Monthly Archive for April, 2006

The 6th Annual Symposium, Part I

Published
by
Mikhail
on April 28, 2006
in Assessment, Baruch College, Conferences and Symposium
. 0 Comments

Each year, the Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College hosts the Symposium on Communication and Communication-Intensive Instruction which brings together about 100 educators and business people to talk about communication. This year’s Symposium, entitled “What is ‘Effective’?: Assessing Communication in Education and Business,” saw lots of discussion on the way we evaluate communication in academic and business contexts. During the morning roundtables, participants identified salient challenges or problems related to teaching and learning effective communication. Here’s what they came up with:

TABLE 1
The differences in the communication in business and industry v. the communication in the academy is that, in business, one has to be able to think on one’s feet and address an audience who wants to know: “What’s in it for me?” In the academy, students often write or speak to and for a professor and their message is: “This is what I
know.”

Making that transition often means thinking outside the box: but do students understand what defines the box? How can we teach students the kind of flexibility needed to communication effectively in business?

TABLE 2
To make communication more effective, we need to build a pre-assessment tool into the process. As you communicate ask yourself: “How do I find out if this will be effective? Diagnose yourself as you communicate. Is the core message is coming through?

TABLE 3
Learning is a life-long activity and universities do not turn out finished products. How can business and academia create an ongoing partnership to continue education as students move from the classroom into the workplace?

TABLE 4
The challenge is communicating more effectively about what effective communication is.

Two main positions keep coming up in answer to the question, What constitutes effective communication?

“It depends on the context.”
“Everybody should know—we know it when we see it.”

We want to define it. Articulate it. Deal with the variance in standards.

TABLE 5
What does “effective communication” mean and how do we as educators cultivate it?

To make effective communicators—people who are going to be hirable and desirable—we have to cultivate the whole person – to transform the students in fundamental ways: maturity, reliability, skills, knowledge, and creativity.

TABLE 6
Audience is the central concern. We are interested in the various audiences to whom effective communicators have to communicate. Regardless of genre, how does feedback—both overt and covert—effect the communication? How does evaluation enter into the planning process? How can students learn to balance fulfilling of expectations and creative thinking? How can we make sure students have contact with those who can demonstrate effective communication?

TABLE 7
Effective Communication is about reconfiguring the model of what communication is. It’s really about forming relationships. It’s about taking into account all the factors. — How can we foster this idea as opposed to an academic, linear, individualistic model of communication?

TABLE 8
What is the standard of evaluation? If we’re talking about a population that speaks 100 languages, and many more cultures, do we have a standard of evaluation that is appropriate for a diverse population?

To be continued . . .

Campus as…

Published
by
Jill
on April 19, 2006
in Higher Education and Technology
. 0 Comments

I heard a wonderful address by Prakash Nair, President of Fielding Nair International and Managing Editor of DesignShare.com. He was discussing David Bartlett’s work on the Connected School/Connected Campus. According to the 8 Rules of David Bartlett, students can educate themselves anywhere, therefore schools must do/offer something different/unique that cannot be found elsewhere. Bartlett argues that school campuses must act as the following eight things:

  • The Campus as Social Anchor
  • The Campus as New Social Infrastructure
  • The Campus as an e-place to be
  • The Campus as an ideas generator (culture of creativity)
  • The Campus as Ideas harvester (trial ideas for testing creativity)
  • The Campus as part of a network economy
  • The Campus as builder of social capital
  • The Campus as a model of a new, participatory democracy

How could communication in the classroom help achieve these goals? Should we, perhaps, use these ideas to rethink communication goals or communication pedagogy ?

Wikis in group authoring

Published
by
Cristina
on April 9, 2006
in Process, Revision and Technology
. 2 Comments

Noticeable shifts in style and grammar in a group-written paper can make it difficult reading. Further, a student may sometimes develop her assigned section in isolation from the rest of the paper, failing to build on what others have written. I’ve talked about these issues with students I have worked with. But until I picked someone else’s brain and found this page on wikis in education, I wasn’t sure how to make the collaborative writing process easier.

This is one way wikis can help. Students set up a wiki site for their drafts, with each student getting a page to write her assigned section in. After each section has been revised, say, two or three times, each student moves on to the next section and applies her revisions. She then moves on to the next section, and so forth. This may force each student to engage and build upon what others have written, as well as be committed to the overall focus and quality of the paper. Wikis smooth the workflow by eliminating the cumbersome process of emailing a Word document because several versions of the paper can be accessed via any Internet-connected computer. Wikis store a document’s history and allow “rollbacks” of changes — no messy strikethroughs and red fonts in Word’s “Track Changes” feature to deal with. I’d love to hear what others think of this process as well as any other thoughts on collaborative writing.

