cac.ophony.org

It pleases me to note the launch on Blogs@Baruch of Lexington Universal Circuit: A Journal of Economics and Politics at Baruch College.

The LUC was founded by Michael Pinto-Fernandes and Sarwat Joarder, two Baruch undergrads who have worked tirelessly to get their journal off the ground, recruiting writers and editors from Baruch and other campuses. They’ve been an absolute joy to work with, and have thought deeply about everything from the design of their journal, to the intellectual property considerations of online publishing, to recruiting and managing a stable of writers, to integration and growth within the Baruch community.  The writing on the site is serious, thoughtful, well-sourced and solidly argued. Currently, there are 5 pieces published, and you’ll likely find much to both agree and disagree with.

The LUC — when combined with the recent transition of Dollars & Sense and the pending move of iMagazine to our system– marks the beginning of a new phase of self-publishing at Baruch College, where Blogs@Baruch supports members of our community as they make their unmediated voices heard. While I’ve worked closely with the LUC crew on the creation of their journal, and helped them think through both the implications and mechanics of online publishing, we’ve always agreed that the content is theirs, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s Left or Right, whether it’s right or wrong.  Therein lies one of the best arguments behind Blogs@Baruch: this is a tool to help our students thoughtfully navigate the world of web, and to do so on their own terms.

So, congratulations, Michael, Sarwat, and the rest of the LUC crew: we look forward to following the LUC as it grows (and we might chime in with a comment or two), and we commend you on your ambition!

We often rag on our students for their poor writing abilities, but here’s a tool from the Writing Program of the University of Chicago that pokes fun at the (sometimes) incomprehensible and bloated writing of academics:

Make Your Own Academic Sentence

After playing around a bit, I came up with “The (re)formation of post-capitalist hegemony asks to be read as the systemization of the nation-state.” Excellent! I can’t wait to put that into my dissertation!

You can spend some good time procrastinating on your actual writing by making sentences containing random phrases like “history as such” and “poetics.” The site also has some excellent writing sources for students and academics alike, such as The Sentence of the Week, where a published sentence is thoroughly critiqued for its positives and negatives, giving us a great sense of what makes a well-written sentence. There’s also this guide to college writing that I’ll surely point out to my students.

But, if procrastinating with random word generators is more your thing, you can always play with the classic Wu-Tang Clan name generator.

Yours,

Tha Eurythmic King of Nowhere

photo credit: mhonpoo

I finally figured out what to write about for Cacophony! Following the advice of my colleagues at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, the best way to approach this was to write about something I am familiar with in the context of my work.  As a professor myself, I set specific guidelines and objectives when giving assignments to my students in order to avoid writer’s block because of the openness of possibilities. I don’t want to curtail, however: Cacophony’s open posting policy makes it versatile and unique.

I hope this post gives some basic guidelines for anyone out there interested in organizing debates as a classroom assignment.  The topics of the debates I am coaching are in the 12th Edition of the Management and Society textbook issued by the Department of Management at Baruch College. But you can device your own and have students do a little research to defend their positions.

The first step is to assign students to groups and divide the groups into PRO and CON sides of a given topic.   Then, provide precise instructions about the format of the debate.  For example, one format consist of a ten minute opening presentation, followed by a five minute period for rebuttal, and three minutes for conclusions, going back and forth between the PRO and CON side.  Ten minutes for the PRO, Ten for the CON; five minutes for the PRO, five for the CON; and three minutes for the PRO, and three for the CON. You can make them longer depending on the number of participants and the time available.

Make sure students understand that the objective is to persuade the audience that their point of view (in the debate) is the most valid: they need to make arguments.

In the beginning, they should introduce themselves, the issue, the point they are defending and any terms that might be unfamiliar or that might take a particular meaning in the context of the debate.  For example, in a debate that deals with whether genetically modified foods should be labeled, it is necessary to know from the beginning what constitutes a genetically modified food product.

