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30, నవంబర్ 2015, సోమవారం

How To Make Grading More Tolerable: Methods

Photo credit: Olu Eletu


In the two previous posts, I went over some suggestions for Grading Policy and Tools. Now, let’s look at some methods that you can employ in the classroom to further integrate grading and assessment into your teaching so that it is easier to deal with.

  • Student-generated rubrics

    • Having students participate in, or entirely lead, the creation of a rubric allows for students to approach their work in a meta-cognitive way (that is, they will think about their thinking and their learning). The rubric that your class creates is a learning moment in and of itself, and is a way to ensure that students realize the significance of what they are learning, what they produce, and how they will be assessed. This is a good way to get students involved if you have had difficulty with peer workshopping in the past, as you can still be the one to evaluate the work. As this is based on the students’ thoughts for credit and content, it is a fairly democratic approach and students will understand that they are being held accountable to their own standards. 

    To help your students create their own rubric, it is best to have an example, or to have the first project(s) utilize your own rubric for students to become familiar with what is expected of them in terms of effective rubric-creation. Rubrics should be short, clear, and easy for the grader to implement. You may want to even allow students to get creative with rubrics – why not encourage them to create an infographic instead of a boring chart? Even a pop of color can make a rubric more exciting. 

    If the student-generated rubrics go well, you may consider creating a class constitution and even a syllabus together with your students. These student-driven documents will empower students to think about their learning goals and you may find that students hold themselves to a higher standard than their professors do.

  • Project-based rather than exam-based learning

    • Although at first blush exams, especially the multiple-choice variety, may seem easier to grade than projects, as soon as exams incorporate short answer and essay questions (including show all-your-work problems), they can really give a teacher heavier grading loads at certain points of the semester. If you employ a project-based approach, especially one that is iterative, assessment will be more fully blended into the daily load of the course. 

    To counteract midterm and final grading malaise, consider doing scaffolded projects that by the end of the semester will not require a giant push at the end for professor or student. A well-structured project can also help you get to know students better while letting them be creative and to let the learning being done in your class overlap with the learning they are doing across their studies. For example, in a Computer Science course I taught, a student who was majoring in Biology did a project on bioinformatics, while an English major considered computer programs that analyzed word choice to prevent cyberbullying. 

    For a case study on how to structure a final project or paper, have a look at Jade Davis’s “Creating a (almost) Fail Proof Final Project or Paper,” in which she explains the flow of a course leading up to this final piece of student work. If you are not ready to give up on exams entirely, consider moving the final exam a week or two earlier in the semester, so that you can have what Anthony Crider describes as an “Epic Finale” instead of an anti-climactic “Final Exam.” Crider explains that by having a collaborative, innovative, and low-stakes class session at the end of the term can give everyone present a feeling of closure, a reprieve from finals-week stress, and a celebratory capstone.



13, సెప్టెంబర్ 2015, ఆదివారం

How To Make Grading More Tolerable: Tools

Image credit: Alberto G.

In the last post, we looked at ways in which we could change grading policy to make grading take up less of a central aspect of teaching, as well as to bring it more in-line with contemporary and equitable classrooms. Here are some tools that can be used to assist you in achieving your grading goals.


  • Engrade 

    • Engrade is a proprietary online tool that is free to use and can really simplify grading workflows. It does all of the calculation for you based on the constraints you put in under Options > Grading Settings, and keeps your grade book as a virtual entity that can be accessed from anywhere and shared with individual students. 

    Although this was designed for K-12 grading, I used this for two semesters at the undergraduate level and had no issue with the interface for use with university learning. It is quite intuitive and easy to use, but is ultimately a specialized and user-friendly spreadsheet. 

    A detail view of Engrade (note that this is not all of the data)

  • Google Sheets 

    Many universities today are integrated with Google for Education, providing teachers, students, and administration with Gmail and Google Drive across campus. Though, like Engrade, this is a free and proprietary tool, if you choose to use Google Drive, you may consider using Google Sheets for your grading purposes.

    Since Engrade is more or less a specialized spreadsheet, adapting a more traditional spreadsheet, like Google Sheets, can be done with a little bit of spreadsheet knowledge. Grading calculations can be set up prior to the start of class with some simple formulas in columns of the spreadsheet.

    Screenshot of Google Sheets

    What I most appreciate about Google Drive is how easy it is to share and collaborate on documents, presentations or spreadsheets. Because of this functionality, I recommend creating two versions of the spreadsheet to share with students – one that will be the un-editable version for the student to view, and another version that the student can play with to see how certain assignments and specific grades will effect his final outcome in your class.

