Facebook Owns You(r Original Content Produced On or Shared Through Their Tubes)

February 17, 2009 By 10 Comments
Image for Art courtesy of Facebook.com.

Image for art courtesy of Facebook.com

Rest easy, Cacophoners; I just removed the “Share on Facebook” option from the “Share This” widget that appears beneath every post.

For those who don’t know, Facebook changed its Terms of Service last week, asserting a perpetual claim to use however it wishes certain content that you post on FB or that is shared on their network via a hosted “Share on Facebook” button.   A similar policy was in place prior to the change in terms on February 4, but Facebook’s claims to your  content used to expired when you deleted items or deleted your account.  That option ultimately gave users control over their content.

No longer. Here’s the key passage from the new ToS:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

Here’s the clause that was removed:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

This has produced no shortage of outrage, as well as a totally inadequate response from FB honcho Mark Zuckerberg that essentially asserts the ToS does not reflect Facebook’s true feelings about user generated content (to which friend of the Institute Matt Gold responds: “What matters is what they *do* with user info, not how they “think” about it!”).

Amanda French of NYU posted a really helpful run down of various ToS’s on other user generated content web sites, which highlights just how off-base and egregious Facebook’s claims are.  Boone B. Gorges of Queens College wonders about the pedagogical ramifications of this change, and also about what Zuckerberg’s response teaches us about the concept of  “sharing” in the digital age.

Ultimately, I hope Facebook sees the error of its ways, because it provides a unique, valuable, and often elegant service.  I have a network on FB which is almost entirely separate and serves a different purpose for me than my networks on Twitter, Ning,  LinkedIn, or BuddyPress; I’d hate to see that diminished.  At the same, anyone who blogs on Facebook’s blog utility should think long and hard before continuing.  Photographers who share their photos through Facebook should reconsider, or at least start watermarking the hell out the images they share.  Musicians shouldn’t upload MP3s of their compositions.  Faculty should reconsider any educational uses of Facebook.  Our students should be informed (though that’s nothing new).  Web masters should zap those “Share on Facebook” buttons from their sites (for clarification, if you post a link directly into Facebook, the claim doesn’t apply).  And those of us who have posted pictures of our kids on Facebook so that cousins abroad and childhood friends can follow their growth should be prepared to see those images used without our notification or permission.

Filed Under: To Ponder, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , ,

Guest Post: Support for Oral Communication within the ESL Curriculum at Baruch College

February 2, 2009 By 2 Comments

The following is a guest post from Professor Elisabeth Garies, of Baruch College’s Department of Communication Studies. She can be reached at Elisabeth.Gareis@baruch.cuny.edu.

Oral communication instruction is traditionally somewhat neglected in the ESL curricula and services of colleges. Many programs focus on reading/writing proficiency and give only nominal, if any attention to listening/speaking skills. The imbalance is due to a great extent to college entrance requirements and grading practices in college classes: Students are often only tested for reading and writing proficiency but not for speaking skills. With the correlation between spoken and written proficiency in nonnative speakers being only moderate, it is no surprise then that some students graduate with low proficiency in spoken English.

This status quo is in stark contrast to the skills needed for integration into the college community and success in the workplace. In fact, oral communication skills are consistently ranked most important by employers of business as well as liberal arts graduates. Yet, every semester, nonnative students report that they are being asked by teammates not to speak during group presentations so that team grades are jeopardized. They also report being dismissed from job interviews due to comprehension-inhibiting accents.

It is paramount, therefore, that we address oral-communication competence. Two services are available for students at Baruch College: (1) Students can go to the Student Academic Consulting Center (SACC, VC 2-116) and make an appointment for free one-on-one tutorials with a professional speech tutor. (2) Students can visit the new ESL Lab (VC6-121, enter through VC6-120) and practice with the excellent software, audio, and video materials there. See http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab for hours, instructions, and materials.

To give an example: It’s the beginning of a semester. An (ideal) instructor collects writing samples and engages his/her students in speaking activities to determine whether a student may need assistance. The student is then encouraged (required?) to make an appointment with one of the speech tutors at SACC (the tutors, by the way, are all professionally trained speech pathologists and ESL specialists). During the first meeting, a diagnostic conversation/reading takes place, and the tutor determines which speech patterns are the cause of he students comprehensibility problems.

