Author Archive for Mikhail

Digital Learning and The Schwartz Institute: Northern Voice 2008

Published
by
Mikhail
on February 29, 2008
in Blogs and Blogging, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Conferences, ESL, Higher Education, Literacy, Pedagogy, Technology, Web 2.0, Writing Instruction, northernvoice and nv08
. 2 Comments

collage by injenuity

Earlier this week I returned from my first Northern Voice, a remarkable conference on social media at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. (The keynote speaker was none other than Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer of WordPress, the open-source blogging platform we have started to use here at Baruch, but that’s for another post.) I spent most of my time at NV around a great group of Canadian and American edubloggers and instructional technologists who have channeled their energies towards exploring how the technologies and media that facilitate all manner of social interaction online might be harnessed to transform teaching and learning. Alan Levine, Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman, Scott Leslie, Chris Lott, Jen Jones, Bill Fitzgerald, and our old friend Jim Groom made me feel welcome at NV and helped me gain invaluable insight into some of the IT projects we’ve taken on at the Schwartz Communication Institute. Most of all, they helped facilitate my thinking through of some of the more salient work we’ve been undertaking lately as well as new directions in which we might move .

For the last 10 years, we have described what we’re trying to do at the Schwartz Institute as “infusing oral, written and computer mediated communication-intensive activities” into Baruch’s undergraduate curriculum. What exactly we mean by the terms in italics above has mutated and evolved over the years as we’ve experimented with new pedagogies and played around with our ideas of what it means to communicate purposefully and effectively.

What we mean when we talk about “computer-mediated communication” has changed most in meaning. At first it was just a way of modifying “written communication”: writing but on computers, mostly email and asynchronous chat via Blackboard. It merely acknowledged the generic differences between the kinds of writing our students did that ended up on paper and those which were both transmitted electronically and read on a screen. This included a limited notion of blogging as simply an occasion for writing and not so much of interacting within any broader community of knowledge producers.

Since our engagement with the key ideas that inform the conversations at Northern Voice, what we mean by “computer mediated communication” has changed to the point that “mediated” is no longer appropriate or especially useful (even “computer” seems limiting). It’s not mediated, it’s facilitated, even transformed by the tools we use. (Medium=Message, etc. etc.) What we’re concerned with now is not just writing with a computer but something much more complex, nuanced, and more exciting: something social. And it no longer involves just writing but other media as well. We have started to encourage faculty to allow students to compose not only in words but also with sound, images, moving and still, and all manner of found objects from the vast vast universe that is the internet. We have started to play around with ways of aggregating the knowledge students produce and encouraging them to offer it up to other community members while maintaining a sense of ownership and of responsibility for their own work.

Kathy Davidson’s distinction between Instructional Technology and Digital Learning has been helpful in illuminating where the Institute has been and where we’re going with electronic media in the work we do with students and faculty. Davidson says:

IT is usually institutionalized from the top down whereas digital learning is shared, contributory, collective, collaborative, customizable. With IT, teachers or, even more typically, administrators propose and implement and often require other teachers and students to use a particular new instructional tool in a certain way and to certain ends. In digital media and learning, the outcomes are less clear, the teachers have less of a determining role, and technology isn’t something delivered to others but is intrinsic to the larger learning project. Its building and application are part of the collective learning experience. The purpose of IT is to facilitate instruction. Digital learning can happen in school–but is as likely to take place at recess or in the lunch room as in the classroom. . . . Digital learning enhances and takes advantage of all the various ways we do things on line, allows us to customize and remix and repurpose online tools, communities, games, and other media, and, wherever possible, also makes us think about the implications and applications of the technologies we use so that we can learn, think, and act better together.

Facilitating digital learning is where we’re headed and I thank everyone I spoke to at NV for helping me get my head around that and showing me some of key tools and approaches that will become indispensable to our work.

