Guerrillas in the Midst

May 28, 2010 By

This post originally was published at my personal blog, Bloviate. If you wish to comment, click on the title and add to the discussion there!

One of the secret missions behind my work with Mikhail Gershovich in developing an open source publishing platform at Baruch College is to gradually integrate into the school’s general education curriculum the deep, critical examination of how digital tools are changing the way we think and live. This curricular purpose is not currently present on any kind of scale at our college. Because of political realities at the school, we’ve very much built Blogs@Baruch in a haphazard, take-what-we-can-get kind of way, and we haven’t had the luxury of being systematic about the thing. But we’re now two years into our experiment, and we’re widely established enough throughout the college that we’re confident we will continue to operate. We’re now able to theorize what we’ve done and to strengthen our case for more attention to the types of curricular innovation we’d like to see.

Creative Commons License photo credit: jectre

Of course, we’re far from the only ones considering these questions, and we’re certainly not the only ones who’ve borrowed the terminology of revolution to cheekily make our case. Matt Gold has already done a fantastic job creating a hit-and-run guide to guerrilla pedagogy that delineates the tools, philosophy, and connective processes requisite at its core. Gardner Campbell has argued for a trajectory in liberal education towards the development of media fluency and in favor of a shift from both “signature pedagogies” to “pedagogies of signature” and from general education to generalizable education. Gardner has also spoken passionately about the role of movements around the integration of digital tools into the work of higher education in destabilizing the institutions at our center. Joss Winn and Mike Neary have written of “The Student as Producer,” connecting pedagogies that place the student squarely in the role of knowledge-maker within broader efforts to combat the corporatization of higher education and to reimagine a university that for once might be fully committed to the development of humanistic thinkers. Jeff McClurken has argued smartly that digital literacy is something that should be developed within the disciplines and shown how, though I’d guess he’d agree that such an approach does not preclude a broader college-wide addressing of these questions. And besides being actively involved in building the tools from the ground up, Boone Gorges has brilliantly theorized the structural similarities between the types of communication and personalized connections that happen within social media and the specific goals of a college’s general education program.

There are others, many others, who’ve been doing this type of work and thinking, and their models and theories are very much the fuel that propels us along our path.

Che Groom

Creative Commons License photo credit: 5tein

Blogs@Baruch has evolved along three broad publishing contours in its first two years, and each can be seen as a step towards developing a foundation upon which those in power at the College might do some tough thinking about how the general education could be reimagined. This said, I have no idea whether or not they might do this, or even when the gen ed was last revisited. But if they call, we’ll be ready to contribute what we’re learning.

Non-Course Publishing

We’ve become the go-to shop for folks at the College who want to get stuff online. Student publications, online magazines, faculty development sites, exhibits, extra-curricular project journals, document reviews using CommentPress, grant competitions and committee sites… we host them all.

Members of our community now recognize that they no longer need HTML skills to be able to publish to the web or CSS skills to control how what they publish looks. On the flip side, each of the individuals and groups involved in these projects has been forced to confront questions of audience, tone, purpose, tools, design, and connectedness. This has spurred conversations that otherwise might have been offloaded to a contracted web group, or might not have happened at all. The Schwartz Institute, through our nurturing of these conversations, has joined the staff of the Newman Library at the center of thinking on campus about the role of digital tools in the varied work of the college. This broad “culture of self-publishing” is raising the overall digital literacy of staff, faculty, and administrators at the College by creating and sustaining unavoidable engagement with the implications of doing professional and intellectual work on the open web. This engagement has been more incidental than systematic, but it’s been ongoing and persistent, and more and more people are taking part.

Course-based Publishing

Our most exciting work is taking place inside of courses. We’ve supported more than a hundred course sections over the last two years, and they are inspiring faculty members towards more experimental and experiential pedagogy. We’ve featured much of this work at Cac.ophony.org. Some courses are using Blogs@Baruch as little more than an open CMS, taking advantage of a flexible aesthetic to create a more intimate relationship between students and their engagement with course materials online. Others have used the system to explode students’ prevailing understandings of audience by creating and capturing collaborative writing through the integration of wikis, scaffolding research papers in public groups, or bringing in the voices of outside authorities. Many have used the power of writing for classmates’ consumption (and beyond) to raise the stakes of an assignment. Some have staged engagement with a difficult text through a dialogic close reading that evolves into performed knowledge about the themes of the work. Many have taken advantage of lowered barriers of entry to the production of multi-media work to create opportunities for students to engage with course themes and texts through video and other media, and then to write about how the process impacts their understanding of the genres engaged in the course. Most have embraced the connectedness of the web to integrate additional resources into their teaching and expose students to critical research methods.

