Gagarin and Limahl walk into a bar…and talk about school curriculum

April 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

April 12th was the 50th anniversary of Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin’s first flight into space in the Vostoc 1 space ship, when he Orbited the earth.

No doubt, the man deserved the Hero of the Soviet Union medal awarded to him, and the glory and fame that came with it.

I learned about Gagarin during a class called “ Knowledge About Society”. The curriculum was build around several themes such as Polish patriotism, building a close relationship with the Soviet brothers, and self defense in case of impending attack form imperialists (yes, that means you!).

From http://www.aerospaceguide.net/spacehistory/yurigagarin.html

It is there that we learned he was Brave, Patriotic and Handsome. A true Soviet Man.

This reminiscing took me down memory lane. What else did I learn in the 1980’s Poland?

The “Knowlegde About Society” class was a catch-all for propaganda and weird pieces of information that did not fit neatly into other subjects. We did not take it very seriously but some of the class trips were rather fun.

We learned how to shoot during a single trip to a shooting range, where we also practiced cleaning and assembling a Kalashnikov. When I arrived in America I was the only teenager in my class with this special skill set.
There were many class exercises when we were told to wear old, decommissioned gas masks and run around the soccer field with them on because it was supposed to help us react in case of a gas attack. The theme of some sort of a danger coming from the USA was common, not surprising given that we were in the middle of the Cold War.

This poster reads: “Be Cautious of the Enemy of the Nation”

From http://c.wrzuta.pl/wi13542/99fc9a1d001fcdc84745f002/Plakaty%20PRL%27u?type=i&key=maM14bouGD&ft=f

 

For a common image of the America-the land- of -social- inequalities, check this poster titled: “The American Advertisement for Shoes.”

From http://www.polskaprl.rejtravel.pl/pp/41.jpg

 

This is a uniform worn by all school children in the 1980s: easily improvised to more or less resemble the basic design, it was customized by different collars, and for the rebels among us, making a statement meant opening up the buttons on the front to reveal some more individualized clothing item, likely made by your grandmother, but still, cooler then the synthetic, clingy, navy blue tent.

From http://www.polskaprl.rejtravel.pl/szkola/2.jpg

 

The school was decorated with few old posters, praising the Communist Party and the Friendship with the Soviet Union, much like this:

From http://www.polskaprl.rejtravel.pl/pp/3.jpg

The letters on this poster: “ ZSSR” is Polish for “the USSR”, and the signs means: “Defender of peace and a friend of children.”

Another theme was the pride in the accomplishments of the nation and socialism.

In this image, the dude walking away from the construction site, hands in his pockets, is described as “a bum”: “ The bum, a deserter from the front of the fight for peace and strong Poland.”

From http://niepoprawni.pl/grafika/bumelant-plakat-propagandowy-prl

 

The economic situation of Poland was often explained to be partly due to the effects of rampant capitalism elsewhere: we in the Soviet block had to manage and help each other in the face of the rest of the world.

From http://republika.pl/printo/warszawa/80te2/w03sl%5B1%5D.jpeg

The stores really did look like this.

And the real economy was taking place on the black market, which the state never attempted to regulate or banish, because it really was central to any survival in the economic system of constant shortages of necessities and all consumer goods.

From http://republika.pl/printo/warszawa/80te1.htm

 

Yummy meat. And here is sugar:

From http://republika.pl/printo/warszawa/80te1.htm

If, walking to school, you happen to see that a delivery truck has arrived at a store, bringing a product, whatever it may be, you would skip class, stand in a long line, and hopefully triumphantly secure some much desired product, like… toilet paper.

From http://m.onet.pl/_m/f81b3974c3f210496819cd5891fcffd2,14,1.jpg

 

Industrializing the country was a point of pride for the Polish Communist Party and a popular topic of propaganda:

“The buildings of socialism are our pride.”
Or:
“1971- 1980: From those years of toil and creativity comes the strength and well being of the fatherland.”

From http://www.polskaprl.rejtravel.pl/pp/16.jpg

 

What else do I remember, ehem, fondly?

From http://europe-band-guides.blogspot.com/2011/04/final-countdown.html

From http://upperplayground.com/wordpress/?p=15361

 

From http://www.wallpaperbase.com/music-depechemode.shtml

 

Filed Under: Art, Asides, Politics

Ciao! Bye! Do widzenia! Tschüss!

December 1, 2010 By 1 Comment

Image taken from http://www.propwishbook.org

Living in a bilingual family raises all kinds of communication issues: questions about what it means to be a native speaker of a language, how to associate each language with a different culture and how to hold your own as a non-native. Sure, in New York City it’s easy to find multilingual households, so it’s a wonderful environment to experience a multiplicity of cultures and languages.