Creative Commons License photo credits: injenuity and penmachine

The Schwartz Institute wins the 2008 TIAA-CREF Hesburgh Award

Published
by
Mikhail
on January 18, 2008
in Baruch College, CUNY, Faculty Development and Higher Education
. 2 Comments

Boy, are we proud around Baruch these days. The Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute has been awarded TIAA-CREF Institute’s prestigious Theodore M. Hesburgh Award which recognizes outstanding faculty development programs focussed on improving undergraduate teaching and learning. Here’s TIAA-CREF’s boilerplate on the award, which comes with $20,000 for Baruch College:

The annual TIAA-CREF Hesburgh Award recognizes exceptional faculty development programs designed to enhance undergraduate teaching and learning. Named in honor of Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame and former member of the TIAA and CREF Boards of Overseers, this award seeks to strengthen the teaching tradition at America’s undergraduate colleges and universities by acknowledging that an energized faculty is key to educational excellence.

What a great honor for all of us here at the Institute! Take a look at Baruch’s press release on the award. And here is a post by David on some of the supporting material we submitted as part of our application. Great work, Fellows. Next stop: the Nobel.

PowerPoint Comedy

Published
by
Mikhail
on September 27, 2007
in Oral Communication and Powerpoint and Presentations
. 0 Comments

For those of us down on PowerPoint, here are a couple of comedians using PowerPoint in their acts. As you can imagine, hilarity ensues.

First, Don McMillan, the poor man’s Edward Tufte, on how not to use Powerpoint. Then, Tim Lee, Ph.D. uses PowerPoint slides and some old fashioned booklearning, to keep his audience in stitches. Enjoy.

WAC/WID Terminology, Parts II & III

Published
by
Mikhail
on August 8, 2007
in CUNY, Faculty Development, Pedagogy, Resources, Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Instruction
. 0 Comments

As promised, here’s the rest of that useful WAC/WID glossary from the CUNY WAC/WID Handbook. Again, please feel free to comment on any of these definitions.

High-Stakes Writing
High-stakes writing assignments are expected to be completed according to formal academic and disciplinary conventions and usually count for a significant part of a student’s grade; examples include essay exams, research papers, lab reports, and critical response papers. This term is generally paired with the term “low-stakes writing” (see below), and distinguished from informal writing that is often exploratory and non-graded. In Britton’s framework, the function of high-stakes writing would be “transactional,” that is, to get the business of college done.

Journal
Generally informal, journals can be a productive place for students to record their thoughts, experiences, questions, and informal writings throughout college, in all disciplines, as well as in their daily lives. A variation on the journal is a “double-entry journal.” Students write in two columns: the first column contains quotations from a reading; the second column contains their reactions or responses to those quotations. Many variations are possible. Students might be asked, for example, to use paraphrases or summaries in the first column instead of quotations. Triple-entry journals, in which the third column might be used for peer responses, research questions, etc., are also commonly used.

Language
To talk about writing is to talk about the uses and functions of language, as well as to talk about politics, history, and culture. All converge at CUNY, which is an extraordinary crossroads of languages: our students speak (and may write in) 131 first languages other than English.

Literacy
The term literacy refers to the ability to use language—to read, write, listen and speak. In recent years, educators and administrators have added “numeracy,” “multimedia literacy,” “information literacy,” and “quantitative literacy” to the literacies expected of college students. Of course, what it means to “use language” successfully is a cultural and political question.

Low-Stakes Writing
Low-stakes writing activities provide students with an opportunity to experiment with ideas, form, and style without the pressure associated with correctness. The term “low-stakes” represents the level of expectation that a student and instructor bring to a particular assignment, meaning that low-stakes writing should count very little (if at all) toward the student’s final grade, while high-stakes writing is presumably graded. Examples of low-stakes writing include: journals, reflective responses, and freewriting. Some argue that the more frequently students engage in low-stakes writing, the more confidence and expertise they will apply to formal, high-stakes assignments. In Britton’s framework, low-stakes writing would be “expressive.”

