It is with much excitement and gratitude that I again have the good fortune to be a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. I have been getting myself acclimated in the past week, and by the end of this week should be happily settled, with the gracious help of the staff, in room 201. Leaving Brooklyn and NYU was a big step after seven years, but I already feel at home. As the beginning of the semester approaches I anticipate reconnecting with old colleagues and friends, meeting lots of new people, and participating in the research group on cooperation.

With the end of the semester comes the opportunity to review what students think of my teaching. As a (relatively) new teacher I take the reviews seriously. However, with four years of practice and data I do struggle with how to interpret the reviews and use them as constructive feedback that yields measurable improvements in subsequent evaluations.

This is not to say that I have not attempted to improve my teaching. For example, I believe I'm much more consistent in reviewing the concepts encountered in a session at its end -- and the students seem to appreciate this. However, when I plot the trend for the overall ratings from those four years I hoped there'd be a strong uptick with time, but there's no consistent trend.

Also, confoundingly, there is the disparity of opinion. For some things people naturally have different preferences: more or less outside readings, lecturing, student discussion, etc. (Students do seem to universally love watching video clips.) However on other things, like the completeness of the syllabus or the clarity of the grading system, I am confused.

As a follow-up to my experiment to quiz the students on the content of the syllabus at the beginning of the semester, students did surprisingly poorly. So I know some of them are not paying attention to the syllabus while rating the syllabus as less than complete. I feel similarly about the grading system as it is clearly described in the syllabus and I do four detailed grade reports throughout the semester, each time saying I would be happy to discuss their performance so far, but some students still occasionally fill-in the bubble suggesting that their grade is an opaque mystery. Also, while one evaluation rated me as a poor instructor overall, the vast majority rate me as very good or better. In fact two wrote in the comments that this was the best class they've taken at Steinhardt and NYU respectively. How to reconcile these disparate evaluations?

I conclude that there will be a student or two that, for whatever reason, doesn't like me or the class. (Most characterize me as nice, friendly, and sometimes even funny, but one noted I was intimidating...?) Yet, since my school finally provided departmental wide statistics last semester, I know I am right in the middle of the distribution. I rate higher than half of the faculty, but also lower than the other half. So I know there is room for improvement. However, given it only takes one disenchanted student to skew the averages and that I've not yet been able to implement changes that clearly manifest in the evaluations, I'm not sure how, or if I should be overly concerned? But I am very curious as to how the instructors in the top quartile manage it.

One of my favorite blogs is MIT's Tomorrow's Professor, and I particularly appreciate the essay on Explaining the Reasons for Criticisms of Students’ Academic Performance. Barbara Walvoord spends some times discussing both student and (end of year) teacher assessment. It seems to me that the question of how to make feedback connect and count with the student is central to the exercise of teaching. In the past year, I have experimented with breaking my final assessment feedback on an assignment down into four categories: engagement, understanding, writing, and scholarly support.

I think this works well, though it can be difficult to ascertain in the course evaluations. While the majority of students assess the completeness of the syllabus and my feedback as relatively high (one student likened the point-based system and frequently e-mailed assessment reports as being "like a science") I still do have the infrequent evaluation where this is not the case. It is a puzzle to me how student could say my syllabus was not complete, or why after I give feedback on one assignment they repeat the same mistakes in the next assignment. So this semester I'm going to try two more experiments: a quiz and self-evaluation. I plan to give a quiz on the actual syllabus (e.g., how many freebie absences are students allowed, do medical notes count against those freebies?) and as part of the first assignment ask students to evaluate what they are submitting in term of the four categories. I'm very interested to see the results.

My sense in teaching over the past four years is that I have been assessing higher grades. (I shy from the term "giving grades" as it sounds like a gift based on character or my fondness for the student.) Beyond an anecdotal report on what the department median grade is (for which I appear to be one half letter grade above), I have no other information for the grading distributions in other classes in my department or at NYU, including other sections of the classes I teach. So, my philosophy is to tell students that if everyone performed excellently, that would be accordingly reflected. I then remind students frequently of how I evaluate their work, based on the departmental criteria, and at the beginning of the course provide exemplars of what I consider to be excellent work.

If there is an improvement over the initial semester, this doesn't surprise me in that I feel like my classes are now more honed, with exemplars students have a better sense of my expectations, and I've debugged assignment specifications. I also feel that while the material and assignments in the Media, Technology, and Society (MTS) class are more difficult than Conflict Management (CM), the students are more consistent. So, I performed a five number summary and generated the following box plots (with outliers below 70 truncated):

My conclusion is that while I assessed lower grades in my first semester of teaching each course, there is otherwise no consistent trend. Also, my sense of the MTS students being more consistent in performance is confirmed.

