Wishing our readers a very happy holidays and a splendid new year!
Hat tip to Hillary Miller, via Facebook.
Monthly Archive for December, 2008
I recently stumbled upon the work of Alexandra Juhasz, a media studies professor and “femi-digi practitioner.” While her writings on activist video interested me from the get-go, her blog persona, MP:me, has some interesting things to say about media theory and pedagogy, and more than a few choice words for the “leprous” stuff of YouTube. Knowing the incredible fervor with which our students race to imbibe pretty much anything they see on YouTube, the experiments she and her students engage in when analyzing YouTube were intriguing.
Speaking of which, I happened to meet someone the other day who works for iCue, which has thousands of video clips, news archives, and, by extension, sample speeches. I felt a little embarrassed that I’d never found it myself, since I regularly use YouTube for on-the-fly speech sample videos in class– and even specific assignments– and thereby end up modeling this YouTube over-reliance for my students. Finding a range of high quality sites for video content is something I would like to make one of my New Year’s resolutions, rather than acting surprised when students head to Youtube as the first and last stop for any kind of video content.
MP:me recently put out a call requesting help in her search for what she calls “productive fake docs” on YouTube. Maybe you’re more familiar than me with this sub-genre? The deadline for contributions is January:
The American Psychological Association’s Science Directorate has just published an article by Marguerita Lightfoot on the potential of electronic communication in the context of psychological interventions. Given many adolescents’ preferences for communicating via the internet over face-to-face interaction, researchers have found that young people may respond more positively to behavioral interventions conducted over the web compared to more traditional interpersonal and group-based models. E-interventions may be especially beneficial when therapies are focused on issues that are hard to talk about, such as the sexual risk intervention reported in this article.
These innovations in psychological practice and research represent interesting and effective uses of the principles of e-learning outside of the classroom in important applied contexts.
While leafing through an AM New York paper on Friday (yeah, yeah, I do that sometimes when riding the subway), I saw a short opinion piece by Ellis Henican that resonated with me. It’s one of the “old vs. new” debates, which are often controversial, and we often tend to either embrace the side of “the old” because of some sentimental feelings, or dismiss it as the bickering of the people who don’t understand how great “the new” is. But sometimes the arguments of “the old” are rather reasonable and shouldn’t be discounted right away.
Henican is quite bitter in his piece, describing blogging as “some self-absorbed nitwit sitting in front of a computer in his bathrobe, stealing the facts that some hard-working, low-paid newspaper drone just spent hours collecting,” but he has a point: bloggers do often get their facts by reading some other sources, be it newspapers or websites, because they often don’t have the time, the resources, or maybe even the desire to go out and do all the “dirty work” of going to crime scenes, sitting through court trials, reporting from war zones, doing the fact checking. Almost inevitably, if you get the facts that have already been retold by someone to their liking, you get a skewed picture; then you add your angle, and it gets even more skewed. And while this is good for something like philosophy, for news reporting it doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Of course, there are biased reporters and diligent bloggers, and sometimes a witness who has a blog can undermine a corrupt newspaper’s official point of view. But still, the overall state of affairs seems to be correct. And this is one of the reasons that it’s so upsetting to see the newspaper industry in such bad shape, and it would be a shame if the disappearing newspapers are replaced by nothing other than the “Bathrobe Boy” bloggers.
In a faculty workshop on commenting on student writing that Diana and I facilitated last week, we discussed the feeling of being overwhelmed by such “lower order” concerns as spelling and grammatical errors and stylistic problems. One technique to counteract this is WAC guru John Bean’s “pet peeve” approach. Pick one or two of your own personal pet peeves about students’ writing, such as use of passive voice or subject-verb agreement, and restrict your lower order comments only to these pet peeves. You can even change it up every semester.
Now, when I first read about this approach, I immediately thought of my number one pet peeve: students’ use of texting lingo in their writing. You know, “Marx wants u 2 throw off ur chains but Durkheim says those chains are solidarity LOL.”
But according to David Crystal, author of txtng: the gr8 db8, text-messaging is a new linguistic form that helps build literacy. He writes,
All the popular beliefs about texting are wrong, or at least debatable. Its graphic distinctiveness is not a totally new phenomenon. Nor is its use restricted to the young generation. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy. And only a very tiny part of the language uses its distinctive orthography. A trillion text messages may seem a lot, but when we set these alongside the multi-trillion instances of standard orthography in everyday life, they appear as no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language. Texting has added a new dimension to language use, indeed, but its long-term impact on the already existing varieties of language is likely to be negligible. It is not a bad thing.
So, am I being a technophobic Luddite every time I want to circle in bright red pen every single instance of txt-speak in my students’ papers? You can read an excerpt of his book and hear Crystal expound on this more at NPR’s Talk of the Nation.
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According to The Gothamist, the flyer on the right was scattered around the campus of New York University last week.
The flyer announced NYU’s “In and Of the City Financial Aid Plan,” in which students who were unable to fork out 50k/year were told their families could save more than $43k annually if they instead attended CUNY.
Turns out the thing was a fake, produced by a group that calls itself “Students Creating Radical Change,” who “made up the flyer to encourage discussion about NYU’s treatment of its students, and to encourage students to question their university’s priorities.” Essentially, the group protests that NYU does not provide sufficient financial support for its students, and focuses instead on expansionist behavior in the real estate market.
The letter to The Gothamist in which the students claim responsibility ends: “Oh, one other thing: we have nothing against CUNY. We just thought a ‘go to CUNY’ plan would make a neat flier. In fact, CUNY is facing its own financial problems these days - check out http://www.cunysocialforum.com/ for info on the student resistance to budget cuts and tuition hikes in the state higher-ed system.”