These courses have done three types of work. First, they’ve produced models that are replicable within this college and beyond, and fueled a buzz and interest in teaching with digital tools that hadn’t been very present on campus until recently. Second, they’re helping us develop a local “community of practice” committed to dialogue around the implications of digital pedagogy, which has filtered into the faculty development initiatives already afoot at the Schwartz Institute. And, third and most importantly, these courses have worked to instill in students a critical sense of how to exist intellectually and professionally on the Web by spurring dozens of small conversations about online ethics, linking, sharing, identity, performance, knowledge building, collaboration, mashing, hacking, looking, listening, and learning. These conversations have not been systematized, but they’re most definitely happening.

Social Publishing

The third contour in which we’ve been working is social publishing. This is an infant compared to the two toddlers described above, and is based primarily in our work supporting Freshman Seminar, which draws all incoming students into conversations on Blogs@Baruch. I’ll spare you the details of how the project has evolved, which you can read up on by following this tag on Cac.ophony.org. We hope that our pending integration of BuddyPress will both challenge some of the alienation that happens on a purely commuter campus, and enable what Matt Gold has called “serendipitous connections” around shared interests that otherwise might not happen. Matt and George Otte’s framing and stewardship of the CUNY Academic Commons is very much our model for structuring and naming such a possibility. This coming Fall our first year students will be writing creative blog posts that integrate freely-available digital tools to examine their own processes of identity formation. In doing so, they will be sharing and connecting their experiences to others at the school and beyond, and also reflecting upon the choices they make and tools they use. This is non-credit bearing work, but we hope that it will provide for our students a critical base from which to use the web to engage and learn that they will carry through their four years at the College.

All of the above work intersects only incidentally with the formal general education curriculum at the College. And, yet, I think we can safely say that what we’ve built with Blogs@Baruch has impacted the generalizable education that our students are getting. What’s needed, however, is some kind of systematization, which will create more points of reflection and articulation, more staging towards digital and media fluency, and more buy-in across the curriculum. As guerrillas, we’ve made and built our critique while modeling an alternative approach to supporting educational technology that saves the College money and raises its profile. If we are indeed in the midst of the revolution that will remake higher education, then we stand with our colleagues at the vanguard, arguing that universities must embrace the core values of the open web, and work them systematically into curricula.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Higher Education

A Memorial: Saul Bruckner

May 27, 2010 By 7 Comments

When I heard that my high school principal Saul Bruckner had died in his Mill Basin home on May 1, I was shocked, but in an aimless sort of way. It felt huge, impossible—a massive loss and somehow a very personal one. And yet while I had a vast sense that Mr. Bruckner had influenced me deeply, I had no luck when I tried to articulate that influence to the people around me. “My high school principal died,” I told my roommate. “He was really incredible.” And then I’d trail off.

So, like legions of other Murrow alums, I’ve been spending time thinking about just what it is exactly that makes me feel like I want a bust of Mr. Bruckner in my living room. Many of us appreciate the important teacher figures from our pasts, but what of the folks who didn’t necessarily teach us long division or what the Rococo period was about? What of the learning that comes from that dispersed thing known as educational leadership?– from administrators, of all people?

The first thing to mention about Mr. Bruckner is just how old school he was, in a new school kind of way. He was a truly progressive educator who didn’t need to appropriate slang or wear a whistle in order to “connect” with young people. He rose up the ranks in the New York City school system (back when it was still a Board of Education, and not a Department) as a social studies teacher, became assistant principal at Dewey High School, and eventually opened Murrow in 1974.

Edward R. Murrow High School is known for the many progressive aspects of its structure and approach, but Mr. Bruckner himself came across as a pretty subdued, non-controversial guy. You’d imagine that a principal who allowed students freedom of choice in their academic pursuits, outlawed bells and hall sweeps and detention and sports teams, gave students the benefit of the doubt when it came to unstructured time, and fiercely defended music and arts programs might be more of a hippie crusader in moccasins than a buttoned-up older gentleman in neat tweed suit jackets. Not so.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Still, those are the facts. When the Times published a short article about his memorial service, I started honing in on what I found so unique about Mr. Bruckner.  The photo that accompanied the article did it; Mr. Bruckner, with his arms folded, his red name tag jutting out from his jacket, listening intently to three students surrounding him, all of whom look like they’ve got more than one bone to pick with the guy. That was his usual posture—arms crossed, ears open, completely committed– and it wasn’t rare for Mr. Bruckner to be outnumbered. I stood in front of him this way many times, standing with my friends and shooting off at the mouth about something or other, while Mr. Bruckner stood stock-still and listened—sometimes with a bemused smile, sometimes with a look of mild judgment. Perhaps the man closed the door to his oblong office (where he also taught his 7:30am AP American History course) and privately screamed into a rattan pillow—if he did, we never caught on.

