Monthly Archive for October, 2008

Information overload! (or, the election is driving me crazy!)

Published
by
Agnieszka
on October 31, 2008
in Fun, Media and Politics
. 1 Comment

Do you remember when there were only two state owned TV channels and they mostly showed footage of the old First of May Parades, or Russian movies about a romantic love affair between a brave female tractor driver and a burly construction worker who made up four hundred percent of his production norm? You don’t remember? Ok, so maybe you did not grow up in Eastern Europe. Now, information is bombarding us form all directions, and it is hard to resist checking your email multiple times a day, reading news, not just daily but hourly, and, if you are a foreigner, checking the immigrant press in the country you are now living in, but also, thanks to internet, checking out the publications from your home land. How much did Sarah Palin spend on clothes? Who endorsed Barak today? Where is the next Bike Kill happening? Did Polish minister of health really say that women should not request an epidural because they need to handle a “normal” childbirth? Who wants to be my new Facebook friend? What’s new on cac.ophony.org? What are other grad students at the Graduate Center writing about? It’s all overwhelming, but also exhaustingly exciting.

Of course we need information to make sense of the complex world around us, to be better people, better citizens, better voters, better humanitarians, better teachers. As graduate students we also need reliable data to built our scientific arguments, and the multiplicity of information can make it easier to access a lot of different data sources.

Hyewon in her post “Deep Attention and Hyper Attention”, talks about research showing that we are moving away from a generation of “deep attention”, the ability to concentrate on a single subject for long periods, toward a generation of “hyper attention”, the tendency to prefer multitasking and high levels of stimulation. ObamaAlvin Toffler in “Future Shock” (Random House, 1971), theorized that the human brain has finite limits on how much information it can absorb and process and argued that information overload will eventually lead to widespread physical and mental disturbances, because with overloaded brain thinking and reasoning become dulled, decision-making flawed and, in some cases, impossible.

I think somehow we are able to manage the flow, but it is not an easy task and includes some time management techniques and making choices.

I can’t wait for the election to be over , so perhaps I can take a breather from the constant news cycle. Not that I am complaining, I am doing just fine, ok, ok, chicken soup, pirates, Colin Powell, whaaaaaat?

Joe, Joe, Joe,….Joe

Published
by
Suzanne
on October 30, 2008
in Debating, Oral Communication and Politics
. 3 Comments

One of my students said to me the other day that she did not want to watch the presidential debates anymore because the only thing you see is a repeat of the message again and again. And she thought the “whole Joe thing is just the last straw, I mean is everyone named Joe?” It is true that through the three debates we have seen the central messages of each candidate come back time and again and the use of in-depth argumentation seems to be less of a sticking point. We have also heard of Joe Six-pack, Joe Biden, Joe McCain, (John’s brother), Joe who can never fill his gas tank to full, and Joe the Plumber. The student has a point.

Yet even in the constant repetition of a name, Joe, or of a concept, Joe is Everyman, there are two fundamental teaching points on public speaking and oral presentations that I hurried to tell my student. The strategic use of repetition in a public talk is often taught as a way to create emphasis and drive a message home. But it is also directly related to the afterthought a speaker desires the audience to experience later. A speaker is trying to lodge in the memory of the audience a significant point or image that will recall the message. But it is not as easy as many students and political strategists seem to think.

One can repeat the name Joe, again and again and believe that the audience has a collective cultural memory that will link Joe to our own lives. We will get it and think about it afterwards. Student speakers will very often repeat that some entity is a “major player” or they forever call the audience “You Guys” again and again. In almost the exact same way a political speechwriter is supposing that the audience has a collective memory and we will get it, so does the student. But what we do know about cultural memory is that language is the tipping point. Audience members in contemporary culture relate to language in more segmented groups then ever before. From text messages to gender titles the audience associates words with different significance and receives messages very differently. So Joe, for some, is remembered as Everyman but for others he is not even real. Even for Joe himself there is doubt as to his place in collective memory, his real name apparently is Sam.

