I’m getting sick and tired of the “excuse,” “Kaya nga ako nag-English” as an excuse not to know basic math concepts and technology concepts.

I’ve been involved in IT education as writer, editor, trainer and consultant largely because part of my personal advocacy is the importance of IT. I do think that technology education should be given as much weight as math, science, and English courses in basic GE. However, since that education policy is still non-existent, we must do something about our current generation of learners.

It is frustrating that in terms of research methodologies, we language scholars are still stuck to early 90s qualitative approaches. Especially in today where research tools for doing corpus-assisted research such as textual analysis software are now widely available. It’s not because the software is too expensive as freeware versions are already coming out. It’s because of students’ limited knowledge on computing.

In my thesis, I was able to use such software to fuse together qualitative and quantitative approaches and, as such, I believe that my claims are better substantiated. Anyone who has tried doing manual frequency counting of, say, pronouns in a 10,000-word corpus would attest to the difficulty. I did not had to go through such an issue all because I was willing to explore and experiment with these tools.

I still encounter people who would rather create their TOCs and bibliographies manually even though MS Office have had ways to automatically generate them. The efficiency these tools provide can help free students from the life of clerical drudgery so that they can pay attention more to deeper levels of analyses.

I believe that there is a need for basic IT courses to be offered. I know that several movements in the University. But can’t we have it institutionalized so that it will be required? Especially now that the RGEP is under review?

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My topic’s not really that alien to me since it’s basically a continuation of my analysis of representations of identities in discourse. Back in 2005, for my BA thesis, I examined representations of Fernando Poe Jr. in the editorials of the PDI. For my MA thesis, I examined the representations of GMA in the 2001-2009 SONAs.

I enjoyed writing my BA thesis. I enjoyed going over PDI editorials and examining the representations of FPJ. And even though I personally agree with PDI’s ideologies, it wasn’t too tough to keep the discussion objective.

I wasn’t really expecting that MA thesis to be that different. Besides, I was applying the fundamental theoretical assumptions that I already used in my previous study. But I was wrong.

To quantitatively and qualitatively account for the grammatical features that show GMA’s representations (which Gene Hunt would refer to as “cleaner than a virgin’s pudendum”) was a much worse experience than the collective hours I spent suffering from toothache.

Anyway, I’ve finished writing my draft so at least the tedious part’s done and over with. I just hope what I’ve managed to come up with will be enough to move to the next phase.

I’ll probably share some of the key insights I’ve gotten from the study once it’s been weighed and judge by a competent panel.

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I just recently heard from my good friend Randwin (a fellow MA student, former classmate, and instructor at UP Los Baños) that their administration has allegedly mandated their division to turn all English GE courses to large classes of 160 students or more.

Any ESL teacher would see the flaw in such an arrangement. The lower the student ratio is, the better. For starters, it allows for more interactions between student and teacher. The teacher will also be more capable of monitoring each student’s progress.

Grading 25 papers on the merits of the good old Content, Oragnization, Style, Grammar and Mechanics is already a huge task. Imagine doing that for 160.

Obviously, some people at Los Baños are not too happy about the matter. Here’s Randwin’s take on the matter.

On Large Class UPLB: A Resounding “No!”

In one of my MA classes in Diliman, I once shared this plan of the UPLB administration to convert Eng 1, Eng 2, and Eng 10 large classes. A large class has 160-250 students while the status quo lecture class has 30-40 students. My classmates, ESL teachers and Call Center trainers were shocked and appalled. My teacher, a student of Noam Chomsky and an initiator of key subjects in Diliman, chuckled because the plan was absolutely crazy.

(According to a DOH survey, 3 of 10 government employees suffer some form of mental condition. I can think of 2 way up in the UPLB administration who might belong to those 3.)

As early as a few months after Chancellor Luis Rey Velasco took office, there have been rumors that the GE subjects offered by the Department of Humanities will be converted to large class format. On September 4, 2006, Prof. Ruperta Asuncion, who was then the English Division head, called for an emergency meeting. The administration told her to tell us to alter the syllabus of Eng 1, Eng 2, and Eng 10 so that it can be taught as large class. The administration expected it the following day because large class was to be implemented next semester. (As if rewriting a syllabus was as easy as making a cup of coffee.)