     A simulation grade book can allow students to be very aware of how they are being evaluated, so that there are no surprises in the end. A very transparent use with a digital tool like this can drive equity in your classroom to ensure that students know what to focus on if they have limited time and resources due to outside work or other constraints.


  • Assessment Documents

    • Any private document-sharing tool will work for this one (I did use Google Docs, but you could try MoPad or a project-management tool) – this is simply to keep an ongoing record of your comments and assessment of each student’s work throughout the semester.

    You may either choose to lock editing completely, or allow students to comment on the assessment in turn (or write comments as “suggestions”). This allows for continued transparency throughout the semester and a record to ensure that both you and the student are on the same page. 

30, జులై 2015, గురువారం

How To Make Grading More Tolerable: Policy

Photo: Luis Llerena
Grading can easily become the bane of teaching, especially if you don’t find enough time to complete all your grading throughout the semester, leaving too much of it at the end in between final exams and final grade submission. Here are some policy-based tips to make this teaching component easier to swallow.

  • Binary Grading 

    • Although clear rubrics are an old standby, I found when I tried peer grading with rubrics, fellow students would grade each other much too hard, and when I used rubrics alone, I would begin to negotiate the grade too much in my own internal monologue.

    The algorithmic nature of an upper-level Computer Science course made me rethink all that, and I decided to employ what I explained to my students as “Binary Grading.”

    Simply put, there was a threshold of competency for students to meet in their work, the earned a “1,” and if they failed to meet that threshold they earned a “0.” As I scaffolded all of my large assignments into smaller components, this allowed for a range of grades.

    Of course, the difficulty here is not using a 0.5 grade when the student has met some expectations, in that case it is best to have a clear revision policy.

  • Crowdsourcing

    Cathy Davidson lays out this system in detail on a blog post on HASTAC.

    In a student-led course, with students responsible for learning and teaching to their peers (any teacher knows how effective learning is when you have to teach the material later!), the students leading a certain topic (the experts) will grade their fellow students.

    Here, Davidson suggests a thumbs-up / thumbs-down approach much like binary grading, with a revision turning a thumbs-down to a thumbs-up.

  • Do All the Work: Get an A

    In this same post, Davidson also outlines an approach where if students complete all the work, they get an A, if they don’t need an A they can aim for a B and complete enough work for that grade. Again, this can be based on a binary or check system so that minimal time is spent negotiating with the language that may be coming from inherited rubrics.

    This can work well for students who are struggling with jobs, family, or other outside forces on their plates, and just need to see what they need to get through a course. And a clear policy like this can really put an end to students worried about their grades throughout the semester. The key here is communication and transparency with students, which is a good policy for any grading system.


31, మే 2015, ఆదివారం

Student-Centered Pedagogy and Technology



I just returned from the HASTAC2015 Conference at Michigan State University in East Lansing. There, I participated as a panelist on my first interactive long-table discussion-style session, where audience members were as much a part of the conversation as those of us who organized the panel. Staci Stutsman wrote up a blog post almost immediately following the session with a focus on pedagogy take-aways, and our panel was also part of Amanda Licastro’s roundup for The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy. 

Below are the notes for my contribution to the panel, along with some images I used as slides, about disrupting the Computer Science through technology-avoidance.


This past semester I taught Ethics in a Technological Society – an upper-level Computer Science course at a small liberal arts college in the New York suburbs. Given the subject, there was a little more scope for humanities-driven work than there typically is in Computer Science courses. For example, we were able to consider a plethora of ethics-minded questions, including how to user-test a cat robot that hunts rodents but is affectionate toward humans. Classrooms for these CS courses were typically labs where computer monitors functioned as barriers for face-to-face engagement, and also served as ripe spaces for distraction – all of the Internet beckons! As my learning goals were to foster collaborative discussion and critical thinking about issues surrounding ethics and computing, I actively avoided technology in the Computer Science classroom. 




Logic, the foundation of computer programming, need not be located within Java-based algorithms after all. I therefore designed projects that could tap into some of the for-loops, if-else statements, and object instantiation outside of our machines. I could achieve this readily with Information System and UML class diagrams, a way to map computer programs prior to actual coding. These would be designed by hand and later polished with a digital tool, such as the open-source ArgoUML (with UML, we have objects, types, attributes, methods – all of the algorithmic thinking required prior to writing code). And then blogged on HASTAC.

