Literature Becomes Electric

October 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

“Everyone is reading short-form text. Literature has not made that jump.” This is a key line from a recent NYT article “Serving Literature by the Tweet” which concerns a new literary magazine Electric Literature. The name of the magazine startled me at first, as I’m a big believer in the old fashioned way of reading literature: precisely as a long-form text printed on a page where I can make notes in the margins. The editors of this new magazine, Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum, make their texts available in multiple mediums: print, Kindle, e-book, iPhone, Twitter, and even audio books. They publish such well-known authors as Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard.

As I continued reading the article, I realized, despite my initial reservations, how promising this project really is. For instance, the authors are asked to select a line from their work to be animated and posted on YouTube. This is a new and very creative form of literary expression that allows for imaginative possibilities and, as Michael Cunningham pointed out, “maintain[s] the integrity of the written word and extend[s] its range.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPqOy2rvfqM[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdJieivqFQs[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSf_4vxWmxg[/youtube]

I was reminded of a few students in our in-class workshops in the past few weeks whose eyes were constantly on their iPhones. The same happens on the subway, in gym classes, and everywhere we go. As much as I’m reluctant to accept the pervasiveness of the electronic world, I must admit that it can effectively create what Rick Moody has called “new envelopes for [literature’s] message.”

Filed Under: literature, Media, Resources, Technology, Twitter

When nothing works

October 29, 2009 By 4 Comments

I had a consultation with a faculty member today on how to help students develop thesis statements. We ended up talking about how her semester is going overall, and she expressed tremendous frustration with one of her classes.

She frequently uses many writing across the curriculum techniques — in-class writing, small groups, staged assignments, etc. But nothing seems to be working. Students don’t answer basic questions that she poses and won’t participate in discussions. It feels like they are not engaged with the material or the course on any level, and some are openly resistant.

I have worked with this professor before and can attest that she is a very talented teacher. She hasn’t encountered this problem with her other classes.

I found myself at a loss as to how help her. She’s doing everything “right” and nothing seems to work. What suggestions, words of encouragement, or advice would you give this professor?

Filed Under: Faculty Development

VOCAT Switcheroo: Assessing the Assessor

October 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago, I logged on to VOCAT for the first time, and as watched the video of a student’s rehearsal for their presentation, I was surprised to hear my own voice. I was sitting near the camera, and focused on the students as they went through their Powerpoint slides. Maybe because the camera was pointed towards them, at the time of the recording I was unaware that I was also recording myself.

And this made for a kind of unexpected self-assessment, along with the student assessment I was prepared to do. I’ve often wondered if my voice is too low, if I repeat myself too much, if what I’m saying makes any sense, if what I’m saying is more helpful than confusing to my students. And I realized, listening to myself talk to a student on the VOCAT video, that I’ve spent six years of graduate school trying to get better at absorbing what I read, and better at writing clearly. But I haven’t put any sustained or rigorous effort into getting better at speaking.

For me, the VOCAT incident, the unexpected switch of the assessment tool back on the assessor, made me realize how alone I have felt with this part of teaching. The first day of your adjunct job: the door shuts behind you, it is just you and students. A professor visits my class for one session during the semester, sometimes they don’t stay for the whole class. Their written assessment is usually generous and they’ve all talked with me after the class to offer encouragement and the wisdom of their experience. But, you know, the rest of the time, it is just you in there. Talking and talking. Wondering if the students are falling asleep because they’ve just eaten lunch, or is it the lulling drone of my voice? I know there are books and articles out there I could be reading on how to effectively engage a class. And I’ve sat in on other professor’s classes to see what I pick up from the way they engage a class. George Shulman at NYU Gallatin showed me how effective it is to value every student’s contribution, repeating it, rephrasing it, writing it on the board. Heidi Kruger at the New School held me spellbound with her intense, low whisper. Sekou Sundiata at the New School moved around the class like we were the orchestra and he was conducting us.

But, what works for me, and for my students, on this particular subject? I hadn’t really focused on that so much. Which is weird, given how, you know, important oral communication skills are in teaching.  Should the VOCAT assessment tool be turned on teachers? Well, I wouldn’t volunteer. But, when confronted with it, I thought it showed me some things that I should be aware of.

This brings me to the connection between writing and speaking. At the recent WAC conference, several people brought up the fact that writing often, in different forms, helps people become better writers. Speaking about writing also improves writing.  We talk about students ‘finding their own voice.’ One impediment to that might be that students are reading authors whose voices are quite different than their own. Often when I’m working with students on their presentation, I’ll ask them to summarize or draw a conclusion from their research. They articulate clear, original, logically organized claims aloud. But, when it comes to the formal work, they leave this out. Why? The answer I’ve heard more than once was, “But, that is just my opinion.”

