LCCC to allow access to Student Evaluations of Teachers

from an article in the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram:

Some instructors at Lorain County Community College may find classrooms either very crowded or very empty next semester, depending on what former students say about their teaching methods and style.

LCCC student Daniel Barnicle of Westlake, who is running for Student Senate president, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the teacher evaluations students complete at the end of each semester because he wants that information made available to students.

Marcia Ballinger, vice president of strategic and institutional development at LCCC, said the evaluations are public records and will be made available.

I am not sure, at first glance, how I feel about this. I suppose I have mixed feelings. Ultimately, I suppose, I am OK with this. There are already many informal means that students use to discuss teachers - might as well allow access to the "official record" on the matter. If anything, it will help students get a more comprehensive idea of what the instructor is like - as opposed to the limited view one might get through word of mouth. The truth shall set you free - as they say.

I am sure, however, that other instructors have different views of this. What is your opinion?

Professor bans laptops from class

from a USA Today article:

A group of University of Memphis law students are passing a petition against a professor who banned laptop computers from her classroom because she considers them a distraction in lectures.

On March 6, Professor June Entman warned her first-year law students by e-mail to bring pens and paper to take notes in class.

"My main concern was they were focusing on trying to transcribe every word that was I saying, rather than thinking and analyzing," Entman said Monday. "The computers interfere with making eye contact. You've got this picket fence between you and the students."

While I feel that in most cases, taking notes with paper and pen works better than taking them on a laptop, I disagree with the professor banning laptops. After all, a preference for paper and pen notetaking is simply a preference - based on many factors - age, typing skills, penmanship (lol) etc... To impose one's own preferences without a solid reason is overstepping the bounds of a professor. Whose classroom is it anyway?

The argument that some students are ineffective taking notes with laptops is meaningless, as there are students who are ineffective taking notes with paper and pen. A professor ought to, within reasons, adapt to the learning styles and preferences of the students. Allowing students to use laptops in class seems to be a reasonable adaptation for a professor to make.

Comments on Friedman Roundtable

The CTE's discussion group on Thomas Friedman's THE WORLD IS FLAT has concluded.

Here are some comments from some of the faculty that attended:

Mike Substelny, Engineering

As I discussed in the group, enrollment in the Engineering and Engineering Technology programs in which I teach has dropped sharply in the last seven years. This semester enrollment is so low that 100% of the classes I am teaching are independent studies. As no program can survive on one or two students per year, I expect the handful of remaining students to have serious problems completing degrees as their classes, degree programs, and academic departments close their doors.

This affects my answers to all questions in two ways:

1) Friedman stresses the importance of engineering and technology, despite America’s recent aversion to these careers. A flat world does not care whether America produces engineers, but I do. Thus I will increase my efforts to inspire children to pursue engineering and technology. I now believe that events like the Lego Olympiad make a bigger difference than any change I could make to lessons in engineering classes which are certain to be cancelled.
2) I also teach one math class, statistics, which is never cancelled due to low enrollment. This class offers my opportunity to change my teaching because of globalization.


What are 3 specific pieces of content you plan on introducing in your classes because of globalization?
• I will test students on the creation of histograms (in the past I only tested on interpretation of histograms because creating them takes so much time). This will be part of a broader strategy to deepen their communication skills.
• I will add lessons on advanced hypothesis testing. This is a critical decision making tool, and a flat world will be run by the people with good decision making skills. It also raises the bar.
• I will end the class with an advanced critical thinking assignment from current events. Students will use their knowledge of statistics to draw a conclusion about a political poll, drug test, etc. This will push their critical thinking skills, again raising the bar.


What are 3 specific ways you plan on changing how you teach because of globalization?

• I will improve efficiency by helping students learn to use their statistical calculators. In the past I left students to learn their calculators on their own (though I would help one-on-one during office hours), with the theory that they would all own different calculators. But in practice 95% use the same calculator and I could make their learning more efficient by devoting some class time to that calculator.
• I will reduce waste by de-emphasizing the rote mathematics of the class. There is limited value in learning to calculate a standard deviation by hand or memorizing the formula for margin of error for a sample mean. But there is great value in being able to calculate these electronically and make good decisions based on the results.
• It seems like a small thing, but because of globalization I will run the class in metric units.
• Tenative: I would like to add some gaming aspects to the class. Students would compete individually or in teams to make a series of decisions based on statistical analysis. They would earn points for their decisions, not for their calculations.

