Focused Inquiry | Matthew James Vechinski

Curiouser and Curiousest

Jul 27 2015

Ian Leslie’s Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It was a great summer read. My interest in the book was initially professional: I wanted to compare it to the textbook I use in my undergraduate research course, UNIV 200. While the textbook is primarily a how-to primer for academic research, it too privileges curiosity as the first step in the process, crucial to the development of an inquiry. Leslie, freed from having to discuss curiosity solely in the context of research, explores a wide range of examples and makes arguments that help readers of any specialization understand what inspires and sustains curiosity.

One key concept from Curious is the difference between diversive and epistemic varieties of curiosity. The former involves flitting from idea to idea in the manner of surfing the web, as it used to be called, and the latter is deeper, sustained engagement with a particular issue. Leslie recommends, as I do in my course, that diversive curiosity be harnessed and converted to epistemic inquiry. I usually introduce this notion to students by contrasting seeking information with investigating an issue, yet maybe I’m not doing justice to diversive curiosity. Leslie associates the diversive with mysteries, and points out that one may read mystery stories with an intense desire to know and enjoy a journey of some length leading to its conclusion. Epistemic curiosity is characterized by asking how and why questions, which I have students refer to as “issue questions,” in line with the textbook I use. So I was pleased to see that asking probing questions was central to Leslie’s notion of curiosity.

The final chapter of the book is indeed prescriptive, titled “Seven Ways to Stay Curious.” But what I found more fascinating was Leslie’s treatment of why some people are more curious than others, an exploration he skillfully handles without resorting to overgeneralization. Early in the book he describes the Need for Cognition (NFC) questionnaire, 18 statements about feelings associated with the work of thinking that can be used as an indicator of how curious a person may be. Here are a few sample statements:

I would rather do something that requires little thought than something that is sure to challenge my thinking abilities.
I really enjoy a task that involves coming up with new solutions to problems.
I usually end up deliberating about issues even when they do not affect me personally.
I prefer to think about small, daily projects to long-term ones.

I could see referencing the NFC test in my class and debating its merits. The test itself doesn’t explain why people would agree or disagree with these statements, though it could prompt such thinking. Leslie spends a chapter of his book describing a “sweet spot” for curiosity, which depends on the level of one’s surprise, knowledge, and confidence. Simply put, if any of these three qualities are too high or too low, people tend to be overwhelmed or underwhelmed rather than productively curious. Leslie is careful to highlight that curiosity thrives in the presence of what Robert Bjork calls desirable difficulties, or enhanced learning that comes from having to think hard. He shows, too, that curiosity involves being in the moment, willing to entertain new ideas and follow thoughts where they lead, without makes long-term investment in an inquiry possible. Merely setting progress goals or imagining future rewards, in other words, is not enough.

The relationship of knowledge to curiosity is a particular emphasis of Leslie’s. He points out repeatedly that if a person doesn’t have a base knowledge of an issue, there will be no foundation for epistemic curiosity. He disagrees with those who feel that curiosity is best encouraged by deemphasizing the imparting of information to students (e.g., think of Paulo Freire’s banking education versus T-shaped skills rooted in expertise). In fact, he argues that social hierarchies are entrenched by lack of access to knowledge:

“[C]uriosity, like other thinking skills, cannot be nurtured, or taught, in the abstract. Rather than being stifled by factual knowledge, it depends on it. Until a child has been taught the basic information she needs to start thinking more deeply about a particular subject, it’s hard to develop her initial (diversive) curiosity into enduring (epistemic) curiosity … The curiosity of children dissipates when it doesn’t get fed by knowledge, imparted by parents and teachers. Even when they find something interesting to begin with, children without adequate background knowledge of a subject will soon give up on learning about it, deciding that it’s just “not for me.” Knowledge gives curiosity staying power.”

Thus youth who have not amassed a store of information are put at a disadvantage that only grows as they age. This circumstance is exacerbated, Leslie shows, by the fact that those of higher socioeconomic classes encourage questioning among their children, especially higher level how and why explorations. It would be interesting to take up with students the matter of institutional advantages and disadvantages in light of curiosity, if it could be done in such a way that it doesn’t reinforce fatalism or self-handicapping. I may at least offer students the block quotation above to solicit their thoughts.

This view of knowledge explains Leslie’s attitude to the Web as a resource. The Internet and social media can be used profitably to build one’s base knowledge, yet reliance on the Web alone may only exercise diversive curiosity. So although Leslie acknowledges concerns that technology may stifle curiosity, he believes the determining factor will be how the Web is put to use. This is a safe conclusion. In this context I would have rather he returned to points he made about family upbringing and education that show that ultimately there is a social dimension to the means and ends of technology. You can teach someone how to use the Web to gather information for herself, or you can use the Web to collaborate, which changes the equation entirely. Leslie remains focused on an individual’s curiosity when perhaps what we need to consider more is how curiosity is externalized and shared. I know this is important to my colleagues and me because we want to promote a culture of curiosity within and beyond the classroom.