So the first teaching point is do not stereotype your audience, and the second teaching point is if using repetition in a public presentation bring into play many different words that imply the same thing and retell the concept in different ways. This is more likely to advance a collective afterthought in our modern and varied audience and initiate reflection that does relate to the message.

Critical thinking and text books

Published
by
Diana
on October 28, 2008
in Higher Education, Pedagogy, Resources and To Ponder
. 4 Comments

I recently led a workshop in an intro class where all the readings are from a textbook. These are frequently used in Sociology and Anthropology and I assume other disciplines as well. I myself never had textbooks when I was in college, and I’ve never used them to teach with. Frankly, I find them bland and overwhelming. They seem to present boiled down and flattened information as a series of facts.

To my credit I came up with an in-class exercise based on a segment of a chapter that allowed students to enter the content imaginatively, and I think it was rather successful.

However, I still have this major misgiving about how to use these books to foster critical thinking and I was wondering if anyone had thoughts or ideas about this. For instance, what are the benefits of using them? How can you liven them up? Where does argumentative and critical thinking come in?

Seniors and Communication Technology

Published
by
Lauren
on October 27, 2008
in Cross-Cultural Communication, E-mail, Interpersonal Communication, Technology and Tools
. 2 Comments

A few weekends ago I schlepped to Florida to celebrate my grandmother’s 99th birthday.  Being almost a century old, her vision and hearing is just not what it used to be, which makes communicating with others quite difficult for her.  However, I was amazed by how much technology is available for her and other seniors (and other visually- and hearing-impaired folks).  She had a hearing aid, which is pretty standard, but also a special phone with large numbers and a light that flashes when someone calls in case she doesn’t hear it ring.

The two pieces of technology that really blew me away, however, were a printing device called Presto, and an enlarger.  The enlarger looks like a combination TV/overhead projector.  If there is something my grandmother wants to read, she places it on the machine, and it appears enlarged on the screen.  This enables her to read everything from the directions on prescription bottles, to her favorite philosophical texts, to emails from her grandchildren.

That’s right–my 99 year old grandmother loves email!  My grandmother is unable to use a computer, but we can send her emails through the Presto machine, which looks like a regular HP printer.  Over the weekend that I visited, daily horoscopes arrived, and several birthday wishes.  After the emails are printed, all she has to do is walk them over to her enlarger and boom–she is able to remain connected with friends, family, and the outside world.

The best communication I have with my grandmother, however, is decidedly low-tech.  It is face-to-face, looking her directly in the eyes, squeezing her hands, and telling her that I love her.  However, because we live a thousand miles away from each other, and the phone has become an impossible barrier, email has to suffice.  As soon as I got home from my trip, I sent her an email filled with photographs of our visit.

PowerPoint in Literature Classes?

Published
by
Hyewon
on October 24, 2008
in Powerpoint and Presentations
. 2 Comments

It was a pleasure attending last Wednesday’s staff meeting. In addition to the usual yummy sandwiches and cookies, I was particularly impressed by Tom’s VOCAT demonstration and our discussion on whether the use of Micro PowerPoint and technology in general opens up new possibilities or sets the limits of our analytical thinking skills. It is probably not an either-or question. Since Kate, Luke, David, Mikhail, Deborah, and Anthony have already elaborated on this topic through their recent postings, it won’t be necessary to reiterate the points they already made. There seems to be a general consensus that “PP” is a kind of necessary evil that should be handled by skilled hands until a better tool is invented. I agree that PowerPoint and other animated presentation software have an advantage especially in a global setting since image and non-verbal means of communication oftentimes enable us to overcome language and cultural barriers.

From http://www.blakearchive.org

From http://www.blakearchive.org
Click to enlarge.

I wonder, however, whether people have used PowerPoint or other multimedia presentation tools in English literature classes. I remember once in my Romanticism class the professor presented Blake’s illuminated poems in slides for us to read, which for me was quite a different way of “experiencing” poetry. It may sound counter-intuitive, but poetry might be the literary genre whose reading experience can be enhanced by certain visual aids due to the pictorial aspect of poetic language, which was illustrated by Horace’s phrase ut pictura poesis (”as is painting so is poetry”) or Derrida’s emphasis on the spatial dimension of writing. Do those in literature or humanities have any stories to share or any tips to offer regarding the use of multimedia resources in class other than film screening? Another question in my mind is, if creating bullet points and inserting animated graphs and charts for a PowerPoint presentation indeed can be considered a genre of writing, how do we incorporate it into the existing composition curriculum? I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

You know, it’s cultural….

Published
by
Szidonia
on October 23, 2008
in Assessment, Baruch College, Cross-Cultural Communication and Interpersonal Communication
. 2 Comments

I am not saying this just to make Mikhail happy about assigning me the Accounting Department in my first year at Schwartz, but I really am enjoying working there. I had my misgivings early on, especially about the students treating me as a second-class citizen, a “fellow” who apparently has no clue about accounting, thus no need to pay attention to her. What I have been experiencing, however, is a great deal of gratitude on their part and a sense of appreciation that, at times, makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. After all, I tell them, I am only doing my job helping them with their presentations.

Maybe it is because of their responsiveness to me that I become a softee when it comes to the evaluation of their performance. Luckily I do not have to grade them, but I talk with their professor about how they did, and, more often than not, I find myself taking their side. I want the professor to be more generous, more understanding of how nerve-wracking a presentation can be, more embracing of the students’ individual skills and needs, etc, etc. On the professor’s side, I am facing a set of extremely well organized grading scale that breaks down final grades to the smallest percentage. This is how grading should really look like, I tell myself, envying the social sciences for their apparent efficieny that messy humanities people, let alone literature buffs like me, tend to miss. Yet, I feel like a coward when the professor mentions a student’s way of being too “soft-spoken” and I let it go saying only that her “softness” comes from her cultural training as a Japanese woman. (Apologies if this comes across as relying, yet again, on stereotypes about Asian women. Obviously not all Japanese women are low-key, but I just finished reading Kyoko Mori’s memoir, Polite Lies, and I think I got at least a better appreciation of Japanese cultural normativity than I had before reading the book.) Evidently, the professor, who has earned all my respect for his superbly organized way of doing his job, cannot let himself bogged down by my remark since he has to evaluate the final product, but I am left with a sense of failure.  I wish I had a way of giving more time and space to the process, of being able to assist each student individually while I do not run around myself trying to finish up my dissertation. In my dream-world, I use a grading rubric that includes “cultural baggage” as a big bonus point because I know how heavy it gets at times and how important it is to keep carrying it on in spite of all.

reCAPTCHA: The Essence of a Distributed Knowledge Network

Published
by
Luke
on October 22, 2008
in Media, Process, Resources, Technology, Tools and Writing Instruction
. 8 Comments

We’ve all come across a CAPTCHA, a challenge response test that web sites give viewers who are trying to register for an account, leave a comment, or perform some other task that might be vulnerable to spammers or bots.  They are useful because they can differentiate human from machine (Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart… don’t ask me how “turing” became a “P” in that acronym).

They look something like this:

These things are a minor nuisance, the price we pay to protect the sites we need from bombardment by unwanted traffic or use as a launching pad for spam attacks.  According to researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, “about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.”

What if the time spent solving CAPTCHAs could be harnessed for productive purposes?  Thanks to reCAPTCHA, it can.

Carnegie Mellon is currently working with two organizations (the Internet Archive and the New York Times) to employ humans to decipher scans of text that are unreadable by OCR software (Optical Character Recognition).  If your site uses reCAPTCHA, your users can contribute to a major digitization project.  For details on how the technology works, click here.

