The National Conversation

December 19, 2011 By 4 Comments

One of the points frequently made about Occupy Wall Street is that it has shifted the national conversation by putting income inequality and financial deregulation back on the table. At the same time, one of the most inspiring things about the actual site of Zuccotti Park, and the other Occupy encampments, has been their creation of a forum for open conversation about issues of local and national policy.

But what is the national conversation? Where does it take place? Whose voices are involved? Today I want to ask: Could expanding the national conversation become a focal point for political mobilization? Could activists mobilize around a clear articulation of the need for a more open, engaged, diverse national conversation? Could this be a way to bridge constituencies that currently have a hard time talking to one another?

Image Credit: Ubiquitous Clip Art

As a rhetorical strategy, the idea of expanding the national conversation is double-edged. It encourages us to pull back from direct, explicitly partisan mobilization, and to look instead for more “neutral” (read: widely acceptable) ways of framing the issues. At the same time, it also takes for granted the idea that “more” conversation on such issues will ultimately mean “better” conversation.

(When OWS puts income inequality on the table, we assume that this is a push in the direction of less inequality, since current norms don’t allow an explicit argument for greater inequality. Those who want to bolster inequality have to reframe the issue, for example by shifting to a conversation about “job creation” — also something that can’t be explicitly rejected in the current political climate.)

Image Credit: HappyPlace.com

Yet I think there is a lot to be said for this kind of strategy, especially in this moment, when the national conversation in the U.S. is operating on a very shallow level, with little substantive debate and much divisive sound-biting. Is this the best we can do?

It bothers me, for example, when my political comrades describe our country as if it consisted of three constituencies: left-wing voters, left-wing leaders, and right-wing leaders. It’s as if they forget all about the right-wing voters, the people who actually vote for and support Romney and Perry and Gingrich. Then they turn around and say: The politicians are ignoring the will of the people! I don’t hear enough activists on my side of the spectrum talking about what motivates Republican voters.

2008 Electoral Map

Of course, gerry-mandering and voter suppression are real. There are all kinds of problems built into the system. To some extent, the politicians are ignoring the will of the people. But we do still hold elections, and plenty of people participate in them — and, of those people, plenty are voting for right-wing candidates. The Republican party has a strong electoral basis in social conservatism and religious fundamentalism. I don’t see how we can hope to change or understand the current situation nationally without taking that into account. And that means framing the national debate to include the issues that mobilize those communities alongside our own.

So: How do we open up the conversation?

Image Credit: Scoop NZ

Sometimes it seems as if presidential debates are just about the only time when a national conversation actually takes place. There, campaign finance reform is a central issue, and already a main focus of political activism. But I usually hear this issue framed in terms of who gets elected, as if the only purpose of presidential elections were to find out which of two parties will hold power for the next four years. Shouldn’t presidential debates be the highest level of national conversation? Shouldn’t they be supported by a layered, systemic national conversation that continues throughout all phases of the election cycle? Isn’t campaign finance reform really about trying to make the presidential contest less of what Brian Lehrer calls a “horse race” and more of a substantive conversation on national issues?

In short, I don’t think it’s enough right now to mobilize on specific issues. The bill that just passed in the Senate is a good example: It’s terrifying. But even more terrifying is the fact that we have arrived at a moment where such a bill can pass without significant national debate. There are only so many petitions that one can sign against specific bills that most people in the country have never even heard of. I am yearning for a longer-term view of politics, for a vision of the future that goes beyond slowing or preventing the slide toward authoritarianism.

Photo Credit: Cover Lay Down

And so I wonder:

  • What if expanding the national conversation became the explicit platform of a social movement or political party? What kinds of implications (for campaign finance reform, for education, for civil rights, for financial regulation) could be woven into an argument for more open and thorough debate?
  • What kind of articulate challenges could be put forth in terms of how actually to accomplish this expansion? What type of debates, conversations, forums, round tables, symposia, performances, and educational programs would support such an expansion? What kinds of institutions and media are best situated to accomplish this? What kinds of pressure could cause them to do so?
  • And finally: Is there a special role here for education and academia? (Here’s a challenge for intellectuals to support OWS. And here’s a proposal to shed light on how politicians interact with experts in relevant fields.) How can we counter the spinning of higher education as an elitist club? What are the real systems that can raise the level of public debate and get people interested in the national conversation?

Filed Under: Audience, Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Debating, Education, Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Media, New York, Politics, Punctuation, Scholarship, Social Media, What if . . .

more thoughts on technology in the classroom

October 27, 2011 By 1 Comment

I’d like to continue on the topic of technology in the classroom that James brought up in his blog post of the other day and that Erica continued with on Wednesday. These two posts and the responses they elicited in the comments section are fascinating and have helped me think through my deep ambivalence to technology in the classroom (in this case the college classroom) and I figured I’d jot down some questions and ideas in this post.

Like one of the commenters on James’s blog post, I ask my students to keep their computers and phones in their bags or out of sight. In the same way that I don’t want someone checking their phone while we’re talking, I don’t want my students to be distracted by an open website while one of their peers is engaging in the often extremely revealing process of speaking up in class.

