cac.ophony.org

During my usual channel-surfing the other day, I caught an interesting debate on Google’s book scanning project. Robert Darnton (cultural historian at Harvard University), David C. Drummond (Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Google) and author James Gleick were the participants in the discussion, each respectively representing the rights and interests of users/readers, Google, and authors/publishers.

In 2005, Google launched its ambitious project to digitize books. It has already scanned 12 million different titles so far. There were lawsuits brought by the Authors Guild against Google regarding a violation of copyright laws because a majority of these books (about 8 million) were out-of-print but still copyright protected. Under the new settlement reached in 2008, authors have control over how and when the material is displayed and receive a share of market revenue. The below video clip features Robert Darnton who criticizes this move as excluding the interests of readers, libraries, and the public good from the process.

I am one of those old-fashioned people who prefer reading in print instead of on screen. But I can’t help but admit that electronic books might be our future destination, particularly considering the younger generations who were born digital. What bothers me the most is not whether or not we should trust the good will of Google, which is, after all, a profit-making private corporation. What is scarier is, as Darnton argues, we as users are not just ignored by one legal settlement and commercial deal between the Authors Guild and Google but excluded from any knowledge of what is happening behind the scene.

I had big writing plans for the weekend, including my cac.ophony post. After spending the whole Sunday drafting a conference abstract and having no topic in mind for my blog post, I ventured out into the rain… Around 11 pm I found myself buying flowers at a local grocery store. I always confuse florists when I randomly pick up individual stems rather than completed bouquets. And then I usually say no to the easy filler of Baby’s breath. No such fluffy nonsense in my Ikebana!

Photo credit Ikebana Arts Studio

Ikebana is a form of Japanese floral art whose major premises are minimalism, symmetry, and organic composition. The stems must be positioned at designated angles, and they must be visible, not hidden in a vase. For this purpose, Ikebana arrangements are made in a kenzan, a flower holder consisting of many closely positioned spikes upon and between which the stems and twigs are placed. If kenzan is not a part of a larger container, it can be placed in one that is best suited for the given arrangement.

Ikebana has a very rich history and philosophy that I have never had a chance to study; for instance, in the most basic composition three stems are slanted in certain ways to symbolize the relationship between heaven, earth, and human being. When I work on my flower arrangements, I don’t usually think about these higher meanings. But I do enjoy every step of the process from selecting flowers to finding the right surface and background in my apartment for the finished arrangements. I wish I could say the same about writing.

And yet last night Ikebana taught me something really valuable about writing: concentration and discipline cannot fully preempt chaos. There was a moment when my major stems were in place, but the arrangement wasn’t appealing. It didn’t express what I intended it to express. Usually by the end of process, I’m pleasantly surprised that the final composition is more exact and beautiful than I imagined it to be. This was not the case yesterday!

I was upset, but then reminded myself that I wasn’t fully done, that there were several small flowers and leaves I could add to reshape the arrangement. Not really having faith in my actions, I cut my remaining thin stems and began sticking them into the kenzan. Magically, my imbalanced composition was transformed into a (not exactly minimalist) cascade of yellow daisies!

Now I have to go back to my conference abstract, and I so hope it will be transformed in the same way.

One of our goals in supporting Blogs@Baruch is to generate new models for online and hybrid instruction. We encourage the faculty we work with to confront the challenging question of what’s made pedagogically possible by using an online publishing platform.

The potential answers are vast. They include, but are not limited to, extending the classroom by tying together face-to-face meetings; creating opportunities for the social consideration of course material; imagining a range of audiences; staging larger assignments; inviting and providing a platform for students to easily create and share work that is visual and/or aural in nature; providing a tool for nurturing, reinforcing, and tapping into the sense of community in a course; and, of course, easily sharing course materials with students.

