Author Archive for Hillary

A Memorial: Saul Bruckner

Published
by
Hillary
on May 27, 2010
in Administration, Asides, New York, Pedagogy, Process, Style and To Ponder
. 6 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?

The Performance Artist and the Archives

Published
by
Hillary
on February 22, 2010
in Art, Fun, Internet, Media, Music, Politics and Resources
. 0 Comments

During the fall of 2009, I took a course at the Graduate Center with Prof. Jean Graham-Jones, “Contemporary Latin American Theatre and Performance.” Going in, I had assumed that much of the archival material we would be referencing would be from the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL), a collaboration between New York University Libraries and NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. This digital venue brings together videos of performance throughout the Americas that would otherwise be “inaccessible to scholars.”

While it’s true that this is a respected and reliable one-stop reference place to find (and preserve) such materials, given the contemporary focus of the class, YouTube offered hours of browsing enjoyment. The two resources serve very difficult functions—and have very different levels of functionality. (Especially since the Hemispheric Insititute’s archive is frequently restricted to performances that they themselves have had filmed at their own events.)

I don’t know if it counts as procrastination or further research, but I whittled away many evenings that semester watching clips of the dynamic performers we had been studying.

First, here’s a link to a performance by Mexican cabaret performer, Astrid Hadad, from the HIDVL. Her performance, ‘Amores Pelos,’ was filmed in Monterrey, Mexico, in July 2001, as part of the Second Annual Hemispheric Institute Seminar. It’s a long clip, but worth the time to see the costumes changes involved in the “wearable art” of her hair. The site provides a bit of context for those first meeting this artist’s work: “Hadad blends popular songs and ranchero, son and bolero music and political satire with highly theatrical precision to create a genre of music she calls ‘Heavy Nopal’.”

And then, below, is another unique Hadad performance, this time from YouTube (and featuring some well-placed self-flagellation). It brings us into the actual performance space, and is part of a larger documentary about Hadad.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OutdQW_jz0g[/youtube]

Palm-of-the-Hand Speeches

Published
by
Hillary
on January 28, 2010
in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Process, Style, To Ponder and literature
. 2 Comments

Throughout his long career, Japanese Writer Yasunari Kawabata wrote a series of short short stories, which he referred to as his “Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.” Kawabata produced 146 of these stories, becoming a true “palmist,” even if his notoriety in the West is focused on his novels.  As described by the editors of the published collection, Kawabata believed that these little stories expressed the “essence of his art.”

I first read these stories in an experimental prose writing course a bunch of years ago, and the concept of these one-to-three page gems intrigued me. I was reminded of these stories this past semester, when, through my work supporting Advanced Accounting, a Communication Intensive Course, I found myself confronting palm-of-the-hand speeches. When I first learned that students had only two-to-three minutes to present their assigned material, I was skeptical. Two minutes to discuss a contemporary concept in accountancy?

As the semester progressed, and I struggled to help students condense the finer points of recording intangible assets on balance sheets, I necessarily focused on the benefits of these l’il speeches. Just as Kawabata’s stories are deeply complex while also being succinct, shorter speeches have the same potential. Translator J. Martin Holman could be talking about ACC 4100 speeches when he writes of the relationship between Kawabata’s small stories and his longer works:

“The palm-of-the-hand story appears to have been Kawabata’s basic unit of composition from which his longer works were built, after the manner of linked-verse poetry, in which discrete verses are joined to form a longer poem, the linkage between each dependent on subtle shifts as the poem continues.”

While longer speaking opportunities are still crucial for our students, these palm-of-the-hand speeches can give students a better familiarity with the basic units of composition required for larger speeches. I used to think of two minute speeches as a good exercise in summarizing, editing and brevity, but they do have their structural benefits, as well.  According to Holman, Kawabata mastered this form using certain elements (the same ones that would make any Palmist speech exiting); “juxtaposition of images,” “unique perception,” and “intriguing and memorable” plots– not reductions, but distillations of larger worlds.

