Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, By David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, [is] a slender, literate volume that is positioned as a Strunk and White for e-mail. Shipley edits the New York Times Op-Ed page, and Schwalbe is editor in chief of Hyperion Books.

Of the ‘manuals’ he mentions, the one whose approach sounded most useful to me was Mark Frauenfelder’s Rule the Web.  He describes it as “a miscellany of mostly free services, tools and tips for managing e-mail and blogs and feeds and photos and music and videos” and discloses that he contributed one paragraph (uncompensated).  He also said he learned at least six things from the book, which is not bad considering it’s his job.

However, I think I made connections between my own academic work and the work with MBA students this spring and a few things clicked into place more clearly. I don’t know how long I’ve told students, “writing is a process.” (Imagine you are hearing that mantra from an annoying professor, battered at you in a sing-song-y voice.) But I think it sunk in a little further for me. After watching 11 groups of successful medical professionals present solid Powerpoint presentations, that nonetheless still needed revision, and watching them watch themselves on video, the light went on. Prior to this they had already submitted the paper versions of their business plans, and felt well prepared. But in addition to the videotape making clear the various nervous tics they had while speaking, or that they engaged the slide screen far more than they did the audience, it also helped them see the entire scope of their presentation, how well its various parts fit together, and where they needed to change the emphasis. They could clearly see if their argument needed bolstering with evidence in some areas, or increased clarity in others.

Watching them, I realized that the only way their presentations could make it to the ‘next level’ so to speak, was by going through this final review and revision process. Not only that, for these students especially, I was truly more of a coach and facilitator than anything else. It was a combination of my experience, their experience, the videocamera, and their own critical review of themselves, that really made the process worthwhile. I wouldn’t say they didn’t need me, but it was the process and the assemblage of them, me, the camera, and the review, that was essential.

As a CUNY Writing Fellow, I recall learning a method for responding to student writing: First, tell the student what you see happening in their work, in a neutral fashion; second, comment on what they do well; and third, propose a question that will help the student make improvements in their work or think about it more deeply. I wonder, is this instruction to fellows (and faculty) at least partially aimed at offering positive critique that won’t damage students’ self-esteem or stir up their defenses? I actually do think it’s a useful technique for responding to student writing. Commenting on student presentations can be a bit more difficult though, because there are a lot of “no-no’s.” I find myself saying: “Don’t cross your legs, don’t hold your arms, don’t lean on the furniture,” along with other positive commands such as “Stand up straight, Project your voice, or Look at the audience!”

In the two years I have worked with students at BLSCI, I have started to think the Mary Poppins school of teaspoon-full-of-sugar-making-the-medecine-go-down, is not a bad pedagogical strategy. I find myself framing my comments to students in terms of what I know they are doing well, and how they can improve their presentation further. I think of my sister, training two new puppies, and how much positive reinforcement in the form of praise (and Cheerios) shapes their behavior. Some time ago, one of the most e-mailed articles from the Times was from the Modern Love section “What Shamu Taught Me About A Happy Marriage” by Amy Sutherland who, in studying animal trainers, learned a new technique for dealing with some of her husband’s behavioral quirks that irritated her most. She began to ignore his negative behavior and reward the positive. I would say there are things students need to be told not to do. But I wonder, are students today more sensitive to criticism? What about cross-cultural differences? In sum, what are good strategies for responding to student presentations today?

It is particularly interesting to think about his argument in light of the work that those of us who support communication intensive Business Policy Courses do. We work with students who are required to incorporate a PP presentation into their final analysis of a company’s strategies, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and position in the industry. I expect to write more on how I think Tufte’s problems with the so-called ‘cognitive style’ of PP relate to our work with students. But in the meantime, check out these nifty links:

PowerPoint Remix

Learning to Love PowerPoint

PowerPoint Is Evil

My understanding of pattern recognition (which is pretty limited) is that it involves using statistical models to classify or categorize large amounts of information. I think the interesting thing about it is that the ‘meaning’ then comes from the pattern itself, not the individual pieces of information that are being communicated. Which seems like a useful way to deal with such massive amounts of information but also leads me to ask if we are then required to change our ideas of what effective communication is.