What I want students to do, what I’ve heard other teachers say they want students to do, is enter a conversation with the authors they cite. What I’ve seen happen too often is a student articulating their own view, then summarizing an author’s view, using the author’s own style. How can we yoke them together?

One possible way might be to value thought when it is articulated aloud, not just in print. And one way to do this might be to film it, to actually turn the light and focus on recording speaking a thought, the way writing records a thought.

At the WAC meeting, Thomas Meechum and Karen Gregory’s documentary about the writing process in professor Michele Pacht’s class showed students responding to questions about their opinions about graffiti. I wondered if the heightened attention of the camera on the spoken thoughts helped the students to value their thoughts enough to commit them to print. I wonder if I should review the recording of my voice, talking to my students, as many times as I am reviewing the drafts of my dissertation proposal. I kind of think I should.

Filed Under: Assessment, Oral Communication, Pedagogy

Baruch College to Host WordCampNYC 2009

October 22, 2009 By 3 Comments

After a remarkable confluence of events and serendipitous circumstances over the last two weeks, I am happy to announce that WordCampNYC 2009, the flagship WordPress event on the East Coast, will be held here at Baruch College on November 14th and 15th. The Schwartz Institute has been asked to facilitate this event on behalf of the College and we are working hard to make sure all the various pieces come together as they should.

WordPress, for those of you who don’t know, is the open-source online publishing platform on which this blog is built. Blogs@Baruch and runs on WordPress MU (multi-user), a version of WP that allows any number of blogs to be generated from a single install. WordPress, in its various incarnations, is widely regarded to be the best-of-breed blogging software and is getting quite a bit of use throughout CUNY (the Journalism School, Macaulay Honors College, and the CUNY Academic Commons also rely on it to great effect.)

This is really exciting news for Baruch and CUNY, more generally, as we have always been big supporters of open source projects like WordPress and are thrilled to be involved in WordCampNYC. Because of the interest in open source instructional technologies throughout CUNY (as evidenced at last May’s CUNY WordCampEd which brought together about 100 people from across most, if not all, CUNY campuses), we expect quite a bit of interest in the education track at the conference which promises to be rich and varied. For example, we’re currently organizing an open roundtable discussion between Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, and a number of prominent educators and instructional technologists to consider on the future of WordPress and other open-source tools in education. You can expect lots of conversation about the various WordPress projects at CUNY and at other institutiions, local and otherwise. We’re especially looking forward to catching up with the folks from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University who have been working on a ScholarPress, a set of plugins that add all sorts of course management functionality to WordPress.

Once the schedule is set, we’ll link to it here. In the meantime, some details about the event are available here.

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Conferences, EdTech, New York, Technology, Web 2.0

I Encourage Students to Torture Their Enemies!

October 21, 2009 By 1 Comment

Several semesters in a row, I taught Dante’s Inferno as part of a broad humanities survey.  In case you’re not familiar with the epic, the protagonist (also named Dante) travels through the Catholic hell and describes the excruciating torture experienced by the many sinners he sees there.

Standing at the Gates of Hell

Creative Commons License photo credit: country_boy_shane

My writing assignment asked students to analyze how the punishments match the sins committed.  It was so tedious.  I quickly realized I was sucking all the interest and fun out of an actually interesting and fun text.

So the next semester I made the writing assignment a bit more transgressive: “Have you ever told someone to ‘go to hell’ (or wanted to tell someone that)?  Describe the scenario.  What did the person do wrong?  Use quotes and interpretations of Dante’s Inferno to describe what their punishment would be and why.”  The assignment still met my pedagogical goals (to have the students think critically about the text and articulate connections between its parts), but the students’ answers were so much more engaged, and reading the essays was much less a chore for me.  Plus, as an accidental sort of value-added bonus, I think the assignment allowed the students to experience the cathartic, semi-therapeutic effects of imaginatively punishing people who’ve wronged them—an effect that Dante himself certainly relished in imagining his hell, which is littered with his personal enemies.

In later semesters I expanded this assignment to ask students to consign various historical and contemporary figures to the appropriate circles of Dante’s hell.  This added a component that I hadn’t originally considered, because it turned into a mini-lesson on both current events and notorious “sinners” from history.  It was also fun!

My only problem is, not every text I teach seems to lend itself to writing assignments that both achieve my goals (for them to become sharper critical thinkers and analytical writers) and engage students creatively.  Any ideas?  Anybody else trying to design these double-duty writing assignments?

