“What impressed us most at the meeting was the complex consensus process called a spokescounsel, where power flowed from coordinated small groups to a synthesis process. Here was an organization that was resisting the war state…”

The “spokescounsel” Ko-yin describes sounds quite similar to the processes governing Occupy Wall Street. Christopher’s recent post enumerated the unique communication methods of the OWS protesters—hand signals, mic checks, labored consensus building through mediated dialogue. Ko-yin’s review reminded me that the rush to compare Wall Street occupiers with Tahrir Square dissenters sometimes obscures a grounding in a much closer and richer history– to the peace movement right here in the United States. In method, strategy, communication, and character, the whole Occupy enterprise borrows generously from the anti-war and nuclear disarmament movements.

Photo by Ed Hedemann

While many locate its direct origins with those independent culturejammers, Adbusters—very true!— the broader lineage of OWS remains aggressively pastiche. JoAnn Wypijewski’s recent ditty in The Nation draws a surprisingly fluid connection: through the more corporeal emphases of the Occupy Movement, she argues that critics itching for ‘demands’ from this movement “need only pay attention, because like the women’s health movement in the 1970s, the AIDS solidarity network that evolved from it in the ’80s, Occupy Wall Street and its spinoffs embody their demands.” Each of these examples, however, suggest activist groups that have faded with the shifting priorities of the moment. The Peace Pentagon is a powerful symbol of the workers who have kept the peace movement humming along, toiling away– and frequently getting arrested– for decades.

I was interested, then, to see the Peace Pentagon mentioned– and not– in a recent New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about Global Revolution,  a media collective that acts as “the switchboard” for the live coverage of the OWS protests across the nation. “The revolution is being streamed from a dilapidated second story office in NoHo,” the author, Andrew Marantz, explains, mentioning only the A.J. Muste Institute, a pacifist organization founded in 1974, skipping over the fact that it was the War Resisters League (WRL) that originally purchased it in 1969 and created the Institute to maintain it. The Institute leases office space to Global Revolution for a mere $400 a month. In this way, they have fanned the embers of resistance activity in this real estate mad metropolis: the Institute provides cheap space to many of the dendrite-like organizations of the OWS movement.

But the WRL itself isn’t mentioned in the article; Marantz quotes the fellow behind the live streaming, who jokes that he’s overstayed his welcome: “the building’s owners should have known this would happen when they invited us, but we have sort of occupied the space.” (I’m quite sure, sir, that they have seen it all.) Marantz– no doubt hemmed in by a word limit– makes no mention of the fact that this dilapidated building is host to any number of activist organizations, many of whom are playing a role in OWS. The video below goes a long way in explaining the significance of 339 Lafayette Street for New York City’s activist communities– with a list of concerns and passions as wide and varied as those of OWS. (A partial list of their past and present tenants can be found here– it includes the Catholic Peace Fellowship, The Grannie Peace Brigade, Peace Action, Grey Panthers, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Metropolitan Council on Housing, GI Resistance, Health Care Now. To name just a few.)

But there’s another face of the WRL that I see reflected in the OWS protests: Grace Paley, the wonderful writer of short stories and active member of the War Resisters League who passed away in 2007. During my first trip to see what all the hubaloo at OWS was about, I immediately noticed the Granny Peace Brigade members there. The Grannies were wearing the sort protest-sign-smock-vests that made me think immediately of a famous image of Grace—her author photo from the back of her essay collection, Just as I Thought:

Photo by Jackie Snow

Photo by Dorothy Marder

While her exquisite stories of quotidian heart break are widely celebrated, Grace Paley was also famous—and sometimes infamous—for protesting much and writing little. Vietnam, nuclear arms, municipal stupidity: all ranked worthy among her protest causes and efforts. In 1979, Grace was fined $100 for unfurling a banner against nuclear energy during a protest on the lawn of the White House; in the 1980s, it was the Women’s Pentagon Action. As Marianne Hirsch explains in her article about Grace’s myriad contributions, Grace was a member of many activist groups that refused to be quiet about the connections they saw between racism, sexism, heterosexism, the disregard of the environment and unfettered militarism. Much of Paley’s advocacy work focused on the military budget, but this was before the disparity between rich and poor had grown to such mammoth proportions. Yet Grace even then was linking economic injustice with the plights of our urban areas: “Our cities have already been effectively bombed by the military budget,” Grace said. “Billions of dollars are put into what’s called defense, while the needs of the people are neglected.”

