Monthly Archive for October, 2007

So yeah I was like you know

Published
by
Jenny
on October 29, 2007
in Language, Non-Standard English and Pedagogy
. 11 Comments

I can’t stand overhearing people on their cell phones. I can’t stand overhearing people having conversation. It’s not so much that I mind the invasion or the fact that people usually talk about private (rather private, sometimes too private) concerns in public, but rather the fact that all I hear is: “So yeah I was like you know and so I like you know told him yeah so and I was like so yeah like you know and he was like yeah so like yeah you know what I’m saying?”

I have no idea what language this is. This language seems to have its own rules and method of meaning, but it’s not one I want to learn or be around. It makes me angry.

What makes me more angry is hearing my neighbor’s rather lame attempts to play guitar when I’m trying to work in my office. I just blast my Glenn Gould. I figure that hearing real music might help him play real music. My other neighbor, on the other hand, is a professional pianist; I don’t mind hearing him at all. I welcome it.

I suppose I wouldn’t mind overhearing conversation if it were real conversation.

In so many classrooms, so many students raise their seemingly enthusiastic hands to say, “Uh, miss, do you like really want like our thesis to like you know be like that because in my like other class you know with my other professor you know like that would be like my professor like you know wanted the thesis to like be to the point like you know and that thesis is like you know what I’m saying?”

No, I have no idea what you’re saying.

Instead of interpreting this non-language, we should ask the student to clarify and speak intelligently.

My ancient Greek professor banned the expression “okay” in class. Expressions I would ban: so like yeah, you know, like, so like, yeah, but miss (why “miss” and not “Professor so-and-so?”), you know what I’m saying, and I was like so like.

I think you get my point.

Teaching effective oral communication should start at the most basic level. Don’t encourage students because they are asking questions; encourage them to ask intelligent questions intelligently. Don’t interpret them; force them to clarify.

Writing In/Across Disciplines

Published
by
Olga
on October 26, 2007
in Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Instruction
. 0 Comments

Last week I attended a workshop on writing within disciplines led by Peter Gray and Mark McBeth at our CUNY WAC meeting. Together we thought about the forms of writing in various discourse communities and their differences when it comes to the issues of composition, organization, research/ register/voice/conventions, and formatting. Figuring out to what discipline a particular writing model belonged created no difficulty for the audience of academic professionals, but all of us agreed that it would not be an equally easy task for the beginning academic writers. What can writing instructors and fellows do to help this community of learners find meaning in the intimidating world of academic discourse(s)? Which aspects of writing are indeed discipline specific and which can be easily carried over from one discipline to another? As was emphasized in the workshop, instructors can show and explain models of a particular writing form they expect their students to produce and help students in the process of writing by giving them a list of guidelines or grading rubric for the assignment.
This workshop made me think about a couple of conversations we’ve had in our Great Works team about the possibility of running workshops for a group of students working in different fields. Writing Center’s workshops are organized precisely in this way, and, as Jody mentioned, it would be great to get together and think about effective strategies. I also thought about my own experience teaching a graduate seminar/workshop called Effective Academic Writing, which at first was really as daunting as it sounds, but as we began looking at writing models from different fields, it became clear that very similar criteria are used when we evaluate papers from such unlike disciplines as biochemistry and art history. This is not to say that we should not carefully study and introduce students to conventions specific to their fields of study. However, it is often the case that major paper components, e.g., thesis and evidence, are present in papers across disciplines only in different forms. It can be indeed enriching for students from these different fields to get together and receive feedback from each other; this way they can learn about original and unthought-of in their fields ways to present or articulate a piece of material.

Both as an instructor in that class and a graduate student/writer, I found one valuable article that pinpoints a few very specific Dos and Don’ts for academic writers. They really make sense regardless of the discourse community we are writing for: Gerald Graff, “Scholars and Sound Bites: The Myth of Academic Difficulty” PMLA. Vol. 115, No. 5. (Oct., 2000), pp. 1041-1052. It can be easily found on JSTOR.
Let me just quote my favorite “DO”:  “Be bilingual. It is not necessary to avoid academese—you sometimes need the stuff. But whenever you have to say something in academese, try to say it in the vernacular as well. You’ll be surprised to find that when you restate an academic point in your nonacademic voice, the point is enriched (or else you see how vacuous it is), and you’re led to new perceptions.”