I have fallen out of the habit of posting updates at the beginning and the end of the semesters. (Mostly because I'm not a student anymore, so I'm not taking new and exciting classes and posting the resulting term papers; instead, I've mostly been focused on the book.) Yet, perhaps it's worthwhile to give it another go.

I've been speaking with a lot of people about Wikipedia, and two such interviews will be up by the end of the day.

• Bryan Crump on New Zealand Public Radio. I really enjoyed this one, Bryan was a great interviewer and I appreciated the non-rushed format (40 minutes!). (The audio files will only be available this week.)
• Natan Edelsburg, of NYU Steinhardt's Communication Club. Natan asks about studying phenomena like Wikipedia from the perspective of a communication student at NYU.

On the academic front:

• I'm doing the job search again, and the market seems much quieter than last year, but hope abides.
• I am teaching Conflict Management and Media, Technology, and Society.
• I've been asked to give two talks this semester: one on Wikipedia as a Reliable Source of Health Information for Professor Ralph Katz's honors seminar "Ethics, Pointillism, Epidemiology & Epistemology: Dueling with Health Science Information" and one on Wikipedia, Plagiarism, and Copyright for Fred Benenson's "Copyright, Commerce, and Culture" course.

Finally, for those interested in the New York City free culture scene, James Vasile is running a Planet NYC aggregator.

I'm at that point in the semester where I'm asking students to think about what they want to do for their more open-ended assignment. Rather than simply answering questions I've asked or applying course material to a particular case, I request that they propose a topic they would like to research. This is a source of difficulty and anxiety for some. Granted, there is an element of risk in the openness but I never had much difficulty with choosing a topic myself as a student, so it's difficult to understand how I can best help as a teacher. For example, for a film class I wrote a brief essay on Blade Runner that I really enjoyed working on and am quite fond of. I didn't get the grade I thought I deserved -- and I suspect the instructor didn't "get it", so I appreciate the risk -- but I had no problem conceiving the topic and executing the argument. (Fortunately, the essay would be widely read on the Web, for which I would get a lot of responses and it was even translated into Italian -- not too bad for an undergraduate essay!)

So while I always liked these type of assignments, some bright students can have difficulties. To address this I do the following:

1. Ask the students to send me a proposal with a sense of the topic, argument, concepts and readings that will be used. (I started this in my second semester of teaching and it yielded better results.)
2. Provide example topics and/or even an example proposal.
3. Encourage students to review their reading responses or bring relevant news items to the attention of the class throughout the semester, so as to build a repository of ideas.
4. Provide a list of themes/concepts at the beginning of the course and highlight them throughout.
5. Encourage them to brainstorm a number of (provocative) arguments they could make as they research and outline their topic.

But, still, some students experience difficulty with choosing a topic. Are there any resources you would recommend in guiding students through the writing of open-ended assignments?

If only I had something like this while working on the dissertation!

... "We here at Mead understand that as students get older and wiser, they need notebooks with increasingly narrow lines," Mead CEO John A. Luke told reporters. "In college, people are at a stage in their education where they require 9/32nds of an inch between each line, which is why we make college-ruled notebooks. But I think we can all agree that grad school is a completely different world than college: a world where 9/32nds of an inch is simply too much room."..."How can we expect graduate students to learn to gather information and construct knowledge independently within their specialized field of study using college-ruled notebooks?" he added. "These students need a narrower-lined notebook, and at long last, they have it."..."Just think: If you are writing a dissertation on elements of thanatopsis and necromimesis as they relate to cacaesthesian themes of mid-20th-century Irish literature, do you really want your notebook lines to be more than seven millimeters apart?" Luke said. "Of course not."..."Gone are the days of graduate students having to tediously pencil in new lines between each existing college-ruled line just to make the notebooks usable," the press release read in part. "And with the time you'll save by not having to flip a page every 33 lines, you could earn your Ph.D. a year early." (The Onion)

In the spring I will again be teaching a class on conflict management. More than one colleague has expressed puzzlement as to why I would teach this class, but I really enjoy it. While I, and a few students, might enjoy discussions on the historical nuances of technology or reference works, conflict management is relevant to everyone -- and I do get to discuss Wikipedia NPOV and good faith! I have developed two exercises for understanding cognitive priming on cooperation/competition (i.e., prisoners dilemma) and integrative bargaining that might be of use to others.