But at home, a family setting is its own microcosm. Having come from a monolingual family I find it fascinating to wonder about just how to create an environment that would lead to a bilingual child. How does one navigate the challenges of introducing a child to a minority language and, no less important, to the minority culture, in a household dominated by the English language and by the ever present American culture.

Developmental psychologists and linguists generally agree that knowing a second language is a big advantage in a globalized world. More than that, bilingualism makes it possible to see the world in more complex ways and to better understand other cultures and countries. There are huge advantages to learning a second language early in life such as developing the cognitive firepower devoted to language acquisition, having improved attention span and it is definitely easier later to learn additional languages. Not so long ago, skeptics argued that bilingualism confuses kids or causes language delays.

When kids mixed languages and choose to speak in a funny concoction of two languages, they appeared to be confused, when in fact they were making sense of the world in which every object has two names ( and in some case a gender as well.) We now know that being bilingual has no down side.

Raising a bilingual child requires a major commitment from all family members but, in particular, from the speaker of the minority or non-native language in the household. It requires a special effort, particularly when it is difficult for a child to find speakers of the minority language or to find educational material in that language. There are also varying degrees of bilingualism: from understanding the language spoken to you by family members, to being able to speak it yourself, and finally to fluently read and communicate with near native fluency.

One of one of the most common methods of teaching bilingualism is known as “one language, one location method.” It works by designating areas of life, sometimes areas of the home, where a minority language will be exclusively spoken. For instance, while English is the dominant language in the school and with peers, the minority language will always be used at home or during weekends or perhaps only at dinnertime. This requires both parents to be able to speak that minority language. Another method, often considered easier and perhaps better at achieving quicker results is the “one person, one language” method, where a minority speaker in the house uses his or her language exclusively to speak to the child. Many families which are not fluent in a second or third language find ways to introduce a child to another language and culture by, for instance, sending him or her to a kindergarten where a foreign language is spoken or hiring a nanny who speaks a foreign language exclusively.

Even if one of the parents is fluent in a minority language and is devoted to helping a child become bilingual, competence in two languages and cultures is a difficult thing to achieve. The ability to devote appropriate time and resources to this task can be made more difficult by just how rare the minority language is, or how difficult it is to provide the child with meaningful interactions with the speakers of the second language. As kids grow into teenagers, new problems appear, from rebellion against a language that is not spoken by the child’s peers and may seem archaic or strange, to the child’s diminished interest in learning the second language.

Regardless of the challenges I think it is worthwhile raising a bilingual child. What is your method? Advice? Experience?

Filed Under: ESL, Language

The Importance of Being Earnestly Edited

August 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment

palin-edits

If your students have any doubts about the importance of good copy editing, perhaps you could use this for “show and tell”.

Filed Under: Fun, Grading, Language, Pedagogy

Fun With Clickers!

May 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment

language-chartThe Finance Economics team recently experimented with using the Turning Point Technology. It is an audience response system which allows students to participate in presentations or lectures by submitting responses to interactive questions.

Each student holds one of the thin little clickers and answers the questions you placed in your Power Point slides. You can see the results immediately (or hide them from the class if you choose).

We were apprehensive about having to learn new software and then adjusting it to work with a Power Point presentation and a workshop we have been working on for months already. But it worked very well. The IT resources tech support person was happy to train us, it took barley half and hour. A little experimenting later and we were able to figure out how to make it work for us. It was as easy as creating additional slides to add to our Power Point. But the benefits were clear: we were able to ask students to respond to questions which then allowed us to introduce a related element of the workshop, or helped us explain a point we were making, or, at the end of the session, we were able to ask student to asses the workshop: what they learned, found useful, found challenging. After the session, with a click of a button, we printed out a report with percentage and graphical representation of the answers (see the fragment of it at the picture attached to this post). We designed very simple “yes” and “no” questions but the possibilities are endless.

The added bonus is that the box of clickers for students is brought to the classroom and then taken away after the class is over, by an IT person. You don’t even have to pick it up. Hopefully, some of our Institute’s PCs will have the Turning Point installed. You can also try it on your home PC. Give me a holler if you need help figuring it out.

Filed Under: Assessment, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Feedback, Uncategorized

The ethics of email…

March 3, 2009 By 1 Comment

08ethicist-1901Here is the letter to the NYTimes Ethicist:

“I am a tenured professor. My provost asked me to evaluate an overseas colleague. I did so, responding in an e-mail message. The provost then contacted the colleague, quoting my report and attributing it to me. I was stunned: such evaluations are assumed to be confidential. When I complained, the provost replied, “If it’s in an e-mail, it’s public,” adding that our colleague deserves to know what is being said about him and by whom. Your opinion? J.H., NEW YORK”

What do you think? I am surprised that the provost thought that email being the mode of communication, somehow changes the fact that it is still an evaluation. Who is right?