Minimal Marking
The principle behind minimal marking is that correcting each technical mistake is not the most useful way to respond to students’ work; minimal marking encourages a focus on the larger ideas the student is trying to communicate, and emphasizes responding to those. Faculty may choose to point out one or two recurring technical errors, but should focus their responses on the work as a whole. Many faculty are concerned that they spend a great deal of time marking and correcting grammatical and other technical errors, and proponents of minimal marking argue that this practice reduces the amount of time spent correcting, and therefore allows for a greater number of writing assignments. Moreover, some research has shown that students can be overwhelmed by too many comments, and have difficulty prioritizing and addressing them in effective ways.

Paper
Common college short-hand for a formal, graded assignment of a specific length. “Paper” covers a lot of ground, from “essay” to “report,” and is also often modified by adjectives like “research,” or “compare/contrast.” Some argue that WAC/WID provides a space for educators to reflect on the many assumptions that cohere around vague terms such as “paper” or “write” or “composition.”

Peer Review
Practice of having students read and provide comments and suggestions for each other’s writing. This is generally done in class in pairs or small groups. Also referred to as peer editing, peer review is often guided through the use of handouts or worksheets that assist students in reading others’ writing through various critical lenses.

Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of speaking or writing effectively, using the principles and rules of composition drawn from classical traditions, typically tied to the art of persuasion. Classical rhetoricians were interested in dividing rhetoric into its component parts. For example, Roman rhetorician Cicero identified five rhetorical components: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronunciato. Early scholars and teachers of composition tended to discuss and teach rhetorical modes: persuasion, description, argument, compare-contrast, etc. More recently, WAC practitioners have focused on the rhetorical nature of all language, emphasizing the rhetorical dimensions and methods of the various disciplines. (For a set of definitions of rhetoric offered by rhetoricians both ancient and contemporary, visit this site.) All these approaches share the fundamental belief that a speaker or writer will use any given language more effectively if s/he is consciously aware of its rhetorical dimensions.

Scaffolding
Scaffolding is a term drawn, primarily, from the work of Russian cognitive psychologist Lev Vygotsky, to represent the centrality of social interaction in the development of cognition. The term has come to be used within education to refer to the ways in which complex projects can be broken down into manageable pieces, with the instructor/expert guiding the students/novices through the entire process, and encouraging students to move to higher levels of expertise. Faculty can monitor how students are developing their ideas throughout, and provide assistance if students encounter obstacles.

SWE (Standard Written English)
There exist many language communities within the larger rubric of the English language. SWE refers to that form of written English that is agreed upon by most publishers, colleges, and standardized tests to be the most “correct” and thus most understandable by all speakers and users of English regardless of differences in dialect or usage. This variant is sometimes called “Standard American English” (SAE), as well. The debate about how to teach what students need to know to gain fluency in Standard Written English (see below) is an important, current cultural, political, and historical debate throughout the English-speaking world.

WAC/WID Terminology (Part I)

Published
by
Mikhail
on August 7, 2007
in CUNY, Faculty Development, Pedagogy, Resources, Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Instruction
. 2 Comments

Here’s more from the CUNY WAC/WID handbook. Useful stuff I hope. Please feel free to comment on any of these definitions. Parts II and III are forthcoming.

Common WAC/WID Terminology (Part I)

Audience
This term is used to define those for whom a piece of writing is intended. The identity of the audience shapes the writing, as writers adapt their tone and content to the situation. It is especially important to keep in mind the difference in audiences implied by discipline (the audience for a lab report, for example, is different than that for a performance review).

Essay
In the classical sense, an essay is a text in which the first-person singular comments upon—questioning, debating, arguing about—a subject. Although “essay” is often used interchangeably with “paper,” the term properly refers to a type of writing that blended the personal with the academic. As a verb, “essay” means an initial, and sometimes tentative, attempt—a “try.”

