Wolf Flats

Standing at the fire shortly after midnight, watching the glow from the not-yet-visible moon shine from behind the cliffs, I felt at peace.

Wind blew through the branches of the cottonwood trees, sending the seed flying like dimmed fireflies through the glow of the campfire coals. The cliffs, one red and tan, the other black under the sun, were mere shapes, silhouettes as the moon rose behind them. Opposite, enough moonglow fell on the cliffs to illuminate, slightly, juniper and sage brush, a barbed wire fence line.

Overhead, an owl screeched. Bats flew by, shrieking and squeaking. The sky was a tumult of wind and invisible wings and cries and wind and stars obscured by a thin laryer of cloud and everywhere the moonshine growing brighter even though a quarter hour later the moon still lay hidden behind the cliffs, standing out black against the milky grey sky.

The last rays of the sun disappeared only two hours earlier, fighting the earth's rotation, fighting the dark of the night with a streak that went from blue to gray to white, then to nothing. But at midnight with the moon rising, it felt almost brighter than when the sun was high, everything -- trees, cliffs, leaves, branches, birds, calls, cries, screeches brightly lit even though the only light was that of the not-yet-risen moon and the glow of the red coals in the fire pit. It was a circle of hell that felt divine, visited by angels when the headlights of a vehicle rumbling on the gravel road cut through the bright ethereal gloom to stab beams of light through the regreened trees.

I went back to sleep.

Then came the skunk fight. I believe it was skunks. I hope it was skunks as I thought of the other possibilities: bobcat fight, badger fight, bumfight, aliens, housecats. Whatever it was screamed and yowled. I still felt safe, hiding under my Winnie the Pooh blanket in the tent under the cottonwoods.

PS: Yes, we did make it camping, despite all the problems. We got propane. We got a new battery -- that brought on a new problem, a weird clicking sound in the interior of the camper, but I fixed that after figuring out I had the battery wires crossed. Then on the way out of town the canopy, rolled up and strapped to the side of the camper, fell -- due to rotted straps -- and crashed onto the road. We picked up the sad remains, took them home, and went on our way.

Worms!

My wife just forwarded this link to me a little while ago, and it brought back some pleasant memories. I, too, remember hearing about the elusive Giant Palouse Worm while I was a student at the University of Idaho. I'm sure there are few regions in the world where people don't have some local legend about some supernatural being or visitation; our local manifestation is of a creature that's supposed to inhabit Bear Lake, which straddles the Utah-Idaho border, kind of a Nessie of the Great Basin.

I heard a few people talk about the GPE, but, of course, I never believed them. One of my friends was in natural resource conservation there at U of I, and he dismissed the worm's existence as hokum. Now, I've seen twelve-inch nightcrawlers, but that a three-foot-long worm exists in the prarie up there, I'm not so sure about.

DC Power Seems So Simple . . .

So, does anyone out there know how to fix 12 volt DC power in an old camper?

I should rephrase that, because, I've found out this evening, there are plenty of people who do indeed know how to do this. But as soon as they start talking about flow meters, solenoids, wiring diagrams and such, I have to surrender. I'm like Dave Barry -- I wish engineers would design products so that when something breaks the offending part, once spotted, waves a tiny little "Help Me!" sign to I know what part needs to be fixed.

I can go the Traditional Guy Route: Replacing the most obvious part -- in this case, the battery -- and hoping for the best. But I'm not optimistic that'll work. I charged the old battery for a few hours last night, plugged it into the camper and voila, we had light. So I thought last night that things were ducky again. But no. Got home from work tonight, unlocked the camper, flicked a switch, and nothing. Nothing at all. So I unhooked the battery and got into the fuse box. Nothing visibly wrong there, except for the rust, which you have to expect in a 23-year-old camper with the fuse box on the exterior. So I've got the battery charging again. I don't know what to think. It's quite likely that the battery is bad. But then again, it's quite likely that it's something else entirely.

The online forums are no help at all. For all my web experience, I can't seem to ask the right question. And there are so many answers out there, all of them a bit different, filled with jargon and spiked with comments like, "If you do this wrong you'll blow yourself up. Let me know what you're going to do before you do it. I'm worried for you." I suspect, since in that particular case, since the puestion-power never reported on his task that he either blew himself up or took the camper to a repair shop that charged him an exorbitant fee to set things right.