There are clear positives and negatives to assigning such a short presentation, but on certain days, the luxury of having a lot of time to concentrate on just two minutes of material did seem like a very Palmist exercise. Students themselves, however, don’t always see the merits of this, and, rather than viewing it as the essence of their art, are more apt to view the assignment as the gnat buzzing around their schoolwork.  How might it be possible to elevate and enliven these palm-of-the-hand speeches to the place that Kawabata realized they deserve?

Then You Can Study It

Published
by
Hillary
on October 6, 2009
in Art, Conferences, Fun, Internet, New York and Technology
. 0 Comments

A few months ago my mother and my aunt embarked on a bit of a nostalgic exercise to see if they could remember (in proper sequence) the storefronts that populated Brighton Beach Avenue when they were growing up. The endeavor proved tougher than they first thought, but the idea itself has led them down some fun memory lanes.

While trying to dig up some examples for a CPE workshop the other afternoon, one article in Popular Science grabbed my attention: a group of computer scientists built an algorithm that matches hundreds of thousands of photos on Flickr using common elements, like a high-tech jigsaw puzzle. Coupled with software that speeds through 3-D reconstruction, they could then create digital models of three cities in three dimensions.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7NT3BrrsaQ[/youtube]

(In the category of “exceptionally cool,” those diamond shapes along the bottom represent the tourists who are taking the photos.) It’s probably pretty clear the potential this kind of project represents for a wide variety of academic disciplines. As one of the scientists explained, “”If you have a digital representation of something, then you can study it.” (And here I’m reminded of Tom’s earlier post about digital museum tours. Same idea, different scale.) The project also turns camera-happy tourists into quasi-professional archivists, with formerly private shots contributing to a very collective and participatory project.

I did a bit of googling, and found another interesting example of this kind of work, “Rome Reborn.” (I’m clearly behind, since there’s also an App.) A bunch of Engineering and Technology centers collaborated on a project that would create a 3-D rendering of ancient Rome’s development, beginning at A.D. 320. This digital modeling relies on collective efforts too, but here it’s a wide variety of research and data. The results, Rome 2.0, are a far cry from the grainy visuals of the ancient city reproduced in textbooks all over.

acqueduct

These efforts to reconstruct cities—past or present—appeal on two distinct levels. Our desire to preserve the very intimate relationships we have to these places is certainly one (see Luke’s post from a while back, when he explored his old neighborhood with Google Earth). But these projects also satisfy our desire to communicate subjects like architecture and history in more dynamic ways, while incorporating changes over time.

These kinds of tools have been on my mind lately. This past weekend I presented a paper at a conference on development in Brooklyn, and a lot of presentations sought to record—and define– neighborhood change in particular ways. Over lunch, when I told a historical preservationist about my mother’s quest and frustration with the limitations of city records, she told me about a tax survey that had been done in the 1930s, which now provides us with a house-by-house visual record of the period. There seems little doubt that our ability to combine existing visual archives with mapping technologies will mean that it won’t be too long before my mom can reconstruct and represent her old stomping grounds.

Although who knows? I admit to wondering if maybe certain things are best left to memory.

Zine Fest…’09?

Published
by
Hillary
on June 23, 2009
in Art, Asides, Fun and Media
. 9 Comments

zinefest1There’s a Zine Fest at the Brooklyn Lyceum this weekend. When I told my former zine co-creater about it, her response was, “Who knew people still made zines?!” I had the same thought. Turns out, they still do.

Hearing about this upcoming event presented a nice occasion to revisit my zine-making past. The information for the Fest seems to refer to real zines, the cut-and-paste kind, not some sort of newfangled virtual version. Do zine-creators distinguish between the two these days? Are you kind of lame if you make an online zine (but not a blog?), or are you pathetically retro if you bother with the paper kind? Some brief research suggests that they’re existing cozily side-by-side— online resources are archiving the material stuff in searchable ways, interested readers are finding them more easily and a community is sustained and expanded. (Back in 1994, I usually found zines to order through the self-styled ads in the back of other zines, a process both haphazard and mysterious.)