Faculty who are relatively new to teaching with technology usually design course sites that take advantage of one or maybe two of the possibilities above. So, I have to give it up for Mikhail Gershovich and his students, who are absolutely killing it on the course blog for “Topics in Film: Fear, Anxiety, and Paranoia.” I’ve tried not to blog about this course blog because I don’t want to be seen as buttering up the boss. But when students showed up this week for a presentation dressed as zombies and attacked one of their classmates, I simply had to bite the bullet and write about this awesomeness.

They’re using their blog for a variety of purposes:

First, Mikhail uses it to share information with his students so that they can easily access course readings and find their way to a wide range of required and recommended films, compiled from disparate locations.

Second, the students are posting in a rotation to very specific prompts that he spent much time designing, and which mix an emphasis on close readings of text and film, allow students to write to reflect, and encourage students to find visual representations of their ideas.

Third, Mikhail has very much constructed the blog as a kind of social glue, tying students together by encouraging all to get Gravatars (though only some have… I’m surprised Dr. G hasn’t docked their grades), to comment regularly, and to write freely.

Fourth, the students will be using the blog to develop and present remixes or re-enactments of short sections of films they’ve engaged this semester, and will write to reflect upon how going inside the productive process impacts their perspectives on both the themes of the course, and the art of film overall.

So, kudos to this group: this is a ton of work they’ve taken on, and they’ve done so openly, creatively, and collaboratively. Mikhail has taken advantage of various support services in the most productive way, from the library’s subscription to the film repository Swank.com, to his Twitter network (where he crowd sourced ideas for films, readings, and discussion), to his awesome educational technologist — me — who he’s consulted on both technology and assignment design. We’re lucky to have their model to build upon.

I encourage you all to check out the site, and to scare the students by leaving some spooky comments.

*note: Jim Groom posted about this course blog simultaneously.

photo credit: mag3737

As a Writing Fellow, I work with students who are having trouble structuring their essays, or need help clarifying their thesis statements, but sometimes I cannot help but address grammar problems. Yesterday I had some extra time with a student, so I gave him some feedback on a recurring grammar issue I noticed when I looked over his draft essay: rampant misuse of commas and semicolons! In speaking with him, it became clear that he didn’t really know what the difference was between a comma, semicolon, or colon, or when it was appropriate to use them.

As far as commas go, I taught him the “pause” trick. Read your sentences out loud to identify where you naturally pause, and that is where the comma(s) should go. When you read, your sentences out loud, it often becomes clear, when you’ve put in unnecessary commas. [When you read [pause] your sentences out loud [pause] it often becomes clear [pause] when you’ve put in unnecessary commas.]

Unfortunately, I did not have any neat tricks up my sleeve to explain semicolon usage. In the draft that the student showed me, his semicolons should have been commas; they did not connect two independent but related clauses that could stand on their own as complete sentences. “Get rid of them,” I advised. “If you don’t know how to use them, don’t use them at all.”

This got me thinking: I can help students identify when not to use the semicolon, but how do I teach them when it is appropriate to use? I’m a sociologist, not a grammarian! I’ve never had a formal grammar lesson myself, and cannot articulate all the rules of grammar, despite implicitly knowing and using them when I write. When I told the student to err on the side of caution by not using the semicolon, I realize that I was also erring on the side of caution in my proscriptive, rather than prescriptive, advice.

I was discussing this last night with a friend I ran into on the way home from the subway. My friend, who is absolutely not a grammarian either, reminded me about her favorite podcast, Grammar Girl. “I used a semicolon for the first time in my life this year, after listening to the Grammar Girl podcast about them,” she told me. By finally learning the rules about the semicolon, she finally felt confident about using them. Now, I’ve never been afraid to use the semicolon, but I’d like to feel more confident about teaching its usage. So, off to Grammar Girl I go.

