Your attention is called to “Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular” on page 1 of the New York Times for January 20, 2008.
This is the most extreme example I have encountered of the phenomena discussed in last year’s annual symposium.
It’s hard to deny the results of this approach to communications. That is, the needs of the parties in the communication are being satisfied. And, in the end, isn’t that the aim of communications?
That conventions are being changed is, I’m afraid, the inevitable result of the release of new methods amongst significant numbers of people who are unafraid and are motivated to explore Frost’s “road not taken.”
New rules are an irresistible force and we need to find a way, as those who have preceded us have had to do (e.g., consider the developments in communications over the centuries), to come to some accommodation with these new practices.
Transformation in communication will undoubtedly accelerate. This accelerated change and its “tipping points” will lead to miscommunication, the subject of this year’s symposium. Managing change and its attendant outcomes thus becomes critical as “new speak” (I think I picked this up from Orwell.) continually influences our lives.
At the risk of inflaming passions, let me advance the notion that we must be on guard against becoming the Luddites of language.
Boy, are we proud around Baruch these days. The Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute has been awarded TIAA-CREF Institute’s prestigious Theodore M. Hesburgh Award which recognizes outstanding faculty development programs focussed on improving undergraduate teaching and learning. Here’s TIAA-CREF’s boilerplate on the award, which comes with $20,000 for Baruch College:
The annual TIAA-CREF Hesburgh Award recognizes exceptional faculty development programs designed to enhance undergraduate teaching and learning. Named in honor of Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame and former member of the TIAA and CREF Boards of Overseers, this award seeks to strengthen the teaching tradition at America’s undergraduate colleges and universities by acknowledging that an energized faculty is key to educational excellence.
What a great honor for all of us here at the Institute! Take a look at Baruch’s press release on the award. And here is a post by David on some of the supporting material we submitted as part of our application. Great work, Fellows. Next stop: the Nobel.
Assessment, assessment, and assessment; this seems to be all I am hearing these days. Editors at academic journals inform me that if I have an article on assessment, they would be happy to publish it… Even my daughter’s 2nd grade teacher had a meeting to explain to the parents how our 7 year olds would be assessed over the school year. In my new position as Deputy Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, I am currently overseeing two major assessments: one of the Institute’s programs and another of student writing in CICs. Surprisingly I find myself enjoying it immensely.
As assessment seems to be the 21st century companion to the education field I guess it is time to just jump in. I find myself fascinated and passionate about looking at and assessing students’ writing over a ten-year period and all of its infinite possibilities. However there is a small part of me that feels there is a fine line that is frequently crossed in assessment. It is when educational institutions, or even individual educators, over-invest in the assessment of whether students attain pre-established learning goals to demonstrate that students have learned. When student outcomes, in relation to pre-set learning goals, are the main goal of an assessment, outcomes can easily become the dominant product of education rather than the messy but profound experience of learning itself, which does not always produce a clear outcome. And if this becomes the assessment norm, to measure outcomes rather than transformative experience, than education runs the risk of merely accumulating material and compromising its fundamental role. This is a line I feel is dangerous for any educator to cross.
Ken Buckman, professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, wrote in the fall issue of Thought and Action that, “the primary character of education is its transformative influence…” Therefore, experiencing the process of learning is as important if not more than the final goal of having attained an acceptable outcome or learning goal. Yet this is one of the hardest areas of learning to assess: the transformative experience.
However, there might be a way of examining student learning as a process and not an outcome. Follow the same students for several years and see what parts of their learning process have become integrated into the way they talk or write. In a sub-sample set of the written diagnostic data we are now examining the same set of students writing over a period of 3-4 years. Their vocabulary, their expectations and the complexity with which they express themselves can be analyzed as well as how this has been transformed over time. This data will not tell us whether the students did well on the final exam or whether they were able to write an “A” term paper. But we might be able to note when and if the student was going through a transformative process between the times they started writing in their first CIC course and the 3rd or 4th CIC.
There is no doubt that any educational institution needs to be able to demonstrate that its students on an aggregate level are reaching the goals and outcomes that have been put forth. However, students should also be studied as distinctive learners with unique goals and experiences. As for my part, I can’t get enough of knowing that my students might have been transformed.
To open up this new year, I would like to extend a discussion that got off to a good start in 2006-7: the new possibilities and challenges associated with the fact that we increasingly–whether we like it or not–have an online persona to project, or at the least protect. Kate got this ball rolling with her post, “Excuse me, sir, but your online persona is showing.”
I came across a closely related article in today’s New York Times, titled “Putting Your Best Cyberface Forward.”
The image above, lifted from the article, clearly communicates the main point. If you have the chance to read the piece you will find a couple of intriguing findings by social scientists studying online behavior patterns, but mostly confirmation of what you already know. Even the author of the article partially acknowledges this, comically noting,
“The scholars found it common for online daters to fudge their age or weight, or to post photographs that were five years old. Also, the world is round and the chemical symbol for water is H2O.”
However, even if the contents of the article don’t teach us loads, it is important to note that the article appears in the “Fashion & Style” section, not in “Technology”, speaking to the expansion of this issue far beyond the technical.
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