My furious bout of zine Googling also led me to the Barnard Zine Library. Barnard College is the first academic library to circulate zines, and their collection numbers in the thousands, focusing primarily on Riot Grrrl and Third Wave Feminist Zines. (And, if you’re feeling confused right now, their website has a concise FAQ to get you up-to-speed on zines.) Thanks to this Zine Library, you can even search for zines in CLIO– Columbia Library’s Online Catalog– which is where I was surprised to find one of my old zines, Electric Mayhem, listed. That’s either entirely embarrassing or extremely cool.

Turning to legitimately talented zine writers, I’m thrilled that one of my favorite zine grrrls continues to make distinctive creations as a graphic designer, and shares them on her blog, Miss Sequential. I was somehow relieved to discover that the same elements that made me wait by the mail slot for each new issue of /nothing/ and Red-Hooded Sweatshirt were still there for me in her current work.

painting by Marissa Falco

painting by Marissa Falco

And, giving a little shout-out to the readers and writers whose zines are languishing in childhood bedroom closets around the globe, she occasionally posts her cartoons from the good old days, when we were all into “intense autobiographical chronicles.”

originally printed in RHS #4

252975933_65e47330bf_o

originally printed in RHS #4

Lessons from a First-Time Course Blogger

Published
by
Hillary
on June 12, 2009
in Assessment, Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, EdTech, Higher Education and Technology
. 9 Comments

I’m finally looking back to Spring ’09, when I had my first experience using Blogs@Baruch in two sections of COM1010, Intro to Speech Communications. I used the blog for the midterm, in which students write critiques of speeches they’ve found online. In past semesters, students have been inventive in their speech choices and committed in their critiques. But the question of how to best enable their classmates to see these videos still lingered. Curious about Blogs@Baruch, I decided to migrate this assignment onto a blog, allowing students to watch (and comment upon) each other’s videos and share their critiques of the speeches. Having learned from the adventure, here are a few words of advice to potential Blogs@Baruch-ers.

1. It’s not difficult. Considering the gong show of Blackboard’s tech problems this semester, it was almost comical how smoothly the blog functioned. A handful of students ran into some problems accessing it at certain computers, but often I found that problems encountered by students were frequently due more to lack of time and preparation on their part than any issue with the blog itself.

2. Don’t be conservative! I was. As one of my students told me at the end of the semester, “the blog was just there.” It wasn’t as dynamic as it could have been, in part because I didn’t use it to capture anything in progress. Students cut and pasted their work onto the blog, and then made the requisite comment on a post, creating a static space outside of the classroom, not a particularly engaging one. While it was satisfying to see this vast collection of interesting video clips assembled in one place—along with frequently cogent, in-depth analyses of them—I see now that I used the blog to solve a problem (that of my midterm assignment) rather than tailoring it for uses that would really suit the nature of the blog. Recent conversations with my students and others have highlighted a range of ways that it could be used in an Introductory Speech course– sharing audio files or outlines of student speech drafts that could be revised as the “audience” comments. On a related note, the public forum really does elicit strong work. When students feel the watchful eyes of their peers, the bar is set somewhere different. This makes my mouth water for the possibilities of the course blog—like facilitating peer review, for example—that I didn’t explore.

3. Be forewarned: out of sight, out of mind. In part due to #2 above, the blog can feel like that side dish you ordered but weren’t quite hungry for. It’s easy to lose track of the blog, and its implementation should be planned with an eye towards avoiding this. Usually, the material nature of grading compels you to eventually plop down on a long train ride and hit it out of the park. With the blog, not so easy. I had good intentions—I wanted to comment on posts frequently, but commenting is time-consuming, especially if students are posting 40-minute inauguration speeches. This in turn leaves less time to evaluate the work for grading purposes. From the student side, they were assigned a date for one post; once students posted, they didn’t have a strong incentive to return, which would leave me begging them to “visit the blog!” when I myself was embarrassingly behind on reading their old posts.