The man was consistency itself, and I’d guess that he realized just how important that was to us, to see him standing by the main entrance every morning as we entered clutching our bagels. He was an eloquent man of few words, but clear actions. Students at Murrow were allowed to lounge in the hallways during “free” periods (which weren’t called “periods” at all), but if we were obliviously sitting next to a clump of trash, Bruckner would suddenly swing around a corner to pitch it in the garbage, reminding us at once that he was boss, it was our building, and no task was too insignificant for him– or us.

Mr. Bruckner’s death crystallized for me even further when I read an article penned by one of my former English teachers at Murrow, Katherine Schulten. Ms. Schulten is now editor of The Learning Network, and she identifies five poignant lessons for educators that she took from working with Mr. Bruckner.  The final one, “Kids come first,” coupled with her description of Mr. Bruckner—kindness, intelligence, commitment and vision—packaged up exactly what I’d wanted to say all along. How remarkable to observe someone with so little (discernable) ego, a fellow who never went out of his way to strut his feathers and yet implemented such a strong vision at the same time. To be an educator who skips the bloviating and lingers on the students while constructing a school culture that follows his thoughtful concepts– and then he hangs out long enough to really see it flourish and sustain? A term that Mr. Bruckner himself taught me is the only one I can think to use: rara avis.

Ms. Schulten’s article got me thinking: as someone who routinely stands in front of clusters of young people and some days finds the crown of educator a very difficult one to wear, ignoring Mr. Bruckner’s legacy outside of its most general terms shouldn’t be an option. Sure, the life of an adjunct lecturer and Communication Fellow is very different from that of a high school principal, but that’s no excuse to disregard the challenge that his example puts forth. I heard the news about Mr. Bruckner’s passing during the crowded and frustrating end-of-semester crush, when students were filling my  inbox with frantic emails arguing about grades, contesting plagiarism charges, pleading for forgiveness. Some days it’s incredibly difficult to maintain empathy, priorities, and focus—the kind of focus, I realize, Mr. Bruckner persisted with, day in, and day out, for so many years.

Numerous Facebook groups have already popped up paying tribute to Mr. Bruckner, and an accompanying campaign to have the street outside of the school renamed in his honor would be a fitting memorial to a life’s work that thrived at the humble intersection of Avenue L and 17th Street. An equally moving tribute is represented by the many students who, like me, have been newly considering just what was in this special sauce and where  we might apply it ourselves. I’d suspect that it won’t just be about picking up that lone piece of trash in the hallways, but also about that particular blend of action and patience. Still, it’s an educational riddle worth committing time to: how did he do it? And how can we?

Filed Under: Administration, Asides, New York, Pedagogy, Process, Style, To Ponder Tagged With: ,

Meet the Lies

May 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Bible pages
Creative Commons License photo credit: almoko

On Sunday morning, I heard this NPR re-broadcast of Bob Garfield’s interview with Carol Rosenberg from the Miami Herald on “On the Media.” Rosenberg along with three Canadian journalists reporting on military tribunals at Guantanamo have been barred by the Pentagon from any further reporting on all trials at Guantanamo.  The Pentagon insists that Rosenberg violated reporting rules by providing the name of an Interrogator at Guantanamo.  However, and this is the odd bit, said Interrogator had already revealed his own identity to the Toronto Star two years prior.  This, according to any respectable rules of reason, makes it a categorical impossibility that Rosenberg “revealed” anything by printing the Interrogator’s name.  Rosenberg has been reporting on Guantanamo for over 8 years and is a dedicated, and more importantly, appropriately “seasoned” and skeptical reporter of U.S. military activities in Guantanamo.  In the interview, she notes:

“I guess what maybe you’re asking is whether the people who handle the Guantanamo message don’t want experienced reporters down there.  And I can say that it does thrive on the confusion and inexperience and ignorance of the people who are first-timers.  They have for years brought people down in hope that they’ll tell the same story over and over again.  That’s why the package tours boast that they’ve had hundreds and hundreds of reporters through there.  The only way you cover Guantanamo well, I argue, is by going back again and again and covering it when you’re not at Guantanamo, and reading the files and reading the motions and being prepared before you ever go down there to understand the totality of the story.  They want to create the impression that this is battlefield-style justice. You know, you pull everybody in, stick them in some tents, throw together a court, and have a variation on a court-martial.  You know, they have rotations of guards.  They have rotations of escorts.  Even the lawyers haven’t been the same for all these years.  The only people who are the same in this instance are the detainees and the reporters.  And I don’t think that they’re necessarily comfortable with the fact that we’ve logged more hours and perhaps know the history of this case better.”