While the student may already have an idea about some patterns (e.g., differentiating between /r/ and /l/), some problems are more difficult to determine. For example, many languages have a syllable-timed rhythm (i.e., syllables have the same length); English, however, is a stressed-timed language (i.e., the rhythm of a sentence is determined by the regular beat of the stressed syllables only). Try to say the following sentences out loud as you clap your hands on the stressed syllables. You will notice that the sentences take the same amount of time, although the first one is much shorter than the last one. This is because of the stress-timed nature of English.

The lion came.
The lioness came.
The lionesses came.
The lionesses arrived.
The lionesses have arrived.

Comprehensibility problems often arise from stress problems; e.g., when a speaker from a syllable-timed language used his/her native rhythm to speak English. A staccato delivery ensues that makes it difficult for English listeners–who are used to listening for word and sentence stress–to follow the speaker.

In any case, once the student is diagnosed, the tutor will help the student produce the speech pattern correctly in one-on-one tutorials. When the student can produce the speech pattern, he/she needs to practice to commit the new pattern to muscle memory. It is said that our body has to practice a new movement (including speech organ movement) 1,000 times before the movement becomes muscle memory. Please see the Accent Reduction FAQs at http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab for more information.

Ideally, a student should see a speech tutor once a week and practice individually in the lab several times a week. With regular practice, significant progress can be made, even in the course of one semester. Please alert your students to these services. and remind them that, to change speech patterns, regular practice is necessary

Filed Under: Baruch College, ESL, Oral Communication, Resources

What to Watch For: Super Bowl Edition

January 30, 2009 By 3 Comments

I was surprised when I got home last night to hear on my answering machine a message from Christine, the “Loyalty Team Manager” at Autoland, where my wife and I purchased a car two years ago.  Christine wanted to let us know that she and her staff were in a “Yes We Can State of Mind,” and that if we wanted to know more about what that meant then we should call and arrange to come in to talk.

How sweet of Autoland to capitalize upon the Obama-inspired can-do spirit in the country in an attempt to separate me from my credit.

This Sunday is the Super Bowl — that annual bacchanalia of gluttonous consumption — and as many of us settle in to watch the Steelers and the Cardinals (in what should be a very good game), we’ll be scratching our heads at subtle and not-so-subtle attempts to tap into the national mood, for profit.  Commercials during the Super Bowl cost $100,000 a second, and while a few are clever and original, most treat viewers as pigs who like nothing more than bikinis, chicken wings, beer, and trucks.  Cultural and consumer trends tend to filter into these ads, threaded through anthropomorphized animals and talking babies.  Clips last year mocked wine tasting, mismatched celebrities, showed how easy it is to buy stocks, and hawked GPS systems.

I’ve got two predictions.  One: Christine and the Loyalty Team at Autoland aren’t the last folks who’ll invoke Obama in a sales pitch to me this week.  And, Two: Steelers 24, Cardinals 20.

* 10-minute post-post update. Just sent to me by my wfe, who was much more diligent in her research… check out this Pepsi ad that will run Sunday, especially the logo at the end:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFAF-bR6Y0o[/youtube]

Filed Under: Media, To Ponder Tagged With: , , ,

On the Horizon…

January 22, 2009 By 1 Comment

horizon2I’m happy to note that Blogs@Baruch received a mention in the annual Horizon Report, a document produced by Educause, an international non-profit organization “whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.” Every year the report is read by information and instructional technology professionals at universities and colleges across the world to get a sense of the current state of technology adoption, and future directions. It identifies key trends and critical challenges facing schools as we attempt to keep pace with the technological needs of modern life and as we explore innovative ways to integrate technology into our functions and curricula.

The bulk of the study is focused on describing, analyzing, and sharing prime examples of six “technologies to watch,” which are organized by their “time-to-adoption.” Click the image above to download a copy of the report; it’s interesting reading for techies and non-techies alike. Here’s a summary of the “technologies to watch”:

Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less

  • Mobiles: making services and information readily available to students and staff on portable devices such as iPhones and Blackberrys. For an example of what this looks like, see Stanford’s iApps Homepage.
  • Cloud Computing: a new way to think about computers, software, and files, which takes advantage of “data farms,” or collections of computers that distribute processing and storage. You no longer need to run productivity software on your hard drive; Google Apps, for instance, supports word processing, presentations, spreadsheet design, and calendars that are accessible, shareable, and functional through a web browser, wherever you are. The vanguard in this development is data intensive cloud computing used by the hard sciences, but this also has implications for students and staff, who, perhaps, need not rely so heavily on Microsoft Office in coming years. (Though not mentioned in the Horizon Report, last September, CUNY’s Online Baccalaureate began a “Virtual Application Streaming Pilot Project,” a local cloud computing experiment).

Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years

  • Geo-Everything: mobile phones, cameras, and other handheld devices can now automatically attach “geolocative” information to data they produce, such as photographs and videos. Researchers and teachers are exploring ways to integrate this functionality into their work via annotated maps, visual narratives, and game-based learning. See Community Walk and Paint Map for examples.
  • The Personal Web: individuals and groups are exploring the “creation of customized, personal web-based environments to support their social, professional, and learning activities using whatever tools they prefer.” At the Institute, we call this “personal publishing,” and it is the core idea behind Blogs@Baruch, which was mentioned as one of five exemplary “Scholarly Community Blogs” cited in this section. Other examples of “The Personal Web” include Omeka, an open source software developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which allows anyone with access to a server and a MYSQL installation to build and share online collections of artifacts; and SMARTHistory, an “edited online art history resource to augment or replace traditional art history texts.”

Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years

  • Semantic-Aware Applications: the “semantic web,” according to Wikipedia, “is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.” Some refer to this as Web 3.0, or “using the web as what to write with.” Educause sees the development of “tools that can simply gather the context in which information is couched, and that use that context to extract imbedded meaning.” Woah. Few examples of the semantic web in higher education exist. Patrick Murray-John, an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington, is exploring what opportunities new tools that look treat online materials as data may have for the studying of teaching, learning, and thinking.
  • Smart Objects: “a smart object is simply any physical object that includes a unique identifier that can track information about the object.” Think about a package that’s tagged with a bar code that is scanned and allows you to track it; or the library book you have that’s way overdue. Products based on this idea are entering the consumer market, and could be used in archaeology, medicine, and in combination with Geo-Everything approaches. An example being developed by researchers at the University of Florida would continuously monitor patients for a variety of conditions as they went about their normal lives.

We’re pleased to be included in a report of this magnitude, and to see such a wide variety of innovative deployments of technology. These are interesting times!

Filed Under: Baruch College, Higher Education, Technology Tagged With: , , ,

“Students today are…”

January 8, 2009 By 2 Comments

Branford Marsalis provocatively lays it down. Thoughts?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rz2jRHA9fo[/youtube]

Via RateYourStudents.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Grading, To Ponder Tagged With: , ,

Holiday Habanera with the Muppets

December 23, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Wishing our readers a very happy holidays and a splendid new year!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDFgtFXfnv0[/youtube]

Hat tip to Hillary Miller, via Facebook.

Filed Under: Fun Tagged With: ,

In Which We Provide the Butt for Your Jokes

December 8, 2008 By 4 Comments
Click to See Full Size

Click to See Full Size

According to The Gothamist, the flyer on the right was scattered around the campus of New York University last week.

The flyer announced NYU’s “In and Of the City Financial Aid Plan,” in which students who were unable to fork out 50k/year were told their families could save more than $43k annually if they instead attended CUNY.

Turns out the thing was a fake, produced by a group that calls itself “Students Creating Radical Change,” who “made up the flyer to encourage discussion about NYU’s treatment of its students, and to encourage students to question their university’s priorities.”  Essentially, the group protests that NYU does not provide sufficient financial support for its students, and focuses instead on expansionist behavior in the real estate market.

The letter to The Gothamist in which the students claim responsibility ends: “Oh, one other thing: we have nothing against CUNY. We just thought a ‘go to CUNY’ plan would make a neat flier. In fact, CUNY is facing its own financial problems these days – check out http://www.cunysocialforum.com/ for info on the student resistance to budget cuts and tuition hikes in the state higher-ed system.”

I might rant about the fetishization of protest embodied by this episode, which is more performative Yippie distractionism than the purposeful speaking of truth to power.  I might compare the postscript about CUNY to the utterances of folks who use phrases like “I have lots of black friends” or “I don’t mean to cast aspersions” when saying objectionable things.  I might snark about grammatical errors contained within the group’s statement, or attack the snobby implication that to go to CUNY is to slum it.

