Archive for the 'Baruch College' Category

Thinking Behind a Redesign

Published
by
Luke
on November 13, 2008
in Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

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

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

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

The site includes:

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

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

Blogs@Baruch was built on the following core beliefs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to continue reading “Thinking Behind a Redesign”

You know, it’s cultural….

Published
by
Szidonia
on October 23, 2008
in Assessment, Baruch College, Cross-Cultural Communication and Interpersonal Communication
. 2 Comments

I am not saying this just to make Mikhail happy about assigning me the Accounting Department in my first year at Schwartz, but I really am enjoying working there. I had my misgivings early on, especially about the students treating me as a second-class citizen, a “fellow” who apparently has no clue about accounting, thus no need to pay attention to her. What I have been experiencing, however, is a great deal of gratitude on their part and a sense of appreciation that, at times, makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. After all, I tell them, I am only doing my job helping them with their presentations.

Maybe it is because of their responsiveness to me that I become a softee when it comes to the evaluation of their performance. Luckily I do not have to grade them, but I talk with their professor about how they did, and, more often than not, I find myself taking their side. I want the professor to be more generous, more understanding of how nerve-wracking a presentation can be, more embracing of the students’ individual skills and needs, etc, etc. On the professor’s side, I am facing a set of extremely well organized grading scale that breaks down final grades to the smallest percentage. This is how grading should really look like, I tell myself, envying the social sciences for their apparent efficieny that messy humanities people, let alone literature buffs like me, tend to miss. Yet, I feel like a coward when the professor mentions a student’s way of being too “soft-spoken” and I let it go saying only that her “softness” comes from her cultural training as a Japanese woman. (Apologies if this comes across as relying, yet again, on stereotypes about Asian women. Obviously not all Japanese women are low-key, but I just finished reading Kyoko Mori’s memoir, Polite Lies, and I think I got at least a better appreciation of Japanese cultural normativity than I had before reading the book.) Evidently, the professor, who has earned all my respect for his superbly organized way of doing his job, cannot let himself bogged down by my remark since he has to evaluate the final product, but I am left with a sense of failure.  I wish I had a way of giving more time and space to the process, of being able to assist each student individually while I do not run around myself trying to finish up my dissertation. In my dream-world, I use a grading rubric that includes “cultural baggage” as a big bonus point because I know how heavy it gets at times and how important it is to keep carrying it on in spite of all.

The Baruch College Teaching Blog

Published
by
Luke
on September 22, 2008
in Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, CUNY, Higher Education and Pedagogy
. 2 Comments

I’d like to call your attention to a new blog we’re supporting here at Baruch College: The Baruch College Teaching Blog.

Several faculty have agreed to post to the blog regularly, and to lead an ongoing conversation about teaching at Baruch College.  Surprisingly, there are very few blogs like this, which provide the opportunity for members of a college community to discuss pedagogy outside of their disciplines.  This is a unique and exciting development for the college and for CUNY, and I look forward to much interchange between the folks who post to and follow that blog and Cacophonites.

Read All About It!!

Published
by
Mikhail
on September 15, 2008
in Baruch College, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) and Writing Across the Curriculum
. 0 Comments

This week, the Schwartz Institute was profiled in Baruch’s campus newspaper, The Ticker. Here’s a juicy tidbit:

The significance of being proficient in language, both written and spoken, is emphasized throughout a student’s academic career at Baruch. From Freshmen Seminar to Business Policy 5100, students are exposed to the various forms of communication and the countless reasons pertaining to why proficiency is relevant. Courses designated as Communication Intensive Courses or CICs are designed and implemented by faculty members, with the help from the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute to help students become more effective writers and speakers.

Read the whole article here.

Institutional Growth at The Schwartz Institute: 1997-2007

Published
by
David
on April 8, 2008
in Assessment, Baruch College, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) and Faculty Development
. 4 Comments

In BLSCI’s application for the TIAA-CREF Hesburgh Award, we made use of the writing diagnostic assessment data to demonstrate the many ways the Institute has grown over the past 10 years.