Rosenberg is now, one might imagine, heading back to more mild reporting in Miami.  Now perhaps she can finally report on how to get those pesky kittens out of trees.

On the Media’s interview with Rosenberg was immediately followed by a story about two college students, Chas Danner, Paul Breer, who have started an online venture that aims to “fact-check” the guests on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” This weekly news program is the longest-running broadcast show ever.  It boasts an equally long history of inviting politicians, economists, foreign policy experts, etc., on to discuss issues on its weekly program.  Including, as you might imagine, the political and legal “goings-on” at Guantanamo.  But, and this is the additional odd bit, Meet the Press does not fact-check its guests.  It publishes show transcripts online, but does not actually make sure that the claims uttered as truth in those transcripts are, well, true.  Maybe it will seem even a bit more odd if I tell you that Meet the Press frequently attracts nearly 3 million viewers.  That seems like a lot of people to tell almost-truths to.  I think that there is an obvious question here.  If our government can routinely bar serious and pertinent reporting on, well, serious and pertinent issues, and our mainstream news media outlets have an “iffy” relationship with holding those (deeply) involved in these serious and pertinent issues (I’m talking to you, Mr. Cheney) responsible for uttering blatant falsehoods, then what happens to the truth?

In my philosophy courses, I routinely teach my students that we all have a responsibility to discover the truth.  And they, in turn, routinely tell me that there is no such thing as “real truth.”  Truth, they tell me, is just the unchecked, unpolished claims of some authority with no need to be accountable.  I am admittedly a natural-born epistemologist, and I find such accounts of truth very worrisome.  However, after 8 years of Bush-Cheney, and 2 years of not-such-much-”Change,” I’m starting to suspect that their deeply cynical attitudes toward the truth are rooted in something other than their young age and lack of experience in the world.  I would like to hypothesize that their attitudes are likely rooted in something akin to Ronald Reagan’s “trickle-down economics.”  Whole truths will benefit the well-off and the rest of us will get by on half-truths and a few outright lies.  But, as I tell my skeptical students, here’s the rub.  We know what it means to lie.  We know that the truth matters.  (Or why would the Pentagon bother preventing Rosenberg from reporting it?).  So perhaps the most serious and pertinent question of all is the following: Who does it matter to?

Filed Under: Politics

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s course?

May 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

coney island // astroland
Creative Commons License photo credit: mandyxclear

Each year, as the spring semester comes to an end, my thoughts inevitably turn to the whims of summer in New York City: long bike rides to Coney Island, rooftop parties and, unfortunately, two-and-a-half hours in a classroom at least three days a week. I am a summer adjunct!

It might seem counter-intuitive to the whole concept of, you know, “enjoying your summer,” but I actually kind of look forward to my summer courses. The main difference, of course, is one of time: In the summer, you only spend five weeks with your students, though the actual class time is usually double that of fall/spring classes. This means that the class becomes effectively super-concentrated; material must be adjusted to fit the new time parameters, and this can often present something of a challenge. After all, two-and-a-half hours is a long time! Without diversifying classroom activities, the experience is going to be grueling for everyone involved.

One of the reasons I enjoy the summer schedule is because of the longer class time, which I find allows me much more room to experiment, improvise, and develop the pedagogical techniques I’ve encountered as a Writing Fellow at Baruch. While I might not have time to do so in the fall or spring, in the summer I feel freer to break my students into groups and have them work on oral presentations together, or to show brief movie clips and “scaffold” low stakes writing assignments from the discussion that ensues (an example can be found here). Either way, the extended class time provides an opportunity to practice new teaching methodologies while staving off the beasts of boredom and exhaustion.

In contrast to the longer class time, the summer session itself is exceedingly brief. How much can a student really absorb in only five weeks? Should a teacher automatically reduce the scope of a class during summer sessions? Since I teach American history, does this mean that I should cut out a few decades, to have the class cover less material in the interest of time? There are of course, different philosophies on this, but I would like to suggest that “covering less material” is not necessarily the best solution to the five-week course problem.

In fact, just as the longer class time provides room to experiment, the shorter overall semester can also be employed to distinct pedagogical advantage. This summer I am teaching a course on the Vietnam War, whose fall and spring permutations contain a much wider “survey-style” approach to all the varied aspects of the era. I plan to have the summer version focus on just a few aspects of the war, in much greater detail, hoping that the students will have an equivalently useful experience through their deeper engagement with smaller bits of material. This way, I can shape the course to the imperatives of the summer schedule without (hopefully) shorting students in the process.

