Teacher at workshop

I'm at the Realizing Student Potential conference all day today, so will be off-line much of today. INFS 1200, I know I owe you a TON of feedback; I'm working on it!

Writing to Legislators Survey Results

The results from our very informal survey are in! I asked:

The 2009 federal and state legislative sessions are in full swing. Do you contact your legislator(s) about issues that are important to you?

Responses were:

Absolutely! That's what democracy is about!	2 (50%)
I might respond to a survey or petition, but I don't really write or call my legislators.	2 (50%)
I've never contacted one of my legislators.	0 (0%)

Votes so far: 4

Only 4 of you voted, so that was kind of a bummer. Especially because contacting our legislators is how we make our voices known in our government.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons licensed photo from Mulad's photostream on Flickr

Spring 2009 Intent to Graduate

Spring "Intent to Graduate" cards are due THIS Thursday, Feb. 26 [that's tomorrow!]. If you are eligible to graduate this term (Spring 2009) you must submit your completed intent card to the Records & Registration office, T.2200, by the deadline. This form is required for any students that wish to participate in the May 2009 Graduation ceremony.

Photo credit to the Creative Commons licensed image from Robert Crumb's phot0stream on Flickr.com

Instructor update

I know some of you have posted questions in D2L and I have not had time to respond. I was in librarian interviews for much of the afternoon, and have been working on a couple of big national reports during my workdays this week. Tonight, my son has a hockey game, so I will not be online this evening. I will do my best to respond to posted questions tomorrow morning. Thanks for your patience.

Culture Cafe: Diversity Workshop, Part II with Jermaine Davis

For those on or around campus...

The next Culture Cafe will be held on Wednesday, February 25, 2009 from 1:00 - 3:00 PM at the Helland Center.

Mr. Jermaine Davis was the keynote speaker at the Student Success Day event held on February 12, 2009. The focus of his presentation was on “Diversity Competence: The Art of Understanding and Communicating Effectively with Others”. The response to his presentation was overwhelmingly positive leading us to ask him to return for a more in-depth discussion on diversity issues specific to the MCTC campus and to explore proactive solutions to these concerns.

Google and out of print books

Photo Credits: From the Creative Commons License posted works on Flickr of rjnagle / Robert Nagle

On All Things Considered, they recently discussed Google and their charges to access out-of-print books that they have scanned. For the most part, the books Google digitized came from agreements that Google reached with libraries to scan items from the library collections, including Harvard, where Robert Darnton is the head librarian. That aspect apparently landed on the editing room floor, as I think this piece on ATC makes the library representative sound petulant. If Darnton is upset, it's probably because Google got the access to these books in the first place from libraries. The payment piece came from a lawsuit that Google settled with the publishers and authors of the works in question; works for which there is still an active copyright, but the works themselves are no longer in print.

What do you think? Post here in the comments or in D2L.

MLA citation:

"Librarian Opposes Google's Library Fees." All Things Considered. 21 Feb. 2009. National Public Radio. 23 Feb. 2009 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100969810

Valentine's Day Survey Results

It appears that most folks responding to the survey are not huge fans of Valentine's Day. Did any of you do something fun? We had "Family Fondue Night," with three fondue courses: cheese (okay, I admit to just scooping out some "chili con queso" snack dip and heating it up), main course, and chocolate dessert fondue with fruit and cake. Yum!

I love Valentine's Day!	1 (9%)
Just another Hallmark holiday	9 (81%)
Valentine's Day is coming?	1 (9%)
What's Valentine's Day?	0 (0%)

Votes so far: 11

Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes

The New York Times recently published an article on grading and student expectations. Since grading has begun in earnest in all of my courses now, and there are many questions about grades and expectations, I thought this article might spur some discussion, either here in the comments or in D2L.

Note that the following citation for the article follows MLA style, save for the hanging indent, because web formatting doesn't love hanging indents. Blogger also doesn't allow underlining, so in lieu of underlining, I've used italics.

Roosevelt, Max. "Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes." New York Times. 17 Feb. 2009. New York Times Company. 19 Feb. 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/education/18college.html

EXPLORADOME

For those of you on or around campus...



MCTC's Science Club is proud to present THE EXPLORADOME, From the Minnesota Planetarium
In the cafeteria, Thursday Feb 19th; from 12pm – 6pm
What is this and how can you experience it? It is a portable planetarium that runs interactive video shows of the universe; just show up, no appointment necessary. It's VERY cool and fun! Refer questions to mctcscienceclub@yahoo.com or contact the Science Club advisor: Rekha.Ganaganur@minneapolis.edu

on again off again

My home internet access has been going down periodically over the past few days. I've been haranguing Comcast regularly about it, but it still seems to be a problem. It has meant that I have not been able to grade and comment on work as quickly as I would have liked to over the past few days. I am working hard to catch up with your postings and grading this weekend.

Home tech woes mostly fixed

I was able to get my internet access up and going again at home, so that's all good again. Now I'm fighting a nasty cold, and was out of the office yesterday trying to get better. It's been a rough winter!

I've been looking for questions in online office and in the general course questions and assignment forums in D2L. But, if you've posted questions to me in your work group discussion forums or in the topical discussions, I may not have seen them. Thanks for your patience as I work through your postings.

What Wikipedia would look like if on paper, broken down

I found this on Flickr. Note this is licensed under Creative Commons, which gives additional permissions beyond the fair use exception to US and international copyright law.

We're talking about Wikipedia, among other things, in INFS 1000 right now. So, to move beyond posting random funny stuff to finding the teachable moment, what about this image rings true? INFS 1000 folks, post comments in D2L; others can add your comments here.

Student Success Day Tomorrow!

