On banning laptops for note-taking in class.

As an avid reader of University Diaries, I have banned the use of laptops during lectures because I don’t want people surfing the web when they should be paying attention to the material upon which they’ll eventually be tested. Besides, I always said to myself, I survived college and grad school taking notes on pen and paper so why shouldn’t they?

Now it seems there actually might be advantages to taking notes on your computer. Heck, I think I want one of those programs.

What do you think I should do now?

More Australia pictures (finally)

Part of the Archibald Fountain in Hyde Park, Sydney:

My son Everett feeding a kangaroo:

The rain forest in the Blue Mountains:

Two tasmanian devils.

The one everyone knows:

The real one:

And a little natural history straight from Slate:

The world’s most famous Tasmanian devil, the character Taz from Looney Tunes, is aggressive and excitable. Are the real ones like that, too?

Yes, especially when feeding. Although devils do hunt other animals—wallabies, possums, and wombats are especially attractive—they’re primarily scavengers. They scavenge in groups of five to 12, possibly because it’s easier to pull apart a carcass together than alone. The competition for limited resources makes each devil highly protective of its share of the food. While eating, they emit a blood-curdling screech and nip at one another’s faces, often drawing blood.

Mating is also a violent process. Males fight over females, and whoever wins grabs the female by the scruff of her neck and drags her back to a den, where they mate. (Watch two male devils fight over a female here.) The male must then defend the female during her 21-day gestation period, lest other males come and try to mate with her, too. The babies also have to fight one another—female devils give birth to 40 or 50 young every season, all of whom must compete for their mother’s four teats.

The article goes on to say that they’re timid and withdrawn when not feeding or mating, just like the ones we’ve seen here in wildlife parks. I’ll have to wait for another trip to go to Tasmania itself.

The problem isn’t Dan Brown. It’s some of his readers.

Ross Douhat seems to think that Dan Brown is trying to take over the world or something:

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

Oh no, learning!  Sorry Ross, but Brown hasn’t said anything like what you seem to be suggesting.  This is Brown from the link provided in the above paragraph of Douhat’s column:

Secrets interest us all, I think. For me, writing about clandestine material keeps me engaged in the project. Because a novel can take upwards of a year to write, I need to be constantly learning as I write, or I lose interest. Researching and writing about secretive topics helps remind me how fun it is to “spy” into unseen worlds, and it motivates me to try to give the reader that same experience. Lots of people wrote me after Digital Fortress amazed that the National Security Agency is for real. I’ve already started getting similar mail from Angels & Demons–people shocked to learn about the Illuminati brotherhood, antimatter technology, or the inner workings of the Vatican election. My goal is always to make the character’s and plot be so engaging that readers don’t realize how much they are learning along the way.

I believe the literary term for this is realism.  It’s no different than when Tom Wolfe visited colleges all over the country to write I Am Charlotte Simmons.  It’s research in the service of making fiction believable.  Just because some people take Brown’s fiction literally doesn’t make him evil; it just makes them stupid.  Indeed, with The Da Vinci Code Brown was quite explicit about his take on this question:

The Da Vinci Code is a novel and therefore a work of fiction. While the book’s characters and their actions are obviously not real, the artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals depicted in this novel all exist (for example, Leonardo Da Vinci’s paintings, the Gnostic Gospels, Hieros Gamos, etc.). These real elements are interpreted and debated by fictional characters. While it is my belief that some of the theories discussed by these characters may have merit, each individual reader must explore these characters’ viewpoints and come to his or her own interpretations. My hope in writing this novel was that the story would serve as a catalyst and a springboard for people to discuss the important topics of faith, religion, and history.

I wish more organized religions were this open-minded.

The History Engine.

The new issue of Perspectives is devoted to History and the New Media. It’s going to take me a long time to get through everything online (particularly while I’m nominally on vacation), but since I once heard Ed Ayers discuss history as an engine, I was intrigued by the articles on “The History Engine” at the University of Richmond (which apparently derived from his metaphor). This is from the about page:

The History Engine project aims to enhance historical education and research for teachers, students, and scholars alike. The Engine allows undergraduate professors to introduce a more collaborative and creative approach to history into their classrooms, while maintaining rigorous academic standards. The core of the HE project is student-written episodes—individual snippets of daily life throughout American history from the broadest national event to the simplest local occurrence. Students construct these episodes from one or more primary sources found in university and local archives, using historical context gleaned from secondary sources to round out their analysis. Students then post their entries in our cumulative database, giving their classmates and fellow participants around the country the opportunity to read and engage with their work.

This sounds good to me, but my problem is that the people who are selling it in the pages of Perspectives don’t seem to be doing it very well:

It would be hard to deny that the digital revolution has changed our classrooms. PowerPoint has changed how we present our lectures, e-mail has altered how we communicate with our students, and classroom management tools—such as Blackboard and Moodle—have revised the way we give assignments and circulate syllabi. Technology has even changed how students cheat, as online content and cell phone texting provide new avenues for plagiarism, forcing us to recalibrate how we formulate and grade assignments….

Yet we began to wonder if we might be missing something by asking students to write papers in the same format their predecessors did more than a generation ago. In a traditional writing assignment, for example, there are few opportunities for students to collaborate. Too often the limitations of the classroom make it unwieldy to ask students to share their papers, research, and insights with one another, even though the benefits of such sharing might be significant. In the same vein, the typical writing assignment presents few opportunities for linking together the discoveries of students with similar findings uncovered by their peers. Several students may independently produce insightful work on parallel topics—such as religion, politics, or race relations—but have no way to connect that work together or even realize they have common insights worth sharing with one another. Technology, it seemed, might offer avenues around these problems and perhaps allow us to amplify the power of the traditional essay assignment. So we began to ask ourselves: “What would a writing assignment look like in the digital age?”

I like the project and I think I plan to use it to help teach research skills in classes where full-fledged research papers are not feasible. Nevertheless, this kind of pitch makes my skin crawl. Why do assignments have to change to meet the mindset of today’s students rather than the students for assignments? After all, even if the book is going to go digital, we still have to teach students how to read well. This is a good project and I look forward to getting more time to read what they have up there, but this smacks of pandering.

In the part I left out in the quote above, the authors praise the traditional essay before they pitch their project as something better. But why does this have to be a competition? On first glance, this seems like a good supplement rather than a replacement for traditional writing assignments. And if this turns off me, imagine how a professor twenty years older than me will react to that pitch? If you think PowerPoint is the Devil why on Earth would you ever bother to click that link?

With the pigeons.

Sydney has got to be the only city in the world where you can find ibises traveling in packs with the pigeons.

Australia Pictures II

These were actually taken by my daughter, Jaclyn. The Sydney Harbour Bridge:

The Three Sisters rock formation from Echo Point in the Blue Mountains:

Little old me:

Wombat vs. Stimpy

Wombat:

Stimpy:

See what I mean?

Australia Pictures I

Obligatory iconic building:

Obligatory iconic animal (in profile!):

My daughter Jaclyn with a rather large snake:

Wombats: A preview

I got this one from Flickr:

While I like this picture, it doesn’t show the really extraordinary thing about wombats. To me at least, that would be their girth. They look more like Ren and Stimpy than actual animals.