 



Think-pair-share with real paper and real pens (when my CS students brought them!) worked great in this course, and I also had students design their own software lifecycles prior to learning what lifecycles are used in the real development world – a way for them to make sense of different software phases in a critical and results-driven way.




Finally, we also engaged in peer-driven learning, the results of which were posted on our HASTAC Computer Science Ethics group. Students worked on a topic of their choice to teach to fellow students, ranging from programming in PERL for bioinformatics, to cyberbullying, to virtual machines. Students decided not only how to deliver the content to fellow students – but also how to construct their follow-up blogs for the web – some chose to offer tutorials, while others were more reflective. These group-based skills are most applicable to their future roles as software developers who will be working and building skills in teams. Of course, we did use technology throughout the class, but I tried to keep it in a supplemental role that would not serve as a disruptor, but instead be integrated at key moments after students have already had time to think through the issues at hand.

31, మార్చి 2015, మంగళవారం

Free Online Chart Tools


Data visualization is becoming an increasingly popular way to convey information. Infographics, as discussed in the last blog post can be a fun and even elegant way to express data in a visual manner, but old-fashioned charts can also be effective.

This past year, I have been teaching Excel to undergraduate students, and have found myself using spreadsheets more and more outside of teaching, as I gain a greater appreciation for the tool through my teaching. For example, spreadsheets have served me well when breaking down budgets for grant applications, and for making Gantt Charts to map my dissertation schedule.

Although I teach Excel to students in a direct way, the skills behind spreadsheets and chart-creation can be an effective way to get students to synthesize data and think critically about ways in which they can convey important information while discarding the excess in order to make a point or substantiate an argument. Maybe History students can put a bar chart in a paper comparing the numbers between Loyalists and Royalists during the Revolutionary War, or a pie chart breaking down the percentages of weapon types among the two factions. Those studying Music can create a line chart of the rise of opera across European countries. And students of Francophone literature may use a visualization to compare novel publication numbers in Africa, the Caribbean, and Canada.

Microsoft Excel is the obvious spreadsheet program, with Apache OpenOffice’s or LibreOffice’s Calc as open source options, and Google Sheets as an online and free alternative. Here are two much more simplified free and online tools that you can use in a classroom without downloading anything or opening an account:

Datawrapper




This open source web-based chart and map tool is available for use for free, with the option for pay-based upgrades. The interface is very user-friendly, and allows you to paste data directly into a box, or upload a csv file. Although this latter option would suggest that the tool can work well with a large amount of data, Datawrapper was not actually that robust and failed for me when I tried to upload a NYC OpenData csv file of the trees of Manhattan:



Still, it is a nice and clean interface and could work well with data that is simplified prior to import (which may make for a nice scaffolded assignment for students).

charts.livegap.com



What is nice about this tool is that it is ready to play with as soon as you visit the site, bringing you directly to a spreadsheet and chart that you can start to manipulate (as in the image above). Students can use this to experiment directly while watching the chart shift as they input new or different data sets.

Like Datawrapper, charts.livegap.com is not as robust as other spreadsheet tools, with no obvious calculation functionality.  It is a little less intuitive than Datawrapper, and also behaves a bit unexpectedly when you leave null values (instead, you should input a 0 to hold that cell’s place in an array).

In the Fellini chart I was working on, below, the range of data from 3-11 was too great for charts.livegap.com to handle, and the number 3 was not visualized in the bar chart:


Despite shortcomings, these free web-based tools can prove to convey to students the importance of simplifying effective data when forming an argument. Incorporating charts and spreadsheets into traditional humanities classrooms can help students to think about their studies in a quantitative manner and help them to connect their learning across fields.


27, ఫిబ్రవరి 2015, శుక్రవారం

5 Infographic Tools for the Classroom


Infographics can be a great tool for teaching and learning. As they are an increasingly popular method for expressing data online, they are very readable by students. You may consider presenting information to students via infographics, or have students create their own infographics for projects that are dealing with data.

(source)
Infographics can liven up your own slide decks, and also your syllabus. Here is an example of a Biology syllabus in the form of an infographic, and here is an example of an English syllabus as an infographic. The use of pie charts make it easy for students to readily understand how they are being assessed. 

For students, infographics can prove to be a creative way of expressing data. Rather than put together a database, students can use icons to represent numbers of people, and really work to make the information easy to understand. Infographic projects need not be limited to Economics, Math, and the Sciences, here is an example infographic for a Classics course, illustrating Death in the Illiad. 

