Audio of “Teaching With Blogs” Presentation

This past Spring I was pleased to moderate a panel at the Baruch Teaching with Technology Conference featuring three of Baruch’s most accomplished blogfessors: Mikhail Gershovich, whose Fear, Anxiety, and Paranoia course site made wide-ranging use of Blogs@Baruch; Paula Berggren, who’s done some of the most focused and interesting work on the system; and Zoe Sheehan Saldana, who’s a two-time reigning Blogfessor of the Year.

The session was well-attended and full of energy, and I think we touched on most if not all of the issues implicated in administering an online publishing platform at the College including pedagogy, resources, administration, and learning outcomes. BCTC was generous enough to record audio of the presentation and to post it to iTunes U, and it’s available below for your listening pleasure. For those of you who wonder what Blogs@Baruch is all about or just what it is I do around here, the audio below should answer some of your questions.

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If you’d like to download this to your portable device for mobile edification, you can get the file here (if I link Cacophony will turn the link into an audio player): http://cac.ophony.org/audio/teachingwblogs.mp3.

Dissertations, Academia and Public Speaking

Last week I attended my first dissertation defense! It was during my residency in my doctoral program in Education. My program is a low residency program of study, meaning that the learners come together four times a year for face-to-face seminars and lectures while the rest of the year they work on their own. So when the cohorts come together it is a non-stop intensive time where everyone is pretty much involved in everyone else’s work, as well as their own. The seminars, discussion groups, and lectures are attended by almost all of the learners as well as faculty and staff. And when one of us is defending it is a must see, one of us actually made it! This particular dissertation defense had six faculty, the dean, several administrators and about 15 doctoral students.

It was truly a public event; I was excited and nervous to see what a particularly brilliant colleague would present, sure that I would feel intimidated on what his 300 page thesis would be like in comparison to my own work. The defense started with opening comments by the chair of the committee and then the doctoral candidate started into his PowerPoint presentation.  Within seconds my heart stopped and my skin started to crawl, every slide was a full written page of documentation, paragraph long quotes, long lists of numbers and statistics. The slides were impossible to read and had no visual graphing to help comprehension. And worst of all the presenter read his slides!!!! How was it possible that at this level we were still seeing a nervous and unskilled oral presentation? I pondered this through out the defense. Is the higher education system, from undergraduate to the doctoral level, still producing academics that have immense difficulty in communicating their own work?

I think in general we educators tend to still consider oral competency as a skill rather than a form of reasoning. Oral presentations do have platform skills and techniques but in academia orality is much more about relying on the spoken word rather than the written word to communicate meaning. It does not replace writing but it is much more than simply stating one’s written work.  I think speaking publicly does ask an individual a form of logic and knowledge that is different from writing and in some ways more complex.Oral reasoning must give meaning to data within a certain amount of time and space and this is no easy task.

I keep wondering about how the logic and sense-making aspect of speaking can be better integrated into the higher education curriculum rather than the 10-20 minute group presentations that seem to abound throughout American colleges. And whether this would make an impact on academics presenting their work in public. More than a personal quest, I do believe that public speaking and oral communication as art and logic should be a part of higher education all the way up to the dissertation defense and beyond.


Reading the Remix

During the spring semester, we had some excellent Cac.ophony posts on the theme of remixing: “Agents of Information Change? Perhaps Not” by Melissa; “Vanilla Ice All Over Again” by Lauren; and “Lessig on Remix” by Wendy.  These posts raise essential questions about how we teach students to produce media in this digital age when it so easy to sample others’ work.

For anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend  “Texts Without Contexts,” an essay from this past March by literary critic Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times books section.  Kakutani begins with a review of many of the challenges involved with production of media in our time, including reviews of texts new and old that challenge the boundaries of copyright law.

I found this part interesting, but was most struck by the next section, beginning with the following:

THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.

Kakutani focuses on intellectual, cultural, and social changes associated with the consumption of media.   She is not writing about teaching students how to read and research, but it is not difficult to see the implications for the classroom, as well as for graduate-level research, and the general communication challenges we grapple with on this blog.

Text v. “Book”

As those of you who are “friends” of mine on facebook are already aware, I recently purchased a Kindle. It will arrive tomorrow, with three “books” already transferred to it. I’m very excited, as I have coveted the Kindle (2) ever since I read an article in The New Yorker about two years ago. Sadly, I never had the spare cash lying around.

