Category: Education/Academia

Contemporary Trends in Academia: The Shadow Scholar and Video Killed the Faculty Star

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

Technology has been changing academia.  Whether this is for the good or bad is open to debate.  As anyone who reads this blog might guess, I’m a big fan of using technological innovations (internet, video, music software) to enhance and improve my teaching, but I often come across some of the darker underbelly of an over-reliance on the “bells and whistles” that online resources offer.  Recently I’ve seen a couple of articles that offer some interesting food for thought on this topic.  The first concerns plagiarism and the second regarding the use of posting lectures online.

The Chronicle Review, the e-journal of the Chronicle of Higher Education, published a very interesting article by “Ed Dante,” the pseudonym for a professional writer who writes for an essay mill.  In The Shadow Scholar, Dante discusses how he makes his living writing papers for college students.  It’s an extremely interesting read and infuriating for those of us who teach or those students who actually make an effort to learn and pay their dues.  The comments are as interesting to read as the article itself.

In a somewhat related article, Inside Higher Ed discusses how videos of college lectures can go viral on the internet, often after being highly edited to present an incomplete or even intentionally misleading portrayal of the instructor.  Some colleges and instructors are being more selective about policies towards their access of online course content now in response.

Learning Styles

~ wilktone ~ 4 Comments

The idea of “meshing” a student’s learning style with the way one teaches is an old and common approach to pedagogy.  As this idea goes, we should work out whether our student is an “analytical” type or a “creative” type and alter our instruction to fit the way our student learns best.  Somewhat related to my post from last Friday, if the student is an intuitive learner and enjoys learning by listening and imitating, then we should teach more by playing for the student.  On the other hand, students who are a little more “left brained” will learn best through analysis and we should teach them the details.  Students who are visual learners should be assigned reading while students who learn best by doing should be given in-class projects.

This sort of teaching philosophy is ubiquitous these days.  There are tests that teachers can give to assess their students’ learning styles so that we can cater how we present the information to them.  Some students may prefer to get their information through pictures, some through speech, some through text, and many other methods.  It seems like a no brainer, particularly for those of us teaching private music lessons, where we can easily alter our instruction for an individual student without worrying about a class full of differing students.  There’s only one problem with meshing instruction to fit the individual student’s learning style.  When carefully controlled and tested, students generally don’t respond better or worse to being taught in their preferred method.

Continue reading “Learning Styles” →

Happy New Academic Year!

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

Today is the first day of classes in the new fall semester for me.  To mark this occasion, here are some items from the annual Beloit College Mindset List for the class of 2014.  This list is put together by Ron Nief and Tom McBride every year to help faculty members get a better understanding of cultural values and backgrounds of incoming freshman.  Here are some of my favorites from this year, mostly the ones related to music.

  • Few in the class know how to write in cursive.
  • “Cop Killer” by rapper Ice-T has never been available on a recording.
  • Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess.
  • Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.
  • Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.
  • Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties.
  • Beethoven has always been a good name for a dog.
  • The artist formerly known as Snoop Doggy Dogg has always been rapping.

There’s a lot more in the complete list.  Most of it is trivial in the bigger picture, but it does make for an interesting look at the class of 2014.

Anyone else feeling a little old right now?

Conducting Thoughts From Dr. Joe Scagnoli

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

I was doing some office cleaning and came across a notebook for a conducting class I took from Dr. Joe Scagnoli, at Ball State.   I don’t recall the context of the following, but I think this may be something he put together for our class.  Here are “Conducting Thoughts, Some Simple-Some Profound” from ‘Doc.’

  • The music is in the sound, not in the printing.
  • Music moves ever forward.
  • Teach your students to play with professional ear.
  • We are either sensitizing our players or desensitizing them.
  • Every ensemble is capable of its own independent pulse.
  • The music, not the meter, should drive the gesture.
  • The left hand is the adjective hand – descriptive.
  • When conducting soft passages with small gestures the facial energy must increase tremendously.
  • Releases are reverse preparations.
  • Always be aware of who in the ensemble has the pulse.
  • People care more about how you feel about the music than how much you know.
  • The music starts before the first beat is given.  Set up the mood of the music.

It’s obvious from reading it that he’s specifically talking about conducting, but there are gems in there for jazz or chamber ensemble directors, and even just musicians in general.