The fact of the matter is, especially in this economy, the group has a point (even if it isn’t really their point).  The cost of NYU is ridiculous, and is an education there really 8-10 times better than what one could get at CUNY?  From anecdotal evidence, applications for early admission to the Macaulay Honors College are up more than 30% from last year.  I think it’s pretty safe to say we’ll see an increase in CUNY and SUNY enrollments over the next couple of years.

So, give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.  I’m not sure there’s that big a difference between an underpaid adjunct teaching a course with 40 students and and an underpaid adjunct teaching a course with 55 students.  Bring it on.

h/t BooneBGorges

Filed Under: CUNY Tagged With: , ,

An Experiment in Digital Storytelling

December 2, 2008 By 11 Comments

I was recently inspired, no surprise, by a post on Jim Groom’s Bavatuesdays: “A Childhood Without Proof.” This was about as close to schmaltz as the right Rev. Groom comes, and being a sap myself, I appreciated both the content and the tone.

Jim, the 6th of 7th children, was aware of only one photograph of himself as a baby. One. But last week a Facebook friend from his old neighborhood tagged an image of him at 3. Jim’s post praises Facebook for being good at connecting people with the past, and at making the sharing of memories so much easier than it was just a few years ago. This would have been possible without Facebook; but it would have been more difficult, perhaps to such an extent that it wouldn’t have happened at all. There’s a powerful argument in there that connectivity tools don’t just impact the way that we relate to one another, but also can impact the way we relate to our individual and collective pasts.

This post was on my mind when I began playing with Google Street View, a component of Google Maps that offers street level views of particular locales. This isn’t a new tool, but Google has been steadily adding images as its van tours and shoots different localities (here’s a list of what’s been added). I was surprised to see that the neighborhood in which I grew up has been photographed. North Genesee Drive is of no great consequence — beyond being sandwiched between the neighborhoods that produced Magic Johnson and Malcolm X — but there it is, ready for your virtual tour.

I haven’t been back to my old neighborhood in years, and was pleased that I was able to recreate the bike rides and explorations of my youth, even if through a somehwat antiseptic, Googleized filter. There was no cutting through yards, lemonade sales, or bullies to run from. My memory can fill those things in. Mostly, it was pleasant to visit from my desk in New York.

Here’s a gallery of screen captures; click through for captions.

I recognize that this particular application of the tool appeals to me on a nostalgic level, and while that’s fine for personal blogging and Facebooking and all that, it’s hardly a pedagogical argument. The images above affect me and the kids I grew up with more than they’ll affect you.

But it’s also pretty easy to see how tools like this, free tools available from your desktop, can be integrated into college curricula. Studying the Lower East Side at the turn of the century? Compare the built environment of Hester Street from Jacob Riis’s photographs to images of the area on Google Maps. Use Google Maps to explore planning and architecture in urban, suburban, and exurban neighborhoods. What can we learn about Barack Obama from a virtual tour of Hyde Park? Find images of parks in three different European cities; how does their location and construction reflect their usage? Locate five “Chinatowns.” How are they alike or similar in organization? Writing a term paper on the Atlantic Yards? Use Google Maps to show how construction will restrict traffic. The possibilities are endless. Google Maps won’t tell us everything we need to know about any of these topics; but then, no single source will. A virtual tour of a street or a neighborhood can impart a sense of location and feeling that can augment other information on the path to knowledge.  (I should also note that Jim is also ahead of the curve on this).

In the movie below, I use Google Maps to recreate the walk from my home to Verlinden Elementary School. Yes, again, I know, the nostalgia trap; but I was struck by the sheer number of possible jumping off points for discussion, reflection, and investigation produced just by reliving that two block walk. There’s something exciting about an exploratory process that encourages one to explore even more.

Filed Under: Tools, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , ,

Now You Too Can Be An Instructional Technologist!

December 1, 2008 By 2 Comments

I get to tell Jewish jokes because I’m Jewish.  I get to tell snob jokes because I’m a historian.  I also get to tell instructional technologist jokes because I’m the Project Manager for Digital Learning (aka, “Blog Guy”) at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute.