I think to some degree, yes. On the one hand, things like accuracy and clarity are still important. But effective visual communication probably can’t stop there, because more ‘affective’ qualities are what catch people’s attention amidst information overload. Of course, many times in our work with students, we are addressing pretty basic ways to improve communication. But many of them are still very affective and visual. Stand up straight, don’t swing your arm like that, use natural gestures. Or, don’t use yellow and red together in a Powerpoint slide–it hurts the viewers eyes! All these things serve to keep the audience’s attention.

If these more qualitative elements of communication have become increasingly important, I also think it suggests that talking about ethics is important. For instance, in your document, you use the image that BLSCI has incorporated into the invitation for the Symposium this Spring. When Mikhail first showed that image to us at the institute, we had a conversation about the fact that it was an image from the 1950s of all white men in suits standing around a desk. My first thought was ‘yikes!’ That is not particularly representative of the world these days, especially not Baruch and CUNY. But that was exactly his point, to use an image of ‘the old’ to raise the question of whether there might be “New Rules” and thus the need to debate “Convention and Change in Communication.”

As reported in the New York Times today, we now have Arts and Crafts for the Digital Age. The German Science Studies theorist Friedrich Kittler has argued that one of the problems with the way most people currently interface with technology is that it is entirely at the level of software. The average person knows very little about their computer’s hardware, and is possibly quite frightened by it. We tend to assume it’s very powerful, and easily damageable. But with the PicoCricket Kit, designed by Mitchell Resnick (assistant professor of learning research at the MIT Media Lab), any child who can afford this $250 toy can begin to interact with digital technologies as both hardware and software. They can learn to program the small computer that comes along with the pipe cleaners, the legos, the electric wiring, and the felt.

The Vex Robot, from InnovationFirst (a robotics company) and Radioshack, is also mentioned. The article quotes a vice-president at InnovationFirst, “Talk to the average high school students, they are a lot smarter…They like open-ended problems, and a lot like to take the tools that are available to solve open-ended problems.” Not mentioned in the article is technoartist Natalie Jeremijenko, who has worked with high school and university students to reprogram robotic dogs made by Sony. These newly ‘feral dogs,’ so named for their street-smart capabilities, are able to sniff out toxic waste such as dry cleaning solvents and paint thinner. Robots… the next critical thinking tool?

When I was a kid, my mother bought my sister and I Erector Sets, in the hopes that we would become engineers. Maybe I’ll just have to save up for the PicoCricket Kit.

The first was due to my own inexperience with blogs. We spent half of one class session together in the computer lab, because CWE’s wireless signal does not quite make it to my classroom in the far corner. Fortunately the CWE tech person there is very accommodating (and a Baruch graduate!) and let us take over the room. In our jammed in session there, I showed students how to navigate the ‘administer’ side of the blog. As we went through that process, I found that a student in the class had used the same login that I had, and in trying to change hers, I deleted mine. Thus I was locked out of the blog for a day or so. Fortuitously, all students had administrative access, so someone then invited me to join as a member. Good grief!

The second issue required more dialogue between myself and the class, and a short period of informal writing to boot. After looking at the sign-up sheet, I discovered that of the ‘blogger’ openings, all but one were taken by male students. Further, all the ‘commenter’ spots were filled by females students. This was especially bothersome because the ratio of male-female students in the class is the exact inverse of those blogging spaces. Our first reading for the semester had been Adrienne Rich’s “Awakening the Dead: Writing as ReVision, in which she talks about her own struggle to awaken as a writer, amidst the patriarchal culture of male writers and writing. When I brought my concerns with the schedule to the students’ attention, most were hesitant to connect the problem to gender. Some said they just felt more comfortable commenting rather than blogging. Others pointed to scheduling issues, or that someone had already taken the topic they wanted. Really, only two students (one female and one male) were willing to say that they thought gender played a role in how the schedule had ‘ended up.’ First we discussed, then they wrote, then I asked them what they thought Adrienne Rich would have to say, and then I sent around a new schedule that was more clearly organized with more informative topical explanations. The result was a schedule with which I was much happier. And, I’m happy to report…

The first blog by a student was posted this week! It’s exciting to see her reflection on Renato Rosaldo’s “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” and his use of the term ritual, to see a student voice on a public site. I’m thrilled to have students entering the blogosphere.

