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Significant Offering Dave is offering us some important capabilities in his efforts to get the Reading List code finished. I can see all kinds of uses in college classrooms. Since the web appeared, it is common in my classes for us to form long, complex and comprehensive listings of web resources matching the subjects of the class. It takes a long time to build such lists; one of the most famous of these class projects is the Victorian Web at Brown University. Faculty and students at Brown have been working on this meta-site for years adding new links, new categories and new relationships every term. I could, then, assign groups of students to search out sites and, once found, update the class listing so that everyone in the class can have the benefit of everyone else's work. The collaborative aspects of building a knowledge-base is invaluable and there really isn't any other software that comes close to this power and value. Students Rating Faculty In the 70s -- when this college was founded -- there was a powerful movement to have students evaluate faculty. If I remember correctly, one of the first examples was from Berkeley. The concept was based on the idea -- mistaken? -- that students were "consumers" and, as such, had every responsibility to evaluate the product they were paying for. This is a sort of "consumer's reports" attitude. It was also part of the general distrust of faculty especially if they were over 30. This college developed an instrument and almost 40 years later we are still using it. Its validity is seldom questioned in spite of the fact that students sometimes fill out the form in less than a minute, that they really don't care if they do it or not, that they tend to stress the faculty as entertainer instead of faculty as teacher, that it is dead easy to influence how students evaluate us and that entities in the college have not always used the results fairly. When the web appeared, then, it was obvious that there would be online sites for evaluating the professor. RateMyProfessors.com is that site. Now a faculty member has set up a site for professors to evaluate their students. Needless to say, some professors are really angry about the students in their classes. Here is the link: Rate Your Students. Fed up with RateMyProfessors.com? A new Web site offers you equal time. [Inside Higher Ed] |
Last modified: Friday, October 31, 2008 at 9:20 PM.
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