Although it has come down significantly in price, what inspired my purchase was actually a debate between two friends over 4th of July weekend. Both book lovers, one was arguing that it is “text” that he loves — the content, not the object. The other, identifying herself as perhaps a more authentic, or sentimental, book person, argued that it was the entire experience of the book.

I identify myself very much as a reader and “book person” — but for some reason the e-reader concept immediately appealed to me. No more lugging books around, no more dusty bookcases (last year I brought 19 boxes of books down to storage, got rid of another five, and still have four full bookcases in my apartment). As for book versus text, I reasoned, when I loved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Heidi, it was the story and the writing that captured my imagination.

All that said, I was very moved by this article in The New York Times that describes the positive results of giving kids 12 books — physical books — to take home over the summer. Suddenly I had a different take on the e-reader issue. The physical book is part of the experience. I remember a fierce attachment to the physical book, walking around with it, curling up with it, just examining the pages, staring at the cover… And it seems that at least for kids this physicality is part of the experience. Not to mention the pride in building a library.

The Times article compares learning outcomes associated with reading physical books with a generalized experience of the Internet, not with e-readers specifically. I’m wondering how e-readers will impact children’s formative reading experience, and am thinking that these devices are more appropriate for mature readers who are already hooked than for novices.

In any event, I still can’t wait for my Kindle to get here!

Intern feedback

Five months ago, I was recruited by the Schwartz Communication Institute as a “Presidential Intern,” through a program originated by President Stan Altman. The Presidential Leadership Program was designed to provide students with hands-on experience contributing to substantive projects for the College.

My work was to begin rebuilding the Institute’s website. The new website was going to run on WordPress, and I would need to write a plugin as well. Sounded like a lot of fun, but for someone who barely knew WordPress, it also sounded like a challenge.

My name is Florian Chauvin. I am an exchange student from France (Lyon), enrolled in the MBA program in Finance, at Baruch. Five years ago, when I first went to College, in France, I decided to learn how to build websites in order to make a little money. I liked the idea of learning something that was probably going to help me in the future instead of going to work for McDonald’s as many French students do. Looks that I was right. The Schwartz Communication Institute sounded more interested in a web designer/programmer than in a Big Mac expert.

Therefore, even though I am a self-learner, I would consider my knowledge of php at the time I started to work for the Institute as fairly advanced. This background helped me quickly learn how to use WordPress and how to develop a plugin.

WordPress is pretty easy to work with. I was once told that if code could be thought as poetry, then parts of the WordPress code were lousy poetry. I have to say that I didn’t really have the opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of this statement since you can write a plugin pretty much without having anything to do with the core code of WordPress itself. This turned out to be a great point.

The major critique that I could address to WordPress’ plugin system is the small amount of documentation available out there. It is sometimes hard to find information about functions that are not among the most popular. As soon as you want to do something a bit more complicated than just using a predefined hook, you can end up spending hours on Google, forums and the codex before coming up with an answer. For example, it took me quite a while to figure out how to implement AJAX functionality on the front-end while keeping it reasonably clean. It is usually just a matter of time before getting things to work and a few trial and errors do the trick just fine, even though the process can be somewhat frustrating.

The first part of this Internship has been to write a room reservation calendar plugin that would allow the Institute to effectively manage the rooms used by Fellows to meet with students. The challenge was to be able to represent the different rooms in the same calendar so that it could be seen at a glance, which ones were booked at what time, by whom. We would therefore need to have a representation of the time, the day and the room in a 2 dimensional area. Squaring the circle basically. We thus compromised and decided that seeing a lot of days at the same time was less important than seeing all the rooms.

blsci mCal

Despite all the great calendar plugins out there, we couldn’t find one that could be customized enough to do what we wanted, so I wrote a new plugin. I probably spent about 200 hours on this plugin and tried to make the code as flexible as possible, even though I am sure it would still look amateurish to a professional.

I spent the rest of my time rebuilding the website, not only to make it look more appealing and modern but also to implement some social networking features that would contribute to making it a hub around which the Institute’s online life would revolve. For that matter, the WordPress plugin Buddypress is the ideal solution. It allows members to interact, create groups, forums, personalize their profiles and so on.