Blog Schedule

We learn something about genre when we we distinguish between a blog “post” and a blog “comment.” Genre refers to a specific form, format, or style a piece of writing takes. There are so many different genres of writing. Technological change seems to highlight these for us, and new technologies form new genres. Traditional genres you are familiar with might be the short story, the persuasive essay, a business letter, or a letter from teachers to parents. If you think about it, each of these has its own specific style. In a blog, “posts” tend to differ from “comments,” A post is often a very brief essay or journal entry that addresses a news article, a movie the writer has seen, or an event in their personal life. Its audience varies from being quite wide and unknown to a select group of friends or fellow bloggers. Comments have a more limited audience—they are often a brief note to the author of the post sharing related experience, information, or disagreement. Noticing these distinctions in blog writing will help us when it comes time to write longer essays and a final paper. For these assignments also, we will need to consider genre and audience.

Please sign up for either one post or two comments.

Ideas for posts— (Posts must be two and half to three(3) full paragraphs. One paragraph equals 5 to 6 sentences.) Include a provocative quote from the reading and your reflection on the quote. Argue with a position the author takes. Provide us with a personal experience you’ve had that is connected to the reading.

Ideas for comments— (One full paragraph.) Comments may contain agreements or disagreement, and explanation. They may connect to other sections of the text that you think support the original post.

After having looked more carefully at the text I’m using (Ways of Reading), and thinking that I will probably require at least one single-spaced page of writing for students per week, and in remembering WAC advice to demand drafts drafts drafts, I thought, now this could provide nice material for blogs. And for student directed conversation. I’m going to try it. Why not? So forget what I said in my last post. There will be a course blog. Just one blog I think though, that everyone will have access to if my relatively low-tech self can manage that.

So my plan for the first assignment using the blog will be that students will post with initial thoughts for their upcoming writing assignment, or with responses to their first reading of the required essays. They will have the option to post their own comments, or to respond to someone else’s. I do not plan to grade this other than as a checkmark sort of thing.
Here is some of what I’ve come across through Google…

“Using Blogs to Teach Philosophy“, Academic Commons at The Center for Teaching and Learning, Wabash College

Internet & Society Course, Northwestern University

COMM 3344: Games for the web (Interactive multimedia) Spring 2005, Trinity University

Creating a Writing Course Utilizing Class and Student Blogs, Ritsumeikan University, Tokyo, Japan

And, last from my cautious self, an article from the Student Life publication at Washington University in St. Louis on the question of security risks and student blogs.

In an email response awhile back, a faculty member at CWE told me she thinks that with blogging students take/have/hold more ownership than in simply responding to a professor’s comment in a Blackboard discussion, and that for this reason blogs can be quite productive. Kate and Mikhail both make this point, that blogs privilege the author.

Students having ownership is important to me, but also requires negotiating and some shaping at times. And I think this would be true in using a blog. Jim’s initial comments also sort of echo some of my hesitations to immediately begin using blog-writing in a course. If I’m new to it using the technology, perhaps a course like Writing in the Social Sciences is not the place i want to first try it, because already there are genres of writing that students need to learn well. Summary, analysis, critique and extensions. That for this first time teaching it anway, it could be me biting off more than I can chew. (Which i am quite good at doing.)

So my first thought being, this sounds cool and fun and potentially productive, my second thought immediately following is let’s dip our feet into the water and try the reading thing first. Blog reading. Kate suggests having students engage with the world through reading and responding to blogs.

(I like this idea, and as a side note, I also think it blows the high-stakes/low-stakes distinction out of the water. Let’s say I decide not to grade their responses: low-stakes. Blogging has a semi-public element to it, an audience in the ‘beyond:’ higher-stakes. I began having issues with the low-stakes/high-stakes distinction midway through my Writing Fellowship. It doesn’t surprise me that in using technology more now as a Communication Fellow, a case would appear in which this framework does not seem entirely useful or accurate.)