As Figure 1 and 2 below show, BLSCI fellows support faculty teaching a number of distinct Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) across a variety of disciplines. As Figure 2 shows, the largest representation of faculty teaching CICs is in departments that have traditionally placed a heavy emphasis on both written and oral communication, such as English, Modern Languages, Marketing, Management, Performing Arts, Sociology and Anthropology. However, the institute has also supported CICs in departments that have not traditionally incorporated communication intensive elements into their curricula, such as Accountancy, Natural Sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and environmental sciences), and Computer Information Systems.

Figure 1

[click to enlarge] 

Figure 2

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When we look at these data and hear about all of the great work going on at the Institute during our staff meetings, what we often don’t take into consideration is the amount of expansion that has taken place over the past ten years. As Figure 3 demonstrates, the number of faculty supported by BLSCI has steadily increased, reaching a peak of 144 last year. The number of faculty currently teaching CICs is nearly three times what it was ten years ago. Despite some minor fluctuations, the number of sections of CICs has also increased dramatically. Specifically, as shown in Figure 4, the number of sections of CICs offered last year is nearly five times as many as there were in 1997.Figure 3

[click to enlarge] 

Figure 4

[click to enlarge] 

There is no doubt this kind of institutional growth contributed to BLSCI’s being awarded the Hesburgh award. However, the most interesting growth going on at the institute is arguably what happens on a more micro level among students, faculty, and fellows throughout continued mentorship and collaboration. Although we all get to observe this in our individual work, it’s often hard to demonstrate this kind of growth across the institute. As we keep on thinking about and celebrating growth at BLSCI we continue to think about ways to assess it. It’s my hope that this post will spark some ideas among readers on how we might approach this kind of assessment next semester.

Charles Simic at Baruch

Published
by
Jenny
on March 30, 2008
in Baruch College, CUNY, Higher Education and literature
. 3 Comments

When people ask me what I do, I often tell them that I work at a business school. Some of the more literary inclined people aren’t interested in my going into further detail, at least not until I tell them at every student at this business school is required to take a Great Works of Literature course. Baruch’s mission to instill ideas and culture and values into their students through literature is what, I think, makes Baruch unique among business schools. What is even more amazing is that this semester, Charles Simic is Baruch’s Harman Writer-in-Residence. I first read Simic’s poems when I was a junior in college. I loved his poems, his essays, his interviews. Later, when I went on to teach writing, I taught Simic. I still do. I am always in utter awe of him and his thinking about language, how it takes on another life that has something to do with this one. Writers-in-residence are usually found in MFA Creative Writing Programs or liberal arts undergraduate institutions. To have a Pulitzer prize winning poet who is also the Poet Laureate of the United States in residence at a CUNY business school is sure to baffle and confound. I can only think that such an occurrence must mean the planets and the stars and their positions right now are responsible, but I’m sure it must have something to do with someone at Baruch who believes that literature is what can change or shape the world and our ideas about our place in it.

Knowing about Business in a Business School

Published
by
Olga
on March 21, 2008
in Baruch College, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) and Writing Across the Curriculum
. 2 Comments

We often hear instructors complain about Baruch students’ narrow orientation toward business. I think a couple of years ago it became a requirement for all Baruch students to take a certain number of liberal arts courses. And of course on different occasions we all have given students explanations of these courses’ immense significance in their education. Personally, for quite a while I used be terrified every time students tried to relate business concepts to their readings or writing topics; my mind would go blank when I heard of such concepts as “equity loans” or “mortgage backed securities.” Hardly anyone can ignore current economic troubles, and I found myself in the alien world of the business discourse this week, as I was trying to establish some connection between contemporary world and classical literature. I saw every one of my nine students make immediate eye contact with me rather than with their computer screens. The energy level in the class boosted and the discussion got lively. I’m never again throwing out the Business section of NYT.

Blogging at Baruch this Semester

Published
by
Luke
on March 10, 2008
in Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Faculty Development, Technology and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

Baruch faculty and students are making some unique and innovative contributions to the educational blogosphere this semester. Our goal in supporting course-based usage of weblogs over the past year has been to produce various models and prototypes that can be duplicated and built upon as the technology becomes more widely deployed throughout Baruch. In advance of the BLSCI’s rollout of Wordpress MultiUser at Baruch, I’d like to highlight the blogs we’ve helped launch in the past two months.

