We’re hitting the road next week for a conference in Savannah, GA and bringing el bebe with us. Happily we’ll have adjoining rooms with the g’parents, so hopefully me and my folks can contain the little guy while Amy attends her conference. Amy flies down with Grey without me, so keep your fingers crossed for her. He’s a pretty easy going little fella, so we have high hopes. We’re all together on the return trip so that should make things easier. Allegedly.

I’ve arranged it so I have student conferences for two days straight when I get back. We can cancel classes at our discretion as long as we meet with every student, either individually or in small groups, as part of conferences. My first semester teaching I kind of dreaded conferences because students tended to treat them as interrogations, but now I like them a lot more and find them quite useful. My first round of conferences was sort of a “How do you think you’re doing?” kind of meeting, which I didn’t find useful. Now I try to give the conferences more structure, as in “We’re going to talk about X,” and students tend to come more prepared. There are also a couple of students stuck in neutral that need some prodding, and this is a decent time to do that as well.

As far as my own studies, it’s very much catch as catch can at this stage. I’m fooling around with design work and, while I like it quite a bit, a find myself only producing semi-satisfactory results—which is probably because I’m not a designer. I finally broke down and bought Adobe CS4 Design Suite Premium, which sells to students for an insanely low $315. This will allow me to hack around in programs I have worked with a little bit (Dreamweaver, Illustrator), give me access to programs I’ve never used but want to learn more about (Flash, Fireworks and InDesign) and update my very old version of Photoshop. Like with most things, having the right tools helps tremendously and though I wasn’t keen on dropping $300, having these tools on-hand should allow me to gain some level of comfort with them that I never would achieve trying to use them in the campus computer lab.

I find this situation interesting in terms of some of the research that I’ve been doing regarding computers and pedagogy. Overwhelmingly, easy access to computers and specific software translates into being comfortable and proficient in teaching oneself new things; in other words, students who have computers in the home are likely to be more comfortable using them than students who only use computers in school settings. Upon reflection, this should seem fairly obvious. But what’s disturbing is how a) these skills make students much more competitive when looking for jobs, and b) students who have up-to-date hardware and software on their home computers tend to be white and upper-to-middle class, not to mention that fooling around on the computer is still predominantly a “guy” thing (though I think this is rapidly changing).

So once again, students who are already at a disadvantage from not having easy access to computing resources (and thus are less likely to feel comfortable self-teaching and experimenting on computers) are also likely to be working from a disadvantage in terms of socioeconomic standing, which in turn strongly correlates to race. Just something to mull over as I, a white guy, drop a good wad of cash on software that hopefully will help me get a job down the line…

Current Mood: Sure |