http://www.What’sYour URL?
by Chris Cumo
Christina Aguilera, that hard, commercial look in her eyes, lures
teenage boys to http://www.christinaaguilera.com. Johann Sebastian Bach,
dead 253 years is alive at http://www.jsbach.org. Even Piltdown Man,
who was never a man, has a Web page at home.tiac.net/~cri_a/
graphics/pskull.gif. If a pop icon, a dead man and a hoax have Web
pages, surely part-time faculty can stake their claim to Cyberspace.
As they do adjuncts might forgive Aguilera her obnoxious preening. Her material-girl instincts sharper than daggers, Aguilera knows how to captivate her audience.
Part-time faculty need these instincts to court their audience: students or customers or whatever one calls them these days. Paul J. Watson, research assistant professor of behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque knows the game.
“Many adjuncts are interested in contact with students, but students may not be aware that they even exist,” says Watson. “I use my Web page to make myself visible to independent-study and graduate students.”
Watson makes sure students know of his existence. His Web page at http://www.biology.unm.edu/biology/pwatson/public-html/pjw_cv.htm offers them the kind of service that blows away the fawning attention to customers at Wal-Mart’s Tire & Lube Express. Students get a promotional blurb of upcoming courses with their days and times and number of credits. He advertises his Gestalt Therapy and Evolutionary Psychology as a five-day workshop. The subliminal message, one suspects, is that Watson can serve up college credit in a fraction of the time and drudgery one must pour into a traditional 15-week course. Watson closes the deal with a link that allows students to register and pay for his courses on-line.
But this only scratches the surface. Watson’s Web page lists his title and education, the courses he has taught, his graduate students, his research interests including a link to a press release that touts the importance of his research, grants and awards, postdoctoral positions he held prior to his current position, publications, and an advertisement for his consulting services. These services include expert advice on the behavior of insects and spiders. Watson is your man if you’ve ever wondered whether a female mosquito really does explode from an excess of blood if you pinch the skin near the bite, thereby preventing her from extracting her stylet from your vein. Watson is also an expert on the behavior of pets, “especially dogs.” There is hope, after all, for your Pit Bull that nibbles on children.
This is the kind of Web page Antonio Vivaldi would have were he alive today: full of wild cadenzas and pyrotechnics. But we can’t all be virtuosos, at least not right away.
“Learn the basics first,” says Norm Clark, a Web Developer at BetterBuilt.com, a computer retailer with offices throughout the Midwest. “The bells and whistles can come later.”
In the bad old days, the “basics” meant mastering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the linguafranca of Web design. Today, HTML is a quaint anachronism. Microsoft Front Page retails for $77.95, and is perfect for creating simple Web pages, suggests Norm Clark. Front Page includes several templates (pre-designed Web pages) that support text created in Microsoft Word and graphics in your choice of digital formats. You can download a variety of free Web page temples on-line. Visit Elated (http://www.elated.com/pagekits/) for a selection of 39 very snazzy templates, but few on-line offerings are as user friendly as Microsoft Front Page. Create text, a biographical blurb for instance, in Word, then cut and paste that text into the template you’ve selected from Front Page. Import graphics by right clicking and copying an image on-line. (Only public-domain images may be borrowed without permission from the copyright holder.) Alternatively, buy a scanner to digitize your photos or public-domain images. What kinds of Web pages have typical adjunct faculty members created?
Peter Wigand, adjunct professor of geography at the University of Nevada at Reno has a Web page in the tradition of Indiana Jones at http://www.unr.edu/artsci/
geography/geoghome/
faculty/profs/wigand/wigand.html. Click on his biography for a photo of Wigand, an anthropologist by training, in the thick of research. The vertical face of a cliff far in the background frames Wigand, whose left hand, outstretched toward the camera, clutches his latest prize, a wood-rat nest. A second photo shows him in sunglasses and ghutra. The accompanying text places him in either Egypt or Jordan, hence the Arabian garb and Spartan surroundings. Click on “more about Paleoecology” for photos of stark mountains and water that carved out a lake in the primeval past. Wigand took these photos of nature in her desolate grandeur while traipsing between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Not everyone has the ability or time to create a Web page on the scale of Paul Watson or Peter Wigand. The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania applies the Model T production method to faculty Web page design. Policy mandates the use of the same template with the same information for everyone.
“I do not even have direct access to [my Web page],” says Tanja Schultz who teaches computer science part-time at Carnegie Mellon. “I can only send updated content to the Webmaster.”
Schultz compensates for this lack of freedom by linking a personal Web page to her Carnegie Mellon Robotics page. Yet, her personal page isn’t much of a departure from the page she uses at the university. The accent remains on research and publications. Only at the bottom of her page does Schultz mention teaching, along with a link to a collection of photos of her trip to China.
The emphasis on research flows, perhaps, from an arms race in which part-time faculty in the sciences try to outpublish their competitors while on the tenure-track job hunt. Scott D. Emr, adjunct professor of biology at the University of California at San Diego, lists his publications and details his research, which he illustrates with a diagram of the components of a eukaryotic cell. Emr includes nothing about teaching on his Web page. Marilyn J. Roossinck, who teaches plant pathology and microbiology part-time at Texas A & M University in College Station, likewise omits teaching from her Web page. Roossinck lists her education, the universities where she has been an adjunct, her areas of research and publications.