Several concerns were raised in our meeting: first, because Eng 1 and Eng 2 are GE courses approved by the BOR shouldn’t the BOR be informed first; second, what was the reason for the implementation of this scheme; and third, because all existing studies on ESL claim that small classes produce more competent students, aren’t we sacrificing our quality of education?

Instead of a syllabus, we submitted position papers against the large class scheme. One of my sources later told me that the administration just laughed at our papers. “Pa-position-position paper pa kayo,” one of them reportedly said.

Every semester, the administration would tell us to convert to large class. Every semester, our division head would present our reasons against it. When Prof. Asuncion stepped down as head (and later retired), it was Prof. Emerita Cervantes’s turn. And she defended our cause just as her predecessor did. Someone form the administration reportedly said: “Sawang- sawa na kami dyan.” If I was there I’d tell that person: “Kung sawang-sawa na kayo, ba’t di nyo pa kami tantanana?”

January 2010. A memo from the chancellor reached the Department of Humanities and the Department of Social Sciences. The memo came with a verbal instruction: Large class will be implemented for all GE classes next school year. It also came with a verbal threat: Take it or leave. (In the case of temporary faculty it’s take it or no renewal.)

On January 18, 2010, 9AM, the faculty of the Department of Humanities will be met by RGEP council head Panopio and Vice- Chancellor for Academic Affairs Laude not to consult but to tell us that we can’t do anything about it. It’s curious why Laude would be there. She’s the one who endorses our renewal to the chancellor.

Technically, it is the administration that is proposing the large class scheme. But so far, we have not been provided the rationale for such a move. (The situation is a far cry from Velasco’s promise of transparency when he took over from Chancellor David.) The rumor is that it has to do with money. Large class means fewer teachers. Fewer teachers means more items. More items means more money in the bank. More money in the bank means more interest. More interest means more savings.

(What is an item? Each department has a set number of items. Items correspond to the number of teacher you can hire. I’m not sure, but I think the government budgets salary according to items and not necessarily according to actual number of teachers. Therefore, even though no one is being paid for that item, there is money being set aside for that item. If no one uses it, the money goes to the bank. It’s an elaborate version of the 15-30 scheme in baranggays.) This is the worst time to be a member of the Academic Personnel Committee. Because few teachers are needed, it pains me to know that I would be one of the people responsible for determining who among my colleagues will not be renewed next school year. (In our division alone, there’s some 20 faculty members. The Department of Humanities has some 60.)

If you ask me, only one person deserves the boot. If money is the problem, our Chancellor shouldn’t be squandering UP’s precious budget on sidewalk displays (those infamous three-coat painted solid concrete Oro can sized bangas littering the sidewalks), 60-foot Christmas trees, and life-size Nativity scenes. If money is the problem, our Chancellor should be creative enough to think of ways to tie up with international research institutions and earn money by simply being a university in the truest sense. Or have the balls to demand a bigger budget from the government. Elections is just around the corner anyway.

Fire Velasco and hire someone new. Preferably someone who understands that the one thing every UP student is proud of is quality education.

January 15, 2010
Los Baños, Laguna

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Even in the humanities, institutions elsewhere are factoring in technologies in their studies, even acknowledging the convergence, intersections and overlaps with the other fields. They have long employed trans-disciplinary researches.

But here are, continuing to dwell in Ivory Towers. We continue to claim exclusivity and authority while the rest of the world is thriving in collaboration. Some of us still even justify our pursuance of the field with our personal abhorrence for numbers and formulas.

It is 2010. And it is a damn shame if we still stick to 20th century thinking.

Check out Bennington president Liz Coleman on her call for a cross-disciplinary approach and the reinvention of liberal arts education.

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Just last night, my younger university colleague, Raymond and I were sharing a few of the ideas that are quite interesting research areas for us language scholars. Then we came to the issue of access to the latest ideas and resources. How can one do relevant research when we’re still quoting 20 year-old materials.

Wikipedia is up-to-date but still questionable for most as a “citable” resource. But who needs Wikipedia if you can get the actual ebooks and book scans online for free? Sites like Gigapedia (which has been online for more than a year now, wonder why only very few UP people know about it) have a better catalog for recent books than local libraries.

