Peter O’Toole, on Fresh Air, telling Terry Gross about shooting the dangerous scene pictured above for Lawrence of Arabia.
I love how O’Toole takes her question and turns it into a narrative, reveling in the details, painting a picture, and ending with a bang. As is often the case, Gross asks a follow-up question that leads to a coda by O’Toole that sums up not only the moment and the story, but also his entire approach to life.
A while ago, I made my first trip to Comerica Park, the stadium where my beloved Detroit Tigers play their home games. I say “play their home games” because to me, Tiger Stadium will always be their true home, even if in the future it’s left only partially standing. I grew up about an hour from the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, and my trips to that grimy cathedral were always something special. The place was beautifully disgusting, crusted with the cheers (and spit) of generations of faithful. Above all, it had character so palpable that it didn’t matter if half your view of the field was obstructed.
Tiger Stadium 
photo credit: hassgocubs
I hadn’t been to a game in Detroit since I left Michigan after college. Since then, the Tigers have changed ballparks, lost 119 games in a season (one short of the record), and dramatically turned things around to win a pennant in 2006. They’re hovering a few games under .500 right now, but have enough firepower and pitching to make a run in the second half of the season.
So I was excited to go to Comerica, which I’d heard was a great place to watch a game. It’s a beautiful structure, framing the skyline of old Detroit in a way that obscures the deep economic and political troubles that plague the city.
Comerica Park photo credit: kw111786
As we settled into our seats along the first base line, I was as giddy as I had been as an 8 year-old. I even called the lifelong buddy who I used to go to games with back then, just to let him know where I was.
Watching the game was a different experience from those trips in the past. I still had a blast, enjoying the company of my siblings-in-law, and appreciating the talent on the field (even as the Tigers lost to the Angels). I was struck, though, by the intensity of the messages flying around the ballpark. If I wasn’t paying attention to the action, an advertisement was unavoidably forced upon my gaze. I’m not sure if I felt more like PIerre Bourdieu or Hunter S. Thompson; either way, I felt like I was captive in Vegas.
Every line of sight offered something different. A giant fountain, sponsored by General Motors, dangled two shiny sedans beyond the outfield. Vendors, hawking $7 beers and $5 pretzels, were easy to spot throughout the stadium, marked by fluorescent yellow shirts. Even bases on balls — of which the Tigers issued too many — were sponsored: as the batter trotted down to first base, an ad blared through the speakers and in the slim screens that lined the upper deck inviting ticket holders to “walk down” to a local establishment for a haircut.
The most astonishing structure in the stadium, more striking even than the ferris wheel in the concourse and the giant tiger statues out front, is the gargantuan Comerica Park scoreboard. Roughly ten stories tall, the scoreboard serves over a dozen distinct advertisements, as well as two giant screens that play commercials when not showing player photos and statistics. In the center of all of this chaos is the actual score and game information, which take up no more than a quarter of the scoreboard’s mass.
Comerica Park Scoreboard photo credit: McPhloyd
One of the beautiful things about baseball is the way that one can read the story of a game through a box score. A young fan develops that particular literacy and carries it forward through life, forever able to regard a score line and imagine the events that led to it. At a ballpark, the scoreboard tells you in familiar code where you are, what’s happened to get you there, and how much space is left for your team to rally or survive. A scoreboard centers the fan within the experience of watching a game.
At Comerica, with competing flashing lights grabbing for my vision, separating out the scores from the messages on the board took dizzying effort. At Tiger Stadium, there had mostly been the game and the camaraderie in the stands, and it was a purer experience: fan meets game. Of course there were hawkers and ads and plenty of consumption; but they were nowhere near as loud or as intrusive as they’ve become.
Yes, there are economics behind all of this, and a straight line from the $7 beer and intense advertising to the giant contract that locked Miguel Cabrera up as a Tiger for the next eight years. If I’m bemoaning anything, then, it’s how the experience of going to a ballgame has changed, and the license that the powers that be feel to barrage the senses of a captive audience with an endless series of pitches. I felt assaulted, and so cheaply. I had to seek ways to tune out the barrage and actively create the experience that I wanted when I bought those $40 box seats.
At the 8th Annual Symposium, many of us discussed how we have been forced by new and more intensive modes of communication to “filter” the information that comes our way. This style of engagement with information requires a certain media literacy that, I believe, needs to be cultivated by colleges in order to better equip our students to navigate the messages, both literal and figurative, that bombard them in public spaces– and, increasingly, in private ones too.
