Monthly Archive for November, 2006

Who Are Baruch’s Undergraduates?

Published
by
Mikhail
on November 28, 2006
in Baruch College and Higher Education
. 0 Comments

A while back, Yana wrote about a presentation Baruch’s Asst. Director of Institutional research, Jimmy Jung, made at the Institute. To follow up on that post, here’s some telling data from Jimmy’s handout as a little something towards a context for the work we do at the Schwartz Institute:

Enrollment: 12,844

    75.9% full time and 24.1% part time
    45.2% male and 54.8% female

Ethnicity: American Indian, 0.1%; Asian, 27.9%; Black, 12.9%; Hispanic, 16.9%; White, 31.5%; and International, 10.7%

Geographic Distribution: Bronx, 8.0%; Brooklyn, 31.4%; Manhattan, 12.8%; Queens, 34.4%; Staten Island, 3.9%; Other NY, 7.7%; and New Jersey, 1.4%

School: Zicklin School of Business, 80.8%; School of Public Affairs, 2.8%; and Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, 16.4%

Top Ten Majors:

    1. Accountancy
    2. Finance and investments
    3. Marketing
    4. Management
    5. Computer methodology
    6. Business communications
    7. Entrepreneurship
    8. Real estate
    9. Psychology
    10. Economics

What makes Baruch’s undergraduates special?

  • Baruch is the most ethnically diverse higher education institution in the US.
  • Baruch is the #1 producer of accounting majors and CPA test takers in the US.
  • Approximately 41.8% of undergraduate students at Baruch are born outside of the US.
  • Approximately 52.6% of undergraduate students at Baruch speak a language other than English at home.
  • Approximately 35 percent of undergraduate students at Baruch are first in their family to attend college.
  • Of the freshmen students who start out at Baruch about 70 percent attended NYC public high schools.
  • Of the undergraduate students enrolled in Baruch about 60 percent transferred in from another college, the majority are from the CUNY community college system.

    • For more interesting data on Baruch’s student body, visit the website of Baruch’s Office of Institutional Research and Program Assessment. Thanks again, Jimmy.

    NYT article on blogs of college leaders

    Published
    by
    Joanna
    on November 22, 2006
    in Administration, Audience, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education and Technology
    . 0 Comments

    We’ve been discussing here on our own blog how students and professors make use of blogs, but now even college presidents are getting into the game:

    Erasing Divide, College Leaders Take to Blogging by Diana Jean Schemo

    How did we/should we learn a second language?

    Published
    by
    Yukiko
    on November 21, 2006
    in ESL, Higher Education and Language
    . 4 Comments

    (This post is more of asking questions and trying to start a conversation. I hope that through this I can find out more of everyone’s experiences and thoughts on second language learning and language education in general…)

    Across the ocean in Japan, there has been a whole debate over whether they should start teaching English earlier in schools. This is due to the worrying reality that Japanese people are not so great at learning English, especially in terms of speaking and listening. Many parents, hopeful for their children possibly becoming ‘bilingual’ or ‘international’, send them to expensive ‘kids’ English classes’ to make a headstart. Reflecting on the trend, the government is on the move to revise the national curriculm so that English classes start earlier than the current 7th grade. They are also considering revising the curriculum so that English classes have more ‘communicative’ components, such as speaking and listening, i.e. reducing the number of classes that used to be devoted to reading and grammar.

    My former supervisor at the university I went to, Yoshifumi Saito, opposes to the idea. He believes that good English skills comes from good grammar knowledge and reading skills. He claims that although learning ‘basic conversations’ can be done at an early age, you would choke as you try to communicate more complex information if no one taught you much grammar and you didn’t get to read much.
    He also argues for the importance of teaching their native language before emphasizing English language learning. He argues that unless students acquire good knowledge and command of the Japanese language, they will never acquire good command in English.
    Therefore, according to him, starting English earlier and only teaching ‘communication’ while reducing the number of Japanese classes (you can only teach for so long!) would never work. (Sorry I would give a reference but as far as I looked his publications are in Japanese).

    I think I agree with him overall. I have never really met anyone who received all the A’s in Japanese but D’s in English. It is the matter of enriching your ‘language sense’ so to speak, and you enrich your sense primarily by quality native language experience (e.g. reading and appreciating literary works). I also think that knowing the grammar of a language well is very important especially at an advanced level; it ultimately matters in any aspects of ESL learning. But the dilemma is that the current state in Japan definitely needs improvement. Even people who are called ‘English teachers’ do not know English so well; starting English classes earlier faces with this practical issue that we just don’t have enough elementary school teachers who know English well enough to even do this.

    I would like to take this opportunity to ask the readers what they think. If English is your second language, how did you learn it? If English is your first language, how did you learn your second language? What did you think of the way you were taught or given opportunities to learn it? How important do you think knowing the grammar of a language is? Do you think knowing your native language is related to your foreign language learning?

    Announcing the 7th Annual Symoposium

    Published
    by
    Mikhail
    on November 15, 2006
    in Baruch College, Conferences and Symposium
    . 3 Comments

    We at the Schwartz Communication Institute are very pleased to announce “New Rules: Convention and Change in Communication,” our 7th Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication-Intensive Instruction on Friday, April 27, 2007.

    For more information, please see our Symposium page.

    Sometimes, Students Know Best

    Published
    by
    Jenny
    on November 14, 2006
    in Technology
    . 2 Comments

    When I was an undergraduate, my Shakespeare professor wanted to show a video of one of the best performances of Falstaff she had seen.  The problem was that she didn’t know how to work a VCR.  (Mind you, this was in the late 1990s.)  She spent about 20 minutes trying to get the VCR to work.  She had never used a VCR before.  We watched and watched her, not knowing whether or not it would be appropriate to offer her help.  After all, she’s the professor and smarter than us.  Her actions confirmed what we suspected all along: that she really was living in Shakespeare’s world and was stuck in Elizabethan England.

    Baruch is fortunate to have “smart classrooms” equipped with computers, an overhead projector, an opaque projector, microphones, speakers, and white boards that slide and layer over one another, making it possible to for instructors to write, write, write, and refer back to what they have written without fear of having to erase for lack of writing space.  Some of us may not think of white boards as “technology,” but after having taught at a college campus with blackboards and nothing else to offer in the way of teaching aids (hardly a piece of chalk could be found), I have learned that whiteboards are technology.

    I have found, however, that some instructors don’t use the tools in their “smart classrooms.”  Many instructors did not even know that they had an opaque projector or what could be accomplished with an opaque projector.  When my colleagues and I set it up for them and project a piece of student writing onto the white board and have the class workshop a thesis, the instructor is invariably amazed at having discovered a new, simpler, more effective way to model thesis revision for the class.

    In these smart classrooms, where the technology looms like a scary storm cloud overheard in the form of a projector and the computer console sits like a large, strange beast in the corner, I find that students are stealthily text-messaging under their backpacks, in their laps, inside their purses, under their textbooks, and yes, sometimes in plain view.

    Students turn to us for help with assignments, but very rarely do we turn to them for help.  They know technology, and they know it intuitively.  I might spend 10 minutes trying to set up an opaque projector if I’ve never used one before, but I bet a student, who has also never used one before, could set one up in thirty seconds.

    My Shakespeare professor eventually asked for help.  The video was inserted in the VCR, the play button was pushed, the TV was turned on and set to the correct input channel, and the video played.  Falstaff laughed and drank and jostled about.  I wonder how arcane we must seem to our students when we hesitate over using the computer in the classroom or simply avoid using the projector because we are afraid of what are, after all, just buttons and wires.  What are students not seeing because of an instructor’s fear of technology?  Rather than being afraid, we should turn to those who so often turn to us.

    Re-inventing the University

    Published
    by
    Nida
    on November 11, 2006
    in Pedagogy and Style
    . 4 Comments

    I’m reading Natalie Angier’s 1999 book “Woman: An Intimate Geography”, a review of biological research on women’s bodies that challenge evolutionary explanations for gender stereotypes.  Angier is a journalist who writes science pieces for the New York Times.  I am fascinated by the ease with which she is writing about phenomena as complex as, for example, “apoptosis”:

    “The millions of eggs that we women begin with are cleanly destroyed through an innate cell program called apoptosis.  The eggs do not simply die -they commit suicide.  Their membranes ruffle up like petticoats whipped by the wind and they break into the hearts of neighboring cells.  By graciously and melodramatically getting out of the way, the sacrificial eggs leave their sisters plenty of hatching room.  I love the word apoptosis, the onomatopoeia of it: a-POP-tosis.  The eggs pop apart like poked soap bubbles, a brief flash of taut, refracted light and then, ka-ping!”

    Scientific terminology explained in everyday language (let’s disregard “onomato-WHAT?”) and imagery in such an engaging way and with a natural authority.  Isn’t this the whole point of WAC/WID?  I often wonder how I can best solve the tension between “Use your own words” and “Learn the disciplinary vocabulary” when I see students use disciplinary terminology in sentences to show that they are aware of its existence, with no evidence of a real understanding of the concepts.  In his well-known piece David Bartholomae talked about our expectations of students to “invent the university”, that is, to adopt the discourses of particular disciplines in which they are writing.  But we want them to do this in a way that shows that they actually grasped the significance of those discourses.  Of course we don’t foolishly expect them all to be Natalie Angier.  But I wonder to what extent we expose students to this kind of “beautiful” scientific writing.  Any examples from the syllabi you are working with?