What are 3 specific ways you will approach your own professional development differently because of globalization?

• Frankly, this experience has shown me that I may be in the wrong field. I was attracted to engineering by the siren song of a guaranteed lucrative career for just two or four years of college. Back in 1982 no one told me I would need to be a lifelong learner. If they had, I would have gone into something else (I definitely should have studied a foreign language). Now that I am a lifelong learner I will broaden my horizons.
• I know I should become more entrepreneurial, but I do not know how to do that.

Larry Worden, Business

In our group discussion and study of the book: “The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman many things were discussed and learned. I would like to share just one area that the world will see more of in the future as companies use their power in controlling their supply chain. Many companies today do not produce their product but purchase the parts and pieces that go into it. Therefore, they become the assemblers and sell the product with their name on it. This name becomes a means of distribution to the world in brand name quality products. General Motors at one time strived to be an automobile manufacture that produced 60+% of their car parts. However they discovered that they could not control the quality as well from the inside as procuring their parts from the outside where they could set the standards for compliance. Thus I share this brief thought:

A positive about globalization:

A society benefit for globalization is that by using the big players in the market field they can enforce a “socially responsible food supply” from global markets. McDonald’s is in such a position as they encourage better management of fisheries to conserve water, energy and waste. Glenn Prickett, senior vice president of Conservation Internal says this: “So what we look for are partners who can put their purchasing power behind a set of environmentally friendly practices in a way that is good for them, works for the producers, and is good for biodiversity. In that way, you can start to capture so many more decision makers… There is no global government authority to protect biodiversity. You have to collaborate with the players who can make a difference, and one of them is McDonald’s”.

Another positive occurrence for globalization is the new HP-Dell-IBM alliance that decided they wanted to see a label on every electronic good stating whether the supply chain that produced it is in compliance with the standards they sat down by it’s alliance. Quoting from Thomas L. Friedman’s book, “The World Is Flat” on Page 299, he writes: “The new Electronics Industry Code of Conduct includes bans on bribes, child labor, embezzlement and extortion, and violations of intellectual property, rules governing usage of wastewater, hazardous materials, pollutants, and regulations on the reporting of occupational injuries. Several major electronics manufacturers who serve the IBM, Dell, and HP supply chains collaborated on writing the code, including Celestica, Flextronics, Jabil, Sanmina-SCI, and Solectron.”

As a concluding point Thomas L. Friedman writes: “…this use of supply chains to create values – not just value – could be a wave of the future.” “We have the power to transmit global governance to our universe of suppliers and employees and consumers, which is a pretty broad universe.” The reason being that companies “…have leverage and are in a position to set standards and [therefore] you have a responsibility to set standards.”

Thnaks to all who attended any of the sessions. It was a lively and informative discussion.

MIT OpenCourseWare and Free Information

MIT offers an incredible range of educational materials as part of its OpenCourseWare project.

The project is

a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT's mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century. It is true to MIT's values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.

"Information wants to be free." is a fundamental part of the hacker ethos. While few may have the resources to duplicate the scope of MIT's efforts, institutions and even individuals can contribute to the sharing of information. One of my goals of this blog provide resources to other faculty inside and out of my own college. It has helped my own professional development even if no one reads it, as it forces me to actively look for material to post and to reflect upon my own teaching. However, my hope is, of course, that a few others read it and find some benefit, either in my own thoughts, or in the resources provided.

Blogs, wikis and other sites (say, flickr or del.icio.us) that allow average people to be creators and not just consumers of information, are helping to make real the vision of Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, who wrote in a 1996 article:

The World Wide Web was designed originally as an interactive world of shared information through which people could communicate with each other and with machines. Since its inception in 1989 it has grown initially as a medium for the broadcast of read-only material from heavily loaded corporate servers to the mass of Internet connected consumers. ... In the future we look toward the web becoming a tool for even smaller groups, families, and personal information systems.

next on my reading list...