The successful development of that literacy impacts matters large, like being an informed citizen, and small(er), like trying to enjoy a ballgame. New technologies, such as digital video recorders and RSS feeds, empower us to shape and filter the information and messages that come at us. At times, these tools feel like weapons in a battle that’s intensifying, and which increasingly threatens the purity of certain experiences. That’s too bad.
Cacophony’s good friend Jim Groom (right) has recently coined a term that has the edublogosphere all atwitter: edupunk. It probably runs counter to the meaning behind the word to note, impressed, that The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog, “Wired Campus,” picked up Jim’s phrase. Punks probably don’t care much what the Chronicle’s got to say.
Edupunk (here are musings and run downs by Mike Caulfield, Stephen Downes, and D’Arcy Norman) is a new name for ideas that have been bouncing around the progressive edublogosphere for some time, namely, that higher education humanity needs an alternative to proprietary course management systems and the philosophy of teaching and learning that they implicitly promote. At the core of edupunk are older pedagogical stances unrelated to technology: an ethic of self-reliance, the valuation of student-centered experiential learning, and the rejection of the “banking concept of education.” Edupunk seeks to update and adapt these ideas within the rapidly evolving realm of edutech.
I’m coming a little late to this particular conversation (last week I was DIYing the walls of my house with a wallpaper steamer and buckets of paint– domesticpunk), and hope I can add something to the celebration/elaboration. Seems to me that “edupunk” is a useful term, though, like all metaphors, it breaks down in the end. It has successfully congealed and branded the thinking that’s at the core of the unease many of us working in this field have with the way things are done at most schools. It’s good that it’s been picked up by the Chronicle, and it’s fantastic that more people are finding their way to Jim’s blog these days.
I fear, however, that the attention to the phrase may distract from the work that produced it. For instance, I’ve been been trying to square the circle of my dislike for punk music and culture with my love and appreciation for the work of the cats who’ve rallied to this term. I see a rejectionist ethos and cliquish sense of superiority behind much punk music and culture, and I’m not sure that’s an accurate description of the edutech movement that I feel a part of. I’ve always been more of a funk and soul man myself, and think that the affirmation native to those genres, the love and depth of feeling at their center, are much more pleasant (and just as useful) rhetorical and political stances. A brilliant administrator I once worked with, wise enough to know what she didn’t know and to defer to folks like Jim and Zach Davis on all things digital, once said, “we want to use technology to seduce students to our pedagogical goals.” That seems more Barry White than Johnny Rotten.
In that spirit, I present: edufunk.
photo(shop) credit: skywaltzer
Or, how about yet another metaphor: edujazz.I sense in the discourse around edupunk an appreciation for messiness, even a distaste for form. I’m not sure this lends itself to the best teaching. The pedagogy that I’ve been exposed to and have practiced as a teacher of history is much more like jazz… lay down a structure, and leave plenty of space for improvisation. This allows a variety of types of learning to happen in a classroom, acknowledges that both facts and the skills to interpret them are important areas to work on, and encourages our students to explore from within material that we’ve laid out with a set of goals in mind. I’m all for the “guide-by-the-side” approach to teaching… but the work that went into the Ph.D. I’m about to earn does qualify me, I think, to do a bit more than that at times.
This metaphor is translatable to how we, as instructional technologists, nurture critical approaches to online learning, particularly in how we can “seduce” talented teachers to experiment with new forms. Our Institute is incredibly lucky to have the autonomy to deploy and develop whatever software we deem pedagogically appropriate, so to a certain extent we are isolated from Blackboard. Baruch’s IT shop also recognizes that an institution of higher learning should offer a range of solutions to its community, even if those solutions compete with one another. BCTC blesses and supports our experimentation.
Yet Blackboard still runs wild at this university, and we are constantly engaging with faculty members and administrators who refuse to see the differences between the solutions we promote and what BB offers. BB’s appeal is in its antiseptic pre-fabrication, in the very fact that it doesn’t force faculty to take the extra steps to really consider how Web 2.0 and distributed learning open up new pedagogical possibilities. As a result, many faculty graft onto it existing modes of learning, fearful of allowing technology to “get in the way.” They get on Blackboard, get off, and move on.
Some faculty members do use Blackboard quite successfully, particularly for collaborative projects. Good teaching is good teaching, no matter where it happens or how it happens. Our job as instructional technologists, I think, is to explore the new possibilities and modes of learning that Blackboard happens to work against. If that software gives faculty members what they need to accomplish what they want, then so be it. But if faculty are interested in making full use of distributed learning, in continuing to learn themselves, and especially in truly empowering students, they need other solutions.