What are your tips for getting through the summer?

Filed Under: CUNY, teaching Tagged With: ,

Once Again Back it’s the Incredible…

May 18, 2010 By 3 Comments

the blog animal, ZOE, blogfessor number one.

For the second straight year, we’re awarding the Blogfessor of the Year Award to Zoe Sheehan Saldana, of Baruch’s Fine and Performing Arts Department. The award comes with priority support from the Schwartz Institute on all online publishing endeavors. Of course, Zoe already has that because she’s so awesome.

Zoe developed three sites on Blogs@Baruch this academic year.  Last Fall, she did a Do-it-Yourself Publishing site that used FeedWordPress to syndicate nineteen individual journals where students documented making their own books from scratch (some digital, some not).

This Spring, she used a site in her Basic Graphic Communication course… here’s a description of her course and how she used her course blog from her “About” page:

…this course

This course introduces the graphic design process and methodology. Conceptual and creative thinking is stressed and understood through problem-solving assignments based on research, readings, and classroom demonstrations. The student is introduced to graphic design principles and exposed to historical and contemporary models and current standards of advertising and design. The Macintosh computer is included as the primary graphic design environment. This class is a prerequisite for all advanced Graphic Communication courses. Complete course guide available here, as a PDF file.

…this blog

This blog is a venue for presenting, exploring, and discussing work, ideas, and topics pertaining to the course.

And, finally, together we developed a site for the Focus on Photography Exhibit which served initially as a processing space for members of the Baruch community to submit photos that they wished to be considered for a physical exhibit (which opened last week at the Mishkin Gallery).  The site’s since evolved into an online companion displaying close to 200 images submitted by Baruch students, faculty, and staff.  The submissions process used the TDO Mini Forms plugin to collect information from applicants, allow them to upload their images, and then it published those images to password protected pages where the exhibit judges could asses them. After decisions had been made about which images were accepted for the physical exhibit and which were not, Zoe hacked the Monotone WordPress theme (ideal for photo blogging) to create the online exhibit, which will live beyond the one at Miskhin. The amazing photographic ability of Baruch folks is a topic for another post, but I encourage you to take your time and click through the exhibit to see the fantastic images these folks have captured.

What’s so great about Zoe, beyond her gracious personality and charm, is that she’s exactly what an educational technologist like me needs to get better at what I do: someone who asks questions that I don’t know the answers to, patiently awaits the answer, and works to arrive at a consensus around what can be done with the tools, time, and resources available.  She’s a great collaborator and a creative teacher.  And, as she showed in talks she gave at last year’s CUNY WordCampEd and this year at the Baruch Teaching and Technology Conference, she has a strong grasp of the pedagogical, political, and philosophical impulse behind what we’re trying to do with educational technology at the Schwartz Institute.  As her course blogs and her own art show, she’s an O.E.: Original Edupunk, and both Baruch and the Schwartz Institute are lucky to have her around.

image credit: lumax art

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, BLSCI, Pedagogy Tagged With:

An open letter to the Coen Brothers

May 14, 2010 By 10 Comments

Dear Joel and Ethan,

So, last week I was reading this article complaining about the state of movies today by film producer Linda Obst. She writes that the only ones that seem to get made these days are those based on comic books and video games, with lots of explosions, dumb laughs, and hot boys under the age of 24. Obst blames the recession, arguing that studios have no money, and are therefore completely unwilling to take on the risk of producing movies that are actually thoughtful or well-written if they don’t have sparkly vampires or require 3-D glasses. (Which doesn’t really make sense to me–wouldn’t movies with big stars and killer special effects require tons of money to produce? Do you have any insight on this?)

I guess I had this article somewhere in the back of my mind when I read this story about diploma mills (h/t Jessie Daniels) about a physicist who happened to see a viral pop-up ad for a bogus university, which somehow led to him falling down the rabbit hole, unearthing a vast transnational network of scam artists. It is a fascinating read full of intrigue, as Dr. George Gollin teams up with the FTC and the Secret Service in a sting operation (OPERATION GOLD SEAL!) to chase and bring down diploma mills. It involves the Liberian embassy, a clandestine meeting at the Mayflower Hotel in DC, and Pentagon officials with fake degrees. It’s like some Cold War-era spy thriller, only about diploma mills instead of assassination and state secrets! Who knew?

You guys are smart. I bet you know where this is going. Please, please, please turn Operation Gold Seal into a movie. It seems right up your alley, a kind of madcap noir. Forget about what Obst said about what kind of movies can be produced these days. I’m sure you are just as sick of the CGI-ification of every single cartoon and toy from the ’80s as I am.