Writing my thesis has been one expensive ride. Wanting to do it not only the right but ethical way, I’ve invested in software licenses and books and ebooks. The running total of my thesis-related expense is somewhere double what a UP instructor gets in a month.

But who else has that money to spend on academic books? Probably not your undergrad (though if UP undergrads can drive BMWs, maybe they can). If you’re an undergraduate working on a thesis where even the printing costs can drain your allowance, would you even bother with buying books or resort to other means of getting the same information without the expense?

Now we come to the more sensitive issue of ethics. Leaked ebooks and scans definitely violate intellectual property. Any self-respecting academic should respect IP.

And how different is it over photocopying – something that has been part of the UP culture for a very long time now? But if you’re in the third world where just one book costs thousands of pesos (and you need like 20-40 to work on a study) and it would take years for the university library to even get a copy, putting on that scholarly eyepatch really is the most viable action.

To paraphrase former UP President Dodong Nemenzo, piracy is the revenge of the third world. But should it also be the way forward for third-world academics? Talk about post-colonial.

Arr!

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Makes you wonder how difficult it really is to write a dissertation these days. I consider myself pretty well-read given my age for my field locally. And yet there’s still a lot of material that I am aware of and have not read, and material that that I haven’t even thought existed despite the thousands of bibliographic entries I’ve browsed. I hate to admit it but I’ve just recently come across Steven Pinker who is, by specialization a psychologist, but anchors many of his arguments on language.

And boy, how I hate myself for only reading about him just now. Quite a lot of my interests in language studies are actually dealt by his works – game theory, pragmatics, and even physics in language. Yes, physics! (Check this video of his talk at Google where he discusses ideas from his book The Stuff of Thought.)

That had me thinking about that joke I had in our graduate class in Semantics about establishing a field on “quantum linguistics.” I argued that deixis and tense can be related to the concepts of space and time. When I was joking about it, I wondered if that was an original idea. Turns out, it isn’t. According to Pinker there’s “space in our prepositions, matter in nouns, time tenses, and causality in verbs.” Humble pie for me.

Still, this has me thinking. How much original and world-changing thought can be conjured up by an ordinary mind? Perhaps that’s the reason why God only sends a genius like Einstein once a century. Maybe the world won’t just be able to deal with such revolutionary ideas if they come plenty and quick in between. The rest of us are just plain bound for mental mediocrity.

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Some people are more equal than others in this regard though. Remember those scenes in A Beautiful Mind where numbers just pop out of all the chaos for John Nash? That’s just a visual depiction of everyone else’s inadequacies. And “everyone else” includes me.

I have to go through hundreds of sentences of GMA’s SONAs in an effort to extract patterns. I’ve already observed some but recently, ever since January struck, I just seem to be at a loss of what to make sense of all of these sentences.

Well, the biased social commentator in me would probably go medieval and say, “I see patterns! Lies! Lies and slander! And dead people!”

Maybe I should stop looking at it for a while. Yup. Maybe that would work. Just like those magic 3D images where it does help to relax your eyes. Only if I don’t have a deadline for my first draft at the end of the month.

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I wanted to pick out a podcast kit so that I can finally start working on a few projects that I’ve been meaning to do since a couple of years back. Too bad audio stores just don’t carry decent podcast kits. Behringer offers the components of the package individually but it’d still set me back twenty grand. My second choice was a brand new acoustic guitar but kuripot struck me again and just decided to get me some new strings for my electric guitar.

A bit frustrated, I just settled to get some books. And it’s not like they’re for leisure reads either. God knows when was the last time I’ve read something just for kicks. All of them are somehow related to current and future writing projects. And boy books are just so expensive these days. Any paperback will set you back Php 500 easy. Can’t wait for my credit card bill next month.

PS. Oh, any idea where I can order these books? Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis [2009], Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis and Text, Discourse and Corpora. Forgot to ask Fully Booked if they can. For some reason, I don’t want to risk Amazon.

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Those 100 academics you helped ship should come back but their return shouldn’t be tied to utang na loob. It’s a worthy cause for the academic but the government must be able to capitalize on these scholar’s potential contributions by uplifting the standards of education here as well.

Mind you that a number of our academics abroad are there primarily because of the government’s failure to provide better learning venues. Our state universities rot due to budget cuts. Teachers sacrifice better lives by staying in the academe. And I’m glad you see things that way.