4. Students might be less excited about instructional technology than you are. (…How to get them more excited is part of the task.) Take ‘tagging,’ for example—it was harder than I might have imagined getting the ‘tagging’ to happen. Some assume that the ‘Sidekick generation’ will tag as if it were natural as breathing. Not so– every nineteen-year-old might know how to search YouTube, but they’re not all writing Facebook applications or even their own blogs. Making some class time available to teach students the rhyme and reason behind some aspects of the blog is arguably essential, and yet somehow easy to overlook.

The Com1010 Public Speaking Award Goes To...

The Com1010 Public Speaking Award Goes To...

5. Students love Pacino. As in past semesters, his speeches were cited with a remarkable frequency, rivaled only by Randy Pausch. This is perhaps not a surprise, since the first hit from googling “inspirational speech” is Pacino’s “peace by inches” monologue from Any Given Sunday, but still. City Hall has a less predictable—and arguably far better—dramatic monologue that I’m glad one of my students spread around.

I’ll end here with a question. As Luke articulated so well in his WordCampEd post, these open source technologies are blessedly DIY. But I can’t help feeling a little protective of the adjunct in this discussion– don’t adjuncts “do it themselves” enough? Can the full potential of Instructional Technology really be unleashed with the real limitations of the adjunct labor force operating in higher education? I’m in a distinctly lucky position as a dual-hatted Communications Fellow and adjunct; working with people jazzed and knowledgeable about these technologies has taught me tremendous amounts about how to use it and why. But how will Jane Q. Adjunct learn about the potential of a course blog, after tearing her hair out over Blackboard for months and missing the departmental meeting that announced a later workshop about blogs, all time she’s not paid for? How will Jane Q. Adjunct get excited about the potential of these tools, and why will she motivate to prioritize the time required to integrate them thoughtfully and productively in her course?

Give or Take a Few Hundred Billion

Published
by
Hillary
on May 18, 2009
in Acacademic Integrity, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education, Internet and Plagiarism
. 2 Comments

I recently came across a particularly glaring plagiarism that highlighted the goofy (and troubling) game of telephone that can happen to information as it circulates through the web. I’ll call the student Cac. It didn’t take me long to diagnose Cac’s speech outline as an out-and-out plagiarism. It was a shoddy piece of work all around—supposedly an outline for a Persuasive Speech about Plastic Bag Recycling, Cac had left out the requisite Topic, Central Idea, and Specific Purpose Statement that belongs at the top of each outline. Cac also neglected to shove his stolen text into a speech outline format—it was laid out in bullet points, obviously ripped from an advocacy website’s FAQ.

Suspicious, I pulled out a short phrase and googled it: “about 2.5 billion plastic shopping bags.” The first hit did the trick. Cac had copy-pasted the entire script, complete with headings—“Facts about Plastic Bags,” “What We Can Do,” “Benefits of Using Reusable Bags.” But did Cac realize, I immediately wondered, that he was plagiarizing from the National Environmental Agency of Singapore?

But I soon wondered which website Cac had ripped this info from; my search for this “about 2.5 billion plastic bags” factoid revealed the same info on many, many sites. Some were repeating it in the context of Singapore (which it no doubt belongs in, given that one of the facts relates to landfills in that country), but many weren’t. The first example I found drew conclusions about Malaysia’s plastic bag usage based on Singapore’s. No biggie. But then I saw a website for RV-lovers based in Canada that used the very same stat for Canada’s plastic shopping bag usage. And Todaysparent.com claimed that “Ontarians alone” used 2.5 billion shopping bags yearly. Even the city of Alexandria, Virginia employed the same stat for justification of their Environmental Action Plan, although in their usage it was unclear who used that many, just that they were used. An online Pakistani daily newspaper listed almost all of the very same “facts about plastic bags,” and they made the 2.5 billion stat sound as though it was global, not national. Even an American company peddling reusable bags used this fact, suggesting that it was the U.S. that used 2.5 billion plastic shopping bags.