Can’t you just picture Russell Crowe as the rogue physics professor? Or perhaps you’d like to go with an older, more distinguished type like Ben Kingsley or Michael Caine. John Cho and George Clooney would make awesome Secret Service agents, and Holly Hunter and Jeff Bridges can be the couple in Spokane who cooked up the diploma mill scheme.

Okay, and just in case Obst is right, how about a compromise: throw in some of those kids from “Twilight” as undergraduate research assistants, and we’re golden.

Thanks for listening.

Sincerely,

A fan

Filed Under: Fun, Media

Technical Changes Causing Cultural Changes. Yes and/or No.

May 13, 2010 By 3 Comments

This blog post is prompted by Clay Shirky’s argument at our 10th Annual Symposium. In his keynote speech, Shirky addressed the fast technical advancement we are experiencing globally and argued that these speedy technical changes are “causing cultural changes.” His thought-provoking point has stayed with me because I think that this cause and effect relationship deserves some untangling.

Doubtless that, as Shirky showed in his speech, as well as in his book, Here Comes Everybody, the increased access to the public fora of the internet has led to increased awareness of a vox populi able to perform organized action and carry out successful grassroots movements. The internet and sites like Facebook or Meetup has also contributed to a dramatic re-definition of the personal and the private by making public information hitherto perceived off-limits. Yet, do these changes amount to “cultural changes” indeed? Does the unprecedented flow of information via technical innovations affect our moral and ethical values, causing a profound shift in cultural norms, or does it lead “only” to changes in the way we continue to perform these values, adding speed and efficiency perhaps, without altering the basic structures of our various cultures? And shouldn’t we argue that, instead of having a unidirectional relationship between technical changes and cultural changes, these changes are mutually influential, meaning that given cultural norms also determine how technical innovations are being put to use in a given cultural context? Yes, there is a universalizing, levelling and westernizing effect that reaches across the globe affecting those with access to the internet while leaving what I assume is still the larger part of the world’s population relatively immune to such changes. And then we again end up with a rather elite western notion of things going our way without really bothering to note that while we do have a large share in the monopoly over the information highways, there are still many sideroads that remain unaffected by us.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Symposium, Technology

Storytelling and business ethics

May 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Bernard L. Schwartz spoke at the Schwartz Communications Institute symposium on April 30th. “I’m a capitalist,” he said, and a “big D democrat.” Schwartz narrated the financial crisis from the perspective of his own political and moral values, that a company has a responsibility to its employers, shareholders, and the public at large. He spoke about capitalism as a system in which work supports safety and human flourishing. This, I thought like a person seeing something she’d only read about in books for the first time, is a capitalist social democrat. But I heard the story Schwartz told first, not the ideology, the way he told the story was my introduction to a particular perspective, formed by experience and knowledge that I myself do not have.

This semester, a professor whose class I’m supporting asked his students to give their opinion on whether or not technological development should be regulated, if it should be up to corporations and market demand, or if government should intervene. The students’ opinions, values, and beliefs varied widely. I found everyone’s perspective intriguing and compelling. As with Schwartz, hearing individuals speak about their economic values and opinions humanized what have predominantly been abstract or historical economic concepts to me. Cass Sunstein’s point that the proliferation of media is making it less likely for people with different political affiliations to talk to each other seemed right, as I realized how exceptional this situation was for me.

While each of the students seemed insightful, willing to probe and test their ideas against other opinions and contradicting evidence, entirely capable of reflective judgment about economics and ethics, it was very clear to me that this was the first time they’d been asked this question in their time at Baruch. I looked at the listing of courses, and found a course called “Ethics, Economics and the Business System,” in the Philosophy Department, a 3000 level class. I wanted to make it a general requirement.

On a recent Charlie Rose show about Goldman Sachs, Newsweek writer and Princeton journalism and writing professor Evan Thomas was asked if the recent scandal is going to keep “the best and brightest” students from the firm.

April 27, Charlie Rose.

Charlie Rose: Is Goldman Sachs a place that the brightest that the smartest people coming out of universities want to go to work, if they want to go to Wall Street, that’s where they want to go?

Evan Thomas: I teach at Princeton, believe me Princeton kids want to go to Goldman. Oh yes, overwhelmingly, even more now. The message that’s Goldman is bad news has not filtered down to the class at Princeton, lemme tell ya. At Princeton pretty much everybody wants to go to Goldman Sachs.

Charlie Rose: What does that say about the values of kids in college today? That’s a question for a whole other show.

Evan Thomas: But I’m telling you, the mystique of Wall Street has not died, even as Congress tries to destroy it. Kids still. You know why? Cause they think it’s a sure bet. They still think if you go to Goldman, Goldman is going to navigate these waters. I’m still going to have a house in Greenwich and a boat.