To try out each of these tools, I worked with data from IMDB on Federico Fellini’s filmography. I used data about his writing vs. directing production, the years his films came out, the cast he worked with across films and decades, and the gender breakdowns of his cast, and thus his characters. Hopefully this can give you an idea of the many ways you can approach data points in a visual way, in turn aiding yours and your students’ research. 


Here are some free tools to get you started with infographics:

  • Infogram helps you to create interactive infographics. First, you will need to create an account, and then you can get going with a number of free designs. Infogram helps you to create various charts (including stand-alone charts), and will let you import images and include text. A lot of the features are only available to paid members, including being able to manipulate text in any way (color, font, size), but the tradeoff is that you or your students are able to build a quick, easy and interactive infographic. All free infographics you create with Infogram will have an Infogram watermark. At the very bottom of this post I have embedded the infographic I made through Infogram. And here is a screenshot to show you how easy it is to add visual blocks:
Infogram interface

  • Easelly is another fast tool to create infographics. This does not require a signup, so you can get started right away with one of the free layout designs, which you are able to download your static infographic once you’re all done. Most of the icons are not available for free, but you can upload your own images, and there are no Easelly watermarks placed on your designs. Here is an example of a timeline infographic I made of Fellini’s feature narrative films from the ‘60s and '70s:
Example created with Easelly
Example created with Piktochart
  • Canva, though not strictly a infogram tool, has a lot of icons available for free that you can use for infographics. This design tool I find to be very intuitive, and has a built-in search functionality to help you find appropriate icons and other images. This also lets you download all of your creations, and has built-in sizes for use across social media platforms. There are no watermarks put onto your designs, and the pay structure is like a free app with pay-as-you-go features, if you really must have a particular image on your design. 

  • Piktochart is the infographic online tool used by the two syllabus examples I linked to above. I found this to be quite similar to Canva, but not as intuitive, and with a less-robust search function. However, it is more natively designed for infographics, and has some guides for designers who may be intended to create print materials (you would need a paid account to download high-quality image files). Free accounts also include a Piktochart logo on the bottom of your files.

  • Venngage offers an expansive library of icons that can easily modified with data. Rather than working with spreadsheets, as with Infogram, the manipulation of data in Venngage seems much more native to infographics. The free version of Venngage is limited to publishing your infograms and therefore sharing publicly (downloads or private sharing is only available for paid users). Still, this is a well-organized and fairly intuitive tool that can make attractive-looking infographics without much difficulty. Here is a screenshot of the interface showing how to manipulate icons without use of a spreadsheet:



Venngage interface

If you are working with students who are already well-versed with design, and you have access to it, Adobe Illustrator offers the most robust platform for creating infographics. Students who are web developers or programers would also be capable of designing and implementing interactive infographics from scratch.

Whether you choose to use the free web interfaces or work on something in an offline program, there are many free icons available with creative commons licensing online, which can be brought right into some of the tools above.


30, జనవరి 2015, శుక్రవారం

Virtual Mapping with Video Games


This past October, Curtis Wong (Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research) gave a talk entitled “Mapping the Universe and Other Small Things” as part of the Futures Initiative series of events at The Graduate Center, CUNY. In his talk, he mentioned a study from 1993 that asked children to a) point out Madagascar on a world map, and b) point out Yoshi’s Island in Super Mario World:

Curis Wong, slide from “Mapping the Universe and Other Small Things”

As we see, there is a huge disparity between knowing the geo-politcal boundaries of the natural world and knowing the layout of a hugely popular video game.

Video game players approach gaming with an intrinsic motivation — that is, it is not a requirement nor is it considered tedious to play video games, as a geography lesson would (or could) be. As I’ve mentioned previously, games can prove to be a source of unintended learning outcomes, just as a consequence of playing the game (as shown in Wong’s example).

Quoting Grandmaster of Memory Ed Cooke in the book Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer writes:

The thing to understand is that humans are very, very good at learning spaces … Just to give an example, if you are left alone for five minutes in someone else’s house you’ve never visited before, and you’re feeling energetic and nosy, think about how much of that house could be fixed in your memory in that brief period. You’d be able to learn not just where all the different rooms are and how they connect with each other, but their dimensions and decoration, the arrangement of their contents, and where the windows are. Without really noticing it, you’d remember the whereabouts of hundreds of objects and all sorts of dimensions that you wouldn’t even notice yourself noticing. If you actually add up all that information, it’s like the equivalent of a short novel. But we don’t ever register that as being a memory achievement. Humans just gobble up spatial information.

