10.23.05
Posted in UIS at 9:04 pm by Stephanie
Ethnohistory - This week’s reading is about footbinding. Dr. Hill Gates’ essay, Footloose in Fujian: Economic Correlates of Footbinding in Society for Comparative Study of Society and History, 2001 gives the reader a view of 3 geographical areas in China and some of the reasons for footbinding. Mostly, it was a matter of station, or hopes for improvement in station. A girl’s feet were bound if the work she could do was “light” (not requiring a lot of movement and time on her feet) and there was the possibility of marrying someone of equal or better social status. This is, of course, an oversimplification of Dr. Gates’ findings, but will suffice for a brief introduction here.
Of interest, are these websites: Bounded Patriarchy and Footbinding, whose author, Dawnelle Loiselle , asks some important questions about beauty and pain, and the lengths that mothers and daughters are willing to go to in order to prove their worth to society, and men.
Compelling questions with no ready answers.
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Posted in Doing History at 4:56 pm by Stephanie
I know that I’m not the only student who falls behind somehow and then panics to try to get caught up. I need to take a look at my own organizational skills and how better to keep myself on top of things. I used to create a big calendar like graphic that lived on my desktop and line things out when I had completed them. Every time I looked at my computer, it was there, in my face. For some reason, I have moved away from that and I think that is part of the reason for falling behind. I need to take a hard look at this because I have many, many years ahead of me and this can’t keep happening or it will bite me hard when I can least afford it.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the last 3 weeks have been tough personally. Death and breast cancer took up residence for a while and I am still recovering from the trauma. When my friend goes for her mastectomy, I told her I would visit every day but I might have to take my homework and read it to her so I could try to keep up. She laughed.
This is the stuff I want to figure out. When I get worn out or am going through a dysthymic episode, how do I take care of myself without falling behind? This is one of the reasons for Breathing History; to ask others how they do it, how they handle it, to discuss survival methods.
What’s your coping mechanism?
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Posted in Doing History at 4:49 pm by Stephanie
I share a friend’s frustration with information retrieval. What good is it to go to a nifty site like Gutenberg Project and type in human sacrifice or “human sacrifice” or human + sacrifice and get results that say things like “your search returned more than x books, please narrow your search” without telling me, specifically what the problem is? It was looking for anything that had human, sacrifice or human sacrifice; not human sacrifice only! I spent a lot of time tweaking it and finally got some results I could live with, sort of.
San Jose Library’s ebook system is equally horrible. Once I found a book I wanted to peruse, I had to enter the search string into the reader and then navigation was horrible, and not very accurate I might add. It would say things like, “There are 49 hits on 45 pages” but I would have to navigate through each page. So if I wanted to navigate away from the book for a bit to look up something else, I would have to start all over again, no real way to tell it I was on hit 27, plus tabbed browsing or opening a link in new a new window not a choice! Bad way to present information, really hard to research.
Search strings on book topics were bad too. Again, human sacrifice got me loads of books that had human but not many on human sacrifice. Latin American Religion got a book about African Religions in Cuba and Panama, which are part of Latin America but there were no other books. Nothing on Incas, Toltecs, Mayans, Aztecs or Catholicism, even. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
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10.09.05
Posted in The Classes at 9:06 pm by Stephanie
One of the questions at the Academic Panel during blogher this past summer was how to get online students more involved in the conversation.
I offered up my experiences, which really hadn’t been very pleasant. Then I was quizzed on how I thought it could be made better, what did I want in an online community. I didn’t have the answers.
In the past 3 years, the experiences have ranged from being so frustrated at the lack of willingness to even try to understand the topic to okay but unsustained conversations. Instructions from the teachers have ranged from allowing a free-for-all, no holds barred discussion on any topic to strict guidelines. No matter how hard I tried, there wasn’t any real connection to any of my classmates. These experiences just drove me deeper into my shell and kept me from making any effort beyond what was expected by the instructor.
But … this semester has been a real eye opener. It’s a very small sample of data but I think I’m beginning to see a pattern.
I am taking a “core” course (required for all history majors) and a “survey” course (an overview of a large topic of history, e.g. The Roots of Latin American History and Culture). Survey courses are usually “General Ed” requirements and therefore, attract a different audience than the core classes.
In my survey class, it’s the same old story. People who don’t bother to read the assignments asking lazy questions, non-thoughtful and lackadaisical responses to prompts about the material from the instructor. The lack of response and enthusiasm to my assigned group for our group project was so bad that I asked permission to do my own paper. Not long after receiving this permission, DrL threatened my former group by telling them they needed to pick a topic by a deadline he chose or he would tell them what their topic was. Not good.
In my core class, we are quite the enthusiastic bunch. We respond thoughtfully to the prompts, often building on each other’s thoughts and asking questions both of the instructor and each other. It’s a completely different story there, something I’ve never experienced and I love it. We are a strong community who laugh at each other’s jokes, share our experiences and offer thoughtful commentary to each other.
My limited experience makes me think the answer to this conundrum is that the community is stronger if the people in that community are enthusiastic and care about the topic.
Which, as I just written the last sentence, seems so obvious! It’s how other online communities work. It just hadn’t occured to me in the academic setting. I was probably blinded by my own enthusiasm and didn’t understand why others didn’t share that. But it’s so easy to see now.
If someone is in a class because they have to be, they aren’t going to participate as much as someone who is the class because they choose to be. This really doesn’t answer the question about how to get students motivated to participate but it is a good clue as to why some class forums work and others don’t.
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