Filed Under: Pedagogy, Writing Instruction

The future in Frankfurt

October 15, 2009 By 2 Comments

PWIt’s been ten years since I worked in book publishing, but I still sometimes miss it, and still follow the industry news a bit via daily emails from Publishers Weekly (PW). Today begins the biggest annual book publishing event, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the show started with a Tools of Change keynote address by Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan that revisited the topic of publishing’s future. PW wrote about the event and how in a blog post a year ago Lloyd had chastised her audience for focusing too much on this worry about the future and not on what was happening right now. In the Frankfurt address this week, she talked about the extent to which that future is now and how much has changed in the past year. For example, the Kindle edition of Dan Brown’s latest bestseller, The Lost Symbol, outsold the print version on the book’s release date. That is not to say that she thinks devices will lead the way for digital publishing, as one of her predictions was that it will be platform-led.

I myself read Kindle editions on my iPhone (if only I could afford a Kindle DX!), but I also like those on the eReader platform I had first used on my old Palm Pilot. That one works not only on my iPhone but also on any computer, and allows me to customize the view on my Mac or PC in a way that makes the book very readable. I like being able to read the book either at my desk on my computer or on the move on my iPhone. But the Kindle app has a lot more books (and a more up-to-date selection), so I am plowing through novels on the subway in the Kindle format, too. Both platforms, Kindle and eReader, have a problem that Lloyd didn’t mention: in the rush to get books out, they’re missing some really basic copyediting steps. I’ve bought several books that had major typos and formatting errors, from blocks of text out of place or repeated, to text being spread across the page like an e.e. cummings poem. An author friend notified me that his backlist was now available on Kindle, so I happily bought some of them. I was embarrassed to tell him that they were full of typos, so I hashed it out with Amazon instead.

The Frankfurt speech ended with the following admonition against complacency in the industry (in any industry?):

Lloyd closed with the following quote from Seth Godin, which stands as both cautionary and a call-to-action: “Things you can learn from the music business (as it falls apart): The first rule is so important, it’s rule 0: 0. The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now. Soon, the new thing will be better than the old thing will be. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late. Feel free to wax nostalgic about the old thing, but don’t fool yourself into believing it’s going to be here forever. It won’t.”
from PW

Filed Under: Liberal Arts, literature, Media, Technology

The Uses of Absurdity

October 14, 2009 By 1 Comment

vanDALIsm
Creative Commons License photo credit: Dr Case

A recent New York Times article details a study at the University of California, Santa Barbara, that suggests unique approaches to stimulating critical thinking in the classroom.  Researchers have observed that when the brain is confronted with “absurdity” (that is, problems and patterns outside the bounds of normal, predictable experience), it struggles to make the new information “fit” within an understandable framework.  This process, they argue, helps develop the brain’s capacity for creative problem-solving:

…Dr. [Travis] Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

While the researchers say that it is too early to draw concrete conclusions from this theory, I’m wondering what role absurdity, or the shaking up of students’ expectations, can play in the college classroom.  As the article suggests, it may be a little too absurd to begin screening David Lynch shorts as a regular feature of your pedagogy; however, there are certainly ways to try the concept out without losing your class to utter confusion.

One idea for developing this notion might be a “puzzle”-type exercise in which students are asked to effectively figure their way out of a particularly tricky, and curriculum-driven, set of problems.  Since I teach American history, I’m thinking about role-playing exercises in which students take on the mindset of a historical character and navigate a specific (unexpected) problem in that person’s life.  The exercise would, ideally, seek to develop the “problem-solving” aspects of the brain as detailed in the article, without veering too far off course.  I wonder, though, what other ideas are out there?

How can we effectively guide students through an absurd text or problem without dictating the solution? What kinds of exercises might “confuse” students in a good way, challenging their perceptions and helping them see alternative modes of thinking?

Filed Under: Pedagogy

And the Nobel goes to….

October 13, 2009 By 5 Comments

Herta Muller in 2004

Herta Muller in 2004

It is nice to receive congratulatory notes from friends upon my “countrywoman’s achievement,” as one of them reads, winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature this past Thursday. Herta Muller is a relatively unknown author living in Germany and writing in German, but originally from Romania. Much of her work, according to the New York Times coverage of her nomination, deals with her experience of living under the dictatorship of the communist regime in Romania and with her position as political exile in Germany.

Is this then a Romanian Nobel Prize or a German one? We are talking about the literary award here, so wouldn’t it be fitting to take the language in which the author writes as the decisive factor? I am not sure about Ms. Muller’s current citizenship, but she has been writing in German, her mother tongue, given that she was born as member of the German minority in Romania. Would she have the same appeal had she been writing in Romanian instead? Yes, the content we communicate is the important thing, but the linguistic carrier of our message also matters; using a language with more cultural capital will probably increase the likelihood of a larger reception. After all, Emil Cioran had to emigrate to France and write in French instead of his native Romanian in order to develop such a wide appeal as one of the most important 20th century philosophers.  The same goes for Mircea Eliade or Eugene Ionesco; all expatriates, all writing in another language instead of Romanian.