But back to the War Resisters League. Taking the omission from the Talk of the Town piece as a kind of provocation, I did a quick search of the New Yorker archives for mentions of the WRL, which turned up some interesting (and also brief) mentions of the organization: 2003 war protests in Times Square, demonstrations after the nuclear accident on Three Mile Island in 1979, and a 1973 article about the Vietnam cease-fire, which included an interview with David McReynolds, a field secretary for the WRL at the time.

Armed Forces Day Parade, 1979. Photo: Grace Hedemann.

McReynolds also appears in the Peace Pentagon video above. (In describing the significance of 339 Lafayette Street, he gives voice to ideas that apply easily to OWS– especially in its ability to link causes such as labor with the principles of anti-violence and an international viewpoint.) McReynolds had been working to bring the war to an end since 1961, the year of the first American casualties; the New Yorker asked him what he thought would become of the peace movement:

“…The underlying problems of an unrestrained Presidency and a huge military establishment remain. It’s true that the war in Vietnam was an outgrowth of American history and character but so is the anti-war movement. There is a great tradition in America of independence of judgment and resistance to tyranny.”

http://doctortext-info.blogspot.com/2009/08/techniques-for-custom-research-paper.html

How much writing did you do as a first semester undergraduate? 15 pages? 30? 22? 2?

How much should a first semester undergraduate write?

I’ve been thinking about the answer to that second question since I met with a student— I’ll call her Jane—in the midst of a routine day of individual appointments with Introduction to Theatre students. Immediately after I had made an introduction in her class in the early days of the semester, Jane emailed me seeking general feedback on her writing– she is a transfer student from another CUNY college, and is eager to take advantage of Baruch’s resources now that she’s here. Unlike the majority of students who utilize the services we offer when supporting THE1041C, Jane wasn’t panicked about a soon-to-be-due assignment, but wanted a kind of general consultation on her academic writing skills. I asked Jane to send me some samples of her written work, and she told me that so far, she only had blog assignments.

When we met, we spoke about her approach to these blog entries; it was clear that she had given them some thought, but her sentence structure was often confusing, and it took me repeated readings to fully grasp her meaning. In most of her blog entries, she was beating around the bush of her argument or main idea. This isn’t an uncommon problem; I face it all of the time in my own writing, and it is among the biggest issues that our students face.

Jane’s eagerness to write more was what was uncommon. As we talked, she peppered me with questions. How could she improve her writing? What should she be doing differently? What kinds of exercises would help her improve her writing on her own? I had never before had a student actively seeking additional written work, so I asked her about the assignments she had coming up in the semester. I discovered that Jane was not being asked to write very much at all. Out of four classes, her longest assignment was a four-page paper. After talking with her a bit more, a few questions kept popping up:

How do we negotiate the balance between boldly experimenting with new technology and maintaining certain (old) standards of rigor? This question comes out of the sheer lack of quantity (yes, not always quality, but important nonetheless) of writing that I saw this student being challenged with, thanks to word-capped Facebook and blog assignments. Often, adventurous faculty members are juggling many different assessment elements at once– course blogs, maybe a course wiki, too, and then oral presentations, low-stakes writing in class, plus quizzes and finals. Your syllabus is busting out before you’ve even gotten to factor in class participation. So it’s not hard to imagine that having students write  extended essays might be what gets lost in the shuffle.