Anthropology/Sociology Faculty Working Group

AnthroSocDiana Rickard, Melis Ece, and I have been running a disciplinary working group with five faculty from Anthropology/Sociology who are using weblogs in their courses for the first time. The project includes seven individual course blogs, and the faculty also contribute their thoughts about using weblogs in their discipline to a shared online space. This project is a fascinating example of how course blogs, even in one discipline, can achieve a range of goals, from pre-writing for in-class presentations, to scaffolding research papers, to extending the classroom, to sharing and exploring related materials in an informal way. Each faculty member has a vision, and has structured their course blog(s) accordingly. It’s exciting to see a group of committed young faculty think through the implications of bringing their courses and pedagogical goals online. The home blog features commentary by our participants, and also houses both links to the individual course blogs and recent posts, which are fed in via RSS syndication.

Leonard Sussman: Digital Photography

SussmanOne of the great strengths of open source products such as Wordpress is the elegant ease with which participants in a course can share their work with one another. Prof. Leonard Sussman, of the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Baruch, gets major props for his willingness to run a prototype of a blog linked to and driven by Flickr.com, the image-sharing site (poetically, the Flickr blog is itself powered by Wordpress). Prof. Sussman was unhappy with the quality of in-class critiques his students have been delivering, and desired a space where they could share their work with one another, and, when prompted, do some pre-writing to develop the language with which to talk about photography.

Each student registered for his/her own Flickr account, and then joined a Flickr group called “Sussman Images.” When they submit an image from their own account to the group, that image automatically feeds into the course gallery, which displays images through a lightbox. The images also appear randomly in a sidebar on the front page of the blog, and Prof. Sussman can pull individual images into the main area of the blog for students to comment upon. He hasn’t gotten them writing just yet, but we’re happy to get the data flow set up, and think that this type of sharing, taking advantage of free tools readily available, provides one innovative model for bringing arts classes online.

Zoe Sheehan Saldana: Designing with Computer Animation and Computer Based Image Making

Art 3059

Mikhail has christened Professor Zoe Sheehan Saldana our first “blogfessor of the month” for her “Designing with Computer Animation” course blog. On this site, she’s taken the rotating header function that comes with the Neoclassical Wordpress theme and hacked it to accept Flash animations. She then had each of her students design an animated header for the site. If you go to the blog, and hit refresh, the header will change.

Our support for this project was limited to loading up the blog, giving Zoe administrative access, and tossing some ideas around. She did the rest. The result is, as Jim Groom has noted, “an awesome intersection of uses of this online space: sharing resources, publishing platform, collaborating on projects, and a class art gallery.”

Baruch Journalism: Writing New York and Online Newswatch

OnlineNewsWatchWriting NYFew fields have been as deeply impacted by the explosion of Web 2.0 as journalism. Undergraduate journalism departments are scrambling to develop online and new media components to their curricula, and we’re happy to be assisting Baruch’s program as it adjusts. We’re currently supporting two journalism weblogs. One is the continuation of a blog first launched for Professor Roslyn Bernstein’s feature writing course last year, called “Writing New York.” The second is Professor Vera Haller’s resource to help all journalism students follow developments in online journalism, called “OnlineNewsWatch.”

Feel free to check out these sites, and follow them as they build over the course of the semester. There’ll be much more blogging at Baruch in the days to come.

When Professors Strike Back…

Published
by
Luke
on February 21, 2008
in Baruch College and Web 2.0
. 3 Comments

Ahhh… employing the tools of Web 2.0 to escalate and make visible to the world the battles we go through in the classroom over the course of a semester. At least, that’s the one part of this story I feel comfortable commenting upon. I will say that the faculty member featured in the films below is one of our intrepid blogfessors, though I fear he may not have many students in future semesters with whom to blog. Beyond that, perhaps the less contextualization done on this one, the better.

From MTVU…

(unfortunately, and inexplicably, MTVU has removed this video as of 2/29. Links to media pickups of the video here and, from The Ticker, here).


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
. 3 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.