Category: Carroll Reflections

Curious David Redux: Dropping Off the Net

Once I have tearfully witnessed Commencement, I don my invisibility cloak.  From the perception of many persons used to finding me ubiquitous, I disappear from the Net. Summer is a time for being outdoors, for travel, for gardening, for playing with children, for taking advantage of our living on North Lake and for being mentored by Leo the Great Pyrenees.

Here are prior expressed summer ruminations when Robin the Newf mentored me.

Reading with the Newf

After last semester I pretty much dropped off the Net for a couple of months (due to an unreliable home networking situation) and spent time reading printed books, hard copies of magazine subscriptions and paper newspapers. I highly recommend it. I am convinced that online reading is a different experience. I look forward to reading Naomi Baron’s latest thoughts on this.

Here are books I found well worth my having read:

  1. Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things– praised by several of my favorite contemporary authors David Mitchell, Philip Pullman, and Yann Martel.
  2. John Scalzi’s Lock In: A Novel of the Near Future.
  3. David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks.
  4. Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age.
  5. Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous
  6. Andy Weir’s The Martian

I presently am finishing Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and am looking forward to reading Ann Morgan‘s The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe when it becomes available in the US in May 2015. Before then I plan to read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

Tomorrow, after my classes, I’ll invite my students into my office to take any books I have read. It always pleases me to see them walk off excitedly with some pleasure reading.

What books do you recommend that I read? That I encourage my students to read?

Mapping New Directions for the Writings of Curious David: Winding Up or Winding Down?

David Simpson Teaching 1

Leo at Central Bark Day 1

Now that I’ve returned to writing this blog with some regularity, I’ve begun to have a sense of the directions I hope to take it—or it to take me. My present thoughts are to write more regularly, to do more collaborative writing with students (my students write so well—here are Arianna’s thoughts on “engagement”), and occasionally to write a lengthy Chronicle of Higher Education or New York Times quality thought piece (such as a response to this interesting survey about “faculty engagement“).

I have just finished rereading Janet Majure’s wonderful Teach Yourself Visually WordPress, and have benefited much from studying online WordPress instructional resources.   Consequently, I feel I now have an ability to master and manage this WordPress.com blogging software.

Some of my most creative bursts of ideas are engendered after extensive manual labor cutting grass, chain-sawing, picking apples, walking the dog and being engaged in other outdoor physical or recreational activity at North Lake.I’m thinking that one distinct thread of writing I want to explore will deal with technology applications to higher education. Another will have the theme of “David in Carroll Land” (perhaps co-authored with invited students, alumni, or other members of the Carroll family). A third will deal with whatever comes to mind (as has been in the past). A fourth focus will deal with contemporary or local issues, and a fifth will just be intended to provoke thinking—perhaps though parody.

I welcome any reader feedback about these new directions. Am I being too ambitious? Will I have any readers? Is this a positive direction to go—or is it, in fact, directionless?

Blogs post topics  that I’ve been considering writing about in the near future include:

  • How can students best be served by academic advising?
  • My last lecture (things I would finally say)
  • Thank you, Diederik Stapel, for the lessons you taught me by your dishonesty.
  • Global Education
  • My most (in)formative learning experiences
  • Lessons learned from my dogs
  • (Oh) Dear Carroll Alumni
  • On Immortality
  • Time
  • How technology distances/enables/empowers/enslaves us
  • Reaching out, reaching within
  • How to kill a college
  • Loss of innocence
  • Kindness
  • The psychology of … (curiosity, religion)
  • Why I don’t give a Twit
  • Where do writing ideas come from?
  • What I wanna be when I grow up?
  • Distinguishing Science from Pseudo Science
  • Language—Leaving no Rosetta stone unturned
  • What is meant by “engaged: faculty and students?

Which of these, dear reader would you like to see and, hopefully, discuss? I welcome your input, encouragement, and assistance.



Retrospective Thinking: How much tinkering should one do with a course that seems to work well?

I continue to experiment with my “best” course to make it better by finding the right balance of technology-assisted and personally- delivered instruction. I have been pleased at the helpfulness, useful feedback and receptiveness of students as we “experiment.”

I just made a Screenflow screencast of what I taught in lab this week (using SPSS to create a scatterplot, calculate Pearson’s r, and do simple linear regression).

This time I published it on YouTube rather than on Vimeo.
I also, in response to student feedback, created some Quizlet study materials. Click the Quizlet link to try them.
A next step will be to involve students in the creation of such materials—rather than my doing so. That may wait until next year, however, since I want to  introduce this year’s students to instruction in using Survey Monkey survey creation software.
Please go here to evaluate the video shown above
It would be fun to teach an entire course on these topics.