My main job here was to create a visual theme for the Institute. The easiest way was to adapt the Buddypress default theme to our needs. Nothing more than a little CSS, HTML and a few other plugins were necessary to complete the project.

blsci front page
Here is a list of the plugins used:

On a more personal note, this Internship has been a great opportunity to meet a lot of people and explore new horizons. Being a Finance major willing to work in the Corporate Finance department of a major entertainment company, acquiring an extensive knowledge of WordPress (used by a growing number of businesses) will undoubtedly make my profile more valuable and attractive. I believe that in many aspects, this internship was one of the most rewarding educational experiences that I’ve had.

Also, I would like to thank everybody at the Institute who helped me, inspired me and believed in me. I just wish I had had more time to improve the website and develop new features that would have made it even better. Maybe a job for a future intern.

Metacritical Cinema

endtroducing.
Creative Commons License photo credit: dearsomeone

To unwind after a long day of interpreting literature in my dissertation, I like to watch movies about other people performing interpretations.

Probably the most famous “interpretation scene” takes place in Hamlet.  Depending on how the king reacts to his play The Mousetrap, Hamlet believes he will be able to determine whether the king killed his father.  (This scene also delivers the memorable line, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”  It’s the queen’s evaluation of the play, and still useful today if you want to tell someone to shut up in the most pretentious manner possible.)

Hollywood has maintained a surprising interest in textual interpretation as a plot device.  In the spirit of Lavelle Porter’s list of interesting academic movies, just out in the GC Advocate, here are my favorite movies that contain a crucial metacritical scene.

The Conversation (1974) Fall in love with Gene Hackman all over again as his divided loyalties affect the way he interprets a recorded conversation.  Also, be prepared to hear the sentence, “He’d kill us if he had the chance,” many many times.

Rashomon (1950)  Four people give their testimonies of a rape and murder they all witnessed, but everyone’s story is completely different.  There is no “text” per se, but this is the consummate movie about the ways a person’s subject-position determines perception and representation.

A Letter to Three Wives (1949)  Just as they are leaving for a weekend trip, three gal pals get a letter from their fourth girlfriend, who announces she’s run away with one of their husbands—but she doesn’t say which one.  What a meanie!  Each wife spends the rest of the weekend (and movie) interpreting the letter as an indictment of her ostensibly happy but secretly troubled marriage.

In the Loop (2008)  An entire war depends on the interpretation and managed circulation of a report called “PWIP-PIP,” written by a lowly assistant played by the still adorable Anna Chlumsky.  A climactic scene involves a political team’s feverishly deleting footnotes and changing verb tenses… just like the exciting moments in my life!

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)  One of the most noir-y noir characters ever, Mike Hammer, (Ralph Meeker) has to interpret the poem “Remember” by Christina Rossetti in order to understand a mysterious message from a dead hitchhiker.  Detective stories, of course, are always about interpretation in some way—but not usually about poetry interpretation.

Others I’m forgetting?

Guerrillas in the Midst

This post originally was published at my personal blog, Bloviate. If you wish to comment, click on the title and add to the discussion there!

One of the secret missions behind my work with Mikhail Gershovich in developing an open source publishing platform at Baruch College is to gradually integrate into the school’s general education curriculum the deep, critical examination of how digital tools are changing the way we think and live. This curricular purpose is not currently present on any kind of scale at our college. Because of political realities at the school, we’ve very much built Blogs@Baruch in a haphazard, take-what-we-can-get kind of way, and we haven’t had the luxury of being systematic about the thing. But we’re now two years into our experiment, and we’re widely established enough throughout the college that we’re confident we will continue to operate. We’re now able to theorize what we’ve done and to strengthen our case for more attention to the types of curricular innovation we’d like to see.