Edujazz, emphasizing structure and improvisation, can help reach out to faculty who are reticent to give up their control and jump into the pit with the edupunks. This argument evolves from my work in an academic service unit, where my job is to help a wide-range of faculty members experiment with this stuff. Such work requires, and benefits from, sensitive responses to their concerns. An anti-authoritarian, anarchic response will ultimately accomplish little. The DIY approach of edupunk is a great goal, but often times DIT– Do It Together–is necessary, and even preferable. Helping faculty members translate their pedagogical structures to a new environment goes a long way towards mollifying their concerns about the impact of technology on their students’ learning. The students, if the structure is sound, can handle the improvisation.
Now, behind the scenes, hell yeah, I’ll cavort with the punks. Jim’s named a movement, even if the contours of that movement still haven’t yet been fully defined. The politics of this stuff and the consideration of the logic of capital are deeply important, and should constantly be a part of the conversation. If a university is going to spend millions on a limited and problematic application, it should probably be able to explain why that solution is better than cheaper alternatives. I haven’t seen that done yet.
Until it is, there’s work to be done. So, edupunks, edufunks, eduheads, or whomever: keep doing your thing.
Parenthood is undeniably a blessing. Yet, if I were to speak honestly, I’d note that there are certain drawbacks, not the least of which is ceding control over the soundtrack to your life. My sweet soon-to-be four year old doesn’t want to listen to many of my tunes. I’m fortunate that her choices are usually pretty tolerable. While I dig Dan Zanes or Laurie Berkner in small doses, they get play in our house mostly because the munchkin wants them.
Of course, she’s allowed her own music. I know our tastes will likely diverge through her adolescence, and we’ll have less of a chance during those years to connect over common sounds. That’s part of why I’m so glad that she’s worked the Dino-5 into her rotation recently. This collection of hip-hop heads is organized by Prince Paul, who produced the landmark De La Soul albums 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul is Dead, and Buhloone Mind State, and features Ladybug Mecca (formerly of the Digable Planets), Chali 2na (Jurassic Five), Wordsworth (an underground Brooklyn MC who appeared on records by A Tribe Called Quest and Blackstar), and Scratch (the vocal turntable, formerly of the Roots). Their debut album is a storybook, narrated by the poet Ursula Rucker, about 5 dino friends at their dino school. My kid is now walking around, rapping in the deep voice of 2na’s character, T-Rex, “I may be big and scary, but I’m really pretty nice.”
What’s so striking about the Dino 5 for me is the way they capture the essence of hip-hop as it was during its golden era in the late 1980s-mid 1990s, before capital swooped in and co-opted what was once predominantly an alternative and oppositional art form. Popping off about your fly Adidas or your adversary’s nappy head and rotund relatives, rapping about dancing, music, girls, boys, friends, enemies, and the neighborhood. Most of that gave way to Big Pimpin’, bling bling, and baseless braggadacio.
Hip-hop is still a vibrant art form, always will be, but there’s a reason that the areas of the music that challenge listeners aurally, poetically, and politically moved “underground,” out of site from the casual observer who doesn’t have the time or the passion to dig for those sounds. Hip-hop ain’t dead, y’all, far from it; it’s been integrated in interesting ways into other forms, it’s been globalized, and there’s still plenty of innovation happening. Yet hip-hop’s foundational meaning has been clouded over the past generation by its loudest voices.
So I’m happy to share with my daughter a feeling similar to what I got during my adolescence, listening to De La transmit live from Mars. The Dino 5 represent the best of hip-hop: role playing, storytelling, deep danceable beats, learned references and musical quotations, wicked flow, and lyrical playfulness. Their music is both nice enough for a four year-old and “nice” enough for her purist dad. Kid tested, pops approved.
As my daughter takes her first tentative steps towards reading, it heartens me to be able to introduce her to the poetry and artistry of hip-hop with something that’s her speed. Soon enough, she’ll be barraged with beats and words and sounds. The Dino 5’s album gives her hip-hop that’s more sophisticated than the corny rapping on Sesame Street. Hopefully, it will help her sort through the cacophony that she’ll meet as she grows, and find something that’s as meaningful to her as the music of my youth is to me.
Here’s a couple of brief clips to tack sound onto my words.
T-Rex struggles with how other kids see him, and hopes that they can think twice about how nice he may be:
Tracy Triceratops has a tough time keeping her voice down:
Posdnous introduces the “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” on De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (1989):
How do academic blogs reflect the disciplines of their authors?
I’ve become interested in this question while following our Anthropology/Sociology working group, and also through my own surfing. A relatively new blog–The Edge of the American West–run by historians Eric Rauchway and Ari Kelman from U.C. Davis, has quickly become one of the better U.S. history blogs. What makes it good is a steady flow of mixed content: scholarship and book reviews, “This Day in History” posts, pick-ups on contemporary political issues and reporting, and some discussion of teaching. Mix in the authors’ fine senses of humor and an occasional reference to sports and, voila, you get pretty good insight into just what it is historians do.