There is something special about how humans remember spaces, which is why the memory palace has been such an effective mnemonic technique through the ages. Utilizing the 3-D imaging readily available within video game environments can be an effective way to harness this mental power for learning real-world spaces and engaging with ideas. Looking at some examples of mapping in video games, we can see how it is currently used in terms of popular trends, and look towards how it can be harnessed for pedagogy and for thoughtful engagement at a conceptual level.


I know that Grand Theft Auto is a very problematic video game franchise due to its depictions of violence, race, class and gender (to name a few), but I recognized Los Angeles immediately (re-casted as Los Santos) while I watched my brother play Grand Theft Auto V without knowing where it was based. The New Yorker reports that the GTA V team spent over a hundred days of field-based research in Los Angeles to recreate a Los Angeles that is familiar but doesn’t quite exist, with its area not quite right, and all its neighborhoods renamed. Grand Theft Data, unaffiliated with GTA, provides full information of real-life LA landmarks as they are mapped onto the Rockstar game, which reveals an interest among gamers in engaging with the real-life cities encountered in virtual worlds.

Screenshot of Grand Theft Data Map with Galileo Observatory / Griffith Observatory highlighted


Another video game with an extensively researched map is the open world Sleeping Dogs, which offers an accurate portrayal of the city of Hong Kong, though it also centers around violent gameplay. Like GTA, the geography of Hong Kong was also modified for the gaming experience (the Sleeping Dogs Wiki details some differences between the real Hong Kong vs. the game’s version). In an additional effort to include realistic narratives and character design, the game developers also worked with real-life people they modeled their story lines after. Additionally, sound designers captured ambient noises around the city for an immersive experience (read about the making of the game’s version of Hong Kong here). This attention to detail can really capture a sense of a living space, especially as sound is bounced off the same walls from real to virtual world, and provide gamers with a close, if revised, mental map of a city they may not have visited.

Map of Hong Kong from Sleeping Dogs

A more surreal approach to mapping a city into a virtual word is available from the game Sky Line, by Bonus Levels / Lawrence Lek. This is an open world game that is about re-envisioning London as a city of art galleries rather than financial centers, and focuses on questions of access:

Sky Line is … a response to the lack of infrastructure for independent galleries and project spaces in London, using the medium of a video game to create a unified transportation network for these disparate zones…

In this virtual world, travellers are given unlimited access to the hovering trains, moving between independent galleries, domestic exhibitions, subterranean spaces, and other fragments of the city. Sky Line proposes a form of utopia where the vision of London is not of financial skyscrapers, but of infinite access.
Screenshot of Sky Line


As a sometimes-Londoner, the environment is a bit disorienting, with all of the East London landmarks in close succession, and a Circle Line that moves through the city in a different manner. But still, the landmarks I look for are there, and it jogs my memory in that sense, and would provide a newcomer with a map of the city’s galleries. What is most interesting is the suggestion of embodiment that is not there. There is no avatar for the first person, there are voices and cars and footsteps that never materialize, there is poetry on the tube via the TfL and all of the art in the galleries, but no human to be found, and a city that is underwater and rendered more tropical with time moving so quickly you can watch the moon glide across the sky. As a piece of art modeled as a game, Sky Line works with maps at a conceptual level, and is challenging in the sense of how it reworks the geography of London to fit the locations of art galleries. Though quite different than the London we would meet today, the arrangement of information and levels of engagement within a three-dimensional virtual space provides the user with a way of approaching big questions (like access) through a geo-spatial medium that can instinctively organize her thoughts through a method that is something like a memory palace.

These examples of virtual maps that can be explored, based on living and breathing cities that exist in the world can give us a context to begin thinking about how to learn based on moving through space. A video game modeled exactly after Marrakech (for instance) would make for an interesting experiment — gamers who had never been there could spend time exploring the virtual city, and then we could see how well they do in the real place. With games like GTA or Sleeping Dogs, a gamer could get a sense of where he may be once he arrives in the “real” city, but with the distortions it may be hard to say. Because the spatial mapping ability of the human mind is so significant, it is important to not limit virtual world endeavors to geographical reasoning, and many more experiments of organizing arguments or ideas via virtual worlds could achieve a lot to not only instill learning but to also create dialogue.

Detail of Nova totius terrarum orbis tabula Amstelodami, Gerard van Schagen

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