Earlier this week, we gave you the first part of a conversation between Jim Groom and Gardner Campbell on edupunk. Here’s part 2 in which Jim and Gardner get a bit more animated and debate further the the appropriateness of the punk metaphor, address questions of leadership and the politicization of ed tech. Enjoy.
[youtube width="480" height="385"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci3rZhftkFo[/youtube]
I was happily surprised by Sunday’s Oscars ceremony: I did not expect Slumdog Millionaire to gather so many awards. I liked the movie a lot, but I did not think it was going to turn out such a winner. I guess had I not seen Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! before and had it not broken my heart, Slumdog would have done it instead. Given that I saw the Mira Nair production, and was instantly taken by it, I watched Slumdog with a sense of seeing a remake of an unforgettable original. Yet, Slumdog featured my favorite Indian actor, Irfan Khan (The Namesake), and those street urchins of Mumbai, and I was hooked.
In addition, I went to watch the movie with a former student of mine who took my Multicultural American Literature course at Hunter. T. comes from Kenya, via London, but her family is originally from India, and she speaks with a lovely accent. She knows way more about South Asian literature than I do, I am about four years older than she is, and we connected instantly. Meeting her in a different context, outside the classroom, however, made communication a bit awkward at first. We were no longer following the teacher-student scenario, yet the overtones of this relationship lingered enough to give a perceptible tint to our conversation. At least, at the beginning. At the end, I went home with a feeling of gratitude and a reminder of the deeply humbling quality of teaching: you don’t even realize it, but you touch people’s lives in the process, and they touch yours. If there is cross-cultural communication and there are cross-cultural encounters, then they should mark turning points in your life where you set out to measure the weight of your full-blown humanity.
You might recall some discussion here of “edupunk,” a term coined by our old friend Jim Groom to describe approaches to teaching and learning that eschew mainstream, proprietary teaching tools in favor of open source technologies and do-it-yourself approaches. The term was, as some of you may recall, one of the New York Times’ Buzzwords of 2008.
We give you, then, the first in a series of videos in which Jim and Gardner Campbell of Baylor University — a new friend whose deft facilitation at last year’s Symposium made a tremendous contribution — discuss of the ideas behind edupunk and consider the appropriateness of the punk metaphor for the sorts of things that the edupunk movement embraces, promotes, and celebrates. Enjoy. We’ll post new episodes as they become available.
I almost choked on my Sunday morning pancakes when I read Daphne Merkin’s recent piece on Rachel Maddow’s “Lesbian Glamour” in the New York Times Style section. Aside from a score of other issues I have with this article (probably best for a different blog), Merkin seemed to miss, I think, one of the more interesting aspects of Rachel Maddow’s popularity, especially for people interested in communications.
Putting aside Merkin’s bizarre summary of the history of gay male sexuality, or her weird analogy between lesbians and wallflowers, the article trades in the worst kind of stereotypes by attempting to provide a sort of taxonomy of lesbian cultural icons, from “lipstick lesbians” to “unstylish dykes” (trotting out poor Gertrude Stein and Fran Leibovitz!). As evidence she offers up the testimonials of an anonymous gay friend of hers and a celebrity hairstylist who decides that the only “giveaway” to Maddow is her haircut. Oy.
By blathering on about pantsuits and Converse sneakers, Merkin misses the point. Maddow is a thrilling arrival on the scene when it comes to the representation of gay Americans in the media in part because her politics, intelligence, and rhetorical swagger have culled her a fan base that feels linked and deeply relevant to the last election and new administration. I don’t always agree with Maddow when I tune in, but it’s hard to deny that she was a particularly well-timed breath of fresh air, and is an idea machine and nuanced policy wonk as well as a strong debater: she’s got the politics, the policy, and the mic. None of that seems to hold much weight with Merkin; the photo that was published alongside the article was telling– her mouth is photoshopped out, leaving just the “giveaway” hair and glasses.
I know; this is the Style section, so maybe it’s ridiculous to expect an article about Maddow that thoughtfully analyzes how a former AIDS activist and Rhodes scholar manages to sell herself and her ideas to more 25- to 54-year-olds during the 9pm cable slot than Larry King Live. But if we’re sticking with style, Maddow herself has made some interesting comments about how she’s had to change her appearance to get TV-ready, from ditching her glasses for contacts to needing to dress up “like an assistant principal in order to meet the minimum dress code.” And, besides all that, as we suggest to our students, style is just one element of oral communications that’s worth analyzing; isolating one presentational quality and evaluating it in a vacuum is pointless if trying to snap a bigger picture…but then, well, I guess that wasn’t really wasn’t the point, was it?
