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.

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…

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Assessment, assessment, and assessment; this seems to be all I am hearing these days. Editors at academic journals inform me that if I have an article on assessment, they would be happy to publish it… Even my daughter’s 2nd grade teacher had a meeting to explain to the parents how our 7 year olds would be assessed over the school year. In my new position as Deputy Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, I am currently overseeing two major assessments: one of the Institute’s programs and another of student writing in CICs. Surprisingly I find myself enjoying it immensely.

As assessment seems to be the 21st century companion to the education field I guess it is time to just jump in. I find myself fascinated and passionate about looking at and assessing students’ writing over a ten-year period and all of its infinite possibilities. However there is a small part of me that feels there is a fine line that is frequently crossed in assessment. It is when educational institutions, or even individual educators, over-invest in the assessment of whether students attain pre-established learning goals to demonstrate that students have learned. When student outcomes, in relation to pre-set learning goals, are the main goal of an assessment, outcomes can easily become the dominant product of education rather than the messy but profound experience of learning itself, which does not always produce a clear outcome. And if this becomes the assessment norm, to measure outcomes rather than transformative experience, than education runs the risk of merely accumulating material and compromising its fundamental role. This is a line I feel is dangerous for any educator to cross.

Ken Buckman, professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, wrote in the fall issue of Thought and Action that, “the primary character of education is its transformative influence…” Therefore, experiencing the process of learning is as important if not more than the final goal of having attained an acceptable outcome or learning goal. Yet this is one of the hardest areas of learning to assess: the transformative experience.

However, there might be a way of examining student learning as a process and not an outcome. Follow the same students for several years and see what parts of their learning process have become integrated into the way they talk or write. In a sub-sample set of the written diagnostic data we are now examining the same set of students writing over a period of 3-4 years. Their vocabulary, their expectations and the complexity with which they express themselves can be analyzed as well as how this has been transformed over time. This data will not tell us whether the students did well on the final exam or whether they were able to write an “A” term paper. But we might be able to note when and if the student was going through a transformative process between the times they started writing in their first CIC course and the 3rd or 4th CIC.

There is no doubt that any educational institution needs to be able to demonstrate that its students on an aggregate level are reaching the goals and outcomes that have been put forth. However, students should also be studied as distinctive learners with unique goals and experiences. As for my part, I can’t get enough of knowing that my students might have been transformed.