 
 

Carroll Moments…

Tonight I’ll finish reading Meg Wolitzer’s novel The Interestings. I teased my student assistants recently that I’d love to follow the trajectory of their lives over the next thirty years as Meg Wolitzer does her characters.In some ways I have been able to do that for past students, by comparing where they are now (as conveyed to me by Facebook, Linkedin, and campus visits) with the information I have kept in their advising folders—photos, letters, occasionally even a paper they wrote. Recently I was reunited with a former student (selfie available upon request) whose daughter might well be enrolling this year and might even be assigned to work with me. So many memories triggered by the Carroll chimes, familiar places, and familiar faces. Do feel free to share your Carroll Moments with me…
Below are some photos from a number of years ago. Precious Carroll moments which evoke a number of stories about you!
 
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Decluttering Revisited


I seem to return to certain topics—like reducing virtual desk top clutter. I am once again in the process of reviewing “applications”—I’ve installed (first on my Mac, then on my Ipads, then on my PC’s).I read a thoughtful piece in the New York Times this morning suggesting that the urge to declutter or the perceptions of succeeding in the task may be misguided.And I just ordered a copy of a revised Stephen Covey book to assist in my reordering my priorities.
I have a goal of reducing the 37-years of accumulated office clutter by pulling together all the institutional research have done the past 37 years (thank you former research assistants) and combining it with present data collection processes. however, I am amused and annoyed to discover how technology sometimes makes data acquisition more difficult.
Right now two of my student research assistants are helping me pull together a blog piece dedicated to the Carroll alumni I have known as students across the past 37 years. Take a peak at a work in progress.

Let me know if you’d like a picture of you from year’s gone by. I’ll trade you for one of me OR of you today.

 

Nifty Shades of Buzz-Transparently Attempting to Engage the Reader as I Move Forward with Rebranding:)

Branding Love
Three books that I have reread the past few years are George Orwell (Eric Blair)’s 1984 and Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

George Orwell fascinates me on a number of accounts—his mastery of language, his prescience, and his outlook about politics. While I was faculty president, I gave copies of his book to people as a reminder of the chilling threats and effects of totalitarianism and the dangers of doublespeak. Lewis Carroll, though more playful, also is masterful with language and with alerting us to the the dangers of when illogic becomes the norm and when language is misused and abused. I find my institution’s decisions a few year’s ago to redefine the word “department” in our Carroll argot and the changing of our name from “college” to “university” Humpty-Dumpty-like. And the “buzzwords”  and evolving (sometime assaulting) lexicons creeping into our everyday discourse are painfully annoying, hinder communication and add many shades of gray to my beard. I am abuzz with buzzwords
Buzz:

  1. hum
  2. murmur
  3. high
  4. bombination
  5. drone
  6. purr
  7. whirring
  8. sibilation
  9. hiss
  10. whiz
  11. sigh
  12. rustle
  13. sough
  14. rumor
  15. report
  16. gossip
  17. heresay
  18. scuttlebut
  19. scandal
  20. small talk
  21. chitchat
  22. fizzle
  23. sizzle
  24. Look here for more here: 

It is interesting how the “buzzwords” (e.g. transparency, branding, moving forward, engagement, buzz) have positive connotations for some professionals and create a need create a need for a swear jar or playing buzz word bingo for others.
Gotta buzz the dog outside before buzzing a friend to see if he wants to play buzzword bingo tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll buzz over to Melibee to read some of their wonderful posts about global issues and making the world a better place.

 

Adventures in Carroll Land – I've been teaching here half my life…

Amy and David—Photo stored on Google Drive
Identity Confusion
Two soon-to-be graduates Phoumany and Ryan
Phoumany, Catrina, and Amy
Ryan, Liz, and Maxine
Patiently waiting for Saint Nick.
Rapping with the Pink Biped Who Feeds Me

On Engaging Students (Part 2): Adventures with StarQuiz and SPSS


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Good recent research suggests that repeated testing enhances learning. How can I best incorporate those important findings into my courses? As a beginning, I have revisited a piece of software,StarQuiz, (originally developed by a high school student) that has proven useful and reliable since I discovered it about 10 years ago. There is something comforting about using a piece of software for almost 15 years and across many evolving operating systems without a glitch.
I am considering incorporating it into my PSY205 “Statistics and Experimental Design Course” —if the students can demonstrate to methat it enhances their mastery of the course’s material. I welcome student feedback—and suggestions from other readers of software they consider better.
To try it enter your name—you need not enter your email address. If a “David” has already tried it, enter a different name (e.g. Voldemoort).
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Here is a link to one of the two practice tests I shared with students in my class today. I encouraged students to collaborate, use notes, and be mutually supportive of each other in the process.
Here is a link to a second example which I introduced in my class.
And here is a review of SPSS (with bloopers!) Keep those constructive comments coming

                     (and you international viewers, I welcome your comments, too).