Dissertations, Academia and Public Speaking

August 20, 2010 By 3 Comments

Last week I attended my first dissertation defense! It was during my residency in my doctoral program in Education. My program is a low residency program of study, meaning that the learners come together four times a year for face-to-face seminars and lectures while the rest of the year they work on their own. So when the cohorts come together it is a non-stop intensive time where everyone is pretty much involved in everyone else’s work, as well as their own. The seminars, discussion groups, and lectures are attended by almost all of the learners as well as faculty and staff. And when one of us is defending it is a must see, one of us actually made it! This particular dissertation defense had six faculty, the dean, several administrators and about 15 doctoral students.

It was truly a public event; I was excited and nervous to see what a particularly brilliant colleague would present, sure that I would feel intimidated on what his 300 page thesis would be like in comparison to my own work. The defense started with opening comments by the chair of the committee and then the doctoral candidate started into his PowerPoint presentation.  Within seconds my heart stopped and my skin started to crawl, every slide was a full written page of documentation, paragraph long quotes, long lists of numbers and statistics. The slides were impossible to read and had no visual graphing to help comprehension. And worst of all the presenter read his slides!!!! How was it possible that at this level we were still seeing a nervous and unskilled oral presentation? I pondered this through out the defense. Is the higher education system, from undergraduate to the doctoral level, still producing academics that have immense difficulty in communicating their own work?

I think in general we educators tend to still consider oral competency as a skill rather than a form of reasoning. Oral presentations do have platform skills and techniques but in academia orality is much more about relying on the spoken word rather than the written word to communicate meaning. It does not replace writing but it is much more than simply stating one’s written work.  I think speaking publicly does ask an individual a form of logic and knowledge that is different from writing and in some ways more complex.Oral reasoning must give meaning to data within a certain amount of time and space and this is no easy task.

I keep wondering about how the logic and sense-making aspect of speaking can be better integrated into the higher education curriculum rather than the 10-20 minute group presentations that seem to abound throughout American colleges. And whether this would make an impact on academics presenting their work in public. More than a personal quest, I do believe that public speaking and oral communication as art and logic should be a part of higher education all the way up to the dissertation defense and beyond.


Filed Under: Oral Communication, Powerpoint and Presentations

Metaphor for Baruch: A Beehive

March 1, 2010 By 2 Comments

This week I sat in for a professor in her Managerial Communication course, and I taught a class on the classical theorists of organizational and scientific management. As the overall metaphor for these early theories is a machine I designed an exercise for the students using metaphors to conceptualize various companies and work related systems. I got this idea from Gareth Morgan’s book, Images of an Organization, which looks at the use of metaphor as a conceptual tool to understand and study organizations. Much of Gareth Morgan’s work is in the use of creative imagery combined with organizational theory to better understand modern management structures.

After having discussed the classical theory approach with the students and asking them to examine why the machine was the metaphor used to describe these theories, I then asked them to come up with a metaphor for Baruch College. The first metaphor they shared was a beehive.  The students thought that there was a Queen Bee, who directed everything at Baruch though nobody really knew who that was. The students and the faculty were all of the busy worker bees that came and went, offering their work up to the hive at all times. The whole class, myself included, thought this metaphor worked well for conceptualizing Baruch. I then asked the students what did this beehive produce, what was Baruch’s main production? With not much enthusiasm, one student answered ” well..um… I guess it is knowledge or something like that” I couldn’t stop from laughing out loud. The next metaphor was a labyrinth…

Filed Under: teaching Tagged With:

Social Media and Young Adults

February 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The Pew Institute recently released a report on young adults and social media use. Here’s the summary page.Pew Internet and American Life Project

It breaks down the various age groups starting with young teens – 12-17, the college years – 18-29, and the 30 and above – adults. There is some interesting data about which age groups use what and how certain social media falls out of grace with different age groups. It seems that  ¾ of young teens have cell phones and 31% get information about health and intimacy online. Young teens and college age young adults are blogging less than adults but sending and receiving text messages more than any other online activity. Texting is the major social communication online for both young teens and young adults. Twitter is big with the adult crowd but not hip with pre-teens or college age youth.

I was especially interested to see that young teens (12-17) create content or remix content more than any other demographic. It makes me think that their sense of creativity and play is still at the heart of their interest in the internet. At least I hope so…

Filed Under: Web 2.0

Reading, Assessment and Great Works of Literature

July 1, 2009 By 3 Comments

charles-dickens-caricature

I am currently working with the Great Works of Literature faculty at Baruch on an assessment for the Great Works course. The faculty is interested in evaluating the learning goals for the course. The first step was to talk with the faculty about what they teach, how they teach it and what they feel about it. These are always great discussions and I believe fundamental to making a good assessment. At one point a faculty member stated that reading was a central part of the course and that she was, among other things, teaching in-depth reading. I was quite struck by this thought of reading and how the Great Works of Literature course taught students to engage with different texts and make inferences to the world around them through reading.

David Frost and I thought a lot about how to incorporate reading as part of the assessment process and how to design a prompt to fit with the specifics of reading for a Great Works of Literature course. The obvious was to ask students to read a short text and respond to it. But the difficulty was to find a reading experience that mirrored what goes on in the course.  Reading literature from multicultural environments and then exploring the relationship between the different genres and cultures is an essential part of the course.  But this is not easy to assess, and as most faculty say, even to grade.

For this assessment we are going to try an experiment; a pool of short texts will be available for the faculty to choose for the prompt. The students will be reading pre and post prompt texts that might be different in author or culture but the same in length and complexity and genre. The texts will also relate to authors or literary periods that the students studied during the semester.

The hope is students will be reading, and responding to the reading, in the same way they do in the course. The second hope is we will be able to draw out meaningful information about the students experience in the course as well as any increase in comprehension and knowledge. Everyone involved in this assessment is pretty excited about this experiment and its creative use of texts for the prompt.

I am too, as I hold in my breath to see if it really works.

Filed Under: Assessment, Baruch College, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), literature

Ability to Communicate Still the Most Desired Quality…

April 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I don’t know if everyone read the Sunday New York Times’ “Corner Office” interview?  Well, Richard Anderson the CEO of Delta Airlines talks about, among other things, the interview process and what he deems important when he is looking to fill an executive position.

And guess what? It is right up the “Communication Walkway” (my term).

He talks about communication as a number one element needed in today’s work world. He also talks about an individual’s personal life as a key factor to integrating them into the organizational culture. Therefore, it is very important to be able to articulate one’s background, ideas and opinions, not just work experience.

Here is an extract and the link:

‘He wants subjects, verbs and objects”

Q. And is there any change in the kind of qualities you’re looking for compared with 5, 10 years ago?

A. I think this communication point is getting more and more important. People really have to be able to handle the written and spoken word. And when I say written word, I don’t mean PowerPoints. I don’t think PowerPoints help people think as clearly as they should because you don’t have to put a complete thought in place. You can just put a phrase with a bullet in front of it. And it doesn’t have a subject, a verb and an object, so you aren’t expressing complete thoughts.

And here is another interesting tidbit:

You spend more of your waking time with your colleagues at the office than you do with your family and when you bring someone into that family — we have 50 senior leaders at our company and 70,000 employees — you need to make sure that they’re a fit to the culture. And that they’re going to be part of that group of people in a healthy functioning way.”

Thanks to Herb Brinberg for showing me and Mikhail this interview and to keeping us in the CEO Loop.

Filed Under: Jobs

Score One For Distance Learning

March 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The trend towards online and distance learning courses at the university level has increased for the past decade and will continue to do so. The National Center for Education predicts there will be 18.2 million undergraduate students enrolled in long distance courses by the year 2013. And today, 90% of all industries surveyed state that video-conferencing is an integral part of their communication systems, whether it be for training or international meetings. Though the educational worthiness of these online courses is still in question, this technology and its integration into the college landscape are certain.  For anyone involved in teaching and learning, or instructional technology, it seems to be the time to do some research and experimenting with online courses. So I jumped right in. I have just finished taking a three-day online seminar in Higher Education and Social Justice. I was online for about 6 hours each day and to my surprise it was great!

The seminar platform was through Adobe Conference Pro, which is basically an online series of conference rooms equipped with streaming video and audio as well as screen sharing and document display tools. Students and faculty just sign into their appropriate room and click on the camera and microphone options and all of a sudden you are talking and seeing anywhere from 3 -20 people all looking back at you from their kitchens or their offices. Talk about cacophony! It is like a moving imagery of inhabitants across the country all squeezed onto your computer screen. There is an amazing sense of intimacy, you are invited right into someone’s home and with a little scrutiny you can imagine so much about their lives, yet every time you get up to get a drink of water you are in your own house and no one is there.

conference_optimized

When the seminar really began, I found myself extremely concentrated on listening and taking notes on the speaker or questions from other participants. It takes discipline to wait one’s turn for discussion and debate as well as having noted content references in order to remind everyone where your question falls within the discussion. These are all strong academic skills and I found that I could not stop using these skills throughout the entire weekend. I can certainly see this as a significant skill for many students. Score one point for video-conferencing and learning. Another skill area that demands a lot of concentration is handling the many channels of communication going on at once. There are visuals, audio, texting, Power Point and keeping track of who has raised their hand, this all at once. Most undergraduate students can handle this multi-channeling, but I believe there is a generational divide and it is more cumbersome for others. Moderating online is also a demanding skill in communication and concentration. At one point each participant was asked to moderate the Q&A of someone else’s PP presentation. This was not easy to do and I can see it fast becoming a desired professional skill for the 21st century. Score another point for video-conferencing and learning.

There was a lot of fooling around at the very end of the weekend as many participants had gotten the habit of the technology and started to play around with our online classroom. Someone in California declared that the cats in NY were making the Vermonters sneeze, and people offered wine across state lines and so on and so forth. Score another point for bonding.
But the main question still remains. Was their real academic learning and can it replace the face-to-face? The answer is yes and no. I walked away from several of my courses with a deeper understanding of how people really look at Social Justice and of how complex our own versions of it really are, and that the philosophies of a just society are as transferable to media literacy and criticism as they are to Human Resource Management. I walked away with a list of books to read from faculty and participants, and I have notes on feminism, religion, education and social responsibility up the wazoo.

Though I feel very positive about this experience and think there might be some real potential in this sort of distance video-conferencing as a learning environment, there are some important points that I feel led to the success of this weekend. For one, I want to emphasize there was extensive training beforehand; we had three live online training sessions before the weekend. This seems crucial to the level of ease for each participant with the technology and perhaps for the sense of community later enacted during the online sessions. As well, this was an experiment in an ongoing Doctoral program and most of the participants have already had face-to-face courses together. This fact is central in thinking about an online learning experience. I believe the seriousness and sense of community that occurred this weekend was largely due to the academic level of the participants and their prior knowledge of what would be expected of them in the online seminars. These are significant aspects of this particular online experiment and I am not sure what the experience would have been without these two components.
So, yes I learned, and no, the human factor of prior face-to-face courses can not be ignored. It is a must, which cannot easily be replaced by video-conferencing software.

As always there needs to be more research and experimentation in this area and I will do some follow up interviews with the other participants and hopefully post on their experiences as well as my own. For the moment, my initial reaction is our students are walking into an amazing Internet world where the limits seem to me boundless. But there are major communication skills needed to make our students the actors in this world and not passers by.

Filed Under: Internet, Online Learning

Communication and Flip cameras

January 16, 2009 By 3 Comments

At BLSCI we are currently conducting research into how the use of Flip Cameras could be used in communication pedagogy.

I was able to interview several experts in the field and the following is a selection of several theories on communication and personal belongings…

Filed Under: BLSCI, Oral Communication, Technology Tagged With: ,

Joe, Joe, Joe,….Joe

October 30, 2008 By 3 Comments

One of my students said to me the other day that she did not want to watch the presidential debates anymore because the only thing you see is a repeat of the message again and again. And she thought the “whole Joe thing is just the last straw, I mean is everyone named Joe?” It is true that through the three debates we have seen the central messages of each candidate come back time and again and the use of in-depth argumentation seems to be less of a sticking point. We have also heard of Joe Six-pack, Joe Biden, Joe McCain, (John’s brother), Joe who can never fill his gas tank to full, and Joe the Plumber. The student has a point.

Yet even in the constant repetition of a name, Joe, or of a concept, Joe is Everyman, there are two fundamental teaching points on public speaking and oral presentations that I hurried to tell my student. The strategic use of repetition in a public talk is often taught as a way to create emphasis and drive a message home. But it is also directly related to the afterthought a speaker desires the audience to experience later. A speaker is trying to lodge in the memory of the audience a significant point or image that will recall the message. But it is not as easy as many students and political strategists seem to think.

One can repeat the name Joe, again and again and believe that the audience has a collective cultural memory that will link Joe to our own lives. We will get it and think about it afterwards. Student speakers will very often repeat that some entity is a “major player” or they forever call the audience “You Guys” again and again. In almost the exact same way a political speechwriter is supposing that the audience has a collective memory and we will get it, so does the student. But what we do know about cultural memory is that language is the tipping point. Audience members in contemporary culture relate to language in more segmented groups then ever before. From text messages to gender titles the audience associates words with different significance and receives messages very differently. So Joe, for some, is remembered as Everyman but for others he is not even real. Even for Joe himself there is doubt as to his place in collective memory, his real name apparently is Sam.

So the first teaching point is do not stereotype your audience, and the second teaching point is if using repetition in a public presentation bring into play many different words that imply the same thing and retell the concept in different ways. This is more likely to advance a collective afterthought in our modern and varied audience and initiate reflection that does relate to the message.

Filed Under: Debating, Oral Communication, Politics

The 8th Annual Symposium Blog

June 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The Symposium Blog is up and running!

The Miscommunication: 8th Annual Symposium blog had it’s opening post on June 5th at 3:03pm. For the next few weeks there will be regular posts highlighting different tables at the symposium. I have enjoyed reading through the notes and table discussions and looking through the photographs of the day.

As I worked on setting up the blog, I felt the urge to post every note and conversation and image that happened during the event. It seemed so important to share with all of the participants what had happened and show them what they had been able to accomplish in one day. But I also have been thinking of how this blog should be more than a showcase or even more than a place for us to revisit and comment on our work after the event.

I have been thinking of the blog as a way to continue the Symposium community, which is nearing its 9th year of existence! At the same time I have realized that my pedagogical side is stepping in and I am not sure that having another blogging community out there is enough. Yes, I want more. Is there a way to make it into something that builds momentum and takes us onward and into the next phase of our extended community?

Mary Hocks uses a term — “Hybridity” — which refers to how the web as a medium or channel can be a space for the “interplay” between the visual and the verbal in a structured environment, perhaps that of a blog (Hocks, 2003). More than the hybridity of a blog medium, I am moved towards this notion of interplay where the use of visuals such as design, graphs, images and even MySpace pages can be intertwined with writing, discussion, and blogging to begin building ideas and areas of study for the next symposium. And it certainly seems that much of the discussions at the symposium were about the constant interplay of communication elements and channel and the influence this had on miscommunication. I like very much the idea of interplay in building momentum or knowledge for the coming symposium. That through reading and writing and linking and posting and images and everything else this medium invites us to do, ideas will form, and a sort of collective knowledge will develop.

So maybe the symposium blog could be, as is often the case in an online community, a place where we look and represent what we have said and have thought about an event. But instead of just commenting on each other’s work, we could seek out threads that can be investigated further and areas of reflection that we would want to develop and bring forward in next year’s day-long dialog.

This might start out being chaotic in the beginning and strange for a blog to go in every direction before some sort of collective knowledge can be shaped or directed towards a detailed thesis around the notion of interplay. But as was mentioned by Hillary Miller during the morning discussions at Table II: the idea is to encourage the messiness of the writing process. As it is from this stage that great reflection can begin. So please come to the symposium blog and inter-PLAY!

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Symposium

CLASP Colloquium

April 14, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The CUNY League of Active Speech Professors (CLASP) is an association of the speech professors at CUNY. Every year CLASP organizes a colloquium to discuss and investigate all levels of teaching and initiating speech and oral communication across the curriculum at CUNY. This year’s theme was Teaching and Learning, and Community.

A tradition at the CLASP gatherings is intensive discussion on the most innovative and creative ways to teach and influence different disciplines with Speech theory and practice. There were two panels that dealt with the creative use of technology in the classroom where faculty from Communication Studies, History, Theater and English presented their different ways of using technologies in the classroom.

Professor Thomas Regan took a camera on class field trips for his intercultural communication course. He had the students take pictures or film themselves, the theaters and neighborhoods they were visiting and whatever else interested them. He then put the pictures or films on blackboard and the students would then use that visual input and memory as a starting point for their research papers on New York experimental theater and intercultural theory.

field trip

Urban Studies professor Hugo Fernandez and English professor Ellen Quish demonstrated how they had the students make urban folktales using all kinds of free software such as Audacity, and I-movie or Moviemaker, both embedded in any PC or Mac computer. Many of the LAGCC faculty is working with digital story telling and experimenting with final projects being team written, edited and fully produced digital stories.

Digital Storytelling

Or, once again, the projects were used as a process to get the students to do more advanced research and writing and were not counted as the final project but a step on the way to a term paper. The work and the projects were all very creative and done with extremely low-tech materials and seemingly very easy to use technology, almost everything the faculty used was free or very low budget. The highest cost cited was $25 for a web cam. There was a constant free exchange of websites where free software, free images, music and even short films are available. And for the technologically challenged a professor presented G-cast, a free service, where you call into a toll free number which records your speech and then emails it to you as an MP3 file! Apparently you can even sign up your class to this free service.

Story Resources

What struck me the most was the use of this technology as a process to get the students into deeper work and research. And how at the end of a semester there is visual knowledge as well as written knowledge from each student. How many members of the faculty just jumped into this technology also impressed me and though they all said they were not tech-savvy they all produced relatively sophisticated and interesting student work. The pedagogy and the outcomes were clear and well substantiated from each panel member but I really walked away with a sense of how much fun they were all having.

Filed Under: Conferences, CUNY, Fun, Oral Communication
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