Thing is, we already fixed something on the camper this year -- had to replace the propane valve. Did it myself. And that's bad, because now the wife assumes I can fix anything else. And I can't. And since she's got a camping itch for this weekend, I've got to come up with some results or I will not be long for this world.

I know. Petty problems, given the strife that so many go through in life. I don't have bullets flying at me, I'm not starving, I'm not being persecuted. But still, it's a frustration.

Motivation

Darth Will Find Ways to Motivate Them

The question has come up in my class on building online classes as to what makes for a motivated student – particularly because as we study and ponder what should go into a successful online course, the recommendation we run into most often is that “this activity/thingy is best for motivated students.”

So what makes a student motivated? I’m tempted to say it’s not as complicated as this list makes it out to be – but I think the author of this piece gets it right with the first bullet point:

Motivated students “have a clear understanding of the relevance and purpose of the study.”

One of the biggest questions we’ve been asked to answer in this class is, for the student, “What’s in it for me?” We have a change through our pedagogy, lessons, activities and assessments to help students answer that question in a positive manner throughout the course. Answering that question positively and constantly is more important than any technology, trick, variation of assessment and lesson or anything else for that matter -- though all of these can help. If students fail to see what a game or technological approach to learning will do for them, they're not worth having.

Why throughout the course? Because even for motivated students, the level of motivation changes over time. Motivation may also shift entirely out of the realm of the specific learning environment, making a student who appeared motivated in the past suddenly appear unmotivated.

What do motivated students need to remain motivated to the task at hand?

An instructor willing to facilitate, but also willing to step in and crack the whip like an old-fashioned teacher. Even among motivated students, there comes a time when the instructor has to lay down the law. “You’re behind schedule.” “You’re not understanding this concept.” “Do I have a class of lazybones?”

Specific feedback. The admonitions thrown out by the whip-wielding instructor are only the beginning. Instructors should start with general announcements, but then get down to specifics, especially specifics with individual students.

Praise. Yes, the ol’ carrot and stick. But, again, specific. Things like “That’s great!” Or “You’re doing well!” is meaningless, and, worse, does nothing to reinforce application or remind the learner of potential application of what is being learned. This is especially important as motivated students take on new, unfamiliar tasks. They may concentrate so much on completing the new task that they neglect to apply past learnings in ways that will make the new task more applicable to what they already know.

I have seen firsthand what happens when motivated individuals, through indistinct feedback and praise, lose their motivation. It’s like flipping a switch that shuts the motivation off completely. Turning that switch back on can be difficult.

Grammar Nazi Hoist by His Own Petard

When I started these Grammar Nazi posts, I noted, with a few exceptions, that I am not a perfect individual, particularly in the grammar and spelling department. Today, I offer an example of that imperfection, one that shows how I was led down the incorrect path by the bugaboo I harp about in others: phonics.

Today we discuss the difference between aerial and areal. Look closely, those of you who don't recognize that second word. For it is a real word. It is pronounced the same way as aerial, but their meanings are as different as the sky and the sea.

Aerial -- the version I used -- refers to the air, the sky, and the moon up above, as in aerial photography, or photographs taken from the air.

Areal -- the version I should have used -- is the adjectival form of the noun area. In this sense, areal refers to a specific area or extent, as defined here by Merriam-Webster.com. Though areal could refer to an area in the sky, it has as much to do with aerial as television aerials have to do with cable TV.

So I am humbled, today, by having learned something new.

Peer Review and Writer Sociality

Too often, the image we have of a writer is that of a lone figure, hunched over a table or keyboard, bound there in quiet frustration as he or she tries to find the right words, the right images, the right character, the right way to say and do the right thing. I’ve heard it said that the novel may be one of the few remaining pursuits which an individual may take on and accomplish alone. I look at it a different way. Though, at times, the act of writing is intimate and individual, the best writers know that what they are doing is innately social, because what is written is just a mechanical assemblage of words, phrases, images and characters until they are brought to life through the act of reading. Where writers and readers meet, what are typically identified as two solitary pursuits become an engaging social contract where the one’s ideas become the other’s projections into the future. So it’s not surprising to consider, as Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch does in her essay “Virtual Peer Review,” that such reviews are not merely imitative of face-to-face reviews, but bring in extra value because the sociality inherent in the combination of reading and writing is present not verbally, but in archival form that readers and writers may refer to again and again as the writing, revision, and reading phases continue over time.