Writing and Identity

Published
by
Anthony
on April 7, 2006
in Pedagogy
. 0 Comments

In his article “Underlife and Writing Instruction” (first published in College Composition and Communication, Volume 38, Number 2, May 1987), Robert Brooke makes some fascinating observations about writing and identity. Using the sociological concept of underlife—defined (by Brooke) as “those behaviors which undercut the roles expected of participants in a situation”—the author describes writing as a form of resistance, inasmuch as it “involves living in conflict with accepted (expected) thought and action.”

He then discusses his observations of underlife in the writing classroom, noting the creative aspects of what might seem like disruptive behavior: in many cases, private conversations during class, for example, showed students applying class concepts quite accurately to their own interests. The suggestion is that these “disruptions,” actually assertions of creative independence, are vital steps in the process of building identity, which, in the end, is “the business we [as writing teachers] are in.”

The question is how to foster this tendency toward creative distancing, how to capitalize on the underlife so essential to writing. Brooke’s answer is that the institutional model has to be changed, from one where students learn from the “authorities” to one favoring more “student-directed projects, peer interaction,” and so forth.

I wonder, though, whether such reform is necessarily in the best interest of students. If learning to write is a process of building identity, couldn’t one argue that students in fact need the authority figure, with all of her rules and judgments, in order to find their own voices? Isn’t separation effected most successfully when one knows precisely what he is separating from? Is there a danger here that by dulling the sharp points of resistance we may be engendering a new kind of conformism?

Towards a taxonomy of course blogs

Published
by
Kate
on April 7, 2006
in Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging and Technology
. 3 Comments

Deborah, Jill, Mikhail and I are speaking today (Friday) at Baruch’s Ninth Annual Teaching and Technology Conference. One thing I am going to be speaking briefly about is different types of course blogs, and how they may lend themselves to supporting Communication Across the Curriculum. Since I have been dredging the ‘net to find samples, I have decided to post them here too.

I will offer these samples which represent a simple taxonomy of course blog structures:

1) Teacher writes, students read: this course blog is really a tool for professors making announcements, offering links, and clarifying assignments. Some professors post lectures or podcasts, or notes. While it is useful on many levels, the student is not actually involved as an active communicator (writing, speaking, or otherwise). Since it doesn’t satisfy the reasons I’d recommend course blogs, I won’t offer samples of these, but I will say that a google search will yield an enormous number of “course blogs” where they only person writing is the professor. All of the other kinds of course blogs I’ve seen, by the way, also include professor’s links, assignments, and the other items included in this category of blogs, but they also include the students’ presence to a much greater degree.

2) Teacher writes, students comment in detail: this is a big departure from the first category. Students are not writing the blog posts, but they are commenting / responding to them. Many professors, including this one at the University of Maryland, use this model in order to post assignments, ideas, or announcements and have students complete them in one place (the comments thread); ideally, the students are talking to each other as well as the professor. Matt Kirschenbaum says of the blog, in his syllabus for the course,

I will use the blog to post announcements, assignments, updates to the calendar, and other administrative items. I will also post questions, provocations, and items related to our current reading and discussions. You may respond to these in the comments section of each entry. I will take blog comments into account when evaluating class participation.

Here’s a sample posting, and the students’ discussion in the comments.

3) Students and teacher take turns writing to the blog and they all comment: since posting on the blog is in a sense primary (you go to the blog and you see the blog posting), and commenting is secondary (you have to click on “comments” to read them), this shifts the balance again. This structure is setting up a different kind of discussion. An example is this website for a course taught by Terra Williams and Charlie Lowe at Florida State: Writing, Researching and Reading the World Wide Web. In this entry, a student’s posting elicits comments (and comments upon comments).

4) Small groups of students have their own group blogs, and the teacher checks in on all of these: this might be useful for courses with group projects of some kind.

5) Teacher has a blog, every student has a blog, and they are all linked together via a central site: everyone posts, and everyone visits the various blogs and reads them. This may sound like a lot of work, but Bloglines or another RSS feed reading tool make it easy and quick to read lots of blogs on one page. It is a good structure if students are doing some sort of projects, as here, in Jane McGonigal’s Game Design as Art Practice course at the San Francisco Art Institute. This model gives every student their own space and they can complete assignments there, then visit classmates’ sites (or read them via an RSS feed reader). Here are two of the students’ blogs (which are linked from the central blog that the professor uses for her own announcements and assignments): kittyparty, and Imperfect Information.

Here’s another example: the Creating History in New Media course taught by Paula Petrik at George Mason. Here are two students’ blogs: Phyllis E. Slade-Martin’s blog and Robert Harless’s blog.
Here are some articles which might be of interest as you consider adding blogging to your course:

Weblogs in Education: Bringing the World to the Liberal Arts Classroom (Note: also applicable to non-Liberal Arts classrooms!)

The WiKipedia entry for blogs.

I have some others, but am out of time. If folks would like to comment below with their favorite blogging-in-college-courses links– preferably ones available online– I will add them to this list.