Language must be part of the deal, along with the thoughts, the experiences leading to exile, exilic existence, life filtered through an exceptionally creative mind. When all these come together, you end up with an author who can reach out from relative obscurity and tell about the changing face of our world. Because a lot has changed since Ceausescu’s Romania, though the present economic and social hardships of the country are much too pressing. Yet, if we can truly celebrate Herta Muller, as the Romanian writer and recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, we have become able to validate the idea of a more spacious Romanian national identity within a globalized Europe and world.

Filed Under: literature

New Media and the Idea of Freedom of Speech

October 12, 2009 By 1 Comment

Gabriella Coleman, cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Media Culture and Communication at NYU spoke at the Graduate Center about her research on the free and open source software movement and the hacker culture last Thursday. I couldn’t make it to her talk but was able to read her article “Code is Speech.” In this article, she investigates how Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) developers have contested and rewritten central concepts of modern liberalism, especially freedom of speech, by illustrating the cases of two programmers, Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov, and the protests provoked by their arrests between 1999 and 2003. Her article touches upon the sensitive issues such as intellectual property, copyright, and the notion of originality, which N. Katherine Hayles also problematizes as the products of the 18C liberal humanism in her book My Mother Was a Computer. Coleman writes:

“This is key to emphasize, for even if we can postulate a relation between a product of creative work—source code—and a democratic ideal—free speech, there is no necessary or fundamental connection between them (Ratto 2005). Many academics and programmers have argued convincingly that the act of programming should be thought of as literary—‘a culture innovative and revisionary close reading’ (Black 2002; see also Chopra and Dexter 2007). As with print culture of the last 200 years (Johns 2000), this literary culture of programming has often been dictated and delineated by a copyright regime whose logic is one of restriction. New free speech sensibilities, which fundamentally challenge the coupling between copyright and literary creation, must therefore be seen as a political act and choice, requiring sustained labor and creativity to stabilize these connections” (449).

Coleman’s words remind me of Mikhail’s recent post in which he weighed in on the question of openness of the VOCAT. I was excited to read that he believed the VOCAT should be free and open wide to other institutions and other developers, to benefit not only many other students and schools but also the tool itself so that it may evolve in ways we’ve never foreseen.

I also think that that’s how William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace,” envisions the Net in his cyberpunk classic Neuromancer. With all the futurist horrors of mechanization of humanity imagined by the novel, it implies that the net can still be the brave new world for us as long as it remains open and public.

Filed Under: Copyright, Media, Tools

Studio H

October 8, 2009 By 1 Comment

Professor Vera Haller gave Tom and me a tour of the Baruch Journalism Department’s spanking new Studio H yesterday. We were blown away. The room, made possible by a generous donation from the Harnisch Foundation (overseen by Baruch graduate William Harnisch, class of 1968, and his wife Ruth Ann) provides a space for our talented journalism instructors to explore the future of the field with their students.

studioh

The room features 24 new large screen iMacs, loaded with the latest productivity software. A quarter of the machines have dv-decks, a dozen have microphones, all have nice Sony headphones, and students can arrange to borrow HD cameras for their assignments. The faculty workstation controls a beautiful projector and two flat panel displays, which can be tuned show cable news or the screen of any computer. JBL speakers in the ceiling provide terrific sound.

What struck Tom and I most, however, was how the space was laid out, with workstations on the exterior and a seminar table in the middle. Talia’s post last week wondered about the impact of computers on the writing classroom. Space was conceived in Studio H in such a way that everyone can see what everyone else is doing… there’s simply no hiding. The class can move from the workstations to the table for discussions, editing sessions, or workshops. This flexible approach to classroom design is terrific, and reflects the goal of the Journalism Department to create a newsroom-like atmosphere for the students.

In a conversation with Vera, we imagined an assignment where students could watch a YouTube clip of a breaking news story — a press conference, perhaps — and then attack it like a newsroom would on deadline. This is not a new assignment idea, but Studio H allows faculty members to more realistically mimic the conditions of a news room, with noise, movement, openness, connectivity, chaos, and even a large digital clock counting down to deadline. What a great example of how space can create pedagogical opportunity.

Congrats to the Baruch Journalism Department and its students on this wonderful new addition. We have a long history of supporting the department’s blogging and multimedia reporting initiatives, and their students do fantastic work. We look forward to seeing and helping publish the work that Studio H helps makes possible.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Higher Education, Writing Instruction Tagged With: ,
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