Early in The Edge’s life, Rauchway answered the question, “Why Blog?” I was particularly struck by his fourth reason:
To change the profession: be the academic discourse you want to see in the world. You want historiography to move quickly, have relevance, be sharper? You can’t make it that way book review by book review: but you can if you blog.
This argument supports the notion of a blog as a personal publishing platform, as an opportunity to get your name and voice out there, and to contribute to the shaping of the discourse in your field.
So, how about it, BLSCI fellows? Your very own blog, and all the opportunity that comes with it, is now just a click away.
Baruch faculty and students are making some unique and innovative contributions to the educational blogosphere this semester. Our goal in supporting course-based usage of weblogs over the past year has been to produce various models and prototypes that can be duplicated and built upon as the technology becomes more widely deployed throughout Baruch. In advance of the BLSCI’s rollout of Wordpress MultiUser at Baruch, I’d like to highlight the blogs we’ve helped launch in the past two months.
Anthropology/Sociology Faculty Working Group
Diana Rickard, Melis Ece, and I have been running a disciplinary working group with five faculty from Anthropology/Sociology who are using weblogs in their courses for the first time. The project includes seven individual course blogs, and the faculty also contribute their thoughts about using weblogs in their discipline to a shared online space. This project is a fascinating example of how course blogs, even in one discipline, can achieve a range of goals, from pre-writing for in-class presentations, to scaffolding research papers, to extending the classroom, to sharing and exploring related materials in an informal way. Each faculty member has a vision, and has structured their course blog(s) accordingly. It’s exciting to see a group of committed young faculty think through the implications of bringing their courses and pedagogical goals online. The home blog features commentary by our participants, and also houses both links to the individual course blogs and recent posts, which are fed in via RSS syndication.
Leonard Sussman: Digital Photography
One of the great strengths of open source products such as Wordpress is the elegant ease with which participants in a course can share their work with one another. Prof. Leonard Sussman, of the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Baruch, gets major props for his willingness to run a prototype of a blog linked to and driven by Flickr.com, the image-sharing site (poetically, the Flickr blog is itself powered by Wordpress). Prof. Sussman was unhappy with the quality of in-class critiques his students have been delivering, and desired a space where they could share their work with one another, and, when prompted, do some pre-writing to develop the language with which to talk about photography.
Each student registered for his/her own Flickr account, and then joined a Flickr group called “Sussman Images.” When they submit an image from their own account to the group, that image automatically feeds into the course gallery, which displays images through a lightbox. The images also appear randomly in a sidebar on the front page of the blog, and Prof. Sussman can pull individual images into the main area of the blog for students to comment upon. He hasn’t gotten them writing just yet, but we’re happy to get the data flow set up, and think that this type of sharing, taking advantage of free tools readily available, provides one innovative model for bringing arts classes online.
Zoe Sheehan Saldana: Designing with Computer Animation and Computer Based Image Making
Mikhail has christened Professor Zoe Sheehan Saldana our first “blogfessor of the month” for her “Designing with Computer Animation” course blog. On this site, she’s taken the rotating header function that comes with the Neoclassical Wordpress theme and hacked it to accept Flash animations. She then had each of her students design an animated header for the site. If you go to the blog, and hit refresh, the header will change.
Our support for this project was limited to loading up the blog, giving Zoe administrative access, and tossing some ideas around. She did the rest. The result is, as Jim Groom has noted, “an awesome intersection of uses of this online space: sharing resources, publishing platform, collaborating on projects, and a class art gallery.”
Baruch Journalism: Writing New York and Online Newswatch
Few fields have been as deeply impacted by the explosion of Web 2.0 as journalism. Undergraduate journalism departments are scrambling to develop online and new media components to their curricula, and we’re happy to be assisting Baruch’s program as it adjusts. We’re currently supporting two journalism weblogs. One is the continuation of a blog first launched for Professor Roslyn Bernstein’s feature writing course last year, called “Writing New York.” The second is Professor Vera Haller’s resource to help all journalism students follow developments in online journalism, called “OnlineNewsWatch.”
Feel free to check out these sites, and follow them as they build over the course of the semester. There’ll be much more blogging at Baruch in the days to come.
I broke away from productive dissertating last Friday to attend a panel on innovating with open source at the 2007 CUNY IT Conference featuring our fearless leader, Mikhail Gershovich, City Tech English Professor Matt Gold, and University of Mary Washington Instructional Technologist and frequent cac.ophony reference, Reverend Jim Groom. Each brought his “A” game.
