Why Gen-Y Johnny Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues: An emphasis on social networking puts younger people at a face-to-face disadvantage.

Now, thanks to YouTube and the Navy’s willingness to “share” their footage of the incident, we can all take a look at the “evidence” and discuss our opinions online… unless, of course, you live in China where YouTube is currently blocked by the  government.

One of the 8 videos of the encounter is embedded below, which shows someone on one of the Chinese vessels using a hook to disable the Impeccable’s sonar line.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlhjhDrChno[/youtube]

The bottom line for me is that I know I can’t simply sign up and be a casual participant in these types of communities. I would feel much like Steven Levy; wanting to be a responsible and contributing member. At the same time, I don’t want my communication with friends, family, and other potential online acquaintances to be consistently motivated by guilt and producing remorse (like Levy’s). These kinds of interactions seem neither meaningful nor effective. As an outsider (cautiously contemplating moving in) I’m curious: isn’t it all way too much to handle after a while? I can barely keep up with my email as it is. I think in order to be a responsible online citizen I should remain offline when it comes to social networking.

These innovations in psychological practice and research represent interesting and effective uses of the principles of e-learning outside of the classroom in important applied contexts.

I think back to what usually happens in elections, when soon after winning and taking on a new audience, we often see drastic shifts, not only in politicians’ messages, but also in their personalities and communication styles.  It may be too soon to tell, but I am not noticing these often disheartening shifts with Obama and his underlying message surrounding his short-term and long-term visions for the country.

For those of you interested in empirically investigating this question, here are some pieces of data:

Obama’s interview with 60 minutes while on the campaign trail…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHe8N5hL0Wo[/youtube]

A piece of his post-election interview with 60 minutes…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTl6UmlaL2E[/youtube]

Also, you can take a look at the content of the postings on his Obama Blog.

Finally, consistency we can believe in.

Other celebrated and effective examples include Apple’s classic “Think different,” and their more recent description of the new iPod touch as “The funnest iPod ever.” Even the Obama campaign’s “Change we can believe in” ends in a preposition.

The worst thing about these slogans is that the television viewing public is exposed to them on a daily basis. Many of these slogans are not necessarily incorrect, but they violate several rules we try to teach our students in efforts to improve the clarity and effectiveness of their oral and written communication. I can’t help but wonder about the extent to which these slogans are negatively impacting the communication skills of the viewing public. The advertising industry seems to be on a mission to legitimize incorrectness.

The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking.

This brings up a lot of interesting questions as educators are increasingly trying to incorporate some of these technologies into the classroom and publishers are pushing textbook content into more profitable eBooks.  Are we actually helping students by doing all of this?  Some initial studies of middle and high school students suggest that technology-intensive curricula do not improve student achievement.

Bauerlein has many interesting points in the article and makes a good case for “unplugging” some aspects of teaching and learning.  However, in my opinion, the question of whether or not technology in general improves/impairs student learning is not that interesting.  Instead, we should be focusing our assessments on understanding which technologies can be usefully employed in which aspects of the curricula.  Finding pedagogical fit for relevant technologies seems to be what we are striving towards at BLSCI.  Thus, as an institute, we undoubtedly have much to contribute to this important discussion.

As Figure 1 and 2 below show, BLSCI fellows support faculty teaching a number of distinct Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) across a variety of disciplines. As Figure 2 shows, the largest representation of faculty teaching CICs is in departments that have traditionally placed a heavy emphasis on both written and oral communication, such as English, Modern Languages, Marketing, Management, Performing Arts, Sociology and Anthropology. However, the institute has also supported CICs in departments that have not traditionally incorporated communication intensive elements into their curricula, such as Accountancy, Natural Sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and environmental sciences), and Computer Information Systems.

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When we look at these data and hear about all of the great work going on at the Institute during our staff meetings, what we often don’t take into consideration is the amount of expansion that has taken place over the past ten years. As Figure 3 demonstrates, the number of faculty supported by BLSCI has steadily increased, reaching a peak of 144 last year. The number of faculty currently teaching CICs is nearly three times what it was ten years ago. Despite some minor fluctuations, the number of sections of CICs has also increased dramatically. Specifically, as shown in Figure 4, the number of sections of CICs offered last year is nearly five times as many as there were in 1997.

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There is no doubt this kind of institutional growth contributed to BLSCI’s being awarded the Hesburgh award. However, the most interesting growth going on at the institute is arguably what happens on a more micro level among students, faculty, and fellows throughout continued mentorship and collaboration. Although we all get to observe this in our individual work, it’s often hard to demonstrate this kind of growth across the institute. As we keep on thinking about and celebrating growth at BLSCI we continue to think about ways to assess it. It’s my hope that this post will spark some ideas among readers on how we might approach this kind of assessment next semester.

This and other programs in their Mobile Learning initiatives are available on their website. They even produced a video entitled “Connected” which provides their vision of what it might be like for a student who has access to this powerful technology.

As you’ll notice in the video, the iPhones that students get are not restricted to educational use. Facebook and other social networking sites are accessible, along with general internet, texting, and emailing capabilities. You can also see how the technology may present particular problems for communication in the classroom and more generally between students and professors. For example, professors are texting students and encouraging online research during class discussions.

So, although their programs may have a lot of potential to change the way students learn for the better, I worry that they also risk creating distractions and promoting poor communication. How connected is too connected?

When looking at the data, on average, students start the semester with scores on both the expectations and writing quality variables in the “middle” range (scores around 3). When we then looked to see if students’ scores significantly improved over the course of one semester in a CIC, there were no major findings. This was because many students started the semester out scoring high (scores from 4 to 5) on many of the variables, and thus did not have any room for improvement (as measured by the diagnostic scoring criteria).

