When people ask me what I do, I often tell them that I work at a business school. Some of the more literary inclined people aren’t interested in my going into further detail, at least not until I tell them at every student at this business school is required to take a Great Works of Literature course. Baruch’s mission to instill ideas and culture and values into their students through literature is what, I think, makes Baruch unique among business schools. What is even more amazing is that this semester, Charles Simic is Baruch’s Harman Writer-in-Residence. I first read Simic’s poems when I was a junior in college. I loved his poems, his essays, his interviews. Later, when I went on to teach writing, I taught Simic. I still do. I am always in utter awe of him and his thinking about language, how it takes on another life that has something to do with this one. Writers-in-residence are usually found in MFA Creative Writing Programs or liberal arts undergraduate institutions. To have a Pulitzer prize winning poet who is also the Poet Laureate of the United States in residence at a CUNY business school is sure to baffle and confound. I can only think that such an occurrence must mean the planets and the stars and their positions right now are responsible, but I’m sure it must have something to do with someone at Baruch who believes that literature is what can change or shape the world and our ideas about our place in it.
Monthly Archive for March, 2008
This semester, I will run workshops for Professor Cherny’s ACCT 5400 (Principles of Auditing) in preparation for the students’ final paper project, a ‘lessons-learned’ assessment of an audit failure. It is different from my last semester’s work on oral presentations for ACCT4100 (Advanced Accounting) in the sense that the assignment focuses on writing (and not speaking), but the two do share a common goal: the coursework is designed to help the students develop as a more effective business communicator. My workshops will review principles of writing (the writing process, organizing the paper, how to do citations etc.) and move on to a (hopefully) in-depth look on the essence of an effective business paper. Even though this assignment may appear to be somewhat ‘old-school’ to some of the students, I hope that they will realize that writing is still an important part of business communication (just as much as the oral communication they practiced in ACCT4100) and they will learn a lot through this assignment. I am looking forward to meeting them at a workshop and hear what they have to say about their coursework. I will report back on the workshop in one of my next posts.
Baruch faculty and students are making some unique and innovative contributions to the educational blogosphere this semester. Our goal in supporting course-based usage of weblogs over the past year has been to produce various models and prototypes that can be duplicated and built upon as the technology becomes more widely deployed throughout Baruch. In advance of the BLSCI’s rollout of Wordpress MultiUser at Baruch, I’d like to highlight the blogs we’ve helped launch in the past two months.
Anthropology/Sociology Faculty Working Group
Diana Rickard, Melis Ece, and I have been running a disciplinary working group with five faculty from Anthropology/Sociology who are using weblogs in their courses for the first time. The project includes seven individual course blogs, and the faculty also contribute their thoughts about using weblogs in their discipline to a shared online space. This project is a fascinating example of how course blogs, even in one discipline, can achieve a range of goals, from pre-writing for in-class presentations, to scaffolding research papers, to extending the classroom, to sharing and exploring related materials in an informal way. Each faculty member has a vision, and has structured their course blog(s) accordingly. It’s exciting to see a group of committed young faculty think through the implications of bringing their courses and pedagogical goals online. The home blog features commentary by our participants, and also houses both links to the individual course blogs and recent posts, which are fed in via RSS syndication.
Leonard Sussman: Digital Photography
One of the great strengths of open source products such as Wordpress is the elegant ease with which participants in a course can share their work with one another. Prof. Leonard Sussman, of the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Baruch, gets major props for his willingness to run a prototype of a blog linked to and driven by Flickr.com, the image-sharing site (poetically, the Flickr blog is itself powered by Wordpress). Prof. Sussman was unhappy with the quality of in-class critiques his students have been delivering, and desired a space where they could share their work with one another, and, when prompted, do some pre-writing to develop the language with which to talk about photography.
Each student registered for his/her own Flickr account, and then joined a Flickr group called “Sussman Images.” When they submit an image from their own account to the group, that image automatically feeds into the course gallery, which displays images through a lightbox. The images also appear randomly in a sidebar on the front page of the blog, and Prof. Sussman can pull individual images into the main area of the blog for students to comment upon. He hasn’t gotten them writing just yet, but we’re happy to get the data flow set up, and think that this type of sharing, taking advantage of free tools readily available, provides one innovative model for bringing arts classes online.
Zoe Sheehan Saldana: Designing with Computer Animation and Computer Based Image Making
Mikhail has christened Professor Zoe Sheehan Saldana our first “blogfessor of the month” for her “Designing with Computer Animation” course blog. On this site, she’s taken the rotating header function that comes with the Neoclassical Wordpress theme and hacked it to accept Flash animations. She then had each of her students design an animated header for the site. If you go to the blog, and hit refresh, the header will change.
Our support for this project was limited to loading up the blog, giving Zoe administrative access, and tossing some ideas around. She did the rest. The result is, as Jim Groom has noted, “an awesome intersection of uses of this online space: sharing resources, publishing platform, collaborating on projects, and a class art gallery.”
Baruch Journalism: Writing New York and Online Newswatch
Few fields have been as deeply impacted by the explosion of Web 2.0 as journalism. Undergraduate journalism departments are scrambling to develop online and new media components to their curricula, and we’re happy to be assisting Baruch’s program as it adjusts. We’re currently supporting two journalism weblogs. One is the continuation of a blog first launched for Professor Roslyn Bernstein’s feature writing course last year, called “Writing New York.” The second is Professor Vera Haller’s resource to help all journalism students follow developments in online journalism, called “OnlineNewsWatch.”
Feel free to check out these sites, and follow them as they build over the course of the semester. There’ll be much more blogging at Baruch in the days to come.
Here at the Institute we’re just starting to think about experimenting with microblogging, 140 character posts called “tweets” within a social network or out in the wilds of the Internet. Just in time, here’s a short video from the Chronicle of Higher Education in which a Professor describes using Twitter, a microblogging service, with his students.
This video is a follow-up to an earlier article in the Chronicle on the use of Twitter in education. For other takes on Twitter, see see this academic article and Howard Rheingold’s discussion of why he’s hooked on microblogging via Twitter. Links via Chris Lott.
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