Fun with PowerPoint in the Classroom

Published
by
David
on October 24, 2007
in Fun, Pedagogy and Powerpoint and Presentations
. 1 Comment

I know PowerPoint is not the most popular kid on the block these days.  Without sounding too much like a conservative talking about gun control, I have to confess that I’m a firm believer that PowerPoint itself is not inherently evil, but people tend to use it in primarily evil ways.  While attending the workshop on Technology and Media at Friday’s CUNY Writing Fellows meeting, it was clear that has the potential to engage students in the classroom using visual media.  However, most of us are still struggling to come up with creative ways of using it which do not impose an artificially linear structure to classroom discussions and stifle students’ ability and willingness to communicate their ideas and think critically about the material.

Although I am still one of those people who are constantly trying to come up with better uses of PowerPoint in the classroom, I thought I would share one way I’ve used PowerPoint in class that tends to promote engagement, discussion, and debate among students without feeling imposing.  It’s also fun!

This is Jeopardy!  That’s right, the popular game show format (along with many others) has been creatively employed in PowerPoint presentations using slide links and transitions.  There are several templates available online (just Google “PowerPoint Jeopardy”).  Ethics Jeopardy is one version I’ve created and used several times in a graduate level seminar on research ethics (although I’ve also used it in undergrad classes in social psychology and statistics).  I usually start by splitting the class into two or three teams.  One team picks first and gets to respond to whatever question (answer) they pick.  If that team does not provide an adequate response, the other team can steal the points away.  I usually give the teams a few minutes to talk amongst themselves before they respond.  Once we’re done discussing the first item, the next team gets to pick a category.  As you can see, the items do not have right or wrong answers, and are constructed to promote discussion, debate, and critical engagement with the material.  PowerPoint allows for audio and visual clues to be included, and this is especially fun to do with Daily Doubles.  My favorite is the Debate Daily Double, which requires the teams to take contrasting positions on an issue and spend some time going back and forth on a critical issue.  Final Jeopardy can also be used as great prompt for some low-stakes, in-class writing activities.    Generally, the game show format, although it seems quite corny, creates a low-stakes atmosphere and I often find students who do not normally participate taking more active roles in the discussion.  It’s also great for exam review.

In my opinion, this is just one way in which PowerPoint and other presentation software packages can be employed in useful, engaging, creative, and fun ways.  I definitely agree that PowerPoint is dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands, but I’m not ready to give up on it as a potentially useful teaching tool.  I’d love to hear others’ thoughts and examples of creative uses of PowerPoint in the classroom.

Dr. What?

Published
by
Luke
on October 23, 2007
in Cross-Cultural Communication, Fun, Web 2.0 and What if . . .
. 0 Comments

My Jamaican sister-in-law shared this with me. The Real McCoy, a British sketch-comedy show that aired on BBC in the early 1990s, offers up one example of cross-cultural interpenetration… Dr. Who translated into Jamaican.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vnoyqykrz_o

How about using this as a model for an assignment on mash-ups, taking advantage of Web 2.0 to explore processes of translation/cultural exchange? Taking students inside the productive process, getting them to exercise knowledge in creative ways? It could work for anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, literature, language, or sketch-comedy classes.

Commenting in Blogs

Published
by
Yukiko
on October 22, 2007
in Blogs and Blogging
. 4 Comments

What makes a blog lively is not just good posting, but also good commenting. Good/sensible comments could benefit it by sparking more fruitful discussion, and bad/less thoughtful comments could harm it. In that sense, successful blogging should create healthy interaction between writers and readers. My own experience of writing and commenting in blogs these days has got me into thinking about how we can participate in a blog, especially a course blog, in a productive way.