Encourage them to read the materials a couple of times (in the management course I coach these are organized in chapters), even the reading for the opposite team.  In that way they can figure out a strategy to organize their presentation as well as anticipate the points are going to be brought up against their arguments.  It’s also important for students to practice their entire presentation out loud so they have an idea of time management as they become familiar with public speaking.  In terms of oral presentation skills,  you should emphasize to the debaters that they should not read, and should maintain eye contact with the audience,  which is a non-verbal way of engaging their attention.  Index cards are an acceptable way of keeping track of the order of the arguments they will stress, but in order to avoid reading too much from them,  suggest they write bullet points, rather than entire sentences.

If they are using numerical data such as statistics and/or percentages, remind your students that if they are hard to understand, the audience will just glaze over them.  Quantitative data should be easy to read and understand and should make a strong point.  If they are quoting textbooks or the internet, make sure they cite valid sources and not just random articles (especially online),  and that they have those sources (author’s names particularly) readily available during the debate, in case someone asks.

Time does not have to be equally split, but all students in a team must participate.  Have students dress professionally (although this is not a strict requirement).  Attire is a non verbal language that reveals many things, and it is difficult to find credible someone wearing an oversized sweater whose sleeves are longer than the arms. Lastly, remind students to keep their language appropriate and to keep their composure.   Debates can get heated,  but for as much as a Jerry Springer fight will definitely engage the audience, the loudest people are usually revealing insecurity.

The end of each debate could be marked by an open Q&A period where the audience can participate and ask questions or comments to the presenters.  Here you can explain how the topic is still current and give an informal assessment of the students’ participation.

While many colleges, even in these tough economic times, are spending small fortunes outfitting their classrooms with the latest technology, The Chronicle is reporting that the dean of the Meadow School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University is actually taking computers out of the classroom. According to Dean Bowen, classrooms equipped with computers and internet access encourage, among other things, bad lectures. Bowen’s biggest complaint, not surprisingly is the use of PowerPoint lectures, which according to several polls, seem to be causing an epidemic of student boredom. Like so many Baruch BPL students, who have bored their fair share of Communication Fellows with meandering and pointless PowerPoint presentations, it seems teachers at Southern Methodist have a difficult time understanding how to use PowerPoint effectively to convey information visually. Although the article is more thorough, in the video above Bowen makes a good argument for why he took the computers out of the classroom, and he makes an especially good argument about the value and importance of interactive classroom discussions. But Bowen is no Luddite nor is he a neophyte when it comes to using technology in the classroom, and in many ways, this is where I part ways with Dean Bowen, who has reportedly used video games to teach his students about the history of Jazz and encourages his professors to put their lectures on podcasts so that students and professors can spend more time exploring lecture ideas in the classroom. What matters most about this argument, though, is that whether you use technology in the classroom or not, it is the ratio of student to teacher interaction that matters most. Perhaps there is a place for podcasts and classroom blogs (I would personally draw the line at video games) but these technologies should not become a substitute for student/teacher interaction.

photo credit: Torley

Since my last two posts have focused on administrative kinds of issues (professional development and assessment) I thought maybe I should write about something a little more practical this time around, something more directly related to teaching. In attempting to incorporate more writing into my sociology/social psychology courses I often ask or at least encourage students to write about themselves as part of an assignment. Depending on the assignment this usually yields some interesting results and students seem to love writing about their identities and experiences. I think this especially makes sense when it somehow involves students learning to think critically through thinking about the individual in relation to the collective or applying sociological concepts. I also tend to think that assignments asking students to reflect on their experiences or place in the world are somehow more engaging although I’m not sure this is always the case.

Most of my students respond well to this type of assignment; others respond a little too well. While I do my best not to ask invasive questions or give assignments that might bring up overly emotional issues that are difficult to handle, there are always a few who write about some really intense personal issues. Suffice it to say my experience in human services has come in handy more than once. Although I have never had a student complain and many enjoy the opportunity to write about experiences or identities they’ve really never had a chance to talk about, I still end up feeling some anxiety about giving this type of assignment. Am I asking too much of them? What does this kind of disclosure mean for the teacher/student relationship? Of course, many of us in the social sciences are hyper-aware of these issues in our research but what about in our teaching? I would love to hear some reflections on this and, having pretty much taught only in the social sciences, I’m curious if this issue has come up for folks teaching in other disciplines.