For those of you on campus, I strongly encourage you to attend the Student Success Day events. In fact, there's extra credit in it for you. If you go to SSD, and attend Cheaper Means to an End: Free Tools for Creating Electronic Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations, a session being led by INFS 1000 instructor Jennifer Sippel and the Amazing John Daniels, library technician, then come back and post two tips you picked up from the session in the Hallway Conversations forum within D2L or as a comment to this blog post, I'll give you 2 extra credit points toward your final course grade.

Check-in begins at 8:30 a.m. at Welcome Tables in the T Building Skyway. Sessions run until 7:50 p.m. Students will get printed programs at check-in. A link to the PDF program is on the MCTC home page.

The keynote speaker, Jermaine Davis, will speak at 12:15 and 5:45 p.m. on "Diversity Competence: The Art of Understanding and Communicating Effectively with Others," in the T Building Cafeteria.

Results from the distance student survey

Yes, I live more than 30 miles from campus and am enrolled in only online courses	3 (27%)
I live more than 30 miles from campus, but I come to campus for some classes	1 (9%)
I live closer than 30 miles to campus, but I still only take online classes	1 (9%)
I live within 30 miles of campus and have at least 1 on campus course.	6 (54%)

Votes so far: 11

We just created a bit of knowledge! We know now that for Spring 2009, of the 11 people that responded to the survey, over half of you are taking an online course although you're also taking face to face courses. We also know that nearly 1/3 (27%) of respondents meet MCTC Library's definition of a distance student: a student living more than 30 miles from campus AND is only enrolled in online courses.

Now, what could we do with this information? We could do further studies to find out why students choose to take a combination of online and face-to-face courses. Is it simply convenience? Is it knowing one's learning styles - maybe for some subjects, you can learn online but for others you know you need to be in a face-to-face course? We could look to find other data to see if other studies support our findings here. We could try to get a larger sample than 11. That's only about 1/4 of the number of students enrolled in my courses this semester.

What ideas do you have for what we could do with this information?

Tip of the Week

From the MCTC Student Planner:

Make a schedule that shows your typical week's obligations.

My addition: okay, so then what?

We often underestimate how long it takes to do some of the regular tasks in our lives. We think, oh, it will take me two minutes to do that. Well, maybe it DOES take two minutes to actually do something, but there's 10 minutes of start-up and clean-up involved as well and the two minute activity really takes 12.

I live in a suburb; I nearly always forget it can take up to 10 minutes to get to the freeway from my house when I'm thinking about how long it will take me to get there.

I have two young children; they're 10 and 6 (and a half, I've been recently reminded - 6 1/2, MOM!). To get out the door with young kids, I read somewhere to give yourself 15 minutes per kid. So, if you want to leave at 7, for two kids you would need to start getting ready to go at 6:30. I thought, "no way." Well, I've learned: "Yes, way." As an adult, it takes me about 5 minutes to get out the door. Gotta get my coffee, make sure I have my cell phone, and oh yeah, get the lunch out of the fridge... I've found that it reliably takes about 7 minutes per kid to get out the door in the morning during the winter. So that means that if I want to be in the car, driving away, at a certain time we need to start leaving at least 15 minutes ahead of time to not be scrambling.

So, what does this mean to you? When you're planning your studying schedule, we forget to plan for how long "life" will take. How long does grocery shopping REALLY take on the weekends? Maybe the actual store time is under an hour, but what about getting there, and then putting away the wretched groceries after you get home? How about that Target run? You THINK you can get in and out in 15 minutes; can you really? Heck, I can't. So, the next thing you know, your morning errands took 3 hours and you now have to leave for work in less than an hour. Or whatever.

The "now what?" part of this week's tip is to think through how long your regular tasks really take you, and to plan for that. How much of your week is spent working? How much sleeping? After you subtract 8 hours for working and 8 hours for sleeping (you can't shortchange sleep without hurting your body), you have 8 hours left. Maybe it takes you an hour each way to work and back - that's two hours total each work day; now you're down to 6 hours left over. Have to eat, right? It takes about 30 minutes minimum for each meal x 3 so that's an hour and a half. Now we're down to 4.5 hours. You need to bathe and care for yourself, so that's another hour out of your day. 3.5 hours left.

And, we haven't read stories to our babies, gone for coffee with our friends, screwed around on Facebook, cleaned our bathrooms, walked our pets, helped our older kids with their homework... all those other things we like to and need to do to make our lives richer.

How many classes are you taking this semester? Did you know that most instructors think you should be spending roughly 3 hours outside of class time for every credit hour of the course each week? For a 3 credit face-to-face class, that means your instructor expect you to spend 9 hours outside of class on readings, homework, etc. In an online class, that means about 12 hours of study per week for that 3-credit class. That works out to about 2 hours a day, with one day off (I'm a math wiz, I know. :-)). Per class. How many credits are you enrolled in? How much time do you have available?

Home technology woes

Two steps forward, one step back...

My internet access at home is on the fritz, so I won't be able to be online outside of regular business hours until that changes. I just wanted to let you know so that if you post a question or email me, my ability to respond will be somewhat hampered.

INFS 1200 students - we have a webinar scheduled for tonight (2/5); I may have to cancel. Check course news for more info.

Master of overestimation...

Okay, I completely underestimated the demands on my time and overestimated how much I'd be able to be online over the weekend. I'm still in Nebraska, and returning to MN tomorrow, so will be driving much of the day on Tuesday. I will look at questions posted in any general areas and in Online Office tonight, but will probably not have time to do much more before Wednesday. If there are any crises that need to be dealt with, rest assured that I will arrange for any deadline extensions necessary due to my absence.