Category: Thoughts

These days there are blogs for everything. One thing I enjoy seeing is that besides news, diaries, and link collections, there are also a growing number of blogs for language learning. I am not talking something like the fantastic Language Hat blog posting things related to the field of linguistics but people who are blogging as they learn a language. This takes courage and a lot of work, but I am interested to see how the blog will fit into language learning tools in the future. Two great recent finds are Hanguk Malkong and Peking Kaoya, both by the same 70 year old (?) Japanese (?) man (UPDATE: 69 Japanese year old man from Chiba prefecture known as Kazama. The former includes lots of links to news articles about Korea in Japanese along with postings for Japanese studying Korean and the latter does much the same for Chinese language with selections from resources he found online (I found his page by chance when I saw the page linked to me via some of this). There is also the older example of the Aradosh blog written by a student of Chinese language who uses his blog to practice his writing of Chinese online.

How soon I wonder, will it be before students in language classes all over are writing up their essays for class online in the form of blogs or something similar? I know my friend C. P. Sobelman, who teaches Chinese at Columbia University, has done something similar for her students, at least on one previous occasion. Whatever happens, this is an exciting time of transition as more and more people are trying to struggle with how exactly the self-publishing boom that is the blogosphere will balance, replace, or merge with various existing mediums of expression. What will be the impact on things like forums, email, or chatrooms? We may be tempted to say there is no connection and that they all fill separate niches. However, I suspect that this underestimates how our favored means of communication will shift. To take one example, some bloggers post their recent happenings on a blog to save themselves generic emails to friends. Generic emails to friends once replaced (for a lazy person like me at least) traditional letters or more frequent updates over the phone. Some people prefer being contacted on IM over getting an email. Some refuse to use voice mail and tell people in their message to send them an email. My point is simply that there is plenty of overlap and shifts among these different mediums. Personal preference will hopefully retain a diversity of means (the hand written letter is still a beautiful thing, even if I am no longer capable of writing one) but some consolidation is inevitable. Some online forms of communication, like usenet, BBS, and gopher, are not what they used to be.

Blogs are more like a chat room that one might first imagine. Many critiqued the blog as being one person singing their praises to the world, speaking to the void as it were and saying, “Read me, and thou shalt know of my thoughts.” I remember using exactly this sort of silly argument a few years ago while I dismissively rolled my eyes at a bunch of young Barnard computer techies who were huddled over their favorite livejournal site. In many ways, blogs, like the web forum or the chat room, are merely part of a grand conversation. Anyone who has spent anytime in a large chat room knows that what they say can go completely ignored. The workings of power and politics extend nicely into cyberspace with a few interesting changes. For example, in a chat room, MUDD, or other virtual environment you often have no way of knowing anything about the age, physical appearance, or background of those you are speaking with. That means that the Elephant Man himself, if eloquently spoken, or at least well tuned to the favored rhetorical tools of room, can completely dominate a discussion (This assumes that no one’s RW, or real-world reputation is known by others). There has been tons of writing on this since the internet came of age.

The same element of anonymity is also often the case for blogs, but you have convenient access to everything that person has said on their blog in the past, a whole history of written words are right there for immediate access (and if they have deleted some of them, sites like google often have a convenient cached copy). In contrast, without special logging and tracking utilities being run, a person in a chatroom can be pretend to be a Republican in one conversation and an Anarchist in the next.

The critique of blogs in fashion now focuses on the risk of it becoming a massive echo chamber with few fresh ideas and highly polarized factions. Personally, I think this ignores the extent to which communities of blogs mirror conversation in reality, or if you prefer a closer example, the written world of academia. If the world of blogs are echo chambers, so too is everything else. When I walk into a coffee shop and say, “You’ll never guess what Bush just said…” and relay to a friend what another friend has told me plus a good wallop of own commentary, I am engaging in the same sort of thing as what blogs do in great frequency online. As some theorists might have predicted, the amount of writing hasn’t decreased because we can now pass on links to each other or have better access to “all” the facts. Indeed, commentary breeds ever more commentary. Words feed on words.

Lots of people moan about grade inflation, especially in graduate school. Some complaints take the form of, “People who don’t deserve an A are getting an A,” and pretty much end at that. Others defend the inflators with, “The grading system is so arbitrary and varies so radically across schools and from professor to professor that it is foolish to injure, however remotely, the chances of students to succeed in the future by actually trying to enforce a meaningful grading system in a class.” Then there is the issue of “performance relative to one’s classmates” vs. “performance relative to a particular standard of learning achieved.” The latter in turn leads to the question of, “Standard? Recognized by and established by who?”

I haven’t really given this or grade inflation in general too much thought. Nor have I read anything by anyone who has (links appreciated). I do know, however, that at Western Washington University, many of my classes had very tough grading practices. In some of my philosophy classes, in particular, it was very hard to get above a B+. The same went for a few of my history professors. In other classes, lower than a B was reserved for “punishment” for students who knew damn well what they did to get it. I was surprised when I discovered that at Columbia, during my masters degree, my grades in the majority of my classes (some notable exceptions) ballooned upwards irrespective of my actual mental investment in the class and in two cases totally irrespective of whether I had a clue or not of what was going on in the class. I assure you I didn’t suddenly get smarter when I entered graduate school and I’m also very sure I didn’t get smarter, more knowledgeable, or more harder working relative to my classmates.

A friend of mine in a masters program at Waseda University got his first “report card” back today. The program uses an A, B, C grading system as the US does in addition to the Japanese gradings 優、良、可. We discovered, however, that grade inflation, or rather, the complete lack of any meaningful differentiation in a student’s input of effort or output of work, is very much alive in his program as well. I was especially interested in a little sheet that came with his report card announcing a new grading system, beginning this semester, which saves professors the trouble and inflates things for them:

90-100% = A+ (formerly A) = 優
80-89 = A (formerly B) = 優
70-79 = B (formerly C) = 良
60-69 = C (formerly D) = 可
0-59 = F

What can we make of this sort of thing? Obviously I should ask the administration directly before making any judgments but my suspicion is that, like many schools, their eye is on how the students will be using these little markings on paper after they leave the school and take the next step. In this case, there is always the chance that students go on to study in the US. I apologize if I’m stating the obvious here, but the assumption seems to be that grades are a form of communication not from instructor to student, or instructor to school about student, but from instructor to everyone in the student’s future. If this is the case, as that old movie quote goes, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

When I finished high school with a 2.6 GPA, about the only positive thing I could have said about my performance in those years was that I showed an amazing respect for “grade diversity.” Finishing at nearly the bottom of my class, I consider myself lucky I got into college at all. I can’t shake the nudging feeling that the whole academic grading thing is a joke of near cosmic proportions, but that we are all prevented from laughing.