Worried about the low literacy levels and poor writing skills of college graduates, composition professors have spent decades debating the question: Should college writing courses teach content (critical reading and in-class debates about social and cultural topics) or form (essay design, paragraph arrangement, and sentence-level syntax, grammar, and vocabulary)?

To my mind, they’re chasing a red herring.  Once we’re actually in the composition classroom, we inevitably combine form with content, regardless of our theoretical pedagogical standpoint.  Anti-content-ers like Stanley Fish pretend that content-rich composition courses rely on “the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow.”  Of course, no one would base a curriculum on such an idiotic notion; rather, some instructors teach composition through thematic readings with the understanding that shared background knowledge will help students build more complex arguments; others use essays about “big ideas” as models students can emulate in their own writing.  Few anti-content teachers would deny the importance of building a knowledge base or following good writing models.  Conversely, even those pro-content composition instructors who strenuously declare, “I do NOT teach grammar,” ultimately are forced to attend to sentences in one way or another.

The Freshman Inquiry Writing Seminar at City College of New York, profiled this month in Inside Higher Education, has provided a curricular counterpart to my claim that writing courses always combine form with content.  The six-credit seminar links a content instructor from one of the disciplines with a writing instructor from the English department, often a Master’s or MFA student.  So, the students learn about a subject–examples include “Energy” and “Comic Books and Conflict”–and they learn how to write about that subject.  Form enriched by content, content supported by form.

Of course, I would prefer to see universities take the writing instruction side of such courses a little more seriously; as the article explains, the content instructor is often the “real” (full-time, tenured) professor and the writing instructor is a contingent laborer.  But that’s a topic for another blog post.

photo credit: zinjixmaggir

This will probably read like the redux of a redux, or, at least, thoughts along Jennifer’s line, but I have been thinking about this since I attended a recent meeting at Baruch where a faculty member expressed concern about Baruch students not speaking Standard American English in the classroom. I was taken aback a bit for several reasons. First, though we are in a predominantly business and marketing-oriented context (versus, let’s say, my former job at Hunter, a Liberal Arts college), we do not seem to look at language as a communication tool within a global market context. I understand that we want to provide our students with solid (American) education, but they will probably work in an international context, if they do not already live there given that sheer existence in NYC is international.

The other thing is my desire to defend Baruch students. None of those I have worked with so far seemed careless about their assignment at hand, at least, when it came to oral presentations, and they did not use “slang” while presenting. Now, that they were using a more informal language among themselves, even with me, that is a different issue and anybody with any understanding of how language works would see why they do so.

While I was completing a degree in Sociolinguistics, our daily mantra was the idea of “context” and how language use always depends upon a specific language context necessitating code-switching. One qualifies as a skillful language-user being able to switch from one linguistic register to another, moving smoothly from one social context to another and being able to understand the intricacies involved.

Below is Lawrence Lessig’s keynote at last week’s Educause 2009: “It’s About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright.”  This 60 minute presentation is well worth the time of anyone who’s interested how antiquated copyright laws are impacting ecologies of freedom, access, education, and science in the digital age.  After delineating how we got to where we are, he advocates that rather than reforming existing laws, we instead challenge them by building alternative structures that will more flexibly, appropriately, and ethically govern information use.  Technologists and educators have specific and crucial roles in this: technologists must “build the code” for sanity by making it easier for others to effectively play by new rules, and educators must perform and encourage in our students skepticism towards rules that simply no longer make sense.

Also: as always, Lessig provides a captivating model for integrating text, images, and art into a presentation.

The above video has been making the rounds of progressive blogs recently.  It features Jay Smooth, a popular New York hip-hop radio host, giving a brief lesson on how best to approach a racially-charged conversation.  In a quick three minutes,  Smooth gives several witty examples of conversational traps to avoid, effectively presenting the difference between the two broad categories of racial discussion:  the “what they did” conversation versus the “what they are” conversation.   The video demonstrates the best way to “call out” racist behavior without leading the conversation into name-calling, by focusing on specific words and actions (“what they did”) rather than drawing broad conclusions (“what they are”).