So let me be clear about the first conclusion to which I have come. There will not be a course blog in Writing for the Social Sciences at CWE. However, there will be a component involving reading content related blogs and responding to those. Hopefully, I can help shape students’ responses by asking that they incorporate some of the types of writing skills we learn in the course into their blog comments. And again, I wonder, how can I find good blogs with content specific to various social science issues and disciplines? I also would like to know if anyone has any thoughts if there are existing blogs where people are writing on social science issues, that might be appropriate sites for students to comment on the readings we are doing? Am I asking someone else to run a blog for my class?

In my last post I noted my WAC professional development as a CUNY Writing Fellow. That experience has taught me to begin my planning by considering: What are my goals for this course? What do I hope that students come away with from WFSS?

Initially, I want to be aware of contextual issues that will affect my goals. The Center for Worker Education (CWE) is a small liberal arts school within the City College of New York, CUNY. Students at CWE are adults working full-time, and I am told that many of them come to the program because they need a bachelor’s degree to move further on in their field. The average student age is forty. I also want to consider the fact that the degree offered is broadly oriented and interdisciplinary.

With those factors in mind, and given that this is my first time teaching the course, I have decided to use a textbook, Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Ways of Reading seems to be intended for First-Year Composition courses, but the excerpts they include come from challenging yet readable texts by scholars and writers such as Gloria Anzaldua, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, John Berger, Adrienne Rich, Edward Said and W.J.T. Mitchell. The readings are also organized in ‘sequences’, for instance, Autobiographical Explorations, Truth and Method, History and Ethnography, or Language, History and Identity, and frames such as these will nicely address a range of topics across social sciences. The sequences take students and professor through a series of writing assignments that can eventually connect into a larger project. For the final paper, I plan to have students select their writing from one sequence and build on it with additional readings and outside research.

So back to my original question, What do I want students to learn how to do? 1)To read challenging texts carefully and to engage with those texts. 2)To make connections: between texts, and between life and text. 3)To provide written summaries, analysis, and critique. 4)To become familiar with one or two discipline-specific styles of writing. In addition to these more outcome-based goals I have for students, I also want to make sure that what we do helps them engage further with the world, whether that is within themselves, family life, work life or some other arena. This may be where blogs come in. Blog/s/ing may partly be about connecting.

I have been wondering how adult students with full work and personal lives would feel about taking time with blogs. Are blogs interesting to people beyond a small technophilic world? I don’t think I want students just reading live journals. If we’re reading blogs, I’d want them to read something substantive, that relates to their professional field or to what we’re reading. I’m not sure that exists. I’ve done some searching for blogs relating to Social Services and Social Work professions and haven’t found much. It occurs to me now that I might look for Teacher Education blogs.

Why even use blogs in a course? Well, I do think it’s beneficial to be aware of the new forms of technology and writing that are out there. In a sense, I think it’s good to ‘keep up.’ But I want more than just keeping up with the Joneses… Of course, there are blogs on writing—I could always have students read and respond to more general writing-focused blogs. These questions I’m asking are about content. The content of the blogs matters to me. I don’t want to waste students’ time, and I guess I’m aware that my own entry into the blogosphere has taken place over a number of months. I am leaning toward having us engage with other blogs that are out there, rather than say, do a course blog, or have students write their own. I’m thinking of this as a baby step, I suppose. Anyone have any thoughts they’d like to share?

As a Communication Fellow I’ve had increasing exposure to weblogs. I had begun one of my own last May on the free site Blog-City, but it was just this semester that I really delved into the whole ‘scene’ as the Communication Institute started discussion of cac.ophony.org. I’m still learning, following links to see where they take me, getting used to the genre, the geeked-up versions of vernacular English, or the letter-to-my-mother versions of critical, cultural and political theory that seem to exist out here. My first impression so far is that a blog is a great space to think thoughts out loud. Blogging is making space for our more tentative, not yet fully formed ideas, to go public. This kind of writing (ideally?) could also make way for interventions, cooperative strategizing and shared theorizing. Of course this is the optimistic view of the information distribution system that is the internet, but experimenting with the possibilities does appeal to me.

Now that my brain has started to think in terms of how technologies across the curriculum can work with Writing Across the Curriculum, I have wondered how I might use blogging in my own teaching. That said, this entry marks the first in a series of posts I’ll be devoting to my thought processes, considerations, questions, concerns and planning for some role that blogging might hold in my Spring 2005 Writing in the Social Sciences course.