From Edutopia, the website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, an excellent interview with James Paul Gee, a linguist who has become the leading authority on video games and pedagogy and who gave a great talk at the CUNY Grad center last year. Enjoy.
Godwin’s Law and the Rhetoric of Reductio ad Hitlerum
December 3, 2008 By Leave a Comment
A field note from the wild, untamed frontier that is the Internet:
Godwin’s Law, posited by Mike Godwin in 1990, states that, in online forums, the longer a discussion thread goes on, the more likely it becomes that someone will compare someone else to Hitler or call them a Nazi in a heated argument. It draws an explicit a connection between on line discussions, especially in discussion forums and Usenet groups, to the logical fallacy of Reductio ad Hitlerum, coined in the 1950s by Leo Strauss, which is very basically the argument that, if Hitler’s regime was characterized by XYZ, then XYZ is inherently evil and invalid. “As an online discussion grows longer,” the original formulation of the law goes, “the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Once that happens — once someone exercises the rhetorical equivalent of the nuclear option — the thread is effectively dead. Meaningful discussion is no longer possible. Once Nazis goose-step into your thread, it’s time to find a new one.
Those of us who have participated in online discussions of various stripes have seen Godwin’s law proven again and again, especially when someone conflates criticism of his or her position on the subject at hand with suppression of free expression. (An interesting example of such a conflation in another context can be seen here.) To wit:
You people have been criticizing my position on homemade v. canned cranberry sauce (Thanksgiving was just last week, after all) and, by doing so, you have violated my right to express my opinion. This is exactly what the Nazis did in Germany. You are worse than Hitler!
While one may initially get the impression that Godwin’s Law somehow trivializes the brutal historical significance of Nazi Germany, Godwin notes that the law first came to be as a means of countering such obviously absurd trivializations in heated online discussions. Writing 18 years after first having created the law, Godwin explains his motivation like this:
It was difficult, after attempting a greater psychological understanding of why the Holocaust happened and how it was conducted, to tolerate the glib comparisons I encountered on the Internet (Usenet in those days). My sense of moral outrage at this phenomenon found an outlet after I read an article in in the Whole Earth Review about memes—viral ideas—that inspired me to create a kind of counter-measure. And so I created Godwin’s Law and began to repeat it in online forums whenever I encountered a silly comparison of someone or something to Hitler or to the Nazis. (source)
I’ll move that Godwin’s law can only work as a counter-measure in this way is if it is cited when a comparison to Nazis occurs — something like “Godwin’s Law: proven again!” Useful here is the Dodd Corollary to Godwin’s original law, which states that whoever invokes the Nazis in an online debate is automatically discredited for doing so and loses the argument. The Dodd Corollary highlights the triviality and the warped sense of history implicit in such comparisons. If I call you a Nazi because you vehemently disagree with my argument that canned cranberry sauce is superior to all other kinds of cranberry sauce, I lose the argument because I was stupid enough to conflate your position with the ideology of an iconically repressive, genocidal regime. I obviously need to reevaluate how passionately I feel about canned cranberry sauce.
For more on Godwin’s Law, see the Godwin’s Law FAQ. (Hat tip to Zach Davis.)
Read All About it!: The Schwartz Institute Profiled in Change Magazine
November 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment
We here at the Institute are very excited about this bit of publicity: the current issue of Change Magazine, published in cooperation with The Carnegie Foundation For the Advancement of Teaching, features a profile of the Schwartz Institute written by Fara Warner, whom some of you may remember from last year’s Symposium. Fara’s article, entitled “Improving Communication is Everyone’s Responsibility” is a lengthy, in-depth discussion of the Institute and the tremendously varied work that we do here at Baruch College. Take a look. Here’s a snippet:
The Institute
To understand how the Institute was created—and has grown into a model for developing and supporting communication-intensive curricula—you have to look at the college’s history and its extraordinarily diverse student body.Baruch’s beginnings stretch back to 1847. Its Newman Vertical Campus is now located at Lexington and 24th Street in Manhattan, one block from the original site of the Free Academy, the country’s first free institution of higher education. In 1919, the City University system created a school of business and civic administration on the site of the Academy. The next year, it added a master’s degree in business administration. In 1953, the college was renamed in honor of Bernard M. Baruch, the statesman and financier who had been instrumental in the college’s creation. In 1968, Baruch College became a freestanding college within the City University of New York. The College currently encompasses the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Public Affairs, and the Zicklin School of Business—now the largest school of business in the nation.
