Nonfiction reviews/Dark Matter
Dark Matter: OK, I'm three episodes in and I see that this show, too, put Firefly in a blender with more mainstream tropes. I approve of this development, though I can't say I have any love for nu!Jayne.
Colin Ellard, Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life: Free LibraryThing early reviewer book. The built environment can make you nervous or excited, engaged or distanced. Homes and cultures are intertwined, so for example “the innovation of dedicated sleeping spaces for married couples was an important milestone in our changing views of sexuality and privacy.” This change accelerated the development of the idea that sex was to be kept behind closed doors. Likewise, the development of food preparation rooms “created a private domain for whoever was in charge of preparing the meals, and helped reinforce the notion of specialized domestic roles for husband, wife, and child within the home.” Apparently, abused children have certain hallmarks that show up in their drawings of houses-no doors, sharp contours, “a profusion of hearts,” often with storm clouds above the house and falling rain. Jagged edges in particular signal danger-in an experiment in which people assembled portraits of a stronger from puzzle pieces with either rounded or jagged edges, the participants who had the jagged edges judged the face to be colder and more aggressive than the participants who had rounded edges did. Likewise, angular art on the walls made participants in another study less cooperative than rounded shapes on the walls.
Ellard even suggests that our feelings of awe at big things like the Grand Canyon are an evolutionary offshoot of our reactions to bigger animals who are likely to win dominance contests with smaller animals. Fun fact: male bowerbirds build structures to attract mates, and they do so in a way that creates a perspective illusion: the size of objects increases as the female approaches, making the male bird appear bigger.
The book discusses virtual environments-our self-representations are malleable and we can easily be taught to experience a long, rubbery, virtual arm as our own arm; our brains readily treat virtual enviroments like physical spaces. (Which is why the tour through abandoned college campuses in Second Life is so poignant.) Ellard is worried that GPS is damaging our brains because navigation is an important part of normal brain function, and since our brains are use-it-or-lose-it GPS could ultimately “trigger degenerative brain changes resembling those seen in demending diseases like Alzheimer’s.” Yikes! I’m still using my GPS all the time, because I never had any sense of direction in the first place, but I hope that doing puzzles etc. will stave off deterioration. Some of this is the usual techno-fear, where Ellard frets that technology allows us to avoid human interactions, but his example-a little old lady who used a wood stove for heating, and who therefore had to plan ahead and ask visitors to ensure she had enough wood, and was therefore more connected to her community and her environment than if she’d had a thermostat and central heating-sounds like it’d be terrible to be the little old lady. Give me a freakin’ thermostat any day! I’ll find another way to make friends.
Jay R. Howard, Discussion in the College Classroom: Getting Your Students Engaged and Participating in Person and Online: This short book has some useful concepts; I am not sure that I learned a lot of practical use, though I think that earlier in my career I would have benefited more from it. Now, much of the advice seems basic to me, but that’s a function of the fact that post-secondary educators get very little training in how to teach. The book is also explicit that it is directed at college professors; grad school is a different kettle of fish because most grad students have somewhat greater motivation to be present/learn the material for the particular class they are in.
The biggest point is that the person who is doing the most work in the room is doing the most learning, which is a reason to make students take on discussion responsibilities. The student-as-customer mentality is unhelpful because students sometimes use it to suggest they’ve paid for the right to stay silent/engage just as much as they want to; plus it leads them to believe that only the instructor has anything worthwhile to say. Other concepts: “civil attention,” which is the expectation in many classrooms that students will look like they’re paying attention-not obviously texting, talking, etc.-even if they are not actively engaged; and “consolidation of responsibility,” which is what happens when 5-8 students take on the burden of doing 75-95% of the talking for the rest of the class, an event regarded with a mixture of disdain and relief by the rest of the class. (These numbers come from actual research about typical classrooms, regardless of class size.)
Other research: male students consistently overestimate how much participation they’re engaged in, though the research is inconsistent on whether men actually talk more per capita. Older students talk more; non-American students talk less (likely related to educational cultures that more heavily value respectful silence); students talk more in classes with female instructors. Class participation is associated with learning the material better, so it is worth trying to encourage participation in useful ways-another thing I learned is that students often define “participation” more broadly than teachers do, so students think they’re participating by reading all the assignments, coming to class, and paying attention/taking notes. Unfortunately for those of us subjected to teacher evaluations, effective teaching is often uncomfortable because students have to confront their areas of uncertainty.
Online discussion: as it turns out, the research on this is young enough that I didn’t get much in the way of help, other than the suggestion that it might make sense to front-load any online contribution responsibilities, so as the semester winds down and other responsibilities start to press in, there’s less pressure to post to class discussion forums. One intriguing suggestion for larger classes was to divide students into groups and require them to read the posts from their group and then summarize the discussion for the professor-this both cuts down on the burden of keeping up with lots of classmates’ required posts and requires them to synthesize the discussion and figure out if it went anywhere. Also, demographics matter even online: white and female students were more positive about online learning than African-American and male students; female students in particular may participate more frequently/be more motivated in online discussions.