Course Theme Dissemination [#CuriousCoLab]

Jul 07 2015

I’m sharing with my Collaborative Curiosity colleagues the revised description of my UNIV 200 course theme, destined for the syllabus. In my last #CuriousCoLab post, I described wanting to make participatory research and design essential concepts in my service-learning section. I hope that in the statement below—with major revisions and additions appearing in bold text—I included just the right amount of detail to stress these priorities at the outset. (To be sure, the syllabus is a peculiar mode of dissemination because it has a dual purpose: an institutional document that is also meant as a reference to students. I’m also working on a web page about the theme and my community partners that should be more inviting to students and the larger community.) Participatory research and design will be explored further in the first unit, as students develop their research questions. I’m in the process of revising the unit to include collaborative blogging on the VCU RamPages platform, which I will use to have students discuss the participatory intent behind their research projects. I’m not entirely sure how I will encourage students to take up questions of design in their blogs—that will depend on the readings I choose. But I have been keeping a list of different design approaches (e.g., universal design, participatory design, systems design, design thinking, etc., many of which overlap) with the idea of having students research them online and interpret how these practices have shaped the technologies they chose to study. Your feedback is welcome!

The course will explore three nuanced ways to discuss the past, present, and future of designed technologies. Technology will be broadly defined as a process or object whereby knowledge is applied to achieve a goal or solve problems, and designed taken to mean having an intended purpose, implying designers who plan the process or object and users who take advantage of the resulting technology.

“Technology” is a socially and historically relative term: new technologies are most likely viewed as innovative or disruptive; established technologies are often so integrated in our daily lives that we take little notice of them; and outmoded technologies we tend to discount because they seem effectively replaced by newer technologies.
Access to technologies differs by social group, due to lack of knowledge or lack of resources, which can reflect existing inequalities and create further disadvantages. But there might be some consolation in this: access shapes different life experiences, seeing how exposure to technology revises the meaning of work, leisure, and community.
The design of technology favors particular outcomes and certain users. This is to say that behind any technology resides a particular intention that is subject to real situational limitations. Nonetheless, designs may be inclusive and invite user participation, to the extent that the intention and available resources allow.

In your research and writing, you will approach the subject of your choice as a designed technology and use these considerations to enrich and deepen your exploration.

Your service may take the form of helping your community partner or those it serves use certain designed technologies to meet their needs. For example, you could help elderly residents use software such as Skype to place video calls to family members. Or, with your community partner you might design a technology to achieve a particular goal that benefits the community. You could, for instance, assist your community partner with organizing its social media campaigns which in turn increase the organization’s reach. Alternatively, you will have the opportunity examine the designed technologies a group actually uses and explore how or why they use them. If you are, say, tutoring elementary school students, you could investigate why your community partner might privilege face-to-face tutoring sessions or practice math with objects or pen and paper rather than a computer.

As a service-learner, you will have opportunities to shape your contributions to the community—what you do, how you do it, and for what purpose. In that sense, you and your community partner are designers and your users are the larger community you serve. These positions will become complicated in many ways, however: service-learners are also participants in the community and thus both users and designers. You will design along with members of the community, who aren’t simply the passive recipients of your contributions.

Google Drive: The Experiment Continues

Jun 30 2015

At the beginning of the calendar year, I wrote a post on my decision to abandon Blackboard for Google Drive for the Spring 2015 semester. The experience was overwhelmingly successful, and my impressions were confirmed by a survey I gave students asking for their feedback. There many shared comments mentioning that they will continue using Google Drive as a resource in the future, which suggests that they see a value in organizing their work in one place and collaborating with others.

I found that using Drive helped me keep up with grading because I didn’t dread logging in as I did with Blackboard. I took a different approach to calculating participation grades as well: I asked that students submit a weekly reflection, and I concentrated on giving feedback on those documents. I didn’t grade every small homework assignment or in-class activity, though I expected that these files were in students’ Drive folders and that their contents were referenced in weekly reflections. I believe this system kept our exchanges to a smaller number of files, meaning students were more likely to read and digest the comments I gave.

