Tried to sing this title to the tune of “Waiting for a Star to Fall,” but no luck. It appears now that I won’t have access to play the game until 4AM tomorrow, so no dice tonight. 

Been writing a lot, but not here, so here’s a post that contains several threads, kind of like an appetizer sampler plate like we used to get at restaurants back in the day.

Terminal Illin’

The Term is over, and now I’m chillin. Thinking about the term a lot, and I have been writing out an extension of some of my public speaking ideas I hinted at in the last post, but the overall feeling of the term is that it is good that it is over, and not all illnesses are virus-bourne. My self-diagnosis is:

• I assign too much work for students to do

• That work is  primarily writing-heavy. If it’s not, it’s not “serious”

• This means the courses have a negative expectation, i.e. “What will this class take” is the first question rather than “What will I get?” as the first response to the class session. 

• Video chat is not the model for course delivery online (webex, zoom, etc). This is not a classroom and a classroom is not needed, it is accidental to teaching.

The prescription is:

• Assign less, or if you do the same amount lower the stakes. Like a lot.

• Become fluid and comfortable in oral assessment. Helps with the stakes to make an assignment to record some oral responses to questions on your phone and post them.

• Writing-intensive does not mean writing-heavy. When assigning writing, make sure that it is attended to, not a background mode of transmission of the evidence of learning.

• Treat class as episodic, and resolution driven – with arcs – so the expectation becomes “What will I get today” when engaging with the class. Explore playwriting/scriptwriting for ideas.

• Streaming is the way a class should go. See Twitch. Streaming with a chat room. That will increase engagement joy and positive expectation. 

So now time to get the technical parts of all this arranged at some point in the summer. Lower the stakes, increase the frequency, don’t fall prey to the idea that writing is somehow more real or superior to the oral (Derrida), and increase frequency of student/professor verbal interaction plus decrease time of assessment of exercises. 

Learning to transition totally to Discord as well, which is a steeper learning curve than I thought looking at everything from Blackboard that it is going to need to replicate. We’ll only have to visit Blackboard for formal grading I think. I can deliver all feedback and commentary on assignments via Blackboard, and students can easily post work for peer review and commentary. 

Podcasting

I think podcasting is the future of higher ed more or less, and what got me thinking about it is how easy it is to produce for those of us on the teaching side of things, how easy it is to share it, and how nice of an advertisement it becomes for our university when we make them somewhat public. 

The value of digital audio is underrated. It’s low bandwidth (can be downloaded quickly onto any device with any sort of bad internet). Takes up little space (MP3 and Org Vorbis are very small files). You are immersed in it if it’s prepared well (all teachers should have a decent, stereo microphone, at least a condenser USB for this, but still cheaper than cameras/video production for YouTube) and the student can listen while doing other things (elder/childcare, housework, family business work, food prep, etc.) All this and a phone is a natural place to consume it makes it ideal in my mind for course delivery. 

Studying how to present on radio, how to voiceover, and how to speak dynamically and interestingly for the ear is on the list. I model someone I think is quite good at speaking for radio, Dan Patrick, a sports journalist who has a morning sports talk show on AM radio nationally in the U.S. There are other models as well. 

Delivering a whole course through high-quality, episodic audio, with conversations and with a bend toward it being desirable to listen to would be the model. Practicing that with the re-launch of In the Bin, which seems to be taking off pretty well. 

The Library

I’m always grateful to have a research library, but today after looking for a book and realizing that it is locked away in my university library with no way to get to it for the foreseeable future, I am even more grateful for the amount of digital resources out there. 

Feeling very lucky to have great internet, and after tweaking this terrible Verizon FIOS router today a few times, I think I finally have apartment-wide coverage that won’t stutter or hesitate, or go dark for a few minutes at least a couple of times a day.

Internet access is so important that I wonder if the university is doing it wrong. Why not give the students a subsidy of some kind for home internet, or wireless internet from their phone provider (hotspot, etc) and pay for that by reducing the quality of the internet provided on campus? I know private carriers in New York City, even the public WiFi offered through the kiosks sometimes feels faster than our campus WiFi, so why invest so heavily in it?

I’m also way behind where I wanted to be on my book that I’m writing, and I have a couple of other ideas for drafts of things to get out before September. Already finished one book chapter, and waiting on a round of edits for a second to come back to me. Working on a couple of essays too. But honestly, when I really look at my workflow, the things that are most engaging and most exciting to work on are the prepared orations for podcasting. There’s something really incredible about preparing to speak. This is why I can’t be a composition teacher even though I know I would love to be one. Composition is so important, but it’s also so narrow. Oratory is my thing, pretty certain of it now, and although I might not be great at it, I really do enjoy working on it, preparing it, and thinking about how it’s going to be heard. I like thinking about the audience out there, hearing it, and wondering what they must be thinking; what they weren’t thinking before they heard what I said, how I said it.