How do we make the assignment diversity feel relevant, not random? Jane was a little self-conscious about her blog posts, confessing that she wasn’t sure of the expectations in terms of formality. But, as I gave her feedback on them, she also defended herself; these weren’t really evaluated, she explained, they were just graded on the basis of whether she had done them or not. She felt they were an after-thought, and so, that’s how she thought of them: after. (Click here for my own reflections on the challenges and triumphs of course blogging, here for a course blogger superstar story, and here for much more about the phenomenal Blogs@Baruch and profs who are using it to thrilling ends.)

Can we teach code-switching within online social networks? Jane was not assigned any papers in her Sociology course, either. The class has a Facebook wall, where they post pertinent links and have lively conversation about readings and class discussions—even the organizing logic of the course is debated on the Facebook page, which looked to me to be a healthy and vibrant online commons. Still, the Facebook page comments are either 250-300 words or 420 characters. Since Jane is likely using Facebook to communicate with her friends and contacts, too, how will this Sociology professor go about making the distinction between one mode of commenting and another?

Could Jane’s lack of high-stakes writing assignments have to do with work-avoidance on the part of her Instructors (and so what if it does)? Are Jane’s assignments—blog posts about 18^th century acting techniques and Facebook comments in response to Sociology theory– examples of radical teaching, or just radical avoidance of the time-consuming task of reading through an 8-10 page (or 10-15 page) academic paper? None of her classes culminated with one of those. (In her Math class, Jane had no writing. In her Great Works class, the bulk of assignments were short—very short, 150 word assignments identifying a certain theme in the literature they were reading.) As is the norm within CUNY, half of Jane’s faculty is adjunct; adjuncts are generally only getting paid for one hour of work outside of their time in the classroom. A Facebook page can easily be monitored in one hour of work, so having students compose 420 characters at a pop could seem like a good way to minimize faculty labor while shaking up the tired old models, too. But there is a vast qualitative difference between infusing your syllabus with a diversity of learning objectives through multiple learning styles and creatively trying to avoid grading 10-page papers from 30+ students.

Are Jane’s assignments  preparing her for future employment challenges? The ability to communicate short, coherent messages is a fundamental expectation of many, many jobs. Just this year, at my “side gig,” I found myself parsing copy for a website, brochure, and even the 140 characters allotted for a web advertising button. These kinds of tasks will await Jane in every one of the fields she expressed interest in pursuing.

Still, these jobs will also expect the ability to sustain an argument (or inquiry into a topic or question)—exactly what is exercised in writing the long essay. Indeed, my friend who does just the kind of work Jane is interested in—communications for a policy organization—is called upon to write everything from one-page letters to the Mexican parliament to lengthy research reports on human rights abuses in Cuba. He is generally not the one tapped to write the blog posts or tweets for his organization, but someone else there is. So if we are giving students Facebook comments and blog posts as assignments, what kind of an evaluative standard should we use to ensure that they’re not just throw-away writings, but reach the kind of level that may one day be expected of them professionally?

I’m not advocating that we willy-nilly unleash a bevy of high-stakes writing assignments on our students, or mandate a standard number of pages of “academic writing” expected of each student. This post is appropriately full of questions, not answers. (And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Write-to-Learn strategies can and should be employed with incredible effectiveness.) And yet, it seems fairly clear that I saw something else happening in Jane’s coursework, and that something seems to be connected to a very worthy kind of experimentation on the part of her instructors. We can’t draw hard and fast conclusions from any one student’s anecdotal experience– and it is important also to mention that Jane was absolutely inspired by many of her classes and professors, and she was motivated to master their individual challenges. And yet, the question nags– what could explain this?– that an undergraduate could be writing so little? And what would you recommend to Jane?

So why, then, is poor Ms. Isaacson ranked in the 7th percentile of city teachers when it comes to student academic progress?

Because of this formula, designed to calculate a teacher’s value-added score by the Department of Education’s “accountability experts” (satirists, start your engines):

Click to view full size.