To grade participation or not: Howard takes the position that the arguments against grading participation, while worth serious consideration-mostly that it favors a certain kind of student/penalizes others-are true of grading any kind of behavior. Participation is important enough that it’s worth encouraging by making clear that it is a part of the learning objectives of the course. At least one study found better learning outcomes where participation was required than in a no-participation-required control group. Plus, it’s almost the only kind of performance on which it’s impossible to cheat. Self-assessment/self-grading or peer grading, he suggests, can improve participation and decrease the burden on the instructor. Even providing students with a rubric to grade themselves or their partners can help clarify for the instructor what she wants them to be doing when they participate. But though students learned more and liked the class more when participation was required, they may nonetheless judge the class more harshly because they perceive it as harder. Such is life.
Howard emphasizes the importance of learning students’ names as a way of showing engagement with them-there’s even research backing this up. This is pretty much impossible for me-I don’t formally have prosopagnosia, but making a good faith effort with the assistance of the seating chart and roster photos is as far as I can go.
Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape: This book starts with St. Louis’s founding and really goes only to the formal institution of zoning in the early 1920s. Sandweiss argues that the city’s development was a result of constant tension between small, fenced-off corners (the house, the neighborhood block) and the wider world, and the city was an unstable middle ground. This is a history told from the point of view of white (sometimes Anglo and sometimes “ethnic”) officials and businessmen, who were often tied by at least running in the same social circles, if not the same families. Throughout the nineteenth century, a main conflict was over improving roads-something the city wanted the directly benefited landowners to pay for, and something those landowners wanted to be a shared burden given the presumably shared benefit in making the city function better. The balance changed from time to time, and the city enacted special assessments on the local landowners-but that meant that only wealthy neighborhoods got good roads, because only they could pay for them. Technology changes, but not politics. By the twentieth century, the leading lights of the city said outright that the city was “a great business establishment” and thus needed planning. Given this conception, it was no surprise that some people held more “shares” in the city than others, and deserved a greater voice. Although zoning and comprehensive planning arrived in the mid-1910s, just the time when the white majority of St. Louis voted for racial zoning excluding blacks from living in white areas and vice versa, race doesn’t play a big part of Sandweiss’s story, though it gets hard to ignore near the end.
I did love the bit in the intro where Sandweiss discusses nearby Wildwood’s attempts to create a community through New Urbanist principles, where the contractor-planners “flatter their client’s [Wildwood’s] revolutionary spirit with talk of the ‘Jeffersonian’ grid, as though a community of sturdy husbandmen were only awaiting the arrival of front porches and four-way stop signs to make its presence known.” Still, the built environment does shape behavior, which is why there’s always so much concern about it among homeowners and local officials.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Colin Ellard, Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life: Free LibraryThing early reviewer book. The built environment can make you nervous or excited, engaged or distanced. Homes and cultures are intertwined, so for example “the innovation of dedicated sleeping spaces for married couples was an important milestone in our changing views of sexuality and privacy.” This change accelerated the development of the idea that sex was to be kept behind closed doors. Likewise, the development of food preparation rooms “created a private domain for whoever was in charge of preparing the meals, and helped reinforce the notion of specialized domestic roles for husband, wife, and child within the home.” Apparently, abused children have certain hallmarks that show up in their drawings of houses-no doors, sharp contours, “a profusion of hearts,” often with storm clouds above the house and falling rain. Jagged edges in particular signal danger-in an experiment in which people assembled portraits of a stronger from puzzle pieces with either rounded or jagged edges, the participants who had the jagged edges judged the face to be colder and more aggressive than the participants who had rounded edges did. Likewise, angular art on the walls made participants in another study less cooperative than rounded shapes on the walls.
Ellard even suggests that our feelings of awe at big things like the Grand Canyon are an evolutionary offshoot of our reactions to bigger animals who are likely to win dominance contests with smaller animals. Fun fact: male bowerbirds build structures to attract mates, and they do so in a way that creates a perspective illusion: the size of objects increases as the female approaches, making the male bird appear bigger.
The book discusses virtual environments-our self-representations are malleable and we can easily be taught to experience a long, rubbery, virtual arm as our own arm; our brains readily treat virtual enviroments like physical spaces. (Which is why the tour through abandoned college campuses in Second Life is so poignant.) Ellard is worried that GPS is damaging our brains because navigation is an important part of normal brain function, and since our brains are use-it-or-lose-it GPS could ultimately “trigger degenerative brain changes resembling those seen in demending diseases like Alzheimer’s.” Yikes! I’m still using my GPS all the time, because I never had any sense of direction in the first place, but I hope that doing puzzles etc. will stave off deterioration. Some of this is the usual techno-fear, where Ellard frets that technology allows us to avoid human interactions, but his example-a little old lady who used a wood stove for heating, and who therefore had to plan ahead and ask visitors to ensure she had enough wood, and was therefore more connected to her community and her environment than if she’d had a thermostat and central heating-sounds like it’d be terrible to be the little old lady. Give me a freakin’ thermostat any day! I’ll find another way to make friends.