At last Friday’s WID/WAC Professional Development session, Jenny and I attended a rather fun workshop put together by faculty of New York City College of Technology called ‘Thinking about Drinking and Writing about Food’. Among all the fun activities in the workshop, there was interesting discussion on how we could respond to this blog entry by William Grimes, a former food reviewer and presently a book reviewer for the New York Times. How would we as general readers post a comment on this posting? What if this was not an informal journal writing by an already accomplished writer but instead a student entry in (say) a writing course blog that you set up as an instructor? Does it somehow make a difference?

While we might appreciate this piece as a fun read with beautiful use of language, it is not a good example of carefully organized essay with one clear thesis statement, etc. A writer like Grimes might be ‘entitled’ to informally share his stream of consciousness on a blog. However, if it was a student’s writing, our response would be different depending on what kind of blog it is intended to be: students can grow their own voice and throw ideas out there without worrying about organizing them, if that is the purpose of the blog. Only if that is the purpose of it.

A beauty of introducing blogging in the course, instead of sticking to the old-fashioned exchange of papers, to me, is its flexibility. Simply giving the students opportunities to write more and share it with others is one way. Identifying a course blog with a way to brainstorm/freewrite and get some ideas together about the course is another. One can also have the blog as a place to compile and discuss each other’s high-stakes writing pieces. The role one would want a blog to play in the course is dramatically different depending on its purpose. Speaking of healthy interaction in course blogging, I think it is very important for all participants of a blog, before launching on it, to discuss and share understanding of how they should regard posting and commenting on a blog entry as, how it would benefit them, and what role they are expected to play in order to successfully develop the course blog together.

An Idea for a Course Blog or, Perhaps, A Blog Course

Published
by
Luke
on October 17, 2007
in Blogs and Blogging, Politics and What if . . .
. 1 Comment

One of my favorite methods of procrastination is contemplating what I’ll do whenever the project that I’m not working on at the moment is complete. Luckily, some of my work at the Institute has involved trying to anticipate where instructional technology will go in coming semesters, and what kinds of demands for support this will create.

In that spirit, I’ve been thinking that next Fall I’d like to build a blog that aggregates coverage of the 2008 Presidential Election and uses it as a jumping-off point for a current events course about politics and convergent media.

I think such a course would work well as a first-year seminar, and could expose students to rigorous engagement with contemporary issues while helping them critically examine the quickly changing processes by which we produce and consume information. Students would be asked to learn about the policy issues at play in the election, and the blog would provide a tool for the teacher to guide their inquiry through directed readings of more in-depth pieces of analysis as well as selected reportage. The presentness of the topic would infuse the course with energy. Students would write regularly to better understand the rhetoric of presidential politics, to debate issues, and also to examine role of the media in the electoral process. Once the election is complete, students would then be asked to place the events in a historical context and to produce a final paper on some element of the election or its coverage.

Anyone know a faculty member interested in teaching this class?

Inner Resources

Published
by
Jenny
on October 16, 2007
in Interpersonal Communication, Oral Communication, Pedagogy and Podcasts and Podcasting
. 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about aural communication lately, how, in classrooms, we oftentimes overlook the aural in favor of the oral.  When we do provide aural instruction, we couple it with visual instruction.  Write on the board!  Entertain!  Give the students something to look at!  I’m one of those old-fashioned educators–I bemoan the current trend of fashioning educators as clowns and spectacle.

When I hear a student complain that a class is boring, I think of John Berryman’s lines in Dream Song number 14: “and moreover my mother told me as a boy / (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no / Inner Resources.’”

When I was in grade school, there was after-school training for competitions with other district schools.  If you won, you went on to regional competition, and if you won at that level, you advanced to state.  One of the activities I trained in when I was eight was a storytelling competition.  The task wasn’t to tell a story, but rather to retell a story that you would have just been told.  This training forced me to listen, to etch details in my mind, knowing that I would have to retell them.  When this became easy, I began to interpret what I heard, to make connections, to go above and beyond the surface of what was presented.  (I think this is why I didn’t do well in these competitions–even at a young age, I wasn’t keen on merely summarizing; I wanted to provide literary criticism as well.)