Creative Commons License photo credit: jectre

Of course, we’re far from the only ones considering these questions, and we’re certainly not the only ones who’ve borrowed the terminology of revolution to cheekily make our case. Matt Gold has already done a fantastic job creating a hit-and-run guide to guerrilla pedagogy that delineates the tools, philosophy, and connective processes requisite at its core. Gardner Campbell has argued for a trajectory in liberal education towards the development of media fluency and in favor of a shift from both “signature pedagogies” to “pedagogies of signature” and from general education to generalizable education. Gardner has also spoken passionately about the role of movements around the integration of digital tools into the work of higher education in destabilizing the institutions at our center. Joss Winn and Mike Neary have written of “The Student as Producer,” connecting pedagogies that place the student squarely in the role of knowledge-maker within broader efforts to combat the corporatization of higher education and to reimagine a university that for once might be fully committed to the development of humanistic thinkers. Jeff McClurken has argued smartly that digital literacy is something that should be developed within the disciplines and shown how, though I’d guess he’d agree that such an approach does not preclude a broader college-wide addressing of these questions. And besides being actively involved in building the tools from the ground up, Boone Gorges has brilliantly theorized the structural similarities between the types of communication and personalized connections that happen within social media and the specific goals of a college’s general education program.

There are others, many others, who’ve been doing this type of work and thinking, and their models and theories are very much the fuel that propels us along our path.

Che Groom

Creative Commons License photo credit: 5tein Blogs@Baruch has evolved along three broad publishing contours in its first two years, and each can be seen as a step towards developing a foundation upon which those in power at the College might do some tough thinking about how the general education could be reimagined. This said, I have no idea whether or not they might do this, or even when the gen ed was last revisited. But if they call, we’ll be ready to contribute what we’re learning.

Non-Course Publishing

We’ve become the go-to shop for folks at the College who want to get stuff online. Student publications, online magazines, faculty development sites, exhibits, extra-curricular project journals, document reviews using CommentPress, grant competitions and committee sites… we host them all.

Members of our community now recognize that they no longer need HTML skills to be able to publish to the web or CSS skills to control how what they publish looks. On the flip side, each of the individuals and groups involved in these projects has been forced to confront questions of audience, tone, purpose, tools, design, and connectedness. This has spurred conversations that otherwise might have been offloaded to a contracted web group, or might not have happened at all. The Schwartz Institute, through our nurturing of these conversations, has joined the staff of the Newman Library at the center of thinking on campus about the role of digital tools in the varied work of the college. This broad “culture of self-publishing” is raising the overall digital literacy of staff, faculty, and administrators at the College by creating and sustaining unavoidable engagement with the implications of doing professional and intellectual work on the open web. This engagement has been more incidental than systematic, but it’s been ongoing and persistent, and more and more people are taking part.

Course-based Publishing

Our most exciting work is taking place inside of courses. We’ve supported more than a hundred course sections over the last two years, and they are inspiring faculty members towards more experimental and experiential pedagogy. We’ve featured much of this work at Cac.ophony.org. Some courses are using Blogs@Baruch as little more than an open CMS, taking advantage of a flexible aesthetic to create a more intimate relationship between students and their engagement with course materials online. Others have used the system to explode students’ prevailing understandings of audience by creating and capturing collaborative writing through the integration of wikis, scaffolding research papers in public groups, or bringing in the voices of outside authorities. Many have used the power of writing for classmates’ consumption (and beyond) to raise the stakes of an assignment. Some have staged engagement with a difficult text through a dialogic close reading that evolves into performed knowledge about the themes of the work. Many have taken advantage of lowered barriers of entry to the production of multi-media work to create opportunities for students to engage with course themes and texts through video and other media, and then to write about how the process impacts their understanding of the genres engaged in the course. Most have embraced the connectedness of the web to integrate additional resources into their teaching and expose students to critical research methods.

These courses have done three types of work. First, they’ve produced models that are replicable within this college and beyond, and fueled a buzz and interest in teaching with digital tools that hadn’t been very present on campus until recently. Second, they’re helping us develop a local “community of practice” committed to dialogue around the implications of digital pedagogy, which has filtered into the faculty development initiatives already afoot at the Schwartz Institute. And, third and most importantly, these courses have worked to instill in students a critical sense of how to exist intellectually and professionally on the Web by spurring dozens of small conversations about online ethics, linking, sharing, identity, performance, knowledge building, collaboration, mashing, hacking, looking, listening, and learning. These conversations have not been systematized, but they’re most definitely happening.