As someone who once taught for the NYC Department of Education and is also a product of it, I wasn’t really surprised that they had gotten it all wrong. I wasn’t even surprised to imagine that they would think such a formula could be an accurate method for tenure evaluation. They did, however, outdo themselves in the category of overall incoherence; not only did this tool strike me as wrong-headed, but it was also completely unintelligible. This is so unbelievably unhelpful a formula (ready-made for critique by visualization genius Edward Tufte), that no teacher could be expected to look at it and see her work (or her true challenges) reflected within it. Matrix-like in its complexity and opaque in its reasoning, it is a formula incapable of communicating what it is measuring or how a teacher might improve her practices based upon it. And from what I can tell, the variables are wonky, too.

It is not until the 16th paragraph of the article that Winerip summons the courage to try to explain the thing:

According to her “data report,” Isaacson’s students had a prior proficiency score of 3.57. “Her students were predicted to get a 3.69– based on the scores of comparable students around the city. Her students actually scored a 3.63. So Ms. Isaacson’s valued added in 3.63-3.69.” Simple enough, right? Wrong. The author– who knows he’s hit pay dirt with this one– goes on:

“These are not averages. For example, the department defines Ms. Isaacson’s 3.57 prior proficiency as ‘the average prior year proficiency rating of the students who contribute to a teacher’s value added score.”

Eh? And the calculation for her predicted score is based on 32 variables, which are plugged into a statistical model– the one that made me feel like I was, surely, reading The Onion.

Anyone reading this case study of Ms. Isaacson will naturally wonder a few things, like, “Wouldn’t it be fun to calculate what percentage of Joel Klein’s contract at Fox News Corporation represents Ms. Isaacson’s salary?” or, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to invite these statisticians to actually teach us this formula and how it works?” I frequently work on assessment at the Schwartz Institute, and it is also a built-in aspect of every course I teach. So I know that evaluating teaching and learning is a tricky thing indeed, a hall of mirrors in which you think you see the student reflected but often, you don’t.

I decided, then, to concoct my own formula, with my own variables, to evaluate the teaching that I do at Baruch in my capacity as a Fellow and an instructor of Communication Studies. What variables get in the way of student progress that cannot be accounted for after you have observed my class, read my syllabus, and tested my students for their proficiency level?

Click to view full size.

What if you really tried to articulate the variables that come into play when facing a group of students and a set of learning objectives?

Winerip explains that teachers are eligible for tenure based upon three categories: instructional practices (including observations), contribution to the school community, and student achievement (which is where the formula comes in). Now, I’ve never been much of a whiz at statistics, but maybe that’s okay. After all, if the communications people made the formulas, and the formula people made the communications, perhaps we’d all start getting somewhere?

So please—in the spirit of collaborative learning, improve upon my draft and post your own visual and/or variables in the comments section.

As if to illustrate this theme, Seldes had a posse of theatrical grande dames with her; seated in the front row were blockbuster stage actresses Angela Lansbury and Joan Copeland. Seldes would occasionally comment on their presence; “Angela, just seeing you there…calms me.”

Fantastic Four: Lansbury, Mason, Copeland, Seldes

After opening with a monologue by playwright John Arden about the blessings of art– “business and politics I leave to the crooks”– Seldes said firmly, “this is what I believe.” With that, she was done with her talk, and announced that she would answer any questions that anyone had– otherwise, she had not much else to say. As expected, the questions flowed from every corner of the audience, allowing Seldes to transfix with stories from her rich career, recollected with ample grace and humor; from her early aspirations as a ballerina, to studying with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse (“you don’t have to be nice to teach acting, but you have to be demanding”), to her well-known roles in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women and Peter Shaffer’s Equus, to her unfulfilled dream of playing Hecuba.