In contrast to Emr and Roossinck, Celia Vitala, adjunct instructor in the Department of Health, Physical Education and Recreation at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, has nothing about research on her Web page. Rather, it has links to her syllabi, grading criteria, and the developmental stages of children from kindergarten to grade six.
To learn just what kinds of materials can and should post to a Web page, check out the site Tara’s Cheap Tricks (For Faculty Web Page Design) at http://www.costumes.org/subwebs/cheaptricks/cheaptrx.htm. According to Cheap Tricks, one of the goals of any professor’s Web page should be to sell a “cult of personality.” Even if this sounds a bit odd, the reasoning is sound.
“The personality of the professor is part and parcel of who he/she is as both a human and a teacher. This is not something that your Web page should be hiding. On the contrary, it is important that any site you use to advertise your classes, should also advertise YOU.”
Even following the guidelines set forth on the Cheap Tricks Web page, much depends on individual preference and the expectations of individual colleges and universities.
Hank Nuwer, a journalist by training, uses his Web pages (he has four) to transcend the world of the No. 2 pencil. A lecturer at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, Nuwer has crafted Web pages that are as much electronic billboard as teaching tool. He once recorded 25,000 hits over three days at hanknuwer.com, an experience he calls “amazing.”
These numbers may not impress Christina Aguilera, but they do underscore the potential of a Web page to give part-time faculty a visibility they would not otherwise have, as well as the opportunity to connect with current as well as potential students.
According to Jeffrey R. Young in a May 1999 piece he wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Some students say the best professors are the ones who bother to make Web pages for their courses. And a growing number of students use the quality of course Web pages as a deciding factor when picking classes.” Adjunct faculty, in particular, should take note of this trend, as low course enrollments often result in canceled sections and lost jobs.
Even given these facts, there are still those who see faculty Web pages as negatively impacting teaching.
Maria Peluso, President of the Concordia University Part-Time Faculty Association (CUPFA) in Montreal, Quebec, has reservations.
“I am not sure whether the new technology (when we can get any) is a Trojan horse or a gift horse,” says Peluso. She worries that students with access to a part-time instructor’s Web page and thereby to her e-mail address can query her ad infinitum
.
“As more and more students have our e-mail addresses, we will end up working and being available seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” says Peluso. “The e-mail traffic involved in our teaching responsibility is getting to be excessive and stressful. Everything being asked of us electronically has meant we are doing far more work with less.”
Ann Larson, who teaches English part-time at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University, disagrees. Her Web page means less work, not more. Syllabi and assignments are on-line, saving Larson the drudgery of photocopying them. Nor does she need to reiterate the due date of an assignment. Students know to check her Web page for the details. Larson doesn’t fret over e-mail from students. She encourages it: a quick reply can save class time and end confusion.
“I find it counterintuitive that one could receive too many [e-mail] queries,” says Barry J. Fishman, assistant professor of Learning Technologies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “If students have questions, they need to be answered. Making it easier to ask questions is a good thing.”
Hartford Seminary adjunct Steven Blackburn agrees.
“I love e-mails from students,” he says. “In fact, I try to run one of my courses as a hybrid between a traditional course and an on-line course, mostly through the use of e-mails and faxes.”
Part of the discord between advocates and opponents centers on the time and effort necessary to create and maintain a Web page. Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Tanja Schultz warns that an outdated Web page is worse than having no Web page. Just as the number pi has no end, a Web page is never really finished.
“After the novelty wears off, then it is a huge amount of work to keep the site up to date,” says Blake Hannaford, who teaches electrical engineering at the University of Washington at Seattle. “If you have a big lab or research group the work grows geometrically.”
Indiana University-Purdue University journalism lecturer Hank Nuwer puts in as many as 35 hours a month updating his Web pages. (Remember, he has four.) By contrast, Long Island University adjunct Ann Larson spends two or three hours a month and University of Michigan assistant professor of learning technologies Barry Fishman only a few hours per term.
For other part-time faculty, the issue is less the amount of work than the absence of pay and technical support. Michelle Squitieri, a former lecturer at the University of California at Davis, sees a Web page as just another unfunded mandate.
“Students and faculty are both cheated when the institution tries to offload the costs of instruction to underpaid, exploited faculty,” says Squiteri. “These costs should be born by the institution.”
But Indiana University-Purdue University lecturer Hank Nuwer does not insist on pay or technical support.
“I’ve felt obligated to keep up with technology as part of my personal responsibility to the profession,” says Nuwer.
Rather, he wishes colleges and universities would lend computers to part-time faculty for the duration of their appointments. A computer-loan policy might coax more part-time faculty to create their own Web pages.
Such a policy begs the question of how many part-time faculty have course Web pages. According to a recent survey conducted by the Campus Computing Project (http://www.campuscomputing.net/), 59.3 percent of all college courses now utilize electronic mail. Similarly, 42.7 percent of college courses now use Web resources as a component of the syllabus, and almost a third (30.7 percent) of all college courses have a Web page, compared to 9.2 percent in 1996.
Your Dean or Department Chair may not care whether or not you have a Web page, but it’s clear that your students will. Generation Xers have grown up in the Internet era; they learn through the exchange of e-mails, thrive on instant messaging and live to blog. They may turn to your Web page before they turn to you for information. Thus, keeping up with technology will make you a better teacher and, ultimately, a more valuable employee.
So, what’s your URL?