I might rant about the fetishization of protest embodied by this episode, which is more performative Yippie distractionism than the purposeful speaking of truth to power. I might compare the postscript about CUNY to the utterances of folks who use phrases like “I have lots of black friends” or “I don’t mean to cast aspersions” when saying objectionable things. I might snark about grammatical errors contained within the group’s statement, or attack the snobby implication that to go to CUNY is to slum it.
The fact of the matter is, especially in this economy, the group has a point (even if it isn’t really their point). The cost of NYU is ridiculous, and is an education there really 8-10 times better than what one could get at CUNY? From anecdotal evidence, applications for early admission to the Macaulay Honors College are up more than 30% from last year. I think it’s pretty safe to say we’ll see an increase in CUNY and SUNY enrollments over the next couple of years.
So, give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. I’m not sure there’s that big a difference between an underpaid adjunct teaching a course with 40 students and and an underpaid adjunct teaching a course with 55 students. Bring it on.
(I believe this is the first line in a Kazuo Ishiguro novel, the title of which escapes me, though I am pretty sure it is not the start of The Remains of the Day, a remarkable book turned into an even more remarkable movie.)
I am going to keep this short and sweet since it is mainly my personal recollection at the end of the my first semester at BLS. I mean to say that it has been real fun, that standing behind the camera and recording all those student-presentations have been truly rewarding experiences. It is not just that I have learned how to actually set up for a recording and come across as “almost” professional, but I have also enjoyed interacting with students in a context different from actual teaching. All of the students I worked with, without exception, seemed to take both the situation and myself seriously, and they were all eager to improve their presentations as much as possible.
I have just responded to an email setting up my last rehearsal for the semester, and I was struck by its courteous tone: “Thank You in advance,” or “Thank you for taking time off your busy schedule.” And this tone has been pretty consistent throughout the semester. So, I do feel warm and happy sitting here and writing this blog. I also have to admit that the fact that I have recently become an ABD makes me feel additionally grateful for my Writing Fellowship that allowed me to indeed write more and not spend most of my time on prep-work for teaching.
Wishing you all a rewarding end of the semester! 
The Lost Museum is a pretty creepy place to go to. Going to the site at night alone while everyone is sleeping freaked me out … Who made the site so freaky?
Those are the words of one of my students in an urban history course at Baruch College, written after completing an assignment at a virtualized version of P.T. Barnum’s American Museum (originally located at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street between 1841 and 1865). The student seems to have meant the comment as criticism, but I believe it is in fact a high compliment to the makers of the Lost Museum website. If you haven’t visited before, I recommend that you check out the site.
A team at the American Social History Project and the Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center developed the project between 1996 and 2004, programming with Flash and Softimage animation software to offer online visitors a deeply interactive experience. User participation is heightened while navigating through the empty museum (in a first-person, role-playing video game format) as visitors seek clues to determine which of Barnum’s many enemies may have burned down the museum in 1865. Along the way, they encounter historical information about the museum, the city, and the nation during the mid-nineteenth century. So, the fact that my student expressed fear in virtually wandering through an empty, dark, 100-year-old museum filled with items ranging from fantastical creatures to war memorabilia means that the site designers succeeded at temporarily transporting him to another place and another time.
Earlier this week, Luke did some virtual transport of his own, leaping 600 miles and many years back to the site of his childhood memories in Michigan, crafting a media-rich tour of the locale. As his title suggests, he did all this through story telling, a technique that does not require a high speed internet connection and new age video processing, but can demonstrably be enhanced by it.
While teaching with the Lost Museum, I noticed that my students questioned the material they encountered on the site far more meticulously than that of their textbook and navigated through it with greater confidence. Some commented boldly about the political turmoil in New York City over slavery evident in the antebellum museum. Others drew accurate conclusions about Barnum’s pioneering role in shaping 19th century entertainment: “Barnum must have been very good at manipulating the audiences to buy the load of nonsense he exhibited at his museum.” A third group zeroed in on minute details: “As for the cage with a bunch of different species of animals that can eat each other, how many times did Barnum have to restock the cage?”
I found a similar tendency by students to raise probing questions when studying tenement living on the Lower East Side with the aid of a virtual tour constructed by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. One of the apartments is empty, but the rest are restored with period furnishings. Unfortunately, you have to go to the museum in person to interact with role-playing actors and get a more visceral feel of the claustrophobic conditions. Next time around, I will plan to add a street-level tour of the surrounding neighborhood, as imagined by Luke. Maybe by then, someone will have invented a simulation of the hustle and bustle of Hester Street so my students can push through the crowds to visit their favorite street peddler (and Luke can restore the cast of characters that roamed North Genesee Drive).
One question I wish to raise here is, what are the risks and rewards of utilizing tools such as the Lost Museum in the classroom? My examples in the last two paragraphs touch on a benefit of such a tool. As for disadvantages, I wonder whether virtual tours of the past can “flatten” the past by making it seem too easy to visit. Many of my students reflected on the process by which the site was constructed, and they tended to demonstrate a firmer grasp on the insurmountable distance between life in 2008 and 1865; but others struggled to contextualize the sites they encountered, even when prompted by the site to do so.
I am curious to hear from folks in other disciplines about the prospects for using computer simulations to enhance teaching your subject. If the historical-minded among us wish to debate the merits of computer-mediated teaching of the history curriculum, I am of course also up for that, but I will wait for comments before getting into that discussion.
From Edutopia, the website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, an excellent interview with James Paul Gee, a linguist who has become the leading authority on video games and pedagogy and who gave a great talk at the CUNY Grad center last year. Enjoy.
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