When teaching works

One of the things about being a teacher is that it's pretty hard to know when teaching works. I tend to believe that the reason things work out is because I have such brilliant students. I am a pretty privileged teacher, I have a lot of brilliant students, they participate, they share, the listen and they learn. It's a wonderful place to be in.

Sometimes, however, I get this sneaking suspicion that I have influenced them. And I am not talking about the many, many students traumatised to the point of never being able to squeeze another ketchup bottle after advertising lectures with graphic images. No, you see, sometimes I do something with my teaching because I want students to get better at one particular skill, and they get better at it!

I have just come out of a marathon of paper grading, the curse of every professor. When the students go on vacation, we hole up with supplies, good reading light and a red pen, and get to it. This is a strange and exhausting process, as it demands intense focus for hour after hour. Luckily the students I grade these days submit computer written papers - when I also have to decode handwriting, this is headsplittingly hard. Anyway.

Going into a long period of grading is like zoning into a very special slice of life. It's just you, the reading list, the course list, the demands to the papers, and this large stack in front of you. It's easy to feel disconnected from reality and worry that you're being too nice or too harsh, or believe you are hallucinating. Sometimes we are. Grading large stacks takes endurance and practice to do well - at the end of day two, the words blur and you turn pages with only a vague idea of what is on them. Again and again you go back, read over, check the notes, worry you may have been in that empty trance state too long, and can't get it all back, but you have to press forwards to the end of the stack.

Then you call the other assessor. You communicate - carefully - your idea about how the grades are this year. Surprisingly often you and the other assessor agree! This is always a miraculous moment. There is something measurable, and you have both sensed and measured it in a manner that is at least comparable!

This year I got this sneaking feeling early; that this was a generally good stack. (Now, if you are a student, no, I am not giving you your grade until all the formalities are in place, and then you have to call the administration. The papers are in the mail between me, the censor and the student administration. Wait for it.) Not that they were all brilliant, some were brilliant, some bad, some failed. It's how it is. But they were on average much better than I have been used to! I thought this was odd, because it's been a rough semester. I had to bring in several external leturers (thanks folks, you did really good by my students!) and rely on the TAs a lot (and they were amazingly reliable). So I started to pay attention, to try to figure out what had happened.

One thing stood out: They papers were organised! They had a strong and clear structure, they had developed the research questions, they had all elements we ask for from a paper, and they used literature well and correctly. I almost wanted to cry. I have been drilling this into student heads all autumn, repeating the structure of a paper, the reference systems, the reason for both and the logic of scholarly argumentation. I have linked reference systems and written outlines, and then repeated it all one-on-one for those who came for supervision. I worried I had overdone it.

If I overdid it, at least the message got through. Even the weak papers were structured. In several cases this saved them from a total crash and burn, as the adherence to structure helped discipline the progress. And this I know is different from the terms before. This one thing was drilled more, and more systematically. The teaching made a difference.

So, now I have that working for me. Tomorrow I'll be at the library, considering what else I need to spend time on. I am thinking of how to tighten up the reading list and the progress of lectures, and couple it better with the exercizes. I can't promise that it will work as well, but I can guarantee that I will try.

It's the week before Christmas

Everything is slowly falling into place. The subject for which I am responsible this spring is taking shape. I have a few interesting dates for lectures and other public appearances in place. I am for instance scheduled to be part of Faltin Karlsen's defense in January. There are a couple of great people coming here to talk to the students. The book is finally out of my hands, and with the publisher, not to return here until in March, when the publishing date is.

I will be insanely busy during the Christmas week, but it will be good busy. I have to write a first draft for an article on e-learning and games, and for this I am planning to follow up the topic of theorycrafting and crowdsourcing. This means I have to read up on literature on how to be a better gamer, and test the theories out in World of Warcraft. Oh, the sacrifices we do for research. It all falls into the cross-over community topic I started to look into for the IR 9.0 conference in October 08, and aims at more work on collaborations and participation using multiple platforms. More about that later, I hope.

A lot of the work I am doing on games is now slowly falling into place with the work I have been doing on social software and the social web. Patterns are emerging in ways that makes it a lot easier to, for instance and rather unexpectedly makes it easier to lecture on Public Relations - which I am now doing regularly again after a break while in Umeå. I have always been in love with the process of seeing connections, caught in the web of knowledge as I am.

Now it's finally stopepd raining, after a week. The storm has relented, and I am optimistic about people coming home for Christmas. I'll be celebrating in one of the few spots the family controls which is still free from internet access: my mother's house, where I grew up with the most beautiful view I have ever lived with. It will be busy, messy, loud and not peaceful at all. But it will be a very different kind of mess, and I can't wait.

Life outside the city

Much as I enjoy visiting cities, living outside them is sometimes much more entertaining and exotic. Today's message to the college was one of those moments. We have a guest lecturer coming in - well, we do a lot of that, a small college like ours just can't cover everything with our own staff. However, this one has more than one errand. He also sells potatoes.

These are not just any potatoes, they are carefully nurtured almond potatoes, a delicacy in a country where we eat potatoes with the rice or pasta. It is still such a wonderful message, such a strong reminder of where I am. The college is surrounded by fields where sheep and cows graze, and one of the huge public arguments lately was about using some of the best fields still left close to Volda center for a conference hall. And when you grow potatoes, you have to, quite literally, put your fingers in the soil, which is a Norwegian expression for having a reality check. Volda is a place where it's easy to put your fingers in the soil. And some people even manage to get potatoes out of it.