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, E-mail, Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication

Cool phones and guide mini ponies.

February 9, 2009 By 1 Comment

super phone

I want a cool phone. I am going to hold out ( with my old chunky Nokia) for a super duper model that can do all the things Japanese cell phones can do: read barcodes, serve as a credit card, have fingerprinting system to protect my data. Wow.
This might happen soon thanks to some amazing technology being developed to serve the needs of the disabled. New software developed for cell phones will allow low vision users to read supermarket products info or street signs. Or how about a program which allows the physically disabled to guide a computer mouse by neural impulses, or imagine a solar system visualization program where a blind person would use a forced feedback device to feel three-dimensional reconstructions of terrain on other planets (whaaaat???). Soon there will be worldwide open-source Web site on which disabled persons and software developers can collaborate on new ideas and add to existing programs. Most of these projects are run by universities and supported by some business like Goggle, but they are to be non- commercial, open-source projects. Very cool.

And on a related note, check out this New York Times Magazine article about the guide animals for the disabled. It is not just dogs anymore. Now it’s monkeys for quadriplegia and agoraphobia, guide miniature horses, a goat for muscular dystrophy, a parrot for psychosis and any number of animals for anxiety, including cats, ferrets, pigs, iguanas and ducks.

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, Interpersonal Communication, Media, Technology, Tools, Uncategorized

Information overload! (or, the election is driving me crazy!)

October 31, 2008 By 1 Comment

Do you remember when there were only two state owned TV channels and they mostly showed footage of the old First of May Parades, or Russian movies about a romantic love affair between a brave female tractor driver and a burly construction worker who made up four hundred percent of his production norm? You don’t remember? Ok, so maybe you did not grow up in Eastern Europe. Now, information is bombarding us form all directions, and it is hard to resist checking your email multiple times a day, reading news, not just daily but hourly, and, if you are a foreigner, checking the immigrant press in the country you are now living in, but also, thanks to internet, checking out the publications from your home land. How much did Sarah Palin spend on clothes? Who endorsed Barak today? Where is the next Bike Kill happening? Did Polish minister of health really say that women should not request an epidural because they need to handle a “normal” childbirth? Who wants to be my new Facebook friend? What’s new on cac.ophony.org? What are other grad students at the Graduate Center writing about? It’s all overwhelming, but also exhaustingly exciting.

Of course we need information to make sense of the complex world around us, to be better people, better citizens, better voters, better humanitarians, better teachers. As graduate students we also need reliable data to built our scientific arguments, and the multiplicity of information can make it easier to access a lot of different data sources.

Hyewon in her post “Deep Attention and Hyper Attention”, talks about research showing that we are moving away from a generation of “deep attention”, the ability to concentrate on a single subject for long periods, toward a generation of “hyper attention”, the tendency to prefer multitasking and high levels of stimulation. ObamaAlvin Toffler in “Future Shock” (Random House, 1971), theorized that the human brain has finite limits on how much information it can absorb and process and argued that information overload will eventually lead to widespread physical and mental disturbances, because with overloaded brain thinking and reasoning become dulled, decision-making flawed and, in some cases, impossible.

I think somehow we are able to manage the flow, but it is not an easy task and includes some time management techniques and making choices.

I can’t wait for the election to be over , so perhaps I can take a breather from the constant news cycle. Not that I am complaining, I am doing just fine, ok, ok, chicken soup, pirates, Colin Powell, whaaaaaat?

Filed Under: Fun, Media, Politics

som thawtz on cmUnik8shn

February 12, 2008 By 1 Comment

socrates-cartoon.gifEach semester, as I introduce myself and the Schwartz Institute to new students, I talk briefly about our philosophy and the importance of communication in all disciplines. I also think about how political and empowering it is to teach communication. Socrates believed that: “to become eloquent is to activate one’s humanity, to apply the imagination, and to solve the practical problems of human living.” We at the Institute stress the Holy Trinity of the written, oral and computer-mediated communication.

But Socrates believed (or maybe he just liked to postulate…) that the young should not learn how to read until they learn to prove, analyze and internalize knowledge (leading them ultimately to posses wisdom and virtue). Literacy would undercut that effort by allowing students to merely decode information, without the necessary skill of internalizing it.