Expressive, Transactional, Poetic Uses of Language
Britton and his team developed a framework for classifying school writing, based on sociolinguistic theories of the functions of language (drawn primarily from the work of linguist Roman Jacobson). They were concerned that most school writing was written to the “teacher-as-examiner” and that students were not encouraged to try out the whole linguistic keyboard. The three categories of language function, according to Britton in Development of Writing Abilities, are:

    1) expressive—writing that is “close to the self,” representing the “ebb and flow” of a writer’s thoughts and feelings.
    2) transactional—“language to ‘get things done’ or participate in the world’s affairs . . . to inform, persuade, or instruct.”
    3) poetic—“writing as a verbal construct, a patterned verbalization [poem, story, song, etc.] of the writer’s feelings and ideas.”

Error
Error is closely connected to the study of grammar, basic writing, and ESL. Error analysis is a technique for identifying possible underlying causes of mistakes in sentence structure, verb form, etc. The identification of recurring “patterns of error” in a writer’s text is a widely used pedagogical tool to reduce a seemingly large number of errors to a handful of teachable categories of error (subject-verb agreement, possessives, etc.).

Freewriting
Freewriting is an informal writing activity in which students write “freely” without concern for grammar, punctuation, and other constraints. Freewriting is often considered a staple in composition pedagogy: typically, students are directed to write in class without stopping for a set period of time (usually just a few minutes). An instructor may specify a topic or leave it entirely up to the students. What is done with the writing varies widely: the texts may be read out in class to prompt discussion, or used as a source of ideas for another writing assignment, or not used directly by the instructor at all.

Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics
Grammar is the study of how words and their component parts combine to form sentences; the system of rules inherent in any language (from the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd Ed). Grammar is structure, form, syntax; by the time children are four or five, they’ve “got” the structure of the language they hear all around them. Grammar needs to be distinguished from usage and mechanics. Usage refers to the way in which language is conventionally applied within the culture and reflects an awareness of one’s audience. Voice and word choice, for instance, will depend upon the formality/ informality of the writing situation and may derive from disciplinary standards as prescribed by particular style guides as MLA, APA, or the Chicago Manual of Style. Mechanics include the technical aspects of writing, such as spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.

From the CUNY WAC/WID Handbook

Published
by
Mikhail
on August 1, 2007
in CUNY, Pedagogy, Resources, Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Instruction
. 0 Comments

Here’s something useful and informative from the brand new CUNY Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines Handbook:

Summary of Key WAC/WID Concepts

The original groundbreaking idea for writing across the curriculum came out of England in the late 1960s, and was focused on the relationships between writing and learning in the schools. In 1975 James Britton and his colleagues published a report of their foundational research in The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). In the United States a number of composition scholars, building in part on their British predecessors, provided an institutional shape to writing across the curriculum initiatives.

What follows is a quick overview of issues and debates that mark the development of this movement.

WAC, WID, WIP:

Some academics and administrators use the following terms and acronyms interchangeably: Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), Writing in the Disciplines (WID), and Writing in the Professions (WIP). For others, the terms are pedagogically, historically, and politically loaded.

Broadly speaking, the central premise behind WAC is that students need to write, informally and formally, in all of their courses (not just in English and composition classes), in order to develop expertise as academic writers. WAC is often considered a pedagogical movement, working to change modes of learning and teaching, particularly the reliance on multiple choice and short answer modes of assessment. Participants argue that WAC not only makes students stronger writers, but also provides more opportunities for students to integrate their learning across the disciplines. They also claim that there are writing experiences and exercises that cut across the disciplines.

Proponents of WID, on the other hand, have argued that the WAC programs that developed in the United States should be more focused on writing within disciplinary frameworks rather than writing as a “process” that is often decontextualized, too focused on expressive writing, and overly personal. WID, therefore, privileges disciplinary contexts and representational forms and styles, recognizing the particular modes and conventions within specific academic discourses. As an extension of WID, Writing in the Professions (WIP) focuses on writing within specific professions, rather than disciplinary bodies of knowledge.