One limitation I encountered early is that a shared file in Google Drive cannot be unshared or made private by anyone except its creator. While a collaborator can move that file to another location, for the creator and for other collaborators, that file stays in the location on their Drive folders where they originally placed it. Thus a shared file is not really one entity like a folder in a file cabinet; people hold many keys that unlock the same door, as it were, and they can store these keys where they prefer. That way students always have the ability to modify document they created, even if I or someone else moved the file (really, their key) to another folder they don’t have access to. That means that when grading major assignments, I had to make a copy of students’ files to move to a private folder and assess the copy rather than the original file. Since I only collect a handful of final products with hard deadlines, this wasn’t too taxing, plus I needed to verify that students had indeed completed these assignments anyway or else late penalties would apply.

My biggest disappointment with the platform: while Drive makes it easy to share and coauthor documents, this proved difficult to do in real-time during class. Inviting classmates to share a file and folder should be as easy as sending them an email. But students sometimes have multiple Google accounts: personal accounts and university accounts linked to their VCU email address. Then there’s the strange phenomenon at VCU of students having two email addresses suffixes that go to the same inbox (@mymail.vcu.edu and @vcu.edu), though students can only link a single Google account to one or the other. This problem is only exacerbated by a quirk in Drive: if the invite goes to one email address, a person might be signed into a different account on her browser when she accepts it, and Google then attributes the collaboration to that account. Needlessly confusing! (I’ll just leave this description here: I’m not going to go into more any more detail about other strange sharing exceptions that I’ve encountered with my students.)

I’ve concluded that the only way to eliminate sharing difficulties once and for all is to set up shared folders for groups within the folders that I use to share course materials. The easiest way would be to assign students to groups that remain the same throughout the semester, or maybe change them by unit. Or I could instead create a set of folders (“Group 1,” “Group 2”) that would serve as temporary housing places for students’ collaborative work for that day, allowing me to reconfigure the groups at will. Either way, students would need to copy their shared work into their own Drive folders at the end of the period, or else grading will become far more complicated. There’s nothing preventing me from combining both approaches, except I don’t want to make the procedure confusing. I’ll need to test out some options and see what works best.

Lastly, here are a few other measures I’m going to implement in the Fall to make Google Drive even better integrated into the classroom culture:

Make the course schedule a Google Doc. I have been using Google Calendar for this, but that app is outside of the Drive ecosystem.
Ask students to coauthor daily class notes. I have been providing PDFs of my PowerPoints, but I want to try providing the slides in Google Docs as images or as text, and have students write around them. The goal, then, will be to capture how the class discussion elaborates on the given material.
Create voice-over videos using Jing demonstrating certain features of Google Drive (renaming files, searching for files across files, commenting functions in Google Docs, etc.). I wrote help files in document form, but I suspect these were not widely read!

If you have other tips or ideas to share, please add them to the comments.

Seamless Service-Learning

Feb 26 2015

Last week I co-facilitated a Department of Focused Inquiry faculty symposium with my colleagues in the Service-Learning FLC. We titled our event “Seamless Service-Learning” and focused on how to make service-learning an integral part of the shared curriculum for UNIV 111, 112, and 200.

The first half of our presentation described the wide range of service-learning options by citing examples from our own courses. Here we emphasized the possibilities for indirect as well as direct service, and compared individual volunteering to project-based service. I described how I place students in groups based on common availability and have them consider all community partners paired with the course before deciding on one. For each partner the groups brainstorm ideas for individual and group service contributions that draw on their talents and meet the partners’ needs.

For the second half of the symposium, we discussed practical strategies for integrating service-learning into our courses. We offered suggestions on matters of course design, including adapting Focused Inquiry assignments for service-learning sections, and how to handle logistics. I spoke of the course email address shared by my teaching assistants and me. We have students and partners carbon-copy this address on all correspondence to keep everyone in the loop and to document indirect service in the form of advance planning over email. I also shared the Google Spreadsheets my students use to map out their service across the term and keep track of their hours.

We were happy that the symposium attracted instructors who hadn’t yet taught a service-learning course. Hopefully we inspired them to give the possibility more thought in advance of the VCU Service-Learning Institute scheduled for early May.

There was some discussion that the FLC should follow up this event with another that centers on working through particular challenges for different courses in the Focused Inquiry curriculum—something like a course design workshop. (I think this is a great idea! I’ll keep you posted.)

Dr. Matthew James Vechinski is an associate professor in the Department of Focused Inquiry at Virginia Commonwealth University. His teaching draws on his interest in process-based writing instruction, communication design, and service-learning. His research centers on authors’ relationships with editors and publishers, with a particular focus on writers of short fiction for American periodicals as well as postmodern and contemporary experimental novelists. He has also written on design, collecting, and social media.

@bostonry28 Jenny Lewis: Puppy and a Truck | The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon https://t.co/rNFciXDP5l via @YouTube

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@bostonry28 https://t.co/C6erdqdwbo

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