While Smooth’s clever lecture/sermon focuses on racial issues, it also functions essentially as a primer on how to engage difficult issues with critical intelligence, and as such it has captured the attention of communication-intensive educators (that’s us). According to this interview on NPR, the video has become a hit among college professors, who use Smooth’s rant to help introduce ideas about effective oral communication.  Because the video is hip, funny, and easily understandable, it seems like a decent way to get students talking about talking.

As I’ve noticed in my own classes,  difficulties with in-class discussions are not always related to shy, silent students. Oftentimes, I’ve had boisterous groups that have LOTS to say, but don’t often have the most effective tools for oral communication at their disposal, and the result can be an awkward, pointless (and, at worst, offensive) discussion.  After all, there are many ways to talk about any given issue, but our job is to promote a very specific kind of academic discussion that is most likely very different from the average student’s everyday mode of communication.

Smooth’s video is certainly a great starting point for a classroom discussion about arguments, evidence, and rhetorical strategy, but I think it also provides an opportunity for us, as educators, to begin thinking about our own role in teaching students how to effectively “speak up” in class.  What other tools can we use to help students create meaningful, civil in-class discussions?  How can we get students not just to talk, but to talk with confidence and authority, avoiding the “rhetorical Bermuda Triangle” described in the video?  And finally, is Smooth available for guest lectures?

Cartoon taken from Paul Silli's blog post "Why Should School Districts Invest in Technology."

“Bill Gates says, ‘Wait till you can see what your computer can become.’ But it’s you who should be doing the becoming. What you can become is the miracle you were born to work—not the damn fool computer.” —Kurt Vonnegut

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Last semester I picked up a $1,000 check from City College for a faculty development workshop that I participated in over the winter break. The workshop was designed to introduce interested faculty to the uses of technology in the classroom and was, no surprise, sponsored by Verizon. As a struggling graduate student who finds himself consistently behind on the rent, I was delighted to receive the money, but part of me feels bad (well almost) since it turns out I really have no intention now, nor did I ever, of using any more technology in my classroom than I normally would. In fact, instead of instilling in me a sense of possibility and excitement, the workshop made me deeply suspicious of the supposed pedagogical value of technology in general. Although it helped me realize that there are, indeed, several kinds of fascinating and interesting things you can do with web applications both in and out of class, I remained unconvinced that using those technologies would actually help my students to better learn the things that matter: how to be, for instance, a thoughtful and contemplative person capable of formulating, analyzing, critiquing, and communicating difficult and original ideas.

The leader of the workshop was, I am quite proud to say, an old student of mine from Hunter College who is now getting his PhD at the Graduate Center and is the head of the Writing Center at my campus. For the entire eight hours, he led the faculty members present that day through a series of exercises that were meant to introduce us to web-based applications that we could use to “help students learn.” While I was familiar with most of the applications and platforms that were being introduced, I had never thought of using any of them in the classroom. From Google and Wikipedia, to YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress, and Facebook, we talked about the potential pedagogical value of these various information, publishing, and social networking platforms. It was a stretch, but we did our best to articulate the different ways we might use these programs or services in our classrooms. The idea of using blogs and Facebook pages was especially popular, as was the idea of using YouTube videos as learning tools.

After the workshop I felt obligated to think more about the ways that I could use some of this technology to help my students learn better, and, since I had to write a report on precisely that subject in order to qualify for the stipend, I spent a good amount of time contemplating my options. The more I wrote and the more I reflected on my thoughts, however, the more I realized that I didn’t want to use any technology in my classroom: not this semester, not next, and if I could help it, not ever. In fact, the more I tried to justify and find a place for technology, the more I kept thinking about what was being lost. Sure, showing a YouTube video is a fine way to generate conversation, but it is the conversation, and not the act of watching a video that matters, and in an English class, where the subject is language itself, does it really make sense to show a video? Technology, no doubt, provides a vast array of new options, but do we really need more of these kinds of options, and do any of them actually aid in the learning process or simply provide us with a temporary distraction from it? What are we sacrificing when we introduce new technologies into the curriculum? And what kinds of messages are we sending to our students?