Charlie Rose: And a G5.

Evan Thomas and Charlie Rose laugh.

Gillian Tett: But they also join it thinking, I can do it for a couple of years, I’ll keep my soul, and then I can get out with the money. Now one of the reasons why these emails (from one of Golman’s traders) are so fascinating is they illustrate very graphically the kind of conflicts joining Goldman Sachs would actually face. He hasn’t been there that long, he can see the contradictions and the hypocrisy of what he’s doing, and yet he’s still playing the game.

I wonder how much opportunity Baruch students have to explore their own ethical perspective. I’m teaching a public speaking class this summer, and hoping to make it a personal essay assignment. I wonder how often it comes up for Baruch students, as they make their way to graduation, and if professors here would echo Evan Thomas’s “overwhelmingly, even more” characterization of Princeton. I was glad that, from my limited experience, I wouldn’t.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Symposium

Irresistible Prompts: Engineering Participation

May 11, 2010 By 3 Comments

In early April, Luke Waltzer wrote a post introducing Performing Diasporas: Identities in Motion, an initiative that seeks to raise the profile of the Baruch Performing Arts Center and to infuse the performing arts into the curriculum. To this end, artists-in-residence Maya Lilly, Randy Weston, and Mahayana Landowne will lead a series of workshops for incoming students that interrogate issues of culture and identity in the context of globalization and late capitalism.

This is where Blogs@Baruch enters the picture. I joined Luke in a training session to introduce WordPress to the 2010 peer mentors, each of whom will lead a section of Freshman Seminar come September. Before our session with the peer mentors, we discussed some of the high and low points of the 2009 blogging season in Freshman Seminar. It should be said at the outset that Blogs@Baruch’s support of Freshman Seminar was amazingly successful in 2009 especially in light of the limited time for planning. Blogs@Baruch supported 60 section blogs with 20 students a week for a total of 1200 freshman bloggers, each of whom were tasked with writing six blog posts over the course of the semester, one after each of the required workshops.

But feedback from the peer mentors indicated that buy-in was low among freshmen. Last year’s peer mentors expressed frustration at having to chase after freshmen and repeatedly remind them to complete their blogging assignments. They also told us that the blogging assignments themselves left something to be desired, and that their procedural nature (to report back on the workshop just attended) tended to put a damper on students’ enthusiasm for the task. And finally, the peer mentors expressed a desire to customize the look of the section blogs.

We took each of these critiques seriously and decided to rethink the approach of Blogs@Baruch to Freshman Seminar in light of the concerns raised by peer mentors.  Luke already had plays to open up the WordPress blogging environment, including giving more control to peer mentors over theme selection and plug-in activation, and incorporating social networking functionality through BuddyPress to create a more networked and collegial environment for peer mentors and first year students alike. Luke invited me to join the team that oversees Freshman Seminar to help him address the second critique, that is, to rethink the role of blogging in the Freshman Seminar curriculum. And so last Friday we collaboratively facilitated two sessions with peer mentors, part of which was a brainstorming session to develop more compelling blog post prompts.

Idle brainstorm moment
Creative Commons License photo credit: everdred

The blog post prompts that follow invite students to reflect on the processes of identity construction through various lenses. In different ways, these blog post prompts encourage students to integrate online, social, and multimedia tools into their student identities, and to consider how aspects of their personal history can inform and ultimately enrich their academic work. If they seem repetitive, that’s because they are. Students are actually not required to complete any of them — which is a whole different issue — but in any case, we are hoping to entice them to do some. The idea is to make the blog post prompts so interesting that students feel compelled to do them!

This is what we’ve come up with so far:

1. If you were an iPhone app, which one would be you and why?

2. Use Grooveshark to make a playlist, a soundtrack for your life, and write a blog post explaining the significance of each song.

3. Cheap eats: Write a restaurant review of a inexpensive lunch spot in the Baruch area or around where you live. Include a photograph of the food.

4. Audit your Facebook account, and write about it; OR Google yourself, and share what’s true and what’s not.

5. Pick a stereotype that you think you embody and expand upon, shatter, or embrace it.

6. Consumer identities: What are the five most important brands that you use throughout the day? Why do you think you are drawn to these brands.

7. Choose a cartoon character that is in some way like you, post a picture or a video of this character, and write a blog post explaining your reasoning.

8. Using Paint or a similar program, paint how you see yourself, and post it with an explanation.

9. Record everything you eat in a day and share it. Reflect on what this reveals about your culture and identity.

10. Take photos or record a video of your commute to school. Describe the various spaces you pass through during this process. For instance you might compare the experience of being on the street in your neighborhood, versus being on the bus or the train, versus at Baruch. What stands out to you?