So, I’ll let out a little secret: here’s where we get all those phrases we throw around that make most normal people feel like there’s a whole world out there they’ll never understand.  (hat tip Barbara Sawhill)

Filed Under: Fun, Language, Technology Tagged With: ,

Thinking Behind a Redesign

November 13, 2008 By 4 Comments

I recently implemented a new design for the homepage for our installation of WordPress MultiUser– Blogs@Baruch.

I tried to accomplish a few things with this redesign.  Mostly, I wanted to update the look of the site… the previous version was a bit clunky, a bit 2003 1999, and I didn’t feel it was popping.  As I usually say when Mikhail critiques my design (which is often): I’m no great aesthete, and certainly not a graphic artist.  But I think this version is markedly better, cleaner, and more inviting.  2008.  2009, even.

The inviting part is really the key, because we’d like to make this page not just a portal to the wide range of blogging being done throughout the Baruch College community, but as a sort of digital commons where ideas and resources and teaching and learning can be shared within the community and beyond.  So I’ve tried to structure the new site in a way that makes it easy to share a lot of different kinds of information, and for visitors to peer in and get a sense of how folks are using this technology at Baruch.

The site includes:

A Home Page with featured blogs and links to recently updated and particularly active blogs on the system  At the bottom of the homepage, RSS feeds pull in posts from the CUNY News Wire, from the Baruch College Teaching Blog, from Cacophony, and from the Ticker.  I’m working on a links list that will be customized for particular pages within the site, and will be using this as a space to tinker, to play with, and to show off the functionality that the WordPress community is constantly building.  All of this is living, and will evolve.

An “About” page with a mission statement about this project :

Blogs@Baruch was built on the following core beliefs:

  • College students should write regularly in all disciplines and in a variety of formats and genres
  • Faculty should have available support for their efforts to create avenues for student communication
  • Open-source technology has an important role to play in the future of higher education, and colleges will gain much from experimenting with a wide-range of open-source technology solutions
  • Community users of centrally-administered software should share both the burden and excitement of innovating with technology.  While a strong support network is necessary, a do it yourself ethos should be prominent
  • WordPress Multiuser is the most powerful and flexible blogging system available, and can be effectively customized to fulfill a wide range of the communicative needs of the college community

A “Projects” page where visitors can take a look at current and past blogs and sites supported by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute.  About three dozen blogs are linked, though some are password protected. Student blogs– we’ve got about 140 going right now– are not linked from this page.

A Blog where we’ll draw attention to specific things happening throughout the system and make announcement that might be of interest to our users.  This space will, over time, we hope, merge with what’s under the “Support” area, where I’m going to be adding to and refining what I hope are helpful materials– FAQs, a manual for WordPress customized for users of this system, suggestions for using weblogs in college teaching, instructional screencasts, and handouts for faculty to use and adapt.  The manual is in need of an overhaul, and this section will be tightened considerably in the coming weeks.

A “Contact” page for visitors to easily contact us.  Features a reCaptcha, for those curious.

Ultimately, we hope users and visitors will find this helpful, and will share in and contribute to the information it provides.  Scott Leslie recently wrote a powerhouse blog post on the ethics of and obstacles to sharing in higher education.  Leslie argues that institution-driven, overly-organized approaches to sharing tend to halt and stutter, while organic, individualized networks are more likely to thrive.  He posits lots of ideas about why and how this is, and concludes ultimately that planning to share gets in the way of actually doing it.  I take and sympathize with his point.

At the same time, I think the technology that eases sharing is still relatively underused and also undertheorized at Baruch and throughout CUNY.  One of our goals is to model just what a distributed learning environment is.  We’ll be using this new space to push, to compile, and to provide paths to useful information for our wildly diverse range of users.  It will ultimately be up to the users of the system to find value, and maybe to contribute some of their own.

The beauty is that they can do that just by getting a blog and sharing their work with the world.  If there’s value, and it’s put out there, it will be found.

In the interest of practicing what I preach– and since I totally relied on the fruits of the Google as I designed the new home for Blogs@Baruch– click beneath the fold for some techie detail on the redesign.  If the words “CSS,” “widgets,” “plugin,” “WordPress theme,” “hackalicious,” and “pwnd” mean nothing to you, no need to read on….

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »