but with some substantial modifications. If anyone is curious, you can head over to the main course blog, GVSU World History Round-Up, and find the links to the various student blogs to see the triumphs and the tragedies of it all.

Would you like a banana?

For reasons I cannot really explain, this is the best passage in Charlie Stross' Saturn's Children, which I just finished the other night. The set-up is that the main character, an obsolete sexbot called Freya is touring an illegal biodome while undercover as a robot aristocrat (this is a universe where humanity went extinct, leaving behind its robots/androids to keep "a" society going while constrained by the limits of the Three Laws and their own programming quirks; attempts to recreate the "Creators" are illegal and snuffed out by the Pink Police):

"Well, very nice to meet you. Perhaps we can continue the tour ... ?"

'Very Well." Ecks turns and points to my right, where a cluster of stunted munchkin trees, barely waist high to me, sprout brightly colored spheroids. "This is our fruit garden. Fruits are the fertilized reproductive organs of the plants you see all around us -- often one tree would bear both male and female flowers, so our Creators, being largely fructivorous, subsisted on a diet rich in hermaphrodite genitalia ..."

Ewwww...

Book Fetish

I've been reading a lot in the last several months, mostly science fiction and fantasy novels of varying types. All of this has been part of a concerted effort, since I finished my Ph.D. in 2007, to spend time reading for pleasure, something graduate school simply allows no time for. You can find a sampling of my earlier reading successes in this post "Reading is Fun!" from last December. Since then, I've absorbed the three books of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars); Charlie Stross' Iron Sunrise and The Atrocity Archives; Brent Weeks' Night Angel trilogy (The Way of Shadows, Shadow's Edge, and Beyond the Shadows); the second book in Brian Ruckley's Godless World trilogy (Bloodheir); Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon; and A.J. Hartley's The Mask of Atreus. Additionally, in the non-fiction arena, I've finished Jon Meacham's American Lion (about President Andrew Jackson) and Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air (about the Enlightenment thinker, scientist, and philosopher Joseph Priestly). Of course this doesn't count the shitload of reading I do for work anyway, nor all my comic book reading.

I can sense, however, that my pleasure reading for the foreseeable future will most likely diminish, as I shift gears back into reading for research. In fact, the most recently finished book, Blue Mars, took me much longer to read than the others. So I thought I would write a bit more about my reading agenda lately before academic drudgery takes over my imagination.

Originally, the rest of this post was to be an epic rant about how I've grown tired of "Epic Fantasy," particularly after reading Week's Night Angel trilogy, which seemed to start off as a wonderfully gritty street-level fantasy story about assassins, but suddenly morphed into this world-saving epic complete with a holding-hands, "Kum Bay Ya" ending. However, I lost the point of what I was going to say, above and beyond what I just said, so we'll just skip by that, shall we?

Instead, what I particularly want to talk about right now is Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. I have said before, and I will surely say again at some point, that hard science fiction has never been my bag. Asimov, Clarke, and the rest never captured my imagination when I was younger, and although I was pretty good at science in school, it wasn't something that seized hold of my brain the way reading about history did (and does).

Nevertheless, I have come to enjoy the hard sci-fi works of Stross, Robinson, and the like that I have read lately. Finishing Robinson's Mars trilogy, in particular, has crystallized for me why. One of the reasons I enjoy fantasy and science fiction is the world-building aspects, the authorial creation motif, if you will. In the Mars trilogy, Robinson has woven a richly textured tapestry of humanity's social evolution among the stars, grounded in real-world extrapolations (no completely outrageous future tech or anything) and reasoned attention to how human society and culture both shapes and is shaped by the environment. Historians do much the same thing (world-building) when crafting their narratives about the past (the past is another country, or world, in this case), an aspect that has always appealed to me. I can remember as a child building whole imaginary worlds for "novels," D&D campaigns, or afternoons of fantasy play in my own head with some rubber bands and a pen. I still do this now, to a certain extent, always thinking, tinkering, probing new ideas for my own fantasy fiction writing (isn't everyone trying to write a novel?). Hard sci-fi represents an approach to world-building that is largely new to me and has thus become my "fixation" lately. At some point, I'm sure I'll move on to something else.

Above and beyond this, I have one other random thought about Robinson's Mars trilogy. When imaging the "Future" (tm), why do so many sci-fi authors almost reflexively extrapolate future sexual relations as one big free love orgy? Of course, the society that Robinson creates on Mars has many aspects of utopia to it (de-emphasized patriarchy; demilitarization; heightened attention to environmental and ecological concerns, etc), but why is there always this assumption that sex will become decentered and polyamorous? It's entirely teleological in approach, and I see it all the time. If I was less charitable, I would chalk it up to the sexual frustrations of nerdy authors writing about hot aliens fucking 200-year-old Martian explorers for shits and giggles. And I'm not being a prude here or anything; I eagerly await our polyphonic love orgy future (uh, hi Andrea, how was your trip this weekend, wife? *sheepish grin*), but I find this assumption that sexual liberation will continue its inexorable forward march toward Whig progress and Fourierian sex phalanxes a gross misreading of history.

So what's in my future, pleasure-reading-wise? Well, if I can find the time, I hope to start Charlie Stross' Saturn's Children; Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind; and, if I'm feeling brave, Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, the first part of the Baroque Cycle. Oh, and Brian Ruckley's Fall of Thanes is begging me to finish the Godless World trilogy.

Revising the Past

(Cross-posted at GVSU World History Round-Up)

When teaching history, one of the key issues I hammer into my students in each course is the notion that nothing in history remains constant. History, of course, is not the past in any direct sense; rather it is the stories and narratives we humans come up with to understand, interpret, and explain what we think happened in the past. Ideally, this process involves testing ideas and theories against the remnants of past events (e.g. eyewitness accounts; annals; archaeological remains; personal artifacts, or what have you) or applying new kinds of theoretical approaches to said remnants. Sometimes this process is a bit more free-flowing, rife with speculation, assumptions, and, well, magic fairy dust (to put it more concretely, this is the tension between history as a science and history as art). Nevertheless, the point is that historians and the general public are always reshaping historical understanding, always finding new evidence, always interrogating sources in new ways. Revision is not some sort of alien process destroying the fabric of traditional understanding; it is a fundamental component of the historian's craft.

In the last few weeks, there was a news story that caught my eye, which in many respects punched home this point for me, particularly since we had just talked about this issue in a number of my classes this semester. According to a report in the Guardian, a group of paleontologists excavating in Georgia (in Central Asia, not the southern US) uncovered potential Homo erectus fossils dating back 1.8 million years ago. The existence of the fossils in that date range challenges the traditional view that these early Hominids developed in Africa only and then migrated out to the rest of Eurasia roughly 1 million years ago:

"The Dmanisi fossils are extremely important in showing us a very primitive stage in the evolution of Homo erectus," said Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. "They raise important questions about where that species originated."

While not definitive in any sense, this discovery contributes to the on-going revision of our historical understanding of early Hominid migration and the origins of humanity. And that is good...and normal. Welcome to history.

Thinking 9 to 5; What a Way to Make a Living...

I have been slowly but surely groping my way back towards a scholarship mindset, after being distracted for the last few months by more sundry issues (job-hunting; logistics of moving an academic office across the state, etc) and more novel pursuits (tattoos; fitness program; vacation glut, etc). I have a number of different irons in the fire all waiting for me pull them out and beat them with mallets, including a few smaller academic tasks I have put off for far too long (book reviews, manuscript reviews, and so on). No plans to go into great detail or specifics right now, but I thought I could provide a brief glimpse into what is sitting on my desk waiting to be read (or read again) as I rev up the academic engine. Consider this a little hint of the different topics and issues I am grappling with right now in my work. These are in no particular order:

Academic To-Do List

Jan Zielonka, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union (OUP, 2006).

Andreas Faludi and Bas Waterhout, The Making of the European Spatial Development Perspective (Routledge: 2002).

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, ed., The European's Burden: Global Imperialism in EU Expansion (Peter Lang, 2006).

Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella, Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 2008).

Gary Murphy and Niamh Puirseil, "'Is it a New Allowance?' Irish Entry to the EEC and Popular Opinion," Irish Political Studies 23, no.4 (December 2008): 533-553.

Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840-1930 (CUP, 2008).

Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origins of Modern Building Types (Routledge, 1993).

James Schmiechen, "The Victorians, the Historians, and the Idea of Modernism," American Historical Review 93, no.2 (April 1988): 287-316.

Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (Routledge, 2000).

And in terms of non-academic reading, I'm still trying to find the time to finish Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars. Nearly there on that one.

What Am I Listening to Lately?

I haven't done an iPod post in a while, so why not now? But instead of listing the latest albums, I'll do a short list of the last 10 songs I bought & downloaded off the internet (in this case iTunes). See if you can tell what decade of music has gripped me lately. The songs go from most recent purchase backwards in the order that I bought them:

1. Radiohead "Paranoid Android"
2. Radiohead "Creep"
3. Butthole Surfers "Pepper"
4. Monster Magnet "Space Lord"
5. Ween "Push Th' Little Daisies"
6. The Flaming Lips "She Don't Use Jelly"
7. Foo Fighters 'Breakout"
8. Bush "Greedy Fly"
9. Nirvana "Sappy (B-Side)"
10. Boys Noize "Starter"

Photoland: Disney Vacation

Okay, in the throes of my head cold/swine flu/consumption, I have managed to cull down the 166 photos I took this last week on our Disney family vacation to a choice 48 or so. And of course, I posted them to Flickr and now have them in a photo set, the link for which you can find here:

Disney Family Vacation Aug 09

Enjoy people!