GW faculty development seminar this Friday

October 31, 2006 By 2 Comments

Hi everyone — the Great Works team is hosting its second faculty development seminar of the semester this Friday, 11.03.06, 10:00 am-1:30 pm, in VC 8-210. We held a very lively seminar on engaged reading last month, and will focus on revision this time around.

If you’re interested in faculty development and would like to sit in, please let me know as soon as you can via email at giuttari27@gmail.com. (Lunch is included and small group activities are on the agenda, so we’ll need a head count.)

If you’re interested but can’t make it this Friday, fear not! Our third seminar on how to create a student-centered classroom will take place in early December, so I’ll send out another invite once it rolls around.

Finally, the GW FDS also has its own blog, which you’re welcome to peruse; it’s password-protected, so just send me an email if you’d like to have a look.

BOO!
Joanna

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Faculty Development, Revision

American English as a Second Language?

October 27, 2006 By 1 Comment

I just finished running a psycholinguistic experiment for my dissertation research. I am working in the field of sentence processing, which looks at how one ‘parses’ the sentences they hear and how to resolve potential ambiguity they might encounter. My project is on English and I am targeting native speakers of English, more precisely those of American English. The participants are undergraduates at Queens Collee who are enrolled in Psychology 101, and they were doing this for a course credit.

This is how the experiment goes. You read a mini dialogue, proceeding from one ‘frame’ to another with the button press, and your task is to choose the answer choice that best fits the dialogue in the third frame. For example,

<start dialogue>
1. Until Frank got the fancy job
that he was just bragging about,
<proceed>
2. how much money was he making?
<proceed>
3. He earned far less than you. OR He earned more than anyone.
<choose Left or Right>

Obviously the right hand answer would best fit the dialogue if you carefully
read and understood the content of the whole dialogue.
I won’t go into details of what we are interested in testing, but it suffices here to know that although students tend to think that they are only being tested for the question-answering accuracy, we also measure how long it took to move through the dialogue, and compare the ‘reading times’ across different constructions.

After running the experiment, we evaluated their performance, since if the participants are reading too slow or making too many errors, we need to discard the data. And an interesting thing I noticed was that most of the data that we had to throw away come from people who were recent immigrants from other places where English is spoken but that English is a dialect that is not American English (for example, Jamaica or Trinidad). They were all ‘prescreened’ by the research management system as native speakers of English. But it fascinated me to know that it showed such a systematic difference in performance between people who are early immigrants (came to the US in their infancy (0-6)) and those who came later (9 or later, when according to a theory the learning of a second language will become dramatically more difficult).
As I interacted with them as the experimenter, they speak good English and they look and behave reasonably smart – it’s not like they forged their background information or they are not part of the smart bunch. I can see them contribute good ideas to the class and write good papers. But in the world of milliseconds in an intricate reading experiment like this, the difference shows up. Their reading speed was almost as if they were second language speakers of English, though highly proficient ones.

Although we are not looking to research on this issue, I brought this up in the meeting I had with one of my advisors and we agreed that the dialectal difference between American English and their English is so huge that we just can’t view them as the kind of ‘native speakers of English’ that we are targeting for.
It has definitely proven something to me. The students who speak certain dialects of English, though treated the same as other American native speakers, they might have more in common with advanced ESL population than we think. And, from my experience of interacting with them, it is definitely not the matter of intellect, or their ‘broken’ English. Though this point may be obvious to some people, I feel like I truly learned something about the variety of Englishes.

Filed Under: Language, Non-Standard English

“Personal Success Is No Accident!”

October 27, 2006 By 1 Comment

Ellen Cahill came to the BLSCI last Thursday morning, Oct 26 to lead a workshop on oral presentations. She has a very impressive resume: for the past 21 years she worked with thousands of professionals in many kinds of businesses, made guest appearances on NBC Today and CNN-FN, where she talked about communications issues, published in several professional magazines. She graduated from Harvard Business School.