That said, I do use technology in my classroom. For the past two semesters, I’ve created a blog for a survey course I teach called Great Works of Literature I (which ranges from the beginning of time to around 1600 CE). Over the course of the semester, each student is responsible for writing three 2-page posts (so on any given class day, four or five students have written and posted a short but complex argument on the text we’re reading for that day) and they are also expected to comment on each other’s posts. The work on the blog counts for a fifth of their final grade (5% per post, 5% for commenting) so it is a hefty part of what I am asking them to do for the class.

A snapshot of my course blog this semester

Above I said that I do use technology in the classroom. However, the blogging I ask students to do takes place outside the actual classroom.

Part of me really likes the fact that it’s done outside of class. It allows shy students to speak up in the comments section. It exponentially multiplies class-time (something they probably have mixed feelings about!). It puts the students at the center of a large part of the production of the class, since they’re the ones who write on the blog, not me. (I write prompts in a special “prompts” section of the blog and occasionally make an announcement using the blog, but they do all the posting and commenting otherwise.)

But I do want to find ways to better incorporate what they do at home into what we do in class. I’ve been feeling lately that the blog sometimes feels irrelevant to the students during class. Sometimes, depending on how the conversation goes, the blog goes unmentioned and all the work that went into the posts and comments for that day might seem unnoticed or unimportant to the writers or to the readers of the posts. While I’m reading and commenting on everything (I email the students my responses to their posts, partially in order to keep the comments section strictly for the students) I sometimes wonder how often the other students are actually reading all of the posts. Reading four or five posts in addition to the day’s reading is a lot of work, and unless I find ways to bring the blog posts into the classroom in a more comprehensive and integrated way, I fear they’ll be writing just for me, not for each other.

So how can I keep laptops from popping up on every desk while still honoring the work they’ve done on the blog and keeping student responses at the center of the class’s production of ideas and knowledge?

Some brief ideas in response to my own questions:

1.    Use the overhead projector more to simply display blog posts and address specific points raised in them. Plan before class which parts of each blog post might be relevant and referenced.
2.    Prompt students to include video or music or other media that relates to the reading in their blog posts. Play these found connections in class on the overhead projector and solicit responses from the rest of the students.
3.    Ask students to come to class with questions for the authors of the posts. Split the “commenting” requirement into comments on the blog and comments in class. Maybe also do in-class writing that involves the text and the blog posts in response to that text, thus reinforcing the idea that they have to come prepared having read their peers’ posts.
4.    Make games/role-plays using the blog. For example, ask a student who didn’t blog to “be” one of the bloggers and explain “her” position. Then have the real blogger respond with a counter-argument, thus asking the blogger to rethink or elaborate on or qualify his original claims.

And some more ideas about generally using technology in the classroom, aside from using the course blog:
1.    Intersperse class discussion, group activities, in-class writing, and mini-lectures (or anything else one does in class) with clips from youtube and elsewhere. I’m currently thinking up ways to use these two videos to communicate to students what I mean when I talk about tone:

2.     Digital story-telling, DIY radio. Lots to learn here from colleagues here at cac.ophony.
3.     Videos. Students can make videos with their phones, or borrow video cameras from their schools if possible (n.b. like Erica, I’m not going to get into questions of cost and privilege here). I’m envisioning students filming the process of memorizing a short poem (and including some of the bloopers), putting on scenes from plays we read and then proving surrounding material as if the video is a Criterion Collection edition, and  filming interactions with texts in non-classroom environments (filming a staged reading of Antigone at Occupy Wall Street, for example, or filming an interview with some yoga instructors  and practitioners about the Bhagavad Gita). We could then watch these videos together in class and discuss the results.

This has become essentially a long riff so I’ll stop here. I’d love ideas from cac.ophony readers. How do you use technology in or around your college classroom?

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, BLSCI, Pedagogy, Technology

Creativity as Wager?

April 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This semester, in the spirit of Joan Retallack’s ideas of “essay as wager” and “poethics,” I decided to make the first high stakes paper assignment of the semester (for my Composition II courses) something fun. Something a little “creative.” I asked my students to write a manifesto—to think about this first paper as a piece of writing they can have fun with, a piece of writing that would express their own unique and specific argument about “happiness” (the course’s theme), a piece of writing meant to be read out loud.

A handful of students really explored the form. But, the majority of the class were delighted when their second paper assignment was to do a (fairly straightforward) close reading. I was pretty surprised. It seemed strange to me that my students would choose a prescribed assignment over one that leaves the door wide open. And, in a lot of ways, this student bias goes against my general theory of essay writing—one that tips its hat to essay’s French ancestry— essayer (to try). Joan Retallack frames this approach by positing, “the source of vitality for the essay is its engagement in conversational invention rather than ordinal accounts of things (including thoughts) that have already taken place” (“Essay as Wager”).  In other words, to write an essay is to explore, to follow thought in motion and then see what shape it takes, and to engage with the world around us. As Lex Runciman writes, “to write is to think, or to try to think.” But, then again, I occasionally call myself a writer, I don’t mind writing essays, and I might be a tiny bit naïve.

*

I attended the Conference on College Composition and Communication a week or so ago. I heard Richard E. Miller give a talk in which he spoke about standards and standardization and said something like (and I am paraphrasing here), one of the failures of our system is “the eradication of ambiguity—we train people to create arguments that bear no relation to the complexity of lived reality.” This felt like a big (to borrow the age old adage) “aha moