Monthly Archive for April, 2007

Pikelets, crumpets, dialects and accents

Published
by
Agnieszka
on April 13, 2007
in Language, Non-Standard English and Resources
. 2 Comments

soundsfambanner.jpg

I have just found Sounds Familiar?, a fantastic website and have spent much time playing with it. It reminds me of the George Mason University Speech Accent Archive.

The site contains numerous recordings from the British Library of regional accents and dialects from every corner of the UK–some recorded as far back as the 1950s and many recent recordings up until 1999. There is a section on phonological, grammatical, social, and lexical variation: this means you can pick a region on the map and hear and learn about how a given pattern of speech developed, or how it fits with the language spoken in the rest of the UK. You can submit to the database and analyze your own accent, if you are British. You can spend hours clicking on the map of the UK to hear how words are pronounced across the region and how dialects change over time and space. Apparently, there are more than 150 audio clips of Geordie – the dialect of Newcastle-upon-Tyne – arguably one of the most recognizable dialects in Britain. You may want to hear how ethic minorities pronounce British English (check out the sound files for Asian English Phonology), or practice your Received Pronunciation, if you are feeling proper.

It is an interactive site allowing you to investigate how the language changes and progresses over time, using learning modules suited to college or high school students. In fact, the entire site is nested in the website of the British Library, and if you venture into the rest of the site, you’ll find all kinds of treasures.

The Sounds Familiar site is fairly new, hence this Guardian story about it.

The article ends with this passage:

Language evolves for many reasons - even something as superficial as the hegemony of supermarkets, as any Midlander trying to buy a pikelet will tell you. In Sainsbury’s it’s a crumpet or nothing. But change is not something to be judged or mourned; it’s something to be observed and understood. The purpose of the website is to document the history of language - with schools and universities invited to become part of the process by sending in their own regional recordings. As Upton says, “We’re not in the business of preservation. The only language that doesn’t change at all is a dead one.”

I know that there are some for whom this is not a self evident truth and in fact this statement invites controversy. But for those of us who accept it, I think it has implications for how we teach, communicate, and think about pedagogy, especially in a universe as diverse as CUNY and Gotham. Doesn’t it?

And for dessert, and since we are talking about accents, check out this truly bizarre, yet funny, (?) clip:

The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why

Published
by
James Drogan
on April 13, 2007
in Cross-Cultural Communication and Style
. 0 Comments

I came across this will browsing Harvard Business Online. I’ve not read the entire article, but the notion that

“There’s only one problem with this process: We all speak different “languages.” We assign different meaning to linguistic behaviors such as questioning, apologizing, and being indirect. Result? We misjudge one another—ignoring or outright rejecting someone’s ideas because we’ve decided he lacks competence.”

seems to me to merit some additional thought.

More grist for the communications mill.

Mathematics and Communication

Published
by
Anthony
on April 13, 2007
in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Language, Oral Communication and Pedagogy
. 0 Comments

The current issue of Bostonia (Spring 2007) includes a look at a fascinating new initiative aimed at helping immigrant elementary schoolchildren in Chelsea, Massachusetts. “Project Challenge” is a mathematics program that “makes talk in the classroom the central component of learning.”

The basic idea behind the program is that students can gain a firm grip on mathematical concepts by discussing them. Instead of being told outright whether a particular equation or solution works, for example, children are encouraged to discuss whether a proposed approach seems viable, and to explain why they think the way they do.

The results are impressive: “After three years, Project Challenge students were scoring in the nintieth percentile on standardized math tests, even better than their counterparts in wealthy Boston suburbs. Not only that, but their English and language arts scores shot up.”

This interactive approach to learning is of course familiar to those of us who teach writing. That the “workshop”-oriented classroom could be so beneficial to children learning mathematics provides particularly strong support (in case any were needed) for the advancement of communications-intensive education.

Just in time…

Published
by
Luke
on April 11, 2007
in E-mail and Symposium
. 1 Comment

As if anticipating our symposium, Nick Paumgarten writes on “The Elements of E-Style,” in this week’s New Yorker. He interviews David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, the authors of a modern day Strunk and White: Send: The Essential Guide To Email for Office and Home. This might be good for us all to check out before April 27th!

The Symposium is Coming Up Fast!

Published
by
Mikhail
on April 10, 2007
in Baruch College, Conferences and Symposium
. 1 Comment

Speaking of New Rules . . . Here are some details re: the Symposium, coming your way on April 27th. Less than three weeks to go!

The Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College, CUNY presents the 7th Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction, “New Rules: Convention and Change in Communication.”

Friday, April 27, 2007. 14th Floor Conference Center, Baruch College, 55 Lexington Ave., New York, New York.

FEATURING

Kathleen Waldron
President, Baruch College, CUNY

Bernard L. Schwartz
Chairman and CEO, BLS Investments, LLC

Chris M. Anson
Professor of English; Director of Campus Writing and Speaking Program, North Carolina State University

Scott Kirsner
Contributing Writer, Wired, Fast Company, and Contributor to Newsweek, Salon, and the New York Times

William C. Taylor
Co-Founder, Fast Company Magazine, and Co-Author of Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win

THE PROGRAM
This Seventh annual meeting of leaders in business and education sponsored by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, will provide a unique, interactive venue for educators and business professionals to engage in a dialogue on the changing rules and conventions of communication in academic and business settings.

Sessions will be hands-on and interactive. Symposium participants will take part in two round-table discussions led by two co-moderators — a business executive and an educator. In each round-table discussion, the group will explore critical questions, share individual views and experiences, and then bring the conversation back to the larger group in two moderated plenary sessions.

FACILITATORS INCLUDE

Jana O’Keefe-Bazzoni, Chair, Dept. of Comm-unication Studies, Baruch College, CUNY
David Birdsell, Dean of School of Public Affairs, Baruch College
Daniel Black, Director, Americas Recruiting, Ernst and Young LLP
Deborah Bosley, Director, Center for Writing, Language, and Literacy, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Ellen Cahill, co-founder, Cahill Associates
Patrick Curtin, Executive Vice President, Bank of New York
Raymond von Dran, Dean, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University
James Drogan, Lecturer in Global Business and Transportation, SUNY Maritime College
John K. Gillespie, President, Gillespie Global Group
Virginia Malone, Dean, Reuters Academy, Reuters America Client Training
George Otte, Director, Instructional Technology, CUNY; Academic Director CUNY Online Baccalaureate
Ruth-Ellen H. Simmonds, Executive Director, One Stop Senior Services
Judith Summerfield, University Dean, Undergraduate Education, CUNY
Donna Reiss, Department of English, Clemson University
Phyllis White-Thorne, Manager of Public Information, Brooklyn Public Affairs, Con Edison
Art Young, Robert S. Campbell Chair in Technical Communication and Professor of Engineering and English, Clemson University

PROGRAM SCHEDULE
The Program will begin at 9:30am with a welcoming address by Dr. Kathleen Waldron, President of Baruch College and an opening keynote by William C. Taylor, a founding editor of Fast Company Magazine and co-author of Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win. The first round-table discussion will begin at 11:00am and the second at 2:30pm, following a lunchtime keynote by Chris M. Anson, Professor of English and Director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North Carolina State University. After the program, please plan to join us for cocktails and dinner at the Players’ Club on Gramercy Park, where we will mark the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Institute and hear a closing keynote by Bernard L. Schwartz.

For more information, please send an email to symposium@baruch.cuny.edu.

New Rules?

Published
by
Luke
on April 9, 2007
in Blogs and Blogging, Interpersonal Communication, Symposium, Technology and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

The Times reports today on a movement to nurture civility in the blogosphere with a “blogger code of conduct.” You can follow the conversation, led by Tim O’Reilly (who:”Web 2.0″ as Bernard Baruch:”Cold War”) and Jimmy Wales (who founded Wikipedia).

I like this. Discursive chaos is great and all, but ultimately blogs are more useful, in my opinion, when directed by a purpose and an administrator to articulate and enforce the rules. This goes triple for class sites. Then again, that’s just good teaching.

Anyway, I’m not sure much will evolve from this effort, which seems intended to empower milquetoast administrators to administer rather than to allow their sites to devolve into nastiness. Just thought that it was something to note in advance of our Symposium.

Tracking where you look…

Published
by
Yukiko
on April 5, 2007
in ESL and Language
. 0 Comments

I just got back from the sunny La Jolla, California, where I participated in the 20th annual CUNY conference on human sentence processing. (Yes, it is called ‘the CUNY conference’ and yet held at some other places; it was here last year, but we can’t afford to host it every year anymore!) It is one of the major and prestigious conferences on psycholinguistics, which my research is in, and I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to present a poster with one of my advisors. I had a very nice and fruitful time there.

The field of psycholinguistics is fast growing and expanding. It seemed that this meeting focused a lot on the resolution of pronouns (e.g. when people process ‘he’ in ‘Mickey hit Donald. He…’ what strategies do they employ to decide what ‘he’ refers to?). Although most of the research looked at native speakers’ language processing, there were also some studies on second language processing. I will introduce one of them that was interesting.

This study used a method called eye-tracking. Participants wear a head-mount device that tracks their eye-movement while they look at objects or parts of sentences. In this study, they focused Dutch native speakers also speaking English as a second language. An interesting difference between Dutch and English is that Dutch (as well as many other European languages) makes clearer grammatical gender distinction, especially in pronouns. So in Dutch, a masculine noun like ‘tractor’ is referred to as ‘he’, where as it would be just ‘it’ in English, although it is the same ‘tractor’ in both languages. If you are a Dutch native speaker and use information about their knowledge of Dutch when processing English, there might be some influence coming from it.

The subjects were shown a picture and hear a text in English describing the scene.

(1)The tractor will be driven by Donald.
He is in the other field.

(2) The tractor will be driven by Daisy.
She is in the other field.