11. Find images related to your heritage on Flickr, and write a blog post explaining their significance.

12. Write a post about your favorite genre of art, and share an example.

13. Take and share a photo of something at Baruch that doesn’t work OR of some ironically defaced signage in the city at large.

14. If you had $1m and had to give it to a charity, which  and why? OR Respond to an open ended, critical thinking philosophical/ethical question, like for example: Is it acceptable to lie under certain circumstances?

15. Search for your name or an idea about you on flickr, and post the first photo that comes up. Compare it to a photo that you think more resembles you.

I plan to revise this list of prompts based on the feedback of the ever-supportive edtech community at CUNY and beyond. Any suggestions? Help me make these prompts irresistible!

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, CUNY, EdTech Tagged With: , ,

Looking Backwards: The U.S. History Survey Course Starting with Obama

May 10, 2010 By 6 Comments

The curriculum in every history course I have ever taken has shared a defining characteristic:  chronological order.  I am looking forward to breaking with this model when I teach Modern American History at Baruch College this summer.

My course units will be standard, and follow Eric Foner’s popular Give Me Liberty! textbook and companion document reader, Voices of Freedom (special thanks to David Parsons for putting me on to these texts).  However, I will present these units backwards relative to the traditional history curriculum.

As described in the course catalogue, this course “surveys United States history from the post-Civil War years to recent times.”  My class be starting with recent times.  Students’ first reading will be chapter 28 of the textbook (“September 11 and the Next American Century”).  The day before the final exam, we’ll finish with the opening chapter (“Reconstruction”).

For over a decade I have aspired to write a history textbook in reverse-chronological order.  The introduction and opening chapter would pose a series of questions about present day society.  Subsequent chapters would incrementally drop further into the past seeking answers to those questions.  I don’t expect that this format would drastically change the content covered.  However, it would encourage a different mindset while reading, creating a sense of searching increasingly deeper into the past to uncover the roots of modern problems and success stories.  There is nothing in the standard curriculum that prohibits this type of thinking, and good history textbooks frequently queue the reader to draw connections between the present and the past.  By the graduate level, all students are expected to give this type of thinking priority, no matter what order the material is presented. But undergraduates (especially those in introductory courses) need practice in developing the skills and background knowledge necessary to read a history textbook critically.

I don’t have time these days to write a textbook, but I do have the opportunity to try out the approach in my classroom.  During the opening weeks of my past classes, my lecture on the relevance of history and the importance of reading sources critically is normally followed by a sudden plunge back in time.  But not this summer.  I made my final decision about the reverse-chronological course design when I was preparing the assignments for the opening classes, requiring students to interpret the meaning of primary documents from the corresponding period.  I believe that the survey course should introduce students to historical methods, and the basic strategies for historical inquiry, including critical reading of primary and secondary sources and communication of historical arguments in written, spoken, and visual formats.  The first set of documents are correspondence and reports from the late-1860s and 1870s; the last set of documents are memos and emails generated in the last few years on controversial subjects like torture and the “War on Terror.”  When teaching students the skill of contextualization and critical reading, it seems natural to begin with the easier materials (learn to ride the bike on a flat surface first, then practice on a hill).  The most recent documents are naturally easier to relate to.  It takes a lifetime of training to work with documents from the 1870s with the same contextual understanding as documents that appeared in your inbox this morning.  Eric Foner is a leading expert on Reconstruction, so the gap between his contextual knowledge of the 1870s and the 2000s is slim.  He recognizes and appreciates the contingency of events that transpired over a century ago, as well as their relevance to the present.  However, for a student in an introductory course, this is not the case.

I have a similar goal in teaching students to read the textbook.  With the reverse-chronological format, the last chapter covers events such as the war in Afghanistan, lending itself well to students’ critical reading.  They are less likely to take the text at face-value, and instead question what is included and excluded from the text.  The reverse-chronological reading breaks the flow of “the story” reminding students that we are not reading a straight-forward narrative of the past, but rather a guidebook to a more dynamic construction of historical knowledge.

I am not the first person to try out this format, although it does seem to be rarely practiced.  The American Historical Association’s monthly publication Perspectives ran an article in 2005 titled “Reinventing the Survey: Pedagogical Strategies for Engagement,” discussing the merits of a few different twists on the survey course, reverse-chronology included.  However, it did not go into detail about the success or failure of the experiment.  I would love to hear from any of you who have tried anything similar to this, or if you have general ideas or advice on the topic.

Filed Under: teaching
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