...is likely to be Global Values 101: A Short Course

The publisher's site describes the book as follows:

Global Values 101 grew out of one of the most popular courses ever offered at Harvard University, in which some of the most original thinkers of our day sat down with students and explored how ideas have made them-and can make us-more engaged, involved, and compassionate citizens. In these engrossing, essay-length interviews, which address the topics of war, religion, the global economy, and social change, Amy Goodman, host of the popular radio program Democracy Now, speaks about the role of the independent media as gatekeeper and witness; Lani Guinier, author of Tyranny of the Majority, reveals that students' SAT scores more accurately describe the kind of car their parents drive than the grades they will earn in college and shows the way to a more equitable college admissions system; Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, explores the American Dream and exposes the myth of the "good war"; economist Juliet Schor, author of Born to Buy and The Overspent American, explains why Americans are willing to sacrifice quality of life to attain financial success; former "mall rat" Naomi Klein, author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, urges readers to go global while fighting global conglomerates; and Katha Pollitt, author of Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism, employs her incisive wit to explore what it really means to be a feminist in the Twenty First century.

You can download and read the intro, in PDF format

In the recent roundtable I completed for the CTE about Thomas Friedman's book THE WORLD IS FLAT, I posed the question to the group, what college course - existing or new, would they recommend every college student should take. While there was a variety of good answers: statistics, information literacy, history of the 20th century, history of technology, and a few others, I would think the Harvard Course this book is modelled on would be a great addition to any curriculum.

Blogging around the world

Global Voices Online is a great blog that aggregates blog posts from countries around the world. "Global Voices seeks to amplify, curate and aggregate the global conversation online - with a focus on countries and communities outside the U.S. and Western Europe. We are committed to developing tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices everywhere to be heard."

Most interesting about this to me is that this gives people in the United States insight in to the minds of the ordinary people from around the world. This blog does a great job of aggegating blogs from around the world and let them touch us on a grassroots, person to person level.

Here is a sample of a touching, recent post that describes an Iraqi blog:

How do you cope with the sudden death of someone close because of the violence that is gripping Iraq? I guess one way is to blog about it. Sunshine’s close friend, R, lost her father, cousin and uncle in the space of four days. Sunshine was the brave one among her classmates and went to console R:

“But when she said “what I will do with those high marks, my dad is gone , I wish I got low marks & return him back instead….. I pray to god to protect your dad & mom”, at that time I couldn’t control my tears at all , it is hard to do that when you see someone you love is really hurt because of losing someone close …..
That made me think to improve my relationship with my dad , as you know we have bad relationship ,at that night I kissed him ,gave him a hug & wished him a good night, for the first time since a long time , I think he wondered why ???!!!!”

DePauw Professor patents Ed-Tech Tool

From the article:

Technology that started at DePauw University and is now enhancing teaching and learning in classrooms around the nation has resulted in a patent. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has assigned patent #7,003,728 B2 to "System for Knowledge Transfer in a Group Setting." The pen-based technology -- which allows teachers and students to electronically share notes -- was started by Dave Berque, professor of computer science at DePauw, and is now manufactured and marketed by DyKnow.

Walmart 101

A posting on Tomorrow's Professors Blog describes a new curriculum centered around Walmart.

The full curriculum is available online.

Here is an excerpt from the section of the curriculum titled "Why Study Walmart":

What both admirers and critics of Wal-Mart agree on is that Wal-Mart - by virtue of its size, scale, and talent for innovation - is changing the world, or at least accelerating changes underway as a result of globalization. As the largest private employer in the United States, Wal-Mart sets the standard for wages and working conditions in retail, with ripple effects in other sectors. As the nation's largest grocery store, toy store, jewelry store, and third largest pharmacy, it affects rival businesses, large and small. And in its quest for "Always Low Prices," Wal-Mart has helped push manufacturing overseas and revolutionized the global supply chain in the process.