Charles and Christy’s Weblog

I’m writing this blog entry while stalling on assembling my tenure dossier. I am honored that my colleagues want me to go up for tenure early but I am so overwhelmed at the prospects for the coming academic year. This dossier itself is a monster… already 50 pages of awards I’ve won, papers I’ve published, talks I’ve given, and student comments on my teaching. I’m working on the “meat” of the dossier… a summary of my group’s research results and direction. After I finish this, 3 of my colleagues will rip the document to shreds, I’ll revise, and then the dossier will go out to 12 of the most famous scientists in my field (National Academy members, department chairs, etc). Each of these people will evaluate me and write a letter back to my department about whether or not they think I deserve tenure. In early October, my Chemistry colleagues will review my dossier and the letters and then vote on my tenure case. Following their vote, there are six more panels, deans, etc that also get to cast their vote on my tenure case. The final decision won’t be known until late next Spring. In the meantime, I have to do an enormous amount of traveling. Usually, a probationary faculty member visits a bunch of universities the year before their tenure case to meet with potential letter writers and do some good PR for their research group. I was pretty busy in the last year with a new baby, and thus, didn’t do said travel. So, while I’m teaching this Fall, I will also visit a university and give a seminar about once every two weeks. While this will be intellectually stimulating, it will make for a blur of a semester. I find myself wishing I had one more year to spread out the travel, get more results, and write more papers… but I suppose, in approaching this huge hurdle, I would always wish for one more year.

This semester I’m reteaching my freshman seminar about Vonnegut and the influence of science and technology on society. Although my class is smaller this semester (9 students compared to 15 last semester), we have much more lively discussions. Maybe I am more relaxed or maybe it’s a function of the students having been at the University for a little while… maybe it’s just random.

Today in class, we read the short story “EPICAC” from Welcome to the Monkeyhouse. A pair of students did a presentation about robots and artificial intelligence, and then posed the question, “Where are moral/ethical lines when using computers/robots?” I thought this was a fairly routine question and said that there are obvious lines such as using internet browsers on cell phones to cheat on exams and asked for more nuanced situations. Instead of going deeper on this question, we ended up discussing how everyone is cheating to some extent and that the only reason to attend college was to get through in the most efficient manner so that you could get a decent job. All of the students in my class seemed to agree that the college experience is largely not an intellectual journey but a necessity, a “trade school” if you will. I’m no luddite… I’m as addicted to email and the internet as everyone else but I am mortified to hear that this is where technology has brought us. One of the students in my class went on to say that he wouldn’t even be upset if he saw the student next to him cheating on an exam as long as he/she was doing it in a creative way.

Is this really what we’ve been reduced to? Should I just expect students to be here only because they have to in order to get a decent job? Should expect them all to be cheating or tolerating cheating? What will they really have when they’re done? What does this mean for the intellectual future of the human race?

I don’t consider myself an intellectual but I certainly strive to have intellectual experiences. Why don’t these students expect and value this?

I am disturbed but thankful for this discussion. Maybe the freshman seminar is more for me than them.

So, in my last post I mentioned that I was going to use blogs for both of my Fall 2006 classes. With the semester over, I figured I’d summarize the results of my experiments. In my freshman seminar, the blog was OK but not great. The students in my class were required to post once every two weeks but the conversation was pretty mechanical and did not achieve my goal of promoting connection between class meetings. In my graduate level course, however, it worked pretty well. Every week, the grad students had to read one article from a current scientific journal and summarize it on the blog. As the semester went on, their summaries advanced to include suggestions for new experiments and constructive criticism of the published experiments. I will definitely use a blog again for this course.

Also, the websites look so nice. The problems sometimes had trouble figuring out how to start a new post (as opposed to just commenting on a post I started). Also, I had to approve every comment before it would show up - this was nice because I could avoid spam but would definitely be a pain with a bigger class.

I had so much fun writing in our blog while I was in Japan that I’ve decided to use blogs in both courses I’m teaching this fall (instead of a web page or portal). If you are interested in looking at my course blogs - the one for the graduate level “Analytical Spectroscopy” course can be found at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/chaynes/8152/ and the one for my Vonnegut freshman seminar titled “The End of the World as We Know It” is at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/chaynes/vonnegut/. The latter is more likely to be interesting for non-Chemists. You can even post if you want to… though I’ll have to approve your comments if you’re not registered in my class!