When asked by an audience member which women of distinction had made an impression on her own life, she recalled the head of Theatre at the Dalton School: “Her name was Mildred Geiger, and she was very important to me,” she said simply, and left it at that. While she was critical of the high prices of theatre tickets today, Seldes shaped a most non-judgmental, gratified, and appreciative theatrical figuration– one who is equally enthusiastic as a performer as well as an audience member. She is never bored at the theatre, she maintained, not even when watching a boring performance– there is always something, or someone, interesting to look at. “I think just watching other human beings is the most interesting thing I’ve ever done.” Soon, the final question was posed, there were flowers to present, and talk of a car waiting outside; time to go.

Later, I reflected on Seldes’s point of linking the individuality of actors to the plays they are in, taking the stance that the original cast is just one of the impossible-to-reproduce, ethereal aspects of the theatre. (When asked if Three Tall Women might be revived, she claimed it wouldn’t work without actress Myra Carter in one of the roles.) This insistence could make any of the younger audience members at yesterday’s talk pine for the opportunity to hop into the time machine and head for the box office circa 1967. I went home, curious for more Marian, and found a bizarre little trailer for a documentary on Seldes that somehow manages to capture just a piece of the intensity she brought to Baruch:

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?

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]

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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?

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

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.

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?

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?

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]

Probably not. Still, these are some of the tidbits from our wacky wired world that take center stage in Continuous City, a recent multimedia piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music created by the tech-savvy Builder’s Association. According to its marketing tagline, the play “explores our accelerated relationships in a sprawling multimedia world.” J.V. (Rizwan Mirza) is an internet entrepreneur trying to strike it big with a new social networking tool, XUBU, by tapping into markets in expanding cities around the globe. He has enlisted Mike (Harry Sinclair), an urban anthropologist, to trot from metropolis to metropolis, attempting to drum up financial and popular support for this revolutionary (and potentially lucrative) new tool. At home in the states, Mike’s daughter Sam (Olivia Timothee) grows distant and depressed while her nanny Deb (Moe Angelos) works on her new video-blog. Poor Mike begins unraveling as the stress of travel and distance from Sam begins to gnaw away at his faith in the power of the product. (Perhaps not surprisingly, the director’s note mentions both Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and Mike Davis’ “Slum Cities” as inspirations for the piece.) Here’s the trailer:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HISxK5Pr_ok[/youtube]

In theory, there seemed to be a lot in this performance that would be of interest to students of communication, which is why I brought my COM 1010 class to see it. And the play earnestly tries to raise questions about our faith in digital communication (particularly in connecting “global cities”) and its limits. There are two conventional stage spaces (depicting the Xubu office space as well as Sam’s bedroom), and, thanks to a dizzying array of video screens, we jump between cities with a pace that would probably wear out even Bill Clinton.

Within this media mess, some genuinely fun innovating goes down: J.V.’s videochats with his family are actually live and unrehearsed videochats with the actor’s family members, and the video blogging done by Deb changes with every city the show tours. Perhaps coolest of all, there’s a phony website for Xubu.cc where anyone can record a message that might be used in the show as an example of Xubu.

My students were unexcited by the prospect of recording their own Xubu video messages, and they claimed to be confused by the frenetic non-linearity of the performance. They seemed to be more attracted to the slickness of its screens than anything else, and at one point during the show I turned around to find two of them sharing i-pod buds; a strange confirmation that perhaps some of the themes of the play both resonated and didn’t.

It is true that, as my friend put it, some of the conceits behind Continuous City felt a tad cliché (“We can’t communicate! Or remember our daughter’s birthday!”), even while it would seem that this is a company on the cutting edge of exploring the uses of this technology in performance. All of the miscommunication seemed to fudge up the rhythm of the dialogue in a way that was more distracting than anything else— the frustration that motivates many of us to just hang up on someone when we have a really bad connection is the way I would explain the emotional response that the play elicited in me. As an audience member, watching other people unsuccessfully multitask or attempt to navigate the impossibilities of time zone coordination tended to alienate more often than engage.