Social Publishing

The third contour in which we’ve been working is social publishing. This is an infant compared to the two toddlers described above, and is based primarily in our work supporting Freshman Seminar, which draws all incoming students into conversations on Blogs@Baruch. I’ll spare you the details of how the project has evolved, which you can read up on by following this tag on Cac.ophony.org. We hope that our pending integration of BuddyPress will both challenge some of the alienation that happens on a purely commuter campus, and enable what Matt Gold has called “serendipitous connections” around shared interests that otherwise might not happen. Matt and George Otte’s framing and stewardship of the CUNY Academic Commons is very much our model for structuring and naming such a possibility. This coming Fall our first year students will be writing creative blog posts that integrate freely-available digital tools to examine their own processes of identity formation. In doing so, they will be sharing and connecting their experiences to others at the school and beyond, and also reflecting upon the choices they make and tools they use. This is non-credit bearing work, but we hope that it will provide for our students a critical base from which to use the web to engage and learn that they will carry through their four years at the College.

All of the above work intersects only incidentally with the formal general education curriculum at the College. And, yet, I think we can safely say that what we’ve built with Blogs@Baruch has impacted the generalizable education that our students are getting. What’s needed, however, is some kind of systematization, which will create more points of reflection and articulation, more staging towards digital and media fluency, and more buy-in across the curriculum. As guerrillas, we’ve made and built our critique while modeling an alternative approach to supporting educational technology that saves the College money and raises its profile. If we are indeed in the midst of the revolution that will remake higher education, then we stand with our colleagues at the vanguard, arguing that universities must embrace the core values of the open web, and work them systematically into curricula.

A Memorial: Saul Bruckner

When I heard that my high school principal Saul Bruckner had died in his Mill Basin home on May 1, I was shocked, but in an aimless sort of way. It felt huge, impossible—a massive loss and somehow a very personal one. And yet while I had a vast sense that Mr. Bruckner had influenced me deeply, I had no luck when I tried to articulate that influence to the people around me. “My high school principal died,” I told my roommate. “He was really incredible.” And then I’d trail off.

So, like legions of other Murrow alums, I’ve been spending time thinking about just what it is exactly that makes me feel like I want a bust of Mr. Bruckner in my living room. Many of us appreciate the important teacher figures from our pasts, but what of the folks who didn’t necessarily teach us long division or what the Rococo period was about? What of the learning that comes from that dispersed thing known as educational leadership?– from administrators, of all people?

The first thing to mention about Mr. Bruckner is just how old school he was, in a new school kind of way. He was a truly progressive educator who didn’t need to appropriate slang or wear a whistle in order to “connect” with young people. He rose up the ranks in the New York City school system (back when it was still a Board of Education, and not a Department) as a social studies teacher, became assistant principal at Dewey High School, and eventually opened Murrow in 1974.

Edward R. Murrow High School is known for the many progressive aspects of its structure and approach, but Mr. Bruckner himself came across as a pretty subdued, non-controversial guy. You’d imagine that a principal who allowed students freedom of choice in their academic pursuits, outlawed bells and hall sweeps and detention and sports teams, gave students the benefit of the doubt when it came to unstructured time, and fiercely defended music and arts programs might be more of a hippie crusader in moccasins than a buttoned-up older gentleman in neat tweed suit jackets. Not so.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Still, those are the facts. When the Times published a short article about his memorial service, I started honing in on what I found so unique about Mr. Bruckner.  The photo that accompanied the article did it; Mr. Bruckner, with his arms folded, his red name tag jutting out from his jacket, listening intently to three students surrounding him, all of whom look like they’ve got more than one bone to pick with the guy. That was his usual posture—arms crossed, ears open, completely committed– and it wasn’t rare for Mr. Bruckner to be outnumbered. I stood in front of him this way many times, standing with my friends and shooting off at the mouth about something or other, while Mr. Bruckner stood stock-still and listened—sometimes with a bemused smile, sometimes with a look of mild judgment. Perhaps the man closed the door to his oblong office (where he also taught his 7:30am AP American History course) and privately screamed into a rattan pillow—if he did, we never caught on.

The man was consistency itself, and I’d guess that he realized just how important that was to us, to see him standing by the main entrance every morning as we entered clutching our bagels. He was an eloquent man of few words, but clear actions. Students at Murrow were allowed to lounge in the hallways during “free” periods (which weren’t called “periods” at all), but if we were obliviously sitting next to a clump of trash, Bruckner would suddenly swing around a corner to pitch it in the garbage, reminding us at once that he was boss, it was our building, and no task was too insignificant for him– or us.