WAC/WID at CUNY encourages the colleges to develop programs that situate writing across and within all academic departments and programs, spanning the disciplines and professions.

I’ll be posting a few choice items from the handbook in the next few days. Next up: Part 1 of the WAC/WID Glossary. Many thanks to CUNY’s 2007-2008 WAC/WID Planning Committee for putting the handbook together. Very useful stuff for us WAC/WID types.

Raymond von Dran, 1947-2007

Published
by
Mikhail
on July 25, 2007
in Symposium
. 1 Comment

vondranI am very sad to report that the Schwartz Communication Institute has lost a dear friend. Raymond F. von Dran, Dean emeritus of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University passed away at the young age of 60 earlier this week. Ray was a Symposium regular who was very influential in the evolution of that event as well as of the Schwartz Institute in general. He facilitated this past year and, as expected, brought his characteristic exuberance and insight to the discussion. Please take a look at the moving tribute to Ray on the School of Information Studies website and his obituary in the Syracuse University News.

Googlewhacked!

Published
by
Mikhail
on July 17, 2007
in Asides, Fun and Search Engines
. 2 Comments

We here at cac.ophony recently received this curious email from across the pond:

Dear Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute

I am writing to you from Kent, England. It’s the county just below London.
I wanted to inform you that your blog (http://cac.ophony.org/) is infact a Googlewhack!

In case you do not know about Googlewhacks, basically it is a game people play with the search engine google. In an attempt to find just one solitary result, they enter two completely random and unrelated words that appear on dictionary.com. My two words were “Jot Semipublicly.”

Following a link to your larger website I stumbled upon this contact.

I thought it appropriate to tell you that you were infact a googlewhack, because if I didn’t, I’d be googlewhacking behind your back.

Hope to hear from you!

Adam

Wow. How cool. A googlewhack here at cac.ophony! What an interesting distinction. There is but one place on the entire world wide web where the words “jot” and “semipublicly” appear on the same page and it is here! Who would have thought? Thanks for letting us know, Adam of Kent!

The official Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute Googlwhack Award goes to our own Kate Moss who authored this googlewhackalicious post.

UPDATE: Here’s Adam’s response to my email letting him know about this post:

Wow.

That was simply my primary response when I saw this page that had been published. I do not recall the last time I was so stereotypically english when reading that there was an official Googlewhack award, exclaiming loudly “Bloody ‘ell!”

This has absolutley made my day, even my month after all these nearby floods and terrible weather. Thank you very much for taking such time and effort.

Thanks Again

Adam

A Former Fellow Making Us Proud

Published
by
Mikhail
on May 24, 2007
in Baruch College and Liberal Arts
. 0 Comments

We here at the Schwartz Communication Institute take a lot of pride in our former Fellows who move on to do great stuff. One of the folks we’re really really proud of is Professor Elizabeth Wollman, an ethnomusicologist on the faculty of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts here at Baruch and author of The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig, published by U of Michigan Press last year. Our own dear Liz, who once supported a communication-intensive course in music (MUS 1003), is now an honest to goodness rock musical pundit who was on the radio yesterday talking about rock musicals on WNYC’s Sound Check. Take a listen and be proud.

Symposium Video Now Online

Published
by
Mikhail
on May 23, 2007
in Baruch College, Conferences and Symposium
. 0 Comments

Videos of the keynote presentations and afternoon plenary session at the 7th Annual Symposium are now up on Baruch’s Digital Media Library (DML). Please have a look. We are working on the video of Bernard Schwartz’s dinner address and should have that up soon.

Alan Webber’s keynote (the transcript is here) and Bernard Schwartz’s dinner address at the 4th Symposium as well as the full program of the 6th Symposium are also up on the DML.

Speaking of the Symposium, have a look at a few reflections on the day’s events here and here.