    Webster and Wikis

    Published
    by
    Anthony
    on November 7, 2006
    in Language and Wikis
    . 2 Comments

    There’s a fascinating history of Noah Webster’s iconographic American dictionary in the Nov. 6, 2006 edition of The New Yorker (”Noah’s Mark,” by Jill Lepore).  When Webster first proposed a “Dictionary of the American Language” in 1800, he was roundly criticized for planning to include new words spoken by common people.  The logic behind the attacks, writes Lepore, “went something like this: Because any words new to the United States are either stupid or foreign, there is no such thing as the ‘American language’; there’s just bad English.”

    Much later, Webster’s was still criticized for its egalitarian tendencies: “In this magazine [The New Yorker], Dwight Macdonald complained that Webster’s Third had debased the language ‘in the name of democracy.’  The dictionary’s editorial staff had called for a show of hands to make decisions about words and usage.  Macdonald challenged both the method and its premise: ‘If nine-tenths of the citizens of the United States…were to use inviduous, the one-tenth who clung to invidious would still be right, and they would be doing a favor to the majority if they continued to maintain the point’.”

    Lepore continues: “It’s probably a good thing Macdonald isn’t around to browse through the Wiktionary, the online, user-written dictionary launched in 2002 by Wikipedia, and billed as the future of lexicography.  There’s no show of hands at Wiktionary.  There’s not even an editorial staff.”

    The implication seems to be that opponents of the “legitimatization” of common usage in language would criticize “Wiki” developments simply because they’re “democratic.”  Yet linguistic inclusiveness surely does not lead inevitably to the acceptance of all sources of information as (at least potentially) valid, I would think.  Aren’t Wikis problematic (potentially) on other grounds?  I wonder what Noah Webster would make of the Wiki phenomenon. 

    The Seminar on Instructional Technology: Blogging Across the Curriculum Minutes

    Published
    by
    Luke
    on November 3, 2006
    in Blogs and Blogging, Faculty Development, Pedagogy and Technology
    . 1 Comment

    Thanks to Tom Harbison, the hardest working man in show business, or, at least, CUNY, we have minutes from our seminar on Wendesday. I’ve also included the agenda and the links that we shared with attendees.

    Minutes from Seminar on Instructional Technology

    The Aesthetics of the Virtual Learning Space

    Published
    by
    Luke
    on November 2, 2006
    in Blogs and Blogging, Pedagogy and Technology
    . 4 Comments

    I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the aesthetics of the virtual space, and how it can impact the amounts and types of traffic to an online learning tool. What got me thinking about this was my attempt to answer the question of how weblogs used as instructional tools were different than “learning management systems” like Blackboard and WebCT. Blackboard, like the course blogs I advocate, can easily transfer a wide-array of file types, and allows for participant discussion (though in a significantly less flexible manner than blogs). If the primary benefit of the blog over Blackboard as an instructional tool lay in its malleability to the purpose of a teacher, then I would say that running a close second in terms of a separating difference is the aesthetic potential of a blog over a Blackboard site. And, obviously, those two points are related.

    I’ve seen some good Blackboard sites in the past, and have used it myself effectively in the teaching of the American history survey. I’ve never, however, heard any faculty member or any student say “what a great Blackboard site! Wow!” Instructional blogs that I’ve seen in circulation, however, have “wowed” frequently. This is likely not a newsflash to anyone with experience using these technologies.

    The “wow” factor, on the surface, seems to have little pedagogical value, and it’s vulnerable to accusations of the elevation of style over substance. But I don’t think it should be completely discounted as an element of our efforts to bring students to our material through online teaching tools. Creating an inviting virtual space, with a logic and an aesthetic that flow from the purpose and materials of the course, can help students see that space as an extension of the learning that is happening concurrently in the classroom. It can help them feel a sense of belonging and a sense of ownership, and can help them feel that they are participating in something unique. I can’t help but believe that this feeling translates to the way that students approach the material and the assignments on the site. I’ve seen it work well and not so well, and I look forward to exploring it more in my teaching. Blackboard’s aesthetic, with its heinous buttons and familiar logic, tends to generalize online learning. It’s much more likely to produce a “duh” than a “wow.”

    I don’t want to open a war on Blackboard here, because I do think it can be effective as a teaching tool, and it’s certainly easier to master than a blog. I just want to drive home the point that we are dealing with spaces here, and virtual though they may be, how they look and act impacts the way we teach in them and the ways that students learn in them. When we’re in the classroom, there are different methods we can use to engage students: mastery of the material, ability to spin a tale, and asking probing and demanding questions are a few that come to mind. Those methods are still available to us in the virtual space, to be sure, but face-to-face contact is not. Just as the personality of the teacher is an important element of his or her ability to engage a class, so too is the personality of an online teaching space. This personality is developed through an attention to aesthetics.

    WAC makes it to NPR

    Published
    by
    Joanna
    on November 1, 2006
    in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs)
    . 0 Comments

    NPR’s Morning Edition featured a short story this morning on writing-across-the-curriculum in action: high school math teachers who use writing in their courses. To listen, click on the following link, then on the “Listen” tab below the title: Schools Emphasize Writing, Even in Math Class.