In an age of increasing technological innovation and scientific breakthrough it is easy to get caught up in the idea that, as educators, we must prepare our students for the brave new worlds that await them. As our lives and our relationships with others become more and more mediated through the use of technology, it seems reasonable that we would teach our students how to use those new technologies to their advantage. To question this assumption, to ask why seems like a selfish, almost churlish endeavor, designed to actively cheat our students out of their right to self-empowerment. Nonetheless, once the question is out of the box the answers become increasingly complicated.

First of all, the use of web technology in the classroom not only assumes that it will remain a viable and useful tool (rather than, say, going the way of the Dewey Decimal System and the card catalog) but that the use of such technologies are a social good. The idea that the university or academy, funded by Verizon, should feel obliged to keep pace with the entrepreneurial fits of the World Wide Web, or that we should feel ashamed not to be on top of the latest marketing device disguised as a communication platform, seems shortsighted.

Indeed, one of the things that frightens me about the often uncritical embrace of technology in the classroom is the way that it potentially dehumanizes the educational experience, where students spend more and more time both in and out of class looking at video screens, computer monitors, Blackberries, and iPhones, rather than looking at the world around them, talking to each other, or most importantly, spending time alone with their thoughts. Sure, constant e-mail, tweeting, texting, and ironic Facebook updates may feel like meaningful communication, but what’s really being communicated besides a desperate desire for the type of community that, without the distance digital communication makes possible, would already exist?

What concerns me most, however, is not what we are introducing into our classrooms—after all, I admit a preference for polished, word processed documents instead of smudgy handwritten ones—but what we might be losing. I’d like to make the argument that, despite our increasingly technological lives, or perhaps because of them, the creation and conservation of technology-free spaces where people can, and are encouraged to communicate face-to-face, free of distraction, with nothing more than their unique temperaments and their private store of knowledge and eloquence, seems more and more important to me. Our students are already attention-deprived and overloaded. The idea of forcing them back onto the Internet, especially to privately owned, for-profit websites like Facebook and YouTube, as part of their schoolwork, seems at best counterproductive and at worst incredibly irresponsible, even unethical. Instead, shouldn’t we be encouraging our students to carve out spaces of time for themselves that are free from the distractions of the market and the market driven popular culture that typifies the Internet. Shouldn’t we be encouraging them to be skeptical and critical of this mass culture, or better yet, encouraging them to ignore it completely. Should we not be inviting them instead to think in full sentences; to write more than 140 characters at a time; and to have the self-reliance and self-sufficiency to be alone with themselves and their thoughts for more than the seven or eight hours they spend unconscious each night.

As a profession we seem to have thoughtlessly embraced the idea of technology precisely because we see it as a way of making learning easier and more accessible for more of our students. Obviously—the logic goes—our students are comfortable using the Internet and social networking tools, so why not allow them to use those skills to learn? This kind of thinking is common among instructors who embrace popular culture because they think it will help their students “relate” to the course material. These are the same teachers who spend class time screening Hollywood versions of Shakespeare because students are supposedly incapable of understanding Elizabethan English or who teach rap lyrics or song lyrics as poetry, because it’s easier for students to get the difference between a tenor and a vehicle when it’s Tupac or Bob Dylan speaking than when it’s Dylan Thomas or Langston Hughes. But our calling as educators extends beyond merely providing our students with opportunities to learn material. As educators we are also responsible for providing our students with experiences which they would not otherwise have access to, such as the experiences that result from finding solutions to difficult problems, engaged and thoughtful conversation, and collegial argument. But even more than this, it is important that we offer our students alternatives to the kinds of experiences provided by the technology of mass media. If we are going to insist on teaching them how to get by in the corporate world they’ve been given, we need to at least teach them that other worlds are still possible.