Mikhail showed off this blog and some of the course blogs we’ve been running, and also demoed to oohs and ahhs VOCAT (which, hopefully, will get a more detailed presentation on this blog once it’s rolled out) while touching on the benefits of “soft money” when trying to break out of traditional teaching and learning molds. Matt talked about his experiences teaching through Wordpress, MediaWiki, and SMF Discussion Boards in the CUNY Online BA program and in a traditional face-to-face class, and displayed how distributed class blogs (each student has his/her own) empower students to see their educations as tied into broader communities of knowledge. These approaches also helped his students develop technological “fluency” as they mastered the material of the course, a project that colleges should be grappling with when they discuss their general education curricula. Jim played the part of the prodigal son, sharing with us what he’s achieved using WordPress MultiUser at UMW. In a community of approximately 3200 teachers and learners, UMW has 800 individual and course blogs up and running on one installation of this software. “Running” is the key word. With Jim as their muse, users–students and faculty–are finding creative ways to connect within courses, across disciplines, and beyond the boundaries of the university. To explore this fantastic project, click here.
This was a truly inspiring panel, and raised some important issues. Though Jim put his finger most solidly on the question (and just built it out here), each presenter touched on the tension between administrative concerns that usually favor proprietary software solutions and innovative teaching and learning achieved through open source. For instance, Blackboard is successful primarily because of its strength as an administrative tool– students are auto-enrolled, grades can be calculated and submitted, it links with e-Reserve. Blackboard, however, rarely wows or gets students excited about participating, and applications like the blog and wiki feature in JournalLX simply fake the funk when it comes to the malleability and connectedness we saw displayed by the presenters. Applications like Wordpress, MediaWiki, and SMF each empower users to shape information and experience however they need to.
Jim argues in his post that this tension is at the very core of what it means to be an instructional technologist. Joe Ugoretz, who is the Director of Instructional Technology at the Macaulay Honors College (Jim’s and my former stomping ground) echoes the question, and points out that information technology and instructional technology aren’t the same thing. Joe hopes that a more mutually beneficial balance of power between “administrating” and “teaching and learning” can be worked out. The MHC is a hotbed of experimentation in teaching and learning, like the BLSCI, and with Joe now running the show over there it would be great if we could explore connections and partnerships. There is great work being done on teaching, learning, and technology throughout CUNY but, in part because the ultimate target of such work is the classroom, few apparatuses exist for such knowledge to really resonate out and through the lives of CUNY folk. That the panel on open source at the CUNY IT Conference was much more highly attended than last year was promising. Perhaps next year these questions can be better represented in the design of the conference.
I’ve been thinking about David’s post a while back discussing strategies for effective PowerPointing. In writing instruction, one of the best ways to get students to begin writing with confidence is to have them “write what they know.” What they know is less important than that they develop the ability to explore and express it. Such an assignment implicitly takes some of the focus off of the content, and moves it onto the form. Though those two elements of writing are never completely separable, it’s often helpful to have assignments that focus on one more than the other.
I’m not sure that students are ever given much of an opportunity to learn to present or to PowerPoint in this way, to “PowerPoint what they know.” Would this be helpful as a freshman year assignment in some type of intro course? (I’m of the mind, by the way, that all freshmen should be taking a required media literacy course in their freshmen years… this would fit perfectly in that class).
I once worked with a freshmen class that used PowerPoint to create documentaries about their families, with embedded movies, audio interviews, and images. The goal of the assignment was to get students to break out of the PowerPoint box, and to get them to construct a narrative through the medium. The only rules were no clip art and no gratuitous animation. I gave them a workshop on PowerPoint, helped them storyboard their presentations, and then assisted them with the programming. Finally, they showed their work to the class. This assignment was a successful way for them to master the software and develop their voices at the same time, with the added bonus of creating community in the classroom through the sharing of personal information.
All of what I’ve written above is just prelude to the PowerPoint slides included below, which are examples of the more serious work that some Baruch students might produce if we give them the chance to PowerPoint what they know. Click on the image to read it.
(Slides taken from here, with a warning that readers not of the hip-hop nation may be offended).
My Jamaican sister-in-law shared this with me. The Real McCoy, a British sketch-comedy show that aired on BBC in the early 1990s, offers up one example of cross-cultural interpenetration… Dr. Who translated into Jamaican.
How about using this as a model for an assignment on mash-ups, taking advantage of Web 2.0 to explore processes of translation/cultural exchange? Taking students inside the productive process, getting them to exercise knowledge in creative ways? It could work for anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, literature, language, or sketch-comedy classes.
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