Even in its early years, the college was known for its diversity, drawing its student body from the immigrant populations that called New York City home. Over the years, those populations have changed from Italian, Jewish, and German to today’s immigrants from countries such as Turkey, Uzbekistan, and China. Approximately one-third of Baruch students were born outside the U.S., and half are the children of immigrants. About 90 percent of Baruch’s undergraduate students graduated from New York City’s public and parochial high schools, and more than half come from families with an income of less than $44,000 annually. The college’s nearly 16,000 students speak 110 languages and come from 160 countries—prompting publications such as U.S. News and World Report and the Princeton Review to name it “the most diverse university in the U.S.”
“The college always had to operate with the knowledge that for many of its students English wasn’t just their second language but sometimes their third or fourth,” says Professor Paula Berggren, who has worked extensively with the Institute to enhance students’ writing and oral communication skills in Great Works of Literature courses, which all Baruch students are required to take. Moreover, “in the U.S., we don’t know how to communicate even if we’re native English speakers.” By the mid-1990s, the combination of a school devoted to teaching business skills and a diverse and underprepared student body had created a situation in which “Baruch was turning out competent vocationally trained students who lacked an ease with communication,” Berggren says.
Baruch faculty members weren’t the only ones who noticed the problem. Over the decades, Baruch had gained a reputation for turning out highly capable business majors who got very desirable jobs in accounting and other business sectors. But major employers reported that Baruch graduates sometimes lacked confidence, sophistication, and facility in business communication. The problem wasn’t lost on the college’s alumni either—including Bernard L. Schwartz, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Loral Space & Communication, who had graduated from Baruch with a bachelor’s of science degree in finance. He believed that Baruch needed to do a better job of teaching students real-world communication skills in addition to their core studies. In 1997 he donated the initial funding to create the Institute that now bears his name, with the expressed wish to help Baruch students become more effective communicators.
There are a number of ways to teach and enhance oral and written communication, from required communication-specific courses and formal academic support units to loose, informal programs driven primarily by individual faculty members. Baruch created an organization that operated somewhere between those two extremes. A few core principles and organizing structures were set down that have guided the Institute, but room was left for creativity and evolution stimulated by the changing needs of faculty and students and by technological developments.
The Institute isn’t housed under a specific department—English or communication studies, for instance. In keeping with the idea that communication is everyone’s responsibility, it operates under the Office of the Provost and remains independent of any one department’s requirements or direct control. It also receives private funds (including ongoing support from Schwartz), giving it flexibility in the breadth, depth, and scope of the programs it offers. It invites outsiders, most notably from the business world, to discuss communication issues that are of importance to the employers who hire Baruch students. Each year, the Institute hosts an annual symposium that brings together faculty and business executives to explore areas of mutual concern, such as the role of new technologies in shaping criteria for effective communication in academic and business contexts.
The Deadly Grip of Tradition
October 15, 2008 By 7 Comments
Over the last two or so decades, research in composition and rhetoric has challenged a number of traditional, “common sense” ideas about writing pedagogy. The emphasis on process over product is one example. Another, quite familiar one is the shift away from the tired old structure of the academic expository essay with its requisite introduction (which contains the thesis statement), body and conclusion. The thinking here is that this form with its three rigidly defined constituent parts is 1) not necessarily conducive to original, critical thinking and is therefore counterproductive to effective arguing, and 2) scarcely found anywhere else other than introductory writing courses.
Some folks find this idea to be radical and exciting enough to claim a bit of what Michel Foucault termed the “speakers’ benefit” in advocating that we move away from the traditional intro, body, conclusion structure. If, for example, we approach the traditional essay structure in terms of how it adversely affects students’ ability to treat their subjects critically and keeps them locked into old, tired ways of thinking, then we can conceive of ourselves as writing pedagogy iconoclasts, liberating our students’ thought from the shackles of outdated, rigid and repressive structures.
Well, we’re not that radical or iconoclastic: To wit, Robert W. Neal, writing in 1912 in The English Journal:
The Deadly Grip of Tradition
Perhaps our pupils are still taught a fixed form for compositions — introduction, body, and conclusion-because, unsuspecting old Aristotle tried to illustrate what he had in mind about dramatic composition by employing the terms that we translate “beginning,” “middle,” and “end.” Or perhaps this mechanical makeshift for analysis is still given them because formal rhetoric in modern guise came to us largely from clerical teachers, used to the cut-and-dry methods of sermon composition as practiced almost universally until outside influences reacted on the pulpit and forced a more vital presentation of thought.
In either case, we have textbooks in use and teachers in service in which and by whom pupils are taught with fatal insistence that a composition- which should mean any piece of writing intended to serve a worth-while purpose-consists of “an introduction, a body, and a conclusion.”
For ease of teaching I wish it were true. But it is not. It falls so far short of being the truth that it often is an indefensible untruth. Modern writing outside of academic walls has largely dropped the introduction. It has dropped the introduction because it does not need it. For the same reason, it has largely dropped the conclusion.Our generation is a generation of skilled writers. But it is not a generation addicted to introductions and conclusions. The teacher who hammers away on the introduction-body-conclusion method shows that he is not familiar with the writings of his own day, or else that he is not capable of learning new things. He is like the farmers, who, in this era of scientific cultivation, farm as grandpap farmed. Some of grandpap’s methods have not been improved upon yet, and some of them ruined the soil they were used on.
A study of the effective writing of our own day will show how largely the introduction-conclusion plan of structure has passed away. From news report to editorial article, from descriptive or expository article to argument, from short story to essay, modern writing-which is probably the most effective the world has known-shuns the formalities of structure except, when it needs them. And when it needs them, they are no longer formal divisions, but essential parts of the thought itself.
When it needs them: for like every other element of successful writing, they exist to serve an extremely definite purpose, and for nothing else. Often indeed they have no function in a particular piece of writing, and therefore, so far as that piece of writing is concerned, no excuse for being. Especially is this so of the introduction; and the conclusion more often than not is already present merely in the logical close of the article itself.My protest therefore is not directed against introductions and conclusions in themselves, but to the teaching that makes them appear as necessary parts of every piece of writing. Every editor knows that he can waste-basket from one sheet to three sheets at the beginning of the “stuff” the tyro turns in, and lose nothing. Every instructor of college Freshmen knows the paper that consists of a long introduction and little else-the necessary number of words having been written, with a line or two of “body” and a formal “conclusion” tacked on. No small part of Freshman teaching consists in demonstrating to the students that they have not in the least outlined a paper when they have set down “Introduction-Body-Conclusion.” Thought is not to be analyzed in any such mechanical way, and we do pupils a wrong in making them think that it can be.
I’d put a conclusion here, but, well, you know . . .
Marshall McLuhan on the Televised Presidential Debate (1976)
September 23, 2008 By 4 Comments
Among the many things were interested in, here at cac.ophony, are the roles of context, genre and different types of media in shaping communication. (The medium is the message, after all.) Given this, and iIn anticipation of the soon to be televised presidential debates, we give you a provocative tidbit to chew on. Here, via if:book, is a remarkable interview with Marshall McLuhan from the Today show in 1976, in which the famed theorist of media analyzes the televised presidential debates of that year and argues that the tried and true genre of the presidential debate is “completely the wrong form for the medium of television.” Bob Stein of if:book notes that
it’s hard to imagine an interview like this on the Today show of 2008. It goes on for ten uninterrupted minutes; there are no cut-aways to video footage or text crawls at the bottom of the screen; and most significantly McLuhan speaks his mind, critical of the mechanisms of political discourse to an extent unimaginable in today’s sanitized mass media landscape.
[youtube]httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF8jej3j5vA[/youtube]
Billy Collins’ Animated Poetry
September 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Via Open Culture, a YouTube channel showcasing short animated films of US Poet Laureate and CUNY Faculty Member Billy Collins‘ poems. Gotta love YouTube. Here’s a taste:
[youtube]httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuTNdHadwbk[/youtube]
Facebook In Reality
August 15, 2008 By 3 Comments
With all the talk on this blog about Facebook and other social networking sites (see here, here, and here), here’s something that humorously encapsulates some of what unnerves many people about Facebook — particularly how social networking of this sort can make us vulnerable to unsavory characters of various sorts and what some people are afraid can be done with the information we typically make available on Facebook.
x Minutes of Freedom
August 11, 2008 By Leave a Comment
From the Dept. of We Stole It From Lifehacker: Here’s a great idea for those of us needing to focus for chunks of time. An application for Mac OS X called Freedom helps keep your nose to the grindstone and away from Facebook, email, LOLCATZ, or whatever by disabling your internet connectivity for a designated period of time up to 6 hours. The developers have yet to figure out how to make an allowance for online library catalogs, the ability to IM your friend who knows everything, and the Olympics medal count.
Now that’s American ingenuity.
EduTweeting
March 7, 2008 By 3 Comments
Here at the Institute we’re just starting to think about experimenting with microblogging, 140 character posts called “tweets” within a social network or out in the wilds of the Internet. Just in time, here’s a short video from the Chronicle of Higher Education in which a Professor describes using Twitter, a microblogging service, with his students.
This video is a follow-up to an earlier article in the Chronicle on the use of Twitter in education. For other takes on Twitter, see see this academic article and Howard Rheingold’s discussion of why he’s hooked on microblogging via Twitter. Links via Chris Lott.
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