This is the latest innovative effort to maximize productivity in a focused way by taking advantage of the reach of the web to congeal a distributed knowledge network.  reCAPTCHA has tapped into existing knowledge and processes to build yet more knowledge through another process.  All of us together are smarter than we are added up.

Brilliant work.

(Nod to Mikhail for the heads up about this technology.)

Communication, the MTA and You!

Published
by
Erin
on October 21, 2008
in Assessment, Media, New York and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Has anyone else noticed the new signs on the subway? For the second time in two years, the MTA is conducting a survey of its riders. I don’t remember seeing the signs when they were doing the survey the first time around, but it was apparently some time in 2007, and they wanted to know what suggestions we had for making the subway system better. You can go to to their website and see the results — what they call the “Rider Report Card.”

Now the MTA wants to know exactly how and why we New Yorkers get around the city. When I first saw the advertisement for the survey I was skeptical. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were actually going to take our feedback seriously or if this was just a public relations move to get us all to feel a little more hopeful that better commuting days are ahead. When I got home, I went online to learn more about the survey. As it turns out, the MTA has contracted an outside firm, Nustats, to gather this information for them. Somehow, the fact that they are investing money to do this made me feel a little more confident that the MTA is actually making an attempt at genuine communication with its customers.  However, I found two things rather peculiar: The MTA does not actually mention this current survey on their web page; I actually had to google “MTA Survey” to find it. Also, the survey is not being made available to the public via the internet. In order to participate you need to either download a paper form from a PDF file or call a toll free number and take the survey over the phone. I’m curious about those choices. I’m also curious about the $500 prize they are giving out weekly to one survey participant who is to be chosen at random from a drawing. If you’re interested, go to:

http://www.nustats.com/mta/

As the presidential election approaches I find myself thinking a lot about communication between institutions and individuals and wondering how much weight does the individual voice carry. But also, how important is it that individuals feel their voices are being heard? Will the chance for $500 entice subway riders to actually pick up the phone or download the file and participate in this survey? How sincerely does the MTA actually want us to?

And Now to Lighten Things Up

Published
by
KateR
on October 20, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

The annual Alfred E. Smith dinner took place on Thursday night at the Waldorf in NYC. This is a big fund raising dinner for Catholic Charities, named after 4-term NY Governor Al Smith (and one-time presidential nominee). It’s a tradition for presidential candidates to attend the event and roast each other, and Senators McCain and Obama did not disappoint. This made for some great sound bites for the media. If you didn’t get a chance to hear each candidate’s entire speech, take some time to view them.

While I don’t advise voting on the basis of these clips, I must admit I enjoyed watching them a lot more than the last debate. It’s a great example of how humor can really bring people together and be a very effective communication tool (if you have good writers!)

Obama Roasts McCain

McCain Roasts Obama

I’m Not Lovin’ It.

Published
by
David
on October 17, 2008
in Interpersonal Communication, Language, Media, Oral Communication, Politics and Writing Instruction
. 3 Comments

I’m starting to get a little bit worried about the rash of strangely written and borderline grammatically incorrect advertising slogans in the media. This is especially true of fast food advertisements. The slogan that bothers me the most is McDonald’s “i’m lovin’ it.” I understand how dropping the g makes the slogan less impersonal and more relaxed, but the lowercase i really irks me. What’s the point?

Other celebrated and effective examples include Apple’s classic “Think different,” and their more recent description of the new iPod touch as “The funnest iPod ever.” Even the Obama campaign’s “Change we can believe in” ends in a preposition.

The worst thing about these slogans is that the television viewing public is exposed to them on a daily basis. Many of these slogans are not necessarily incorrect, but they violate several rules we try to teach our students in efforts to improve the clarity and effectiveness of their oral and written communication. I can’t help but wonder about the extent to which these slogans are negatively impacting the communication skills of the viewing public. The advertising industry seems to be on a mission to legitimize incorrectness.