It turned out that Alex Rodriguez should have taken performance-enhancing drugs for his oral performance last Tuesday. I don’t know whether anyone has followed the story of his steroid-use scandal, but I thought I would bring to the attention of the BLSCI communication experts this video clip of his news conference following his admission that he took steroid injections from 2001 to 2003. I wonder how you’d all assess it from a presentational point of view.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI0lZTQC2Ck[/youtube]
Here are a few bits and pieces of the critical responses from media experts and sports commentators, particularly to the 30 second-long pause near the end of the clip, when Rodriguez thanks his Yankee teammates:
So, what grade would you give A-Rod?
If you have ever taught a college course, you might be familiar with the “grade-grubber,” that is, that special species of student who is never satisfied with the grade that he or she has earned, but is always keening for you to bump them up a half-letter or higher. On Tuesday, the New York Times published an article about the clash between student expectations and the grades they receive from professors, and it is currently their most emailed article. Professors interviewed attribute a rise in grade disputes variously to an increased sense of entitlement, competition among peers, and “ultra-efficient” test-prep in their K-12 education. Most interesting was the explanation that students have a misunderstanding about what grades actually reflect:
James Hogge, associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, said: “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “
In line with Dean Hogge’s observation are Professor Greenberger’s test results. Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.
Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland echoed that view.
“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”
“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”
So, if grade-grubbing is a widespread phenomenon, and is at least in part a function of students not grasping the difference between merit and effort, what can we do to counteract this? How do we more effectively communicate our expectations to students? Do you provide a grade-breakdown in your syllabi? Do you give students access to grade calculators via online classroom management systems such as Blackboard? Do you provide students with the rubrics you use to grade their work?
As an aside, what do you think was missing from this Times article? I saw nary a mention of how the commercialization of higher education and the-customer-is-always-right mentality plays into student entitlement.
President Obama caused a bit of a stir when he persuaded his security staff to let him continue using his BlackBerry device after he took office. Even though he’ll only be able to connect with a select group of staff and friends, the 44th President is now the first sitting President to use a wireless email device. This does not seem like a big deal to me. I would have been more surprised (and perhaps alarmed?) if they did not welcome this technology into the Oval Office. One of the main concerns had been security and legal issues, but surely we now have the expertise to work around those. I think in 20 years, or even less, we will look back and think, “How did other Presidents communicate without BlackBerries or smart phones?”
With this thought in mind, and in honor of Presidents’ Day, I decided to do some research to find out when other “high-tech” communication devices were first introduced to the White House. I found these snippets on www.whitehousehistory.org, which credits the book The President’s House, by William Seale:
EASY DOES IT Barbara Ganley, near her home in Weybridge, Vt., thinks of blogging as a meditative art form. Photo by Caleb Kenna.
Some of us here at the Institute recently had the tremendous pleasure of sitting and chatting with Barbara Ganley, prolific blogger, educator, photographer, champion of social media for teaching and learning, and a great source of inspiration for the various and sundry edupunks we’ve been hanging around with lately. Barbara, who was recently profiled in the New York Times, is well known in the blogosphere as one of the voices that comprise the “slow blogging” movement. Like other slow bloggers, she uses her blog as a means of facilitating meditation and reflection rather than of delivering reportage. She writes long, thoughtful, meditative and sometimes infrequent posts that read more like artful reflective essays than typical, concise, rapid-fire blog posts.
An early adopter of online writing tools for pedagogical purposes, Barbara first used blogs in the classroom in the dark days of 2001 — coincidentally, on September 11 when students suddenly had the unfathomable to reflect upon. Since then, she has explored ways of employing blogs and other social media for a myriad pedagogical uses (both in and out of the world of academe) and offers a tremendous wealth of ideas on realizing their exciting promise for teaching and learning. Having left the academy after almost 20 years, Barabara recently founded Digital Explorations, a non-profit organization that explores the impact social media and digital story-telling tools can have on rural communities.
We learned a ton from chatting with Barbara and hope to find another occasion to do it again.
By the way, the way we arranged for Barbara’s visit to the Institute is a great illustration of her now famous aphorism, “Blog to reflect, Tweet to connect.” Barbara had indicated via Twitter that she was heading to NYC. I tweeted right back inviting her to come see us here at Baruch, she accepted, and there you have it.
Thanks, Barbara, for paying us a visit. Let’s work together soon.
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