Somewhere along the way, (I don’t know when) I became a terrible listener.  I’ll sometimes just slip into daydreams when I’m at a literary reading.  I have to prompt myself to listen.  I have to concentrate.  When someone reads something aloud to me, I invariably begin to go elsewhere unless I try really, really hard to stay there in the passage.  I retain better when I look at the text, and I don’t think this is a good thing.  It’s probably something that starting happening by my being immersed in classrooms that coupled aural and visual instruction in the belief that children learn better this way.  I think it’s hurt me.

We let our students read aloud things that are beautiful, that should not be read aloud by fumbling, untrained students–Shakespeare for example.  (No wonder our students have a hard time listening!)  Why don’t we let them listen to trained actors on tape?  Or on an MP3 player?  I recently saw a news clip that showed MP3 players being used in public school classrooms.  I have reservations about a gadget, however, that allows us to pause and resume, allowing us the safety of getting lazy, of drifting off.

Perhaps students are bored because they aren’t listening or don’t know how to listen.  They’re elsewhere.  Perhaps they have no inner resources, or perhaps they have too many inner resources.

We train our students to be articulate, eloquent speakers, but are we training them to be alert, contemplative listeners?

Making the Process Work

Published
by
Olga
on October 12, 2007
in Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, ESL, Low-Stakes Writing and Process
. 2 Comments

Inspired in many ways by Luke’s post, I asked students in my Great Works tutorial whether they would want to share their thoughts and questions on our Blackboard discussion board.  To my slight surprise (this class is already very demanding of their time - they come to the 90-minute tutorial every week and often attend the Writing Center) they overwhelmingly agreed.  I see that despite the product-oriented writing instruction or perhaps because of it, students long for a safe space to share their thoughts in.  They really seem to understand the need for a process to take place before any product can be put out.  For this reason, I think it’s a great idea to have the tutorial in the first place, as it provides plenty of room for that process to develop.  In a similar way, the Writing Center with its “I Write” campaign, which seeks to give student writers a sense of empowerment, is also a comfortable Baruch venue where academic professionals serve as facilitators not judges of their writing efforts.

  I hope that Blackboard discussions would be valuable for my group of Great Works students.  Some of them need a lot of support in language areas, and they are the ones who would probably benefit most from these online discussions.  However, I’m afraid they would also be the least forthcoming participants.  Can those of you who have experience initiating blogs suggest ways to reach out to most diffident participants? 

E-Mail Is Easy to Write (And to Misread)

Published
by
James Drogan
on October 7, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Here is an item from today’s New York Times that warrants consideration when it comes to effective communications.  It suggests to me that when you want to absolutely, positively sure that your communications has been properly understood, do it face-to-face.

The last line from the piece:

‘As Professor Shirky puts it, “social software” like e-mail “is not better than face-to-face contact; it’s only better than nothing.”’

Writing Diagnostic Assessment: Preliminary Research Questions

Published
by
David
on October 5, 2007
in Assessment, Baruch College and Communication Intensive Courses (CICs)
. 0 Comments

After meeting with the Associate Provost and faculty representatives of the Zicklin School of Business and the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, we have now settled on some initial research questions to ask of the Writing Diagnostic Data. I share them here in hopes of generating discussion around the assessment and further ideas for analysis.

The first and most general research question is “Does the quality of students’ writing improve over the course of a semester in a CIC?” Related to this question, we are interested in whether improvement occurs across the college or only within specific classes or disciplines. We will also explore whether we see improvement for all students, or only among students who are scoring in the low or middle range to begin with. It will also be worthwhile to see what happens over the course of a semester with students who score high on their initial diagnostics.

Second, we hope to answer the questions of “What happens to students’ who are enrolled in multiple CICs throughout their career at Baruch?” and “Is there consistent improvement among these students from one CIC to the next?” These related questions are of particular importance within the Zicklin School, as students there are required to take 4 CICs before graduation.

We hope to have answers to these questions in the form of a preliminary report by the end of the semester. In the meantime, we are continuing to think about how we can use the data to address issues related to changes in admissions requirements, differences between lower level vs. upper level classes and ESL students vs. native English speakers, and how the outcomes of this assessment may correlate with other academic outcomes, like GPA.

As most readers are very familiar with the data (both its strengths and weaknesses) we welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions regarding these preliminary ideas for analysis as well as other research questions you think are important and would like to see addressed.