Cognitive neuroscientist, Maryanne Wolf, thinks that Socrates’ concerns warrant a second look as we enter a historical transition in prevalent modes of communication.
She writes (“Socrates’ nightmare”, The Boston Globe, September 6, 2007) about “the plight of the reading brain as it encounters this technologically rich society.” She argues that literacy – as a “miracle” and a skill that transformed the neural circuitry of the brain and the intellectual development of the species – is threatened. This is supposedly “a consequence of the transition to a digital epoch that is affecting every aspect of our lives, including the intellectual development of each new reader.” From the neuroscience vintage point, there is apparently not enough research to answer the questions: Will the students become so accustomed to immediate access to escalating on-screen information that they will fail to probe beyond the information given to the deeper layers of insight, imagination and knowledge that have led us to this stage of human thought? Or, will the new demands of information technologies to multitask, integrate and prioritize vast amounts of information help to develop equally, if not more valuable, skills that will increase human intellectual capacities, quality of life and collective wisdom as a species?” Brain research shows that learning to read (a skill by no means natural to our species) may help us “to go beyond the decoded text to think new thoughts of our own.”

But, would Socrates argue that we should forbid the use of technology until the students learn to be critical thinkers? C’mon, don’t tell me that you are not just a tiny bit tempted by this idea, especially when you receive an email from one of your students, sent via a Blackberry and filled with symbols and emoticons.

Filed Under: Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Fun, Higher Education, Technology

Musings about social networking sites

December 2, 2007 By 1 Comment


This recent New York Times article provides an interesting perspective on the popularity of networking sites. Some academic researchers argue that the recent growth of online social networking and the popularity of sites like Friendster and Facebook are reminiscent of ancient patterns of oral communication in tribal societies. One of them argues that “the popularity of social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric patterns of human communication” because “we evolved with speech, we didn’t evolve with writing.” The way we express ourselves online is more like talking and this “orality”, which is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present” is what “unites people in groups.” (Walter J. Ong, coined the term “secondary orality” in 1982 to describe “the tendency of electronic media to echo the cadences of earlier oral cultures.”)

An anthropologist studying a tribe in Papua New Guinea now applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users. He sees parallels between how ones’ identity in tribal cultures is wrapped up in the question of how many people one knows, not unlike on Facebook, where you define yourself by the friends you have.

Obviously in virtual reality it matters much less who you know, because your real, and not virtual, survival does not depend on it. The biggest difference is the superficial nature of online “friendships” but it is this shallow bond and the elimination of the need for physical proximity which stimulates online intimacy. “That distance makes it safe for people to connect through weak ties where they can have the appearance of a connection because it’s safe.” So how does all this new way of relating to each other affect the way we… relate to each other? Some “worry that the rise of secondary orality may have a paradoxical consequence: It may be gobbling up what’s left of our real oral culture.”

I wonder about one more thing. Apart from their use as purely networking/fun/hobby spaces, these sites are used as pedagogical tools, for instance when we start a Facebook page to encourage semi-academic discussion among our students. And so, when we employ these methods to reach out to our students, who are obviously well versed in them, are we risking that we will make them less “cool”, thus subverting our own purpose and making students less likely to use them in learning/teaching processes? Or maybe a question like this is redundant. In the time I spell-check this message and click the “post” button, a brand new networking site will be up, starting as a small, “cool” outlet, and spreading through the virtual world, until us educators get a whiff of it and make it “lame.”

This article from The Independent finds that students are weary of allowing academics to intrude into their spaces, while teachers often find that their students’ Facebook pages provide insights into the students and offer an opportunity to connect. These sites are private, independent, and can decide on membership, content and the discussions that take place there are not sanctioned by the universities, even if often there is some learning going on and students may be building real connections, something a university will welcome. Some professors are weary of using such a private forum for knowledge sharing and argue that academic work on Facebook is inappropriate while there are plenty of new technologies that can be used in teaching, such as discussion groups, wikis, or Second Life, but social networking is not one of them, unless it’s restricted to an institution’s virtual-learning environment.

Filed Under: Interpersonal Communication, Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Technology

You Tube Democracy?

August 19, 2007 By 4 Comments

A few weeks ago, the democrats debated each other in front of a live audience, as usual, but also on millions of computer screens via You Tube. The format of this event, co-sponsored by CNN, was a bit different than usual. The internet users were invited to submit their questions on video as well, and those were played on a large screen and then the responses of each candidate were also posted online.

Is this format really a revolutionary new approach? I am sure it was meant to attract young voters, and offer a “fresh” approach to an old, tired way of doing things. But was this a successful attempt or simply a rehash of “same old” with a new technology attached to it? Jon Stuart’s Daily Show had a rather harsh critique of the idea and its execution.

More recently, the LOGO, LGBT channel, hosted a democratic presidential debate as well.

This was a live debate, where a couple of moderators asked the candidates questions about issues that the LGBT community cares about. It is also an innovative way of doing things, and certainly this type of event would probably not be possible 10 years ago. But there were no technological gimmicks here, and yet I think I learned more about the candidates’ opinions about a few specific things. In this particular case the technology of the You Tube/CNN debate did not contribute to providing information or clarifying the issues.

Filed Under: Politics, Resources, Technology, Web 2.0
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