I miss students!
March 24, 2011
Last Friday, I had the pleasure (and I do mean pleasure) of heading into one of Richard Blot’s sections of Shaping the Future of NYC for a quick lesson on how to do online scholarly research (aka, “Moving Beyond Google or Wikipedia”). It was an upbeat and fast-moving discussion of what research is (a conversation, a debate), followed by some of the intricacies of Google Scholar, and a short segment I like to call “What Amazon is Really Good For.”
What Amazon is Really Good For (click to see!)
The general concept of forward- and backward-citations was new to pretty much everyone in the classroom, so I left feeling like I had made a positive contribution to the research that guides the Seminar 4 final projects. I hope that as students move from the research stage to the presentation stage, I’ll be called in again to help.
Part of the reason this contact felt special is because it is becoming rare. If students have tech questions, they always, always, always e-mail. The only question I ever get in person at my office hours is, “What is the password for the Macaulay network?” And given the decision to do away with spring semester tech fair (a decision I wholeheartedly support given our replacement activities, truly), there just… haven’t been any students in my MHC experience, except for our talented and industrious programming intern, who happens to be in the reading room the same day I am.
I totally heart the intern, but I miss having an entire MHC class trouping through the building. I am trying to brainstorm ways to get more (and more productive) ITF contact with students. Workshops? “Bring Your Computer And Ask Us Any Questions You Have Over Wine And Cheese Dessert Night”? “How To Do Totally Badass Online Research”? Do we just need to jazz up the names a bit, or do we need to completely rethink what we’re doing here?
I wonder also how we can get the information we need to make these decisions. Students sometimes seem loathe to reach out to us, no matter how much we reach out to them (and believe me, if I issue any “please feel free to contact me if you need my help!” messages to my Seminar 4, it’ll get creepy). Maybe the Macaulay Scholars Council or some other student organization would be willing to canvass the campuses.
Part of our ongoing discussion about the use value of in-person office hours needs to be “what do we do instead?” I’m all for “work more on My Amazing Dissertation about X,” believe me, but if we could find new ways to be relevant to both the student and faculty populations, it would only help us steer the ship in the direction we want it to go.