Mr. Bruckner’s death crystallized for me even further when I read an article penned by one of my former English teachers at Murrow, Katherine Schulten. Ms. Schulten is now editor of The Learning Network, and she identifies five poignant lessons for educators that she took from working with Mr. Bruckner.  The final one, “Kids come first,” coupled with her description of Mr. Bruckner—kindness, intelligence, commitment and vision—packaged up exactly what I’d wanted to say all along. How remarkable to observe someone with so little (discernable) ego, a fellow who never went out of his way to strut his feathers and yet implemented such a strong vision at the same time. To be an educator who skips the bloviating and lingers on the students while constructing a school culture that follows his thoughtful concepts– and then he hangs out long enough to really see it flourish and sustain? A term that Mr. Bruckner himself taught me is the only one I can think to use: rara avis.

Ms. Schulten’s article got me thinking: as someone who routinely stands in front of clusters of young people and some days finds the crown of educator a very difficult one to wear, ignoring Mr. Bruckner’s legacy outside of its most general terms shouldn’t be an option. Sure, the life of an adjunct lecturer and Communication Fellow is very different from that of a high school principal, but that’s no excuse to disregard the challenge that his example puts forth. I heard the news about Mr. Bruckner’s passing during the crowded and frustrating end-of-semester crush, when students were filling my  inbox with frantic emails arguing about grades, contesting plagiarism charges, pleading for forgiveness. Some days it’s incredibly difficult to maintain empathy, priorities, and focus—the kind of focus, I realize, Mr. Bruckner persisted with, day in, and day out, for so many years.

Numerous Facebook groups have already popped up paying tribute to Mr. Bruckner, and an accompanying campaign to have the street outside of the school renamed in his honor would be a fitting memorial to a life’s work that thrived at the humble intersection of Avenue L and 17th Street. An equally moving tribute is represented by the many students who, like me, have been newly considering just what was in this special sauce and where  we might apply it ourselves. I’d suspect that it won’t just be about picking up that lone piece of trash in the hallways, but also about that particular blend of action and patience. Still, it’s an educational riddle worth committing time to: how did he do it? And how can we?

Meet the Lies

Bible pages
Creative Commons License photo credit: almoko

On Sunday morning, I heard this NPR re-broadcast of Bob Garfield’s interview with Carol Rosenberg from the Miami Herald on “On the Media.” Rosenberg along with three Canadian journalists reporting on military tribunals at Guantanamo have been barred by the Pentagon from any further reporting on all trials at Guantanamo.  The Pentagon insists that Rosenberg violated reporting rules by providing the name of an Interrogator at Guantanamo.  However, and this is the odd bit, said Interrogator had already revealed his own identity to the Toronto Star two years prior.  This, according to any respectable rules of reason, makes it a categorical impossibility that Rosenberg “revealed” anything by printing the Interrogator’s name.  Rosenberg has been reporting on Guantanamo for over 8 years and is a dedicated, and more importantly, appropriately “seasoned” and skeptical reporter of U.S. military activities in Guantanamo.  In the interview, she notes:

“I guess what maybe you’re asking is whether the people who handle the Guantanamo message don’t want experienced reporters down there.  And I can say that it does thrive on the confusion and inexperience and ignorance of the people who are first-timers.  They have for years brought people down in hope that they’ll tell the same story over and over again.  That’s why the package tours boast that they’ve had hundreds and hundreds of reporters through there.  The only way you cover Guantanamo well, I argue, is by going back again and again and covering it when you’re not at Guantanamo, and reading the files and reading the motions and being prepared before you ever go down there to understand the totality of the story.  They want to create the impression that this is battlefield-style justice. You know, you pull everybody in, stick them in some tents, throw together a court, and have a variation on a court-martial.  You know, they have rotations of guards.  They have rotations of escorts.  Even the lawyers haven’t been the same for all these years.  The only people who are the same in this instance are the detainees and the reporters.  And I don’t think that they’re necessarily comfortable with the fact that we’ve logged more hours and perhaps know the history of this case better.”

Rosenberg is now, one might imagine, heading back to more mild reporting in Miami.  Now perhaps she can finally report on how to get those pesky kittens out of trees.