About 15 fellows attended her workshop. Even though she mainly works with corporate clients, she was able to gear her entire presentation towards our needs. Throughout the workshop, she addressed our work with Baruch students as well as some universal issues of making presentations in any fields, for any audience, in any discipline. It was a great, pointed, precise and useful presentation. I would certainly like to hear her speak again and possibly for a longer workshop.

She initially asked us in the audience to post questions and issues we would like to hear about and then she was able to build her presentation to fit our needs. Pretty impressive endeavor and all of this done right on the spot!

Obviously watching her do her job was an experience in itself. Now, that is how you do oral presentations! She was confident, knowledgeable, and certainly did not have any doubts about what to do with her hands…

There were a lot of tips that I personally took out of this workshop.

For example, did you know, that often the audience is only able to remember things in groups of three (3)? And so, if you can, build your data into sets of threes.

Power Point presentation needs to illustrate and explain what you cannot otherwise convey, and it should not serve as your cue card or a reading prompt.

Remember that your body language is important- for example, arm lock (arms close and tight to the body, as if protecting chest) says: “I am stressed and nervous”.

When you prepare a presentation, do not spend so much time on the middle part of it- the “meat “of it. Obviously that is the part you know best. So concentrate instead on presenting a pointed opening statement – Ellen called it a “headline.” And start with a strong opening point/thought/idea which addresses the most important issue in any presentation: WIIFM!

This stand for: What’s In It For Me. Apparently, the most serious indictment in the business world is people thinking that they are wasting their time. So make sure they know why they are here and what they can take out of it. This certainly goes for our students and any audience I can think of.

Ellen left us with a business card which contained a list of “Cahill’s Commandments”. Here they are:

  • Know what you want your audience to do, think or feel.
  • Decide what your listener NEEDS TO KNOW. Less is more!
  • DO NOT SPEAK unless you are looking at a pair of eyes.
  • The secret is energy. Use your voice and body to tell your story.
  • Use mind jogger notes. NOT TEXT.
  • Use “pictures” to help the listener remember the message.
  • Tell me what your visuals MEAN, not what they say.
  • Don’t touch the furniture!
  • Listen to the question. Then built a better one. Answer the better one.
  • Be yourself—have a conversation with the audience.
  • PRACTICE! PRACTICE! PRACTICE!

Can’t obey the Commandments? Call us!

(Copyright by Cahill Associates, Inc.)

Here is the front of the card:

“Personal Success Is No Accident!”

Cahill Associates, Inc.

The Business of Speaking

Email cahill@cahillassoc.com

I think many of us found her presentation very useful. Comments anyone?

Filed Under: Oral Communication

Interesting MacArthur Foundation Initiative…

October 27, 2006 By Leave a Comment

$50 million for research on Digitial Media and Learning. There are some interesting pieces under Projects>MacSeries Volumes, and also at the new “Spotlight” blog.

http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Funding, Pedagogy, Technology

Telling statistics?

October 26, 2006 By 2 Comments

Today some of us here at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute listened to a presentation by Jimmy Jung, Assistant Director of Baruch’s Office of Institutional Research and Program Assessment. The presentation was called “Who are Baruch College Undergraduate Students?” and was intended, I believe, to give us an informative “map” of the student population at Baruch. And it started off that way. But soon, probably unexpectedly for the presenter, it turned into a conversation that touched on such topics as NY public school system and the pressures professors might feel when they are deciding on a grade.

The first statistic that raised some eyebrows was the breakdown of students by ethnicity. International students were listed as a separate population and not grouped with their ethnic groups as many of us would have expected. And the first generation immigrants, who might speak a language other than English at home, but who are permanent residents as opposed to holders of a student visa, are all listed together under “white”. It turned out that that is “the way the government requests” the student population to be broken up. And on top of that, there is a financial reasoning behind this, which is that since the international students were shown do better at the university than other groups, less budgetary resources need to be allocated to them as a group.

Next up for scrutiny was the statistic that Baruch is the #1 producer of accounting majors and CPA test takers in the US. It provoked a half-joking question, whether those test-takers were also “test-passers”. It seems that most of them are, but we didn’t get a specific percentage.

The diversity of Baruch students and the number of languages they speak was not that surprising to hear about, but what was interesting to know was that about 60% of undergrads at Baruch transfer in from another college, the majority from the CUNY community colleges. Now that I think most of us didn’t know. And it might be one of the reasons why in every class there is such a wide range of communication skills. Apparently the applicants who are rejected by Baruch because of their low GPA and test scores can go to a community college and later transfer to the same program at Baruch without necessarily having brought their writing and content knowledge to the same level as the original Baruch students. Some argued that the problems in writing can be traced back to the middle and high schools, and that the variable quality of NY schools can account for the variability in the skills of undergrads. Also, one study that was mentioned claims that the student’s grade in high-school English is the best predictor of college freshman year success.

The other statistic that proved to be controversial was that 94% of Baruch freshmen receive grades of As, Bs and Cs in their first writing intensive English course. This smacked of grade inflation for some of us in the audience. And although the presenter tried to reassure everyone that Baruch has been doing better than other institutions in regard to grade inflation, that still does not mean that there isn’t any of it going on, or that Baruch hasn’t reached ceiling in terms of grade inflation. This issue has sparked a whole conversation on the reasons a professor has for giving a certain grade. For some, if they saw that the person was making an effort and submitted all the assignments, they couldn’t give him a grade lower than a ‘C’. For others the dilemma was: if the whole class submits papers that are only “F-worthy”, can a professor fail everyone?

There were many other points raised; I am surely forgetting some. If anyone would like to continue this conversation here, or add some insightful statistics, please feel free to do so.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Higher Education

The Seminar on Instructional Technology: Blogging Across the Curriculum

October 24, 2006 By 1 Comment

The Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute and BCTC present

The Seminar on Instructional Technology: Blogging Across the Curriculum

Wednesday, November 1, 2006
12:30 pm-2pm, VC 14-285

This roundtable discussion will explore the implications of new instructional media including weblogs and wikis for teaching and learning. Participants will consider ways in which these new media have been incorporated in undergraduate courses at Baruch and elsewhere as a means of encouraging active learning and facilitating write-to-learn activities.

Lunch will be served.

Please RSVP to Corinne_Giladi@baruch.cuny.edu

ABOUT THE SEMINAR: The Seminar on Instructional Technology is envisioned as the first in a series co-sponsored by the Schwartz Institute and BCTC. The goals of this first meeting are to cultivate interest in blogs, to build a community of faculty and staff interested in instructional technology, and to begin to construct a support structure that will maximize the pedagogical benefits of the college’s use of blogs. The seminar is organized by Mikhail Gershovich, Director, Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute; Luke Waltzer, CUNY Writing Fellow; Jim Russell, Director of Instructional Technology; and Patrick Ackerman-Hovis, College Website Administrator.

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Faculty Development, Technology

Value of Role-Playing

October 19, 2006 By Leave a Comment

If you’re reading this post, chances are that you are one of those lucky few who just happened to posses an innate ability to grasp language. Your teachers called you a “natural” writer. You may have gone through your whole undergraduate career without making a “comma splice” without ever really knowing what a comma splice was. You didn’t quite know the rules, but you knew the rules on an innate level. It’s also likely that you were precocious when it came to reading and writing, and, unlike your classmates, you could write your term paper the night before and still get an A. Somehow, quite naturally, you knew what a term paper should do, and you did it well, exceptionally well.

Chances are that you have taught, are teaching, or will teach a course that requires writing. In every course, there may be one or two students that fit this profile of the “natural” writer. The disjunction occurs when the “natural” writer is now the teacher of writing and believes that every student must be a “natural” writer as well.

To avoid this disjunction, I think a simple task that teachers can do from time to time is role-play: put yourself in your students’ shoes. Doing this with other faculty members, perhaps in a development seminar, while focusing on a specific objective (syllabus or assignment design, understanding a thesis statement, unraveling a work of literature) would be ideal. This is easier said than done, however. Many college instructors would rather, believe it or not, grade papers than role-play as their students. What can be an enlightening experience oftentimes is seen as a silly and sometimes torturous exercise. Many instructors simply cannot role-play as their students; they are unable to put themselves in their students’ shoes not out of shyness or lack of dramatic training, but out of a total disconnect from who their students are and what their students’ experiences are.

In order to most effectively teach students, I think we need to know or at least try to know who they are. We may have many divisions between ourselves and our students–knowledge, age, interests–but role-playing helps us to at least try to imagine who they are. Knowing who they are helps us to know how to close other gaps such as assignment design and what our students produce in response to our assignments, our comments and their revised assignments, our discussion questions and their responses. As unnatural as it may feel to imagine how our students, the majority of which aren’t “natural” writers, receive our teaching, role-playing might be one of the simplest and most effective ways to see how small changes in our teaching can lead to better results.

Filed Under: Faculty Development, Pedagogy

Weblogs — Why They’re Still Not ‘Happening’

October 14, 2006 By 5 Comments

Here is a view from one of my favoriate bloggers, Dave Pollard. It is, as most of his posts are, provocative. In short, he suggests that since blogs are not filling a need, but a want, they are not having the impact one might think.

That may well be what I am observing with the SUNY Maritime Masters blog. The ramp-up in former and current graduate students becoming members of this blog is lower than what I expected.

This brings me to best practice versus popular practice versus what is needed, a theme my students and I have been discussing. Perhaps blogs fall in the popular practice category. I have earlier expressed dissatisfaction regarding tne involvement of business in cac.opony. Maybe that’s true because the blog doesn’t fill business need.

Anyway, we all needed more to think about over the weekend.

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging

The Schwartz Institute is Hiring

October 13, 2006 By Leave a Comment

That’s right, we’re hiring. In response to a whole lot of growth and thanks to lots and lots of generous support from various folks within Baruch and CUNY, the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College is able to add another full-time person — a Deputy Director — to help manage the myriad programs and projects we’ve got on our plate. Take a look at the job notice (after the jump) and please circulate it.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Baruch College, Jobs

Technology and the Public/Private Divide

October 12, 2006 By 13 Comments

In the Metro section of the October 10, 2006 New York Times, an article appeared about a police investigation into the case of a Brooklyn man named Michael Sandy, who was hit by a car after two men pushed him onto the Belt Parkway near Sheepshead Bay. The article featured a screenshot of Mr. Sandy’s Friendster homepage, and summarized information about him gleaned from the site.

Sandy Friendster
Michael Sandy’s Friendster page as it appeared on page B6 of the New York Times on October 10, 2006.
(Sinister technology-related update to this case here, Times subscription required).

While I know from conversations with real live journalists that they often use resources like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook in their research and reporting, this was the first instance in which I’ve seen an actual reproduction of a page from such a site in a newspaper (though I admittedly haven’t been looking too hard for it). If users didn’t realize how “public” these public sites really are, the Old Gray Lady’s screen grab should make it perfectly clear. (for a related post, see Kate Moss’s “Excuse me sir, but your online persona is showing.”

The relationship between technology and the question of what’s public and private has come up recently in our conversations about how to stimulate blog usage within the Baruch community. When BCTC rolls out its Movable Type blogging package, all Baruch blogs will come equipped with a disclaimer that indemnifies the college against the worst efforts of community users. What’s not clear yet is whether these blogs will be open to the public, restricted to the Baruch community, or restricted to a group determined by the blog’s administrator.

I feel strongly that course blogs should be seen initially only as an extension of the classroom for the use of participants in the class, and that they should be closed off from the public unless the community they immediately serve wants them to be open. A learning community–faculty and students–should be able to take advantage of the ease of information transfer afforded by new technologies without worrying about who’s watching (tenure committees, parents, and intellectually property attorneys come to mind!). At the same time, we are trying to study how course blogs are being used across academia, and we are finding that our access to them is frustrated by the very philosophy we embrace.

The solution, it would seem, is some combination of public/private sections in a course blog, where only collectively approved content goes out over the airwaves. Ultimately at Baruch we hope to build a community of faculty who can share their blogging experiences with and learn from one another. Whatever happens, though, users—faculty and students—should be educated about the implications of their choices and should know who, potentially, has access to any work they put up on a server.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Technology
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