The phrase “classroom management” appears a few times in this Sunday’s New York Times article on teaching, and the author seems to apologize for it. It is kind of icky, but why?

photo credit: dcJohn

I think part of the problem is that it implies one-size-fits-all, when individual students are…individuals, and group dynamics vary from class to class. There are video clips in the article of teachers in class, with a narrator who explains their techniques. I watched all the ones on the Times website, and went to the Uncommon Schools site to watch more. They’re compelling and entertaining. And then, the wince factor arises with a description of how a teacher “draws kids’ attention to the normalcy of compliancy, everyone is doing it.” Lots of the ideas on the Uncommon Schools site seem useful and insightful, but I also know that if I tried to mimic what I’ve watched people do in videos, it would be ridiculous. There’s a smile between a teacher and a student in one clip that isn’t instructional so much as inspirational. It shows the kind of particular attention to a person’s distinct way of thinking and expressing themselves, that seems beyond these techniques and studies.

“I think that’s why after citing a lot of research on teaching, this article and a recent Atlantic article both claim that it is very hard to predict what traits make good teacher. The teacher is one part of a huge variable, and one person’s cheesy gesture is another’s brilliant interaction.

photo credit: Sara. Nel

After doing several workshops for students planning to take the CUNY Proficiency Exam (CPE) I’ve been thinking about some fairly basic questions about standardized testing that are nonetheless important ones. I’ve come to realize (as have other Fellows at Baruch) that one of the most important functions of these workshops is to alleviate student anxiety. While some students do not seem to worry too much about the exam, many (some of them excellent students) become rather anxious especially in regards to the time constraints. This raises a number of questions for me regarding the effectiveness of this form of assessment. Are we really setting up a situation that accurately measures student performance of these skills given the stress of the testing situation? According to this article, we aren’t.

As health blogger Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen points out, “Scientists have long known that long-term stress impairs brain cell communication, but they’re just now learning that even short-term stress – such as a few hours of anxiety – can negatively affect cognitive skills.” Pawlik-Kienlen cites research from the University of California (Irvine) School of Medicine as well as the Laboratory of Stress Research at Douglas Hospital Research Center to make this point. Given this negative affect of stress on memory it would seem that we are setting up students for failure. Of course, it could be argued that the anxiety-producing test situation is preparation for stress soon to be experienced by students in the work world. If this were the case, why wouldn’t we coach students on ways to manage this type of stress early in their educational careers? In general I understand the need for assessment of student learning; however, I wonder if it isn’t time for us to start thinking about some different ways of accomplishing this goal outside of the traditional timed exam.

The most persistent psychological barrier to working on my dissertation is not the intimidating size of the project, or insecurities about its intellectual worth, or a lack of time to devote to it.  It’s not even my cac.ophony.org deadline.  What keeps me away from the library is the constant barrage of warnings about the doom that awaits the humanities Ph.D.  Articles that beg undergrads not to pursue useless advanced degrees arrive regularly in my inbox, forwarded sympathetically from the secure, salaried desk jobs of my smug friends outside academia.  Why, I wonder, should I spend my day squeezing one or two footnotes out of hours of reading?

Discouraged, I retreat to the most reliably mindless escapism I know of, a deeply trusted ally in the war against productivity: syndicated sitcoms.

Marge, how could you?

This week I sat in for a professor in her Managerial Communication course, and I taught a class on the classical theorists of organizational and scientific management. As the overall metaphor for these early theories is a machine I designed an exercise for the students using metaphors to conceptualize various companies and work related systems. I got this idea from Gareth Morgan’s book, Images of an Organization, which looks at the use of metaphor as a conceptual tool to understand and study organizations. Much of Gareth Morgan’s work is in the use of creative imagery combined with organizational theory to better understand modern management structures.

After having discussed the classical theory approach with the students and asking them to examine why the machine was the metaphor used to describe these theories, I then asked them to come up with a metaphor for Baruch College. The first metaphor they shared was a beehive.  The students thought that there was a Queen Bee, who directed everything at Baruch though nobody really knew who that was. The students and the faculty were all of the busy worker bees that came and went, offering their work up to the hive at all times. The whole class, myself included, thought this metaphor worked well for conceptualizing Baruch. I then asked the students what did this beehive produce, what was Baruch’s main production? With not much enthusiasm, one student answered ” well..um… I guess it is knowledge or something like that” I couldn’t stop from laughing out loud. The next metaphor was a labyrinth…

Playing with the ongoing theme of dance in recent postings, here is one controversial piece of dance. The 2010 Olympics ice dancing competition just ended, and the aboriginal folk dance put together by the Russian team brought a lot of controversies in and out of the ice rink. Voila! (The video clip shows the original version performed in the past month before it had to be “toned down” at the Olympics.)

It has been reported that especially some indigenous Australians expressed their anger and frustration calling it as “appalling,” “a rip-off” and “exploitation.” Bev Manton, chairwoman of the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council, wrote last month in The Sydney Morning Herald that “the faux tribal designs on the costumes and the skaters’ faces ‘are no more authentic or Aboriginal than the shiploads of cheap Aboriginal tourist trinkets that pour into our country from overseas.’”

Now, compare this to the U.S. team’s “Bollywood” impression, which has become a YouTube sensation and instant favorite amongst Indian communities.

Apart from the quality of each performance itself, there are a series of questions that come to my mind. Why do some people consider the Russian pair’s dance offensive or feel uncomfortable while the majority enjoy the U.S. pair’s? (To my mind, it is not just a simple matter of the skating costumes, although one of the NBC commentators mentioned that the Russian team’s faux leaves hanging from their tribal costumes were “gimmicks” whereas the U.S. team’s Indian clothes were “authentic.”) If dancing is a means of cultural expression and human communication, what are the limits of cultural appropriation in dancing in which indigenous culture can be shared, celebrated, and replicated by nonnative members? When does cultural tribute stop being appropriation and become theft? Where is the line between them? How far is too far? While costume controversy seems to be a perennial source of woe and entertainment in figure skating, it is amusing to find these questions to be still valid, perhaps more than ever, in the so-called age of globalization.

photo credit: morgan childers

A professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway, recently sent an email that has gone viral, due largely to its unique approach in response to a student’s particularly obnoxious behavior.  The student, who remains anonymous, had arrived an hour late to class and been denied admission, and later emailed the professor to explain that he was late because he had been “sampling” different classes, the last of which was Professor Galloway’s, and that it was within his rights to explore different options at the beginning of the semester.

Galloway’s response has caught attention because of his brutal honesty in addressing what he sees as the student’s overall functional weaknesses.   In short, he takes him down a few notches.  You can read the full exchange here, but I wanted to focus on a specific piece of Galloway’s final advice:

“Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance…these are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential which, by virtue of you being admitted  to Stern, you must have in spades. It’s not too late xxxx…”

Opinion on the web seems split, mainly centered on Galloway’s known personality quirks.  The entire controversy, though, provides an opportunity to think about the appropriate tone and level of “honesty” in student-teacher communications.  As an adjunct at Baruch for five years, I’ve certainly felt the occasional urge to respond to particularly ridiculous requests with a similar sense of disbelief.  Galloway’s message, however, takes the impulse a step further, directly and personally addressing what he perceives to be the student’s overall failures.  His main point seems to be that, by exhibiting such a lack of decorum, the student is effectively handicapping himself, making it impossible to succeed in college or the larger world.

I find Galloway’s response generally appropriate considering the student’s rather arrogant assumption that “sampling” courses (by walking in and out of several classes mid-lecture) was a reasonable behavior.  His most memorable advice (“get your shit together”), while perhaps obscene, communicates an underlying truth.  If the student wishes to succeed in the business world, his presumed career direction, he will have to drastically adjust the attitude and expectations reflected in his brief interaction with Professor Galloway.

On the other hand, is it right to draw larger conclusions about a student’s chances of future success from one embarrassing incident?  Further, is it even within a professor’s rights or responsibilities to dole out such “advice” at all?  How can we effectively steer our students toward more appropriate and “successful” behavior without being too harsh or judgmental?