I could go on.

Doing some quick Internet research of my own pulled up figures for U.S. yearly plastic bag usage between 100 billion and 380 billion—even more stunning numbers than the 2.5 billion Cac was so impressed by. (And the global annual figure seems to be closer to 1 trillion. If my sources are to be believed.) False information on the web isn’t much of a newsflash, but this incident quickly became less about plagiarism for me (a separate issue) and more about the minefield of Google when used by students for (legit, non-plagiarized) research. Sure, 2.5 billion is a persuasive number any way you slice it, and it’s being employed to make the same argument each time: plastic bags are bad, and we use an awful lot of them.

Somewhere In The World

Somewhere In The World

But each of these filchers was too careless to put the stats in context, or to read closely enough to figure out exactly what the stat was referring to. It calls to mind Jeff Jarvis’s question (referencing Nicholas Carr) at the recent Symposium: does Google make us stupid? (And another of one of his questions: how do we structure the information that we have?) The breaking down of media orthodoxies through Jarvis’s “conversation as content” model perhaps works best when it relates to an individual journalist/blogger taking corrections and comments from a diverse and vibrant peanut gallery, but there’s easily 2.5 billion cases of downright incorrect information streaking across the web, posted on sites without external or internal fact-checkers.

Here’s Lookin At You, Kid…or Not.

Published
by
Hillary
on March 9, 2009
in Audience, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Feedback, Interpersonal Communication, Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Powerpoint and Presentations, Process, Style and To Ponder
. 4 Comments

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRAcZ2rTGPg&feature=related[/youtube]

I love this quirky little how-to clip, mostly because the audio doesn’t match up to the video, making poor Leila look like she needs her own mandated visit to the house of corrections. But I can relate to Leila and her message, and I’m willing to admit that I stumbled upon this video in a moment of desperation, when I was brainstorming different approaches to this question of encouraging solid eye contact in oral communicating.

As most of us have probably discovered by now, when we’re providing feedback on speeches, merely repeating “you need to make more eye contact” doesn’t do the trick. (And really, why should it?) Most of the speakers we work with know full well that eye contact is something they should shoot for—they’ve seen this on speech evaluation forms and read about it dutifully in their Intro to Public Speaking class way back when. But if they commit this same “offense” in every presentation they make—staring at the PP screen, or at the floor, or at their hands, or note cards—when does the practice actually come in?

And, just as importantly, how do we invigorate our own approach to this thorny delivery snag? Some days, “make more eye contact” becomes the easy go-to, that dull phrase you know you’ll probably say before the student even begins. But isn’t commenting on eye contact just another way of saying that they didn’t make a connection with their audience? If we wanted to get all Eckhart Tolle on this post, we could extend it into the idea of being fully present (which has plenty of resonances in actor training). We all know how magical it can be when someone gives really great eye—that mixture of confidence, care, and connection– but how is it best learned?

I’ve tried a few new things in my recent quest to investigate the power of the Connecting Eyes. In the classroom, I’ve become more emboldened to push away the chairs and try out some of the better eye contact exercises that I know of, forcing people to get used to going eyeball-to-eyeball. Some of these exercises transform the room into a sort of communications gym class, which is a little hard to get used to, but not a bad thing at all. Does this have more successful outcomes in student performance? Hard to tell, exactly. But it certainly increases comfort and community among the students.

And during my BPL sessions with student groups, I’ve changed my approach. Instead of allowing the students to run through their entire presentations before I provide my feedback, I now occasionally stop them mid-stream, prompting them to re-do an entire section, this time focusing on, say, sustained eye contact. I know some of you out there have run your practice sessions like this for quite a while, but I’m just now catching on to its real benefits. I had been skeptical of the logic of isolating one element and potentially distracting the speaker with it, but I’m now thinking of these sessions as true rehearsals; if they can’t “run through” their work multiple times, what are the chances that a pattern of poor delivery will be broken?