Along with all of this, Continuous City also allowed me reflect a bit on my own relationship to video chatting, as I’ve very recently become acquainted with this weird plane. While it of course hasn’t been a perfect experience, it’s made a tough long-distance communication situation better, not worse. (I couldn’t help wondering if Mike would have been a crappy father even if he lived in the same city as the neglected Sam.) Trying to sustain a meaningful conversation over video chat can be strange and self-conscious; at one moment it feels like an invaluable alternative to the tinny-ness of cellphone, and at others it feels boring and fractured.

For all its benefits, my v-chat experiences have also made me dubious about people actually doing business over this thing, which was also exposed in J.V.’s frantic video-conferencing; video chatting seemed to reveal itself as a horrible way to try to be productive and/or efficient. It didn’t surprise me to see that the video chatting done by the characters in the play was most successful during the simple moments of visual playfulness—like when Mike puts his computer camera on the grass in a park and plays virtual hide-and-go-seek with Sam. In its current incarnation, it often feels like a blessedly unproductive medium somehow, maybe because it creates intimacy by forcing you to sit down and focus on someone (on a screen) in an engaged, patient way; there’s no masking of any other activities, and, most of all, you need to really work to catch the freaky rhythms of the conversation. All of which, of course, we don’t necessarily manage to do even when we happen to be sharing time zones.

Communication is not exactly the MTA’s forte. Between their signature garbled announcements (what’s the next stop?) to the impossibility of communicating across the vast gulf between the MTA booth worker and the puzzled tourist yelling helplessly at the glass, when they do communicate something (anything!) well, it’s cause for some serious celebration. Even the notoriously goofy advertisements on the trains (Dr. Zizmore joke, anyone?) serve as continual reminders of botched opportunities to reach the diverse train-riding audience while making substantial revenue– how many times have you seen empty ad space on our broken-down subway cars?

To make matters worse, the MTA has also been slightly slow on the uptake when it comes to wielding technology to the best of their advantage, which is why it’s perhaps no surprise that their latest stab—the new digital screens in some updated subway cars—already seem to be malfunctioning perfectly (according to my own admittedly informal survey of new train cars, that is).

And which is also why it’s interesting that something so simple manages to communicate so much: the train lines & representative letters themselves have incredible expressive power for many New Yawkers. Initially, when someone forwarded me the recent article in the Observer about the perceived changing desirability of certain train lines, I had to let out a small groan; anyone who’s interested in the brand-ification of NY neighborhoods has seen and been frustrated by this kind of article before– a few random quotes from random folks strung together to try to create a coherent snapshot of a neighborhood in supposedly wild flux.

The biggest problem I see with most of these articles is that their discussion of New York history seems to cover on average about three years, give or take a few months. As some irate comments to the article noted, New Yorkers who can recall when the Q wasn’t the Q or the R wasn’t the R look upon this obsession with particular train lines with bemusement. I grew up listening to my parents refer to subway lines by their old-school avenues, which I always found odd-sounding: “Did you take the IRT there?” “Doesn’t the 7th Avenue line stop there?” (Whaaa?) The Observer article engages in its own short-sighted historicism, looking all the way back to the roaring ‘00s to declare the Q the new L; eh?

I wonder if coveting a Chosen Train Line with static, starry-eyed love serves to cut down on the level of advocacy for better and more functioning trains across the board, or if it instead creates a neighbor more rooted in and concerned about where they live. The urge to want a transportation arrangement that is convenient, safe, and reliable is natural, but there seems to be something else at play here. What is it about the process of attributing status to certain subway letters/lines that feels like another lame fetish of the me-me-me-and-also-me generation?

I’ve sat through numerous student presentations (often by international students) who are shocked to discover upon arriving that our subway system looks like the old, neglected bohemoth that it is. A comparative analysis of the Hong Kong subway system, say, or the St. Petersburg subway, versus ours, is an embarrassing enterprise to be sure. I have the impulse to be protective of our train stations, to defend the long history that has made them what they are, and yet there’s something in the logic of these presentations that I can’t argue with. I sat in a shiny new Q car the other day, and couldn’t stop staring up at the broken screen above me that was promising that 34th Street would be the next stop– after we had already past 34th Street twenty minutes before and were hurtling towards Coney Island. Indeed, the MTA has given the very fabulous Q very fabulous new train cars and yet still can’t figure out where we’re headed.