I find "giving" grades as a teacher to be as troublesome as getting them when I was a student. Alfie Kohn (1999) in his book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes argues, based on solid research, that rewards, such as grades, often undermine intrinsic motivation (p. 148), which is key to a substantive long-term learning. This counterproductive practice persists because our educational system attempts to do two things that are often at odds with one another: facilitating learning and sorting students (p. 202). I've seen this in my own classroom. Some of the brightest students, and no doubt the most consistent "performers," have expressed a strong distaste for open ended assignments. Asking them to propose a topic that interests them is far too frightening relative to the more remedial types of tasks they have clearly mastered. As Kohn notes, "when we are working for reward, we do exactly what is necessary and no more" (p. 63); this isn't necessarily because of laziness, it also avoids the risk of hurting one's GPA. On the flipside I've seen students with a lot of potential but also significant challenges (perhaps English isn't their first language, their previous education wasn't as rigorous, illness, financial constraints, etc.) become demoralized with a poor grade. Few things are as frustrating as seeing motivated students and a positive classroom culture taking hits because of grades. Nor do I want to be in that position of judging students' circumstances: perhaps Solomon could fairly judge between genuine illness, family emergency, forced overtime, or a hangover -- but I can't.

I'm not completely comfortable with my present approach, perhaps one day I will become an "easy" grader and submit all "A"s except for the most obviously negligent, but this is what I work with now: explicit criteria and early feedback.

According to the standards of my department, which are quite useful and comprehensive, an "A" is a reflection of an "An Outstanding Student" whose "Writing demonstrates impressive understanding of readings, discussions, themes and ideas. Written work is fluid, clear, analytical, well-organized and grammatically polished. Reasoning and logic are well-grounded and examples precise." My present understanding of an "A" is also informed by my experience as a Ph.D. student. I expect I've been a bit of a "grade grubber" myself, though fortunately willing to take risks to pursue my interests. One of my greatest disappointments in my nearly 10 years of classes, but not my lowest grade, was an "A-" in a historical methods course. I loved the course, adored the professor, and invested a lot of myself in the research and final paper. But at the outset the professor said he only gave an "A" to those papers he could see being accepted for publication and he was true to his word. After a few days I could admit to myself that my paper was not yet at that level, my research and thinking weren't developed enough yet, and I learned I was not alone -- in fact I was in the vast majority. (It's a sad truth of how we can feel better or worse about ourselves through comparison with others! A colleague of mine once cynically captured this with a sentiment that, "every time a friend of mine succeeds I die a little inside.")

In any case, I use a similar threshold in undergraduate classes. I don't "give" grades, I evaluate performance according to the departmental criteria. I don't grade on a curve, but I do make sure my expectations are reasonable by first reviewing the range of performance. An "A" is truly outstanding, something I could use as an exemplar in future courses or even recommend to someone interested in the topic. An "A-" fell little short and could be a "A" with a few small tweaks. A "B" is a reflection of good work, a "C" of "fair" work. I do want to be humane, some professors have cut me slack in the past, but also fair. It is not at all uncommon that at the end of the semester when I'm porting grades from my spreadsheet to the bubbles of the Scantron to want to bump a grade, but I fear this may be favoritism, so I don't.

Grading sucks, but it's a requirement of the job, and I am not sure of what the alternatives would be.

Given a wretched experience with using Microsoft Word for my Masters thesis 10 years ago, I decided to try LaTeX this time around. One might think that Microsoft Word has improved, but my tinkering has shown it is still quite dangerous. Word's notions of styles are extremely frustrating, and have changed over time. Additionally, creating multi-document files, or very large files risks corruption. Furthermore, given I work in an interdisciplinary space, it is useful to be able to format a document, including footnotes and bibliography, as, say, either historical or sociological: LaTeX is quite good at this.

That said, LaTeX is a pain. Granted, I prefer a simple structured text markup language over a corruptible proprietary binary blob, but LaTeX is like the Perl of markup languages, and I am a Python guy. (To be fair, TeX and LaTeX are now decades old.) No doubt, regardless of what you want to do, there is a way to do it in LaTeX. The problem is, like Perl, there are too many ways to do it. There are dozens of packages that appeared to do the same thing, though many are different enough to make you wonder why the difference is important. It is difficult to discern the present best practices and most of the documentation is in annoying PDF. Even understanding LaTeX syntax is a confounding task. Does '[]' mean an optional parameter to a command? Mostly yes, but sometimes no. The only way I could get a handle on the world of LaTeX was to purchase Tex for the Impatient and The LaTeX Companion.

In any case, when I do have a problem the LaTeX community on comp.text.tex is extremely helpful. So even though there is a steep learning curve, when I ascend a particular hill, that challenge stays behind me. There is no equivalent to Microsoft Word kicking me down the mountain.

Like all colleges, Steinhardt has a particular format they require for doctoral dissertations. Unfortunately, its specification is sometimes ambiguous, and more a creature of typewriting, than computer typesetting. (For example, section headings are supposed to be underlined!) In any case, I thought I would share the fruits of my frustrations: steinhard-pkg-opts.tex. I haven't yet received approval that this is sufficient, nor am I an expert in LaTeX, but, should someone else at Steinhardt need such a thing, this might be a start.