Breuch writes: “. . . virtual peer review offers us an extraordinary opportunity to bridge what we already know about writing and pedagogy with what future technologies may bring. Indeed, virtual peer review has solid roots in an activity that has been documented in past scholarship, but it is unique and it can adopt technologies of the future” (154).

As far as I can tell, virtual peer review is core to the classes we’re creating – mirroring similar peer review experiences we’ve had in both on- and off-line classes. This holds true even for me, as I pursue bringing a speech class online, rather than a “writing” class in the strictest sense. But as Breuch writes, virtual peer review allows for the review of text created in other ways than with a pen and paper or with a keyboard and word processor – Students in my speech class will create videos to which their peers will respond with the written word. Though this is true in off-line classrooms as well (we all remember those film strips from elementary school, right?) that such technologies can be used to bring together students scattered over vast distances is a telling way in which the pedagogy behind peer review is taking advantage of modern technology.

I’m excited that I’ll be able to incorporate online peer reviews into this speech class. Though peer reviews are quite common in speech classes, I’m tempted to think that the online element, with easy archiving of peers’ comments, will make the learning and revision processes more valuable to students than in a traditional classroom. As Breuch notes in a study conducted by Mark Babrito of four writers who had participated extensively in online peer review, student writers who had archival review to draw from were more likely to include those revisions in further drafts of their papers. “It is a promising finding, then, that recording peer comments may stimulate recall (it is more difficult to remember exact suggestions from peer reviewers in face-to-face settings,” Breuch writes (148). I know this from my own experiences as a student – I have an easier time recalling comments if they’re written, rather than if they’re spoken. It’s my experience, too, that the ability to set aside written comments and revisit them for further reflection often reduces the barriers some writers/speakers may cast up in the face of criticism. Comments that may have stung at the onset, upon further reflection, make sense and are more easily incorporated than those that are delivered verbally, because more often than not it is the hurt, not the verbal comment preceding it, that is recalled. The ability to set aside archived comments and revisit them with a cold eye is invaluable as writers and speakers seek to improve their craft and to understand the theory behind the comments received.

But, to coin a phrase, with greater archival opportunity comes greater responsibility on the part of commenters, as Beth Hewett and Christa Ehmann write in “Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction”: Twice we’re cautioned against overcommenting. “When instructors overwrite or are unable to decide on the two to three crucial teaching points for the particular interaction, they can spend far too much time on each student, lessening their effectiveness and efficiency,” Hewett and Ehmann write (75). I think we’ve all felt the pain of swimming through page after page of commentary, looking for the solitary nuggets of wisdom buried therein that can help us improve our papers – reflecting again what Hewett and Ehmann say “Our experience has shown that students – especially basic writers – comprehend the feedback better when they are not overwhelmed by the online instructor’s comments” (81). How many of us recall times when we’ve seen long comments and simply don’t read them, skim them, or otherwise dismiss them in whole or in part because they’re just too long to read?

Breuch and Hewett and Ehmann combined offer online instructors a valuable set of tools and red flags as we leap into not only reviewing our students’ work, but also in establishing guidelines on how peers should review the work as well: Do indeed comment, but keep the comments instructive and, above all, brief. And also more directive comments, as Breuch points out: “students may feel more free to offer directive comments for revision suggestions, which is a stark contrast to the non-directive speech patterns encouraged in face-to-face interactions” (148). Combine an innate opportunity for more directive comments with what Hewett and Ehmann call “critically kind” responses (75) and we can create environments where budding and experienced writers and speakers can mutually benefit through positive, constructive interaction, all in a space where that interaction is recorded for posterity, or for as long as the class lasts at least. This is the kind of environment we envision in the online utopias we’re creating; in reality, we probably won’t approach this level. But it’s good to have something to shoot for.

Election/Fourth of July Note

Even though Rex Rammell has registered to run as a Republican for governor, the Madison County Republicans float in the Rexburg Fourth of July Parade Saturday didn't mention his name, though it mentioned all three of our local state senators by name. What does anyone suppose that means . . .