The U.S. Creativity Crisis

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know that I would call it exactly a “crisis” myself, at least not as described in Po Bronson’s and Ashley Merriman’s Newsweek article, The Creativity Crisis.  New research looking at American’s creativity quotient (like IQ, except it measures an individual’s ability to create something original and useful) shows that CQ scores in the U.S. had been rising steadily up until 1990, when they began to consistently drop.

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

I would argue that TV and video games are a lot more complex than the authors give credit.  Many of today’s TV shows require fans to follow very complex plots that arc over years of episodes with characters and events influencing shows seasons later.  Video games today are equally complicated and not like traditional games, where the rules are established and learned from the beginning.  In a video game you learn what to do by probing and figuring out what you’re supposed to do to play the game.  You have to learn to think creatively in order to probe the game and work out how to play it.

As far as creativity development in schools, there are some interesting points raised in the Newsweek article.

Continue reading “The U.S. Creativity Crisis” →

More On Music and Learning

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

A few days ago I wondered about how much validity there is to the belief that musical training will prepare you to do other things.  It’s pretty common for many of my music teaching colleagues to tell concerned parents that their children will “learn how to learn” or that the skills they learn majoring in music will teach them what they need to know to succeed in just about anything.  While I certainly don’t want to discourage the study of music, I think this recruiting tactic is misleading and can backfire.

Coincidentally, Dr. Steven Novella (a neurologist at Yale, blogger, and podcaster) happened to post on a recent review on music and its effects on overall cognitive function.  Specifically, what is musical training’s effect on brain plasticity.  He uses typing as an example.  After decades of typing you don’t need to think anymore about where to push down on the keys, you simply type what you want to write.

Continue reading “More On Music and Learning” →

Music Education Will Make You Business Savvy?

~ wilktone ~ 4 Comments

Will music training prepare you to deal with the demands of the business world?  Brian Pertl, a musician, former Microsoft senior manager and now Dean of Lawrence Conservatory of Music, believes so.  He writes about the qualities that companies are looking for in prospective employees, including focus, self-motivation, a collaborative attitude, good communication skills, and creativity.  Being a successful musician, Pertl argues, necessarily involves developing those five skills and they can directly translate into success in business.  He writes:

“. . . from where I sit now, as a conservatory trained trombonist, the current dean of a major conservatory of music, and a former senior manager at Microsoft with 16 years of experience in the business world, I see the connections between conservatory training and core business skills from a unique vantage point. Over the years, as I analyzed the reasons for my successes as a business manager, it always came back to the skills I had learned as a musician and had honed at my conservatory of music. Now that I am back in the world of the conservatory, many worried parents of prospective students ask me what good conservatory training will do if their child doesn’t happen to become a professional musician.”

I really want to agree with Pertl, but I think he’s piling on a lot of spin on this topic.

Continue reading “Music Education Will Make You Business Savvy?” →

Highly Rated Professors are Overrated

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

Anyone who has ever been a college student is probably familiar with the once-a-semester ritual of filling out student evaluations for the professors teaching their classes.  As a student, I was typical in not taking them very seriously.  When I did make an effort to do more than merely fill in the right bubble on the scan form, it was either because I had a beef with the professor or really, really, enjoyed the class.

As a college professor receiving student evaluations, I’ve discovered that most students behave similarly.  One college I taught at switched from a paper and pencil evaluation form filled out during class to an online system where the students were requested to evaluate their courses by logging onto a web site and completing them outside of class.  Not only did the number of students who evaluated their courses drop significantly, the results of the evaluations got skewed towards both extreme ends.  Students who really liked or hated the class were likely to fill them out, but not many others.

So it comes to me as little surprise that student evaluations turn out to not be very effective methods of evaluating the quality of education the students are receiving.  A study done by Scott E. Carrell of UC Davis and James E. West of the USAF Academy entitled, “Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors” looks at this very thing.

Continue reading “Highly Rated Professors are Overrated” →

Grade Inflation in Higher Education

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

It’s commonly believed that for decades the average grade of college students have been steadily rising.  While a grade of C is still defined as being the average grade, a C is really perceived by students and teachers alike as a poor grade today.  Where a B was once the most common grade for college students to earn, these days more college students earn A’s.  This trend in academia is known as grade inflation.

According to Stuart Rojstaczer this trend began in the in 1960’s, particular during the Vietnam era, when flunking out of college meant becoming eligible for the draft.  Some site the rise of minority students as being partially responsible for this trend, but Rojstaczer points out that grade inflation actually declined in the 1970’s and 1980’s when minority enrollment in higher education rose most sharply.

Continue reading “Grade Inflation in Higher Education” →