However, when we looked at students who scored in the “low” to “middle” range on all of the variables (thanks Diana for this suggestion!) we observed statistically significant increases from the beginning to the end of the semester on all variables. These increases were consistent across disciplines and schools as well. The figures below illustrate the changes we observed in the data separately for the Weissman and Zicklin Schools.

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Although these results are based only on a subset of the data we’ve been able to clean, match, and analyze (~ 5,000 students), they nonetheless illustrate that the work of BLSCI in creating and implementing CICs seems to be paying off for students across the board. Although most probably knew or were able to sense this already, it’s always great to have “hard data.” We would love to hear readers’ thoughts on these findings and how you see these data stacking up next to the work you’re doing with students in your own classes. Also, as always, any general thoughts and/or questions on the assessment data are welcome.

Although I am still one of those people who are constantly trying to come up with better uses of PowerPoint in the classroom, I thought I would share one way I’ve used PowerPoint in class that tends to promote engagement, discussion, and debate among students without feeling imposing.  It’s also fun!

This is Jeopardy!  That’s right, the popular game show format (along with many others) has been creatively employed in PowerPoint presentations using slide links and transitions.  There are several templates available online (just Google “PowerPoint Jeopardy”).  Ethics Jeopardy is one version I’ve created and used several times in a graduate level seminar on research ethics (although I’ve also used it in undergrad classes in social psychology and statistics).  I usually start by splitting the class into two or three teams.  One team picks first and gets to respond to whatever question (answer) they pick.  If that team does not provide an adequate response, the other team can steal the points away.  I usually give the teams a few minutes to talk amongst themselves before they respond.  Once we’re done discussing the first item, the next team gets to pick a category.  As you can see, the items do not have right or wrong answers, and are constructed to promote discussion, debate, and critical engagement with the material.  PowerPoint allows for audio and visual clues to be included, and this is especially fun to do with Daily Doubles.  My favorite is the Debate Daily Double, which requires the teams to take contrasting positions on an issue and spend some time going back and forth on a critical issue.  Final Jeopardy can also be used as great prompt for some low-stakes, in-class writing activities.    Generally, the game show format, although it seems quite corny, creates a low-stakes atmosphere and I often find students who do not normally participate taking more active roles in the discussion.  It’s also great for exam review.

In my opinion, this is just one way in which PowerPoint and other presentation software packages can be employed in useful, engaging, creative, and fun ways.  I definitely agree that PowerPoint is dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands, but I’m not ready to give up on it as a potentially useful teaching tool.  I’d love to hear others’ thoughts and examples of creative uses of PowerPoint in the classroom.

The first and most general research question is “Does the quality of students’ writing improve over the course of a semester in a CIC?” Related to this question, we are interested in whether improvement occurs across the college or only within specific classes or disciplines. We will also explore whether we see improvement for all students, or only among students who are scoring in the low or middle range to begin with. It will also be worthwhile to see what happens over the course of a semester with students who score high on their initial diagnostics.

Second, we hope to answer the questions of “What happens to students’ who are enrolled in multiple CICs throughout their career at Baruch?” and “Is there consistent improvement among these students from one CIC to the next?” These related questions are of particular importance within the Zicklin School, as students there are required to take 4 CICs before graduation.

We hope to have answers to these questions in the form of a preliminary report by the end of the semester. In the meantime, we are continuing to think about how we can use the data to address issues related to changes in admissions requirements, differences between lower level vs. upper level classes and ESL students vs. native English speakers, and how the outcomes of this assessment may correlate with other academic outcomes, like GPA.

As most readers are very familiar with the data (both its strengths and weaknesses) we welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions regarding these preliminary ideas for analysis as well as other research questions you think are important and would like to see addressed.

Starting back in 1997 and ending last spring, fellows at BLSCI have done a tremendous amount of work collecting writing samples from students at Baruch enrolled in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) across a variety of schools and disciplines. As part of an ongoing assessment of the effectiveness of CIC curricula in improving students’ writing, fellows scored students’ writing samples at the beginning and end of each semester. Specifically, fellows scored each writing sample in terms of students’ expectations for the class (i.e., development, tenor, and range of expectations) as well as the quality of their writing (i.e., ideas and development, organization and coherence, spelling and vocabulary, syntax and punctuation, and grammar).

We are currently in the processes of organizing and cleaning the data. So far, we have data from 1,395 CICs and 31,408 students entered into electronic format and (almost) ready for analysis. These data are primarily from 2000 – 2006, so we can expect the size of the sample to almost double when we are finished entering the early data and as fellows continue to enter remaining diagnostic data.

I can honestly say that I have not yet had the pleasure of working with such an extensive and impressive sample, despite having been a part of several large-scale research and assessment projects. The data are very exciting, because of the many lines of analysis we can potentially follow. For example, we have the ability to look across all of the students’ work to see if their writing has been improved by CIC curricula. We can also focus on the effectiveness of CICs within specific student populations (e.g., ESL students) and compare the effectiveness of CICs across schools and disciplines. We can also follow students who have been enrolled in multiple CICs, to see if and how their writing has changed over their entire career at Baruch, not just during one semester.

As with any “good” assessment project (see Luke’s posting from 9/12/07), we will be meeting with representatives from the Zicklin School of Business, Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Public Affairs early next week to determine how to best use the data. Our goal is to identify each school’s unique concerns and questions and push forward with an analytical approach that satisfies the needs of each stakeholder as well as our internal curiosities as BLSCI.

I will continue to post updates as we make progress with this project. We welcome your thoughts and suggestions at any stage in the process.