Rachel Maddow’s Intelligent Glamour

Published
by
Hillary
on February 24, 2009
in Asides, Fun, Gender, Media and Politics
. 2 Comments

rachelmaddow1I almost choked on my Sunday morning pancakes when I read Daphne Merkin’s recent piece on Rachel Maddow’s “Lesbian Glamour” in the New York Times Style section. Aside from a score of other issues I have with this article (probably best for a different blog), Merkin seemed to miss, I think, one of the more interesting aspects of Rachel Maddow’s popularity, especially for people interested in communications.

Putting aside Merkin’s bizarre summary of the history of gay male sexuality, or her weird analogy between lesbians and wallflowers, the article trades in the worst kind of stereotypes by attempting to provide a sort of taxonomy of lesbian cultural icons, from “lipstick lesbians” to “unstylish dykes” (trotting out poor Gertrude Stein and Fran Leibovitz!). As evidence she offers up the testimonials of an anonymous gay friend of hers and a celebrity hairstylist who decides that the only “giveaway” to Maddow is her haircut. Oy.

By blathering on about pantsuits and Converse sneakers, Merkin misses the point. Maddow is a thrilling arrival on the scene when it comes to the representation of gay Americans in the media in part because her politics, intelligence, and rhetorical swagger have culled her a fan base that feels linked and deeply relevant to the last election and new administration. I don’t always agree with Maddow when I tune in, but it’s hard to deny that she was a particularly well-timed breath of fresh air, and is an idea machine and nuanced policy wonk as well as a strong debater: she’s got the politics, the policy, and the mic. None of that seems to hold much weight with Merkin; the photo that was published alongside the article was telling– her mouth is photoshopped out, leaving just the “giveaway” hair and glasses.

I know; this is the Style section, so maybe it’s ridiculous to expect an article about Maddow that thoughtfully analyzes how a former AIDS activist and Rhodes scholar manages to sell herself and her ideas to more 25- to 54-year-olds during the 9pm cable slot than Larry King Live. But if we’re sticking with style, Maddow herself has made some interesting comments about how she’s had to change her appearance to get TV-ready, from ditching her glasses for contacts to needing to dress up “like an assistant principal in order to meet the minimum dress code.” And, besides all that, as we suggest to our students, style is just one element of oral communications that’s worth analyzing; isolating one presentational quality and evaluating it in a vacuum is pointless if trying to snap a bigger picture…but then, well, I guess that wasn’t really wasn’t the point, was it?

This is Your Brain on YouTube

Published
by
Hillary
on December 17, 2008
in Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education, Internet, Media, Pedagogy, Resources and To Ponder
. 0 Comments

I recently stumbled upon the work of Alexandra Juhasz, a media studies professor and “femi-digi practitioner.” While her writings on activist video interested me from the get-go, her blog persona, MP:me, has some interesting things to say about media theory and pedagogy, and more than a few choice words for the “leprous” stuff of YouTube. Knowing the incredible fervor with which our students race to imbibe pretty much anything they see on YouTube, the experiments she and her students engage in when analyzing YouTube were intriguing.

Speaking of which, I happened to meet someone the other day who works for iCue, which has thousands of video clips, news archives, and, by extension, sample speeches. I felt a little embarrassed that I’d never found it myself, since I regularly use YouTube for on-the-fly speech sample videos in class– and even specific assignments– and thereby end up modeling this YouTube over-reliance for my students. Finding a range of high quality sites for video content is something I would like to make one of my New Year’s resolutions, rather than acting surprised when students head to Youtube as the first and last stop for any kind of video content.

MP:me recently put out a call requesting help in her search for what she calls “productive fake docs” on YouTube. Maybe you’re more familiar than me with this sub-genre? The deadline for contributions is January:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJSCS_KxYAk[/youtube]