On the Media’s interview with Rosenberg was immediately followed by a story about two college students, Chas Danner, Paul Breer, who have started an online venture that aims to “fact-check” the guests on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” This weekly news program is the longest-running broadcast show ever.  It boasts an equally long history of inviting politicians, economists, foreign policy experts, etc., on to discuss issues on its weekly program.  Including, as you might imagine, the political and legal “goings-on” at Guantanamo.  But, and this is the additional odd bit, Meet the Press does not fact-check its guests.  It publishes show transcripts online, but does not actually make sure that the claims uttered as truth in those transcripts are, well, true.  Maybe it will seem even a bit more odd if I tell you that Meet the Press frequently attracts nearly 3 million viewers.  That seems like a lot of people to tell almost-truths to.  I think that there is an obvious question here.  If our government can routinely bar serious and pertinent reporting on, well, serious and pertinent issues, and our mainstream news media outlets have an “iffy” relationship with holding those (deeply) involved in these serious and pertinent issues (I’m talking to you, Mr. Cheney) responsible for uttering blatant falsehoods, then what happens to the truth?

In my philosophy courses, I routinely teach my students that we all have a responsibility to discover the truth.  And they, in turn, routinely tell me that there is no such thing as “real truth.”  Truth, they tell me, is just the unchecked, unpolished claims of some authority with no need to be accountable.  I am admittedly a natural-born epistemologist, and I find such accounts of truth very worrisome.  However, after 8 years of Bush-Cheney, and 2 years of not-such-much-”Change,” I’m starting to suspect that their deeply cynical attitudes toward the truth are rooted in something other than their young age and lack of experience in the world.  I would like to hypothesize that their attitudes are likely rooted in something akin to Ronald Reagan’s “trickle-down economics.”  Whole truths will benefit the well-off and the rest of us will get by on half-truths and a few outright lies.  But, as I tell my skeptical students, here’s the rub.  We know what it means to lie.  We know that the truth matters.  (Or why would the Pentagon bother preventing Rosenberg from reporting it?).  So perhaps the most serious and pertinent question of all is the following: Who does it matter to?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s course?

coney island // astroland
Creative Commons License photo credit: mandyxclear

Each year, as the spring semester comes to an end, my thoughts inevitably turn to the whims of summer in New York City: long bike rides to Coney Island, rooftop parties and, unfortunately, two-and-a-half hours in a classroom at least three days a week. I am a summer adjunct!

It might seem counter-intuitive to the whole concept of, you know, “enjoying your summer,” but I actually kind of look forward to my summer courses. The main difference, of course, is one of time: In the summer, you only spend five weeks with your students, though the actual class time is usually double that of fall/spring classes. This means that the class becomes effectively super-concentrated; material must be adjusted to fit the new time parameters, and this can often present something of a challenge. After all, two-and-a-half hours is a long time! Without diversifying classroom activities, the experience is going to be grueling for everyone involved.

One of the reasons I enjoy the summer schedule is because of the longer class time, which I find allows me much more room to experiment, improvise, and develop the pedagogical techniques I’ve encountered as a Writing Fellow at Baruch. While I might not have time to do so in the fall or spring, in the summer I feel freer to break my students into groups and have them work on oral presentations together, or to show brief movie clips and “scaffold” low stakes writing assignments from the discussion that ensues (an example can be found here). Either way, the extended class time provides an opportunity to practice new teaching methodologies while staving off the beasts of boredom and exhaustion.

In contrast to the longer class time, the summer session itself is exceedingly brief. How much can a student really absorb in only five weeks? Should a teacher automatically reduce the scope of a class during summer sessions? Since I teach American history, does this mean that I should cut out a few decades, to have the class cover less material in the interest of time? There are of course, different philosophies on this, but I would like to suggest that “covering less material” is not necessarily the best solution to the five-week course problem.

In fact, just as the longer class time provides room to experiment, the shorter overall semester can also be employed to distinct pedagogical advantage. This summer I am teaching a course on the Vietnam War, whose fall and spring permutations contain a much wider “survey-style” approach to all the varied aspects of the era. I plan to have the summer version focus on just a few aspects of the war, in much greater detail, hoping that the students will have an equivalently useful experience through their deeper engagement with smaller bits of material. This way, I can shape the course to the imperatives of the summer schedule without (hopefully) shorting students in the process.

What are your tips for getting through the summer?