But how about the rest of us here, Senator Angara? How about the rest of the academics who toil for their own academic development all while paying taxes and serving the country? The answer I’m looking for is not about creating more opportunities to go abroad, it’s about making sure that our own institutions are able to provide world class instruction.

Let me indulge my jaded sense of idealism in this. The point is, we never have to go abroad for quality education. Don’t get me wrong. As an academic, I know the importance of gaining perspectives, especially cross-cultural ones. Overseas travel is a personal frustration quite frankly. I know I need it.

It’s just that the opportunities to study abroad are limited, and, if present, are only accessible to those who can actually afford it. Yes. Realistically speaking, scholarships abroad, even with waived tuition and allowances are expensive. These scholars stand to lose more personally and financially than what they can gain intellectually.

The rest of us who can’t afford must content ourselves with the available instruction locally, most of which even fail to address 21st century concerns.

So you can’t really blame scholars for not wanting to go back especially if the prospects are to take up positions handling overbooked courses in ill-equipped classrooms and laboratories and virtually non-existent research projects.

Until the whole system of education is sorted out, everything’s basically moot. Sending scholars abroad and urging them to go back simply breeds frustration. And frustration breeds stagnancy.

As for the rest of us here, we’re frustrated. And yes, stagnancy is being bred.

No academic wants that. But that’s what the government has done and continues to do to us.

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Technology has changed so much over the past three years that I’m out of the industry that the problem with today’s educator is choice rather than the availability of tools and resources. With Web 2.0 technologies reaching a fairly impressive level of sophistication for effective use in education, it’s really quite exciting for educators. But that’s just among the many issues that stakeholders in our context face.

Among these, still is the issue of infrastructure. Schools are still inequipped with proper computer laboratories and enough computers to cover the needs of a school population. There’s also the issue of hardware and software investments. The sheer pace of development in both fronts means that a computer laboratory faces obsolescence in even less than two years.

Broadband, while inceasingly becoming available and popular due to Wi-Fi and 3G are still questioned as worthwhile investments by some school administrators. Some schools even deliberately shy away from Internet connectivity to prevent students from accessing adult and gaming websites – a crude carpet bomb approach to an issue easily resolved by a single bullet that is proper network administration.

Teachers do have to cope. Rare is a teacher who will admit that they get left behind by some of their more tech-savvy stydents. Even rarer is ateacher who is humble enough to admit that they can easily be replaced by a computer or a website. Perhaps even a few years ago, teachers can simply get by with their encyclopedic knowledge. Not today. How can you even compete with Google, Wikipedia and even Wolfram Alpha with the amount of information that they make available.

For older teachers, it’s a matter of dealing with the learning curve and technophobia. Interfaces have become overly intuitive these days but if the issue is not being able to differentiate a single-click to a double-click, there definitely are greater issues underpinned in such cases. And these cases exist. Generally, it’s a matter of motivation and competence for the teacher. How far are we willing to go to maintain at least a step ahead of our students. Or do we even need to?

As for students, it’s still a question of work ethic and scholarship skills. The resources are there. However, it’s just too easy for them to be drawn to the less serious side of things – MMORPGs and Facebook (and its many insipid apps). Copying and pasting assigments and terms papers are common place.

For e-learning to become viable, it has to overcome these challenges. While it’s easy to think it’s a financial hurdle, it’s actually a battle of ideology.

***

Such discourse is commonplace for us young turks. As part of the Internet generation, it is frustrating not being able to use all of these technologies inside our classroom. If you teach in a university where you can’t even use PowerPoint in a daily basis due to the basic lack of projectors, the situation is more than pathetic.

The oldies would simply say that such limitations offer the challenge to be creative. I still admire and emulate those who can make students understand complex discourses though sheer eloquence.

There are times when I stop and wonder if technology messes with pure thought. That our creativities are hampered by the draw of interfaces and the logic of ones and zeros.

***

I really feel like an old man talking. Or perhaps because I am still technically in the business of education. Cliche as it is but if I had these resources back in basic education or even as an undergraduate, I would’ve been a much better student. However, I know that I am an exception. Not too many people rush to finish papers on the day they were assigned.

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