“In fact, Jonson has a complex sense of human psychology, but his interest as a dramatist lies more in the psychology of habitual behavior than behavior in the transitional moments of life crisis for which Shakespeare’s plays are often metaphors. He is also interested in the way that human desires, anxieties and creative energies are affected by the material conditions of their communication.”

Jonson’s interest in these material conditions birthed some good stuff, like Epicoene, a play in which the character “Morose” develops a nervous reaction to the noise and congestion of London; he double-lines his walls, insulates his windows, seeks a silent wife, and even plans a silent wedding. While reading Morose’s comic antics, I was reminded of a recent posting on the blog Burnt Out Adjunct, who writes about the ‘Research = Google’ phenomenon that’s pitting frustrated professors against usually-clueless students in universities across the country. (World?) Maybe it’s all in a name, but suddenly, the familiar plight of poor Burnt Out seemed to strangely echo the desperate shutting-out attempts of Morose.

“Contemporary students come to college with a different set of expectations than they did even ten years ago,” Burnt Out notes. “These students are not agog at the level and breadth of information available to them. Rather, they expect to be able to, within a few key strokes, to gain access to whatever information they seek.” Cut to cranky professors trying to hold their research high ground, sputtering “but…but…” while the well-meaning libraries scramble to catalog information in new and easier and more searchable ways that do everything but deliver e-journals to students with a side of fries and a coke.

Perhaps for many of us though—especially those of us still in the slow drip of a doctoral program—both sides of the battlefield make sense. Sure, we grew up with Atari and eventually graduated to SuperNintendo, but many of us went to school before there was a computer in every classroom, and attended undergrad right around the time that card catalogs were transforming into still-lifes in the hallowed halls of our libraries. We know what Burnt Out knows—that “the Net does not cast the skein that one might assume.” And so while I’ve plenty of times found myself “just checking” the exact date of which Dumas was which on Wikipedia, I’m still made uncomfortable by a student relying on it as one of their sources for a speech or paper. (And it’s very easy to somehow dump on Wikipedia first; wisegeek.com and answers.com seem to be just as popular these days, and there are of course plenty others.) If only it were as simple as the use of pure plagiarism sites like dreamessays.com, but those kinds of offenses are the most easily detected and argued against.

Earning his moniker, Burnt Out ends his posting on a negative note: “So, committees will form, grants will be given and studies will recommend that individual professors seek to imbue a research skill-set into their objectives. And without a standard (either a collective standard (MLA) or an organizational approach (ie Google)), the Natives and the Profs will continue to lament just how odd, lazy, out-of-touch, etc. the other is.” I’m not ready to feel quite so despairing—perhaps because I think that imbuing a research skill-set can go a long way, depending on its implementation— but also because I’m somewhat wary that a collective standard issued by MLA will really connect to the heart of the problem (especially given the reality of the student population found at so many large universities, which seems to prohibit a one-size-fits-all approach from the get-go). And also because I wonder what the point of frowning in the face of the coming tide will really accomplish.

It raises an interesting question, to be sure: what part of the problem is just plain ol’ insistence on things being as we were taught? And how can we embrace the challenge of defending why an article on Walt Disney from the Journal of Popular Culture is preferred (and required) over one from Wikipedia? How do we rise to the task of communicating these reasons to our students in innovative and effective ways, rather than just putting a big “X” through wisegeek.com in their Bibliography? After all, as much as Morose tries escaping the noise, he’s the one who ends up looking like an absurd old man and unsympathetic spoiler—easily polarizing characterizations that risk getting in the way of communication most of all.