As expected, they found that English monolingual subjects they didn’t look too much at the tractor in (1) because it cannot be a candidate for ‘he’. In contrast, the Dutch-English bilingual subjects looked more at the tractor when hearing ‘he’ in (1) than when hearing ’she’ in (2), which means that they are considering the possibility that the tractor might be ‘he’ because it is masculine in Dutch. Interestingly, this phenomenon is limited to ‘cognate’ words between the two languages; if the word is unrelated (e.g. English ‘kite’ and Dutch ‘vlieger’), there is no increase in looks at the object when hearing ‘he’, which means that they don’t use the information about the Dutch word ‘vlieger’ to think about the English ‘kite’; they seem to observe the similarity in form to strategize.

The point that this study makes seems somewhat intuitive, but it was really nice to actually see clear and solid data proving that it is the case. Studying second language processing seems very interesting and it would definitely be a possible future topic of my research. Also this eye-tracking method is really nice; without pressuring them to answer questions or write essays, we can see what’s going on in their heads!

Learning 2.0: free, fun, self-paced, and effective training in Web 2.0

Published
by
Kate
on April 5, 2007
in Administration, Blogs and Blogging, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Literacy, Technology, Web 2.0, What if . . . and Wikis
. 1 Comment

The article “Public Library Geeks Take Web 2.0 to the Stacks” on Wired.com describes a program where hundreds of staff members at North Carolina public libraries were asked to explore Web 2.0 in ways by trying out 23 things that were simple, yet meaningful and useful.

The result: Learning 2.0.

The impetus was the need for staff to know about Web 2.0 technologies:

When the IT director at North Carolina’s Charlotte & Mecklenburg County public library began training staff in the latest web technologies, she lured reluctant participants with bribes — a free MP3 player and the chance to win a laptop.

Six months later, the program they developed is the real prize. Learning 2.0., developed by public services technology director Helene Blowers, has become a surprise grassroots hit, available for free on the web and adopted by dozens of other libraries around the globe.

“The last thing we want is for people to come into our libraries and ask about Flickr or Second Life and be met with a blank look,” said Christine MacKensie, director of the Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Melbourne, Australia, which just finished a four-month version of Learning 2.0. “And they certainly won’t now.”

The program is inexpensive to run, but is fun and engaging. Hundreds of staff members signed on.

Recognizing that librarians need to know how to participate in the new media mix if libraries are to remain relevant, Blowers challenged her 550 staffers to become more web savvy. Using free web tools, she designed the program and gave staff members three months to do 23 things.

They created blogs and podcasts, tried out Flickr, set up RSS feeds, learned about wikis, uploaded video to YouTube, played with image generators and Rollyo, and explored Technorati, tagging and folksonomies.

“Librarian avatars were popping up all over the blogs,” said Blowers.

In the end, the library system found that they’d just trained their staff in new media with very little financial output (save some blog hosting and the mp3 incentives), without going to the trouble and expense of bringing in staff training, or forcing people to sit through classes.

Although her original goals for Learning 2.0 were touchy-feely “E’s” — exposing staff to new tools, encouraging play, empowering individuals, expanding the knowledge toolbox, eliminating fear — the effects were both practical and financial.

“We don’t have to wait for some training company to come along and say, ‘For $20,000 we’ll show you how this stuff works,’” said Michael Stephens, who wrote Web 2.0 and Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software. “Helene put it on the web so anyone can use that program.”

Libraries all over the world are doing just that — moving the entire Learning 2.0 program to their own websites. The program has been duplicated by university and community library systems in Sweden, Australia, Canada and Denmark. In the United States, programs are underway in South Carolina, Florida, Maryland and California. Even the Combined Arms Research Library, a military repository, is trying it.

It’s no surprise that now the 23 Things idea is spreading beyond libraries, to two realms cac.ophony.org readers are much more familiar with: higher education, and business.

Now Blowers’ program is spreading beyond libraries (even virtual ones, like the teen library in Second Life teen library in Second Life): A public relations firm wants to set up a Learning 2.0 program for its staff, and several universities and an elementary school want to use the system to educate teachers, she said.

Several years ago, I taught a semester-long course and some weekend workshops with Paul Allison and Ken Stein of the New York City Writing Project. We walked participants (mostly high school teachers, but also some CUNY and SUNY college faculty) through various experiences, from setting up a blog, editing a wiki, to using bloglines, del.icio.us and tags (this is a few years ago, mind you, when bloglines, del.icio.us, and podcasts were “new” new, or at least a newer new, not old hat, as they are now). Then, as now, new stuff was coming out every week.

The New York City Writing Project was interested in giving teachers a chance to blog, so they’d see if, and how, blogs might be useful for their students. They ended up finding out how blogs, flickr, podcasting, WiKis and all kinds of other web 2.0 applications could be useful in teaching literacy and communication skills, and they ended up using these, and other aspects of Web 2.0, in their classrooms. The 23 Things idea is very similar, though the 23 things could easily be tweaked to include the newest useful Web 2.0 technology, since good new stuff comes out all the time.

Perhaps the best thing about Web 2.0, and Learning 2.0 is that so many resources that work, like the 23 Things program, are free to use and free to build on.