Jay R. Howard, Discussion in the College Classroom: Getting Your Students Engaged and Participating in Person and Online: This short book has some useful concepts; I am not sure that I learned a lot of practical use, though I think that earlier in my career I would have benefited more from it. Now, much of the advice seems basic to me, but that’s a function of the fact that post-secondary educators get very little training in how to teach. The book is also explicit that it is directed at college professors; grad school is a different kettle of fish because most grad students have somewhat greater motivation to be present/learn the material for the particular class they are in.
The biggest point is that the person who is doing the most work in the room is doing the most learning, which is a reason to make students take on discussion responsibilities. The student-as-customer mentality is unhelpful because students sometimes use it to suggest they’ve paid for the right to stay silent/engage just as much as they want to; plus it leads them to believe that only the instructor has anything worthwhile to say. Other concepts: “civil attention,” which is the expectation in many classrooms that students will look like they’re paying attention-not obviously texting, talking, etc.-even if they are not actively engaged; and “consolidation of responsibility,” which is what happens when 5-8 students take on the burden of doing 75-95% of the talking for the rest of the class, an event regarded with a mixture of disdain and relief by the rest of the class. (These numbers come from actual research about typical classrooms, regardless of class size.)
Other research: male students consistently overestimate how much participation they’re engaged in, though the research is inconsistent on whether men actually talk more per capita. Older students talk more; non-American students talk less (likely related to educational cultures that more heavily value respectful silence); students talk more in classes with female instructors. Class participation is associated with learning the material better, so it is worth trying to encourage participation in useful ways-another thing I learned is that students often define “participation” more broadly than teachers do, so students think they’re participating by reading all the assignments, coming to class, and paying attention/taking notes. Unfortunately for those of us subjected to teacher evaluations, effective teaching is often uncomfortable because students have to confront their areas of uncertainty.
Online discussion: as it turns out, the research on this is young enough that I didn’t get much in the way of help, other than the suggestion that it might make sense to front-load any online contribution responsibilities, so as the semester winds down and other responsibilities start to press in, there’s less pressure to post to class discussion forums. One intriguing suggestion for larger classes was to divide students into groups and require them to read the posts from their group and then summarize the discussion for the professor-this both cuts down on the burden of keeping up with lots of classmates’ required posts and requires them to synthesize the discussion and figure out if it went anywhere. Also, demographics matter even online: white and female students were more positive about online learning than African-American and male students; female students in particular may participate more frequently/be more motivated in online discussions.
To grade participation or not: Howard takes the position that the arguments against grading participation, while worth serious consideration-mostly that it favors a certain kind of student/penalizes others-are true of grading any kind of behavior. Participation is important enough that it’s worth encouraging by making clear that it is a part of the learning objectives of the course. At least one study found better learning outcomes where participation was required than in a no-participation-required control group. Plus, it’s almost the only kind of performance on which it’s impossible to cheat. Self-assessment/self-grading or peer grading, he suggests, can improve participation and decrease the burden on the instructor. Even providing students with a rubric to grade themselves or their partners can help clarify for the instructor what she wants them to be doing when they participate. But though students learned more and liked the class more when participation was required, they may nonetheless judge the class more harshly because they perceive it as harder. Such is life.
Howard emphasizes the importance of learning students’ names as a way of showing engagement with them-there’s even research backing this up. This is pretty much impossible for me-I don’t formally have prosopagnosia, but making a good faith effort with the assistance of the seating chart and roster photos is as far as I can go.
Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape: This book starts with St. Louis’s founding and really goes only to the formal institution of zoning in the early 1920s. Sandweiss argues that the city’s development was a result of constant tension between small, fenced-off corners (the house, the neighborhood block) and the wider world, and the city was an unstable middle ground. This is a history told from the point of view of white (sometimes Anglo and sometimes “ethnic”) officials and businessmen, who were often tied by at least running in the same social circles, if not the same families. Throughout the nineteenth century, a main conflict was over improving roads-something the city wanted the directly benefited landowners to pay for, and something those landowners wanted to be a shared burden given the presumably shared benefit in making the city function better. The balance changed from time to time, and the city enacted special assessments on the local landowners-but that meant that only wealthy neighborhoods got good roads, because only they could pay for them. Technology changes, but not politics. By the twentieth century, the leading lights of the city said outright that the city was “a great business establishment” and thus needed planning. Given this conception, it was no surprise that some people held more “shares” in the city than others, and deserved a greater voice. Although zoning and comprehensive planning arrived in the mid-1910s, just the time when the white majority of St. Louis voted for racial zoning excluding blacks from living in white areas and vice versa, race doesn’t play a big part of Sandweiss’s story, though it gets hard to ignore near the end.
I did love the bit in the intro where Sandweiss discusses nearby Wildwood’s attempts to create a community through New Urbanist principles, where the contractor-planners “flatter their client’s [Wildwood’s] revolutionary spirit with talk of the ‘Jeffersonian’ grid, as though a community of sturdy husbandmen were only awaiting the arrival of front porches and four-way stop signs to make its presence known.” Still, the built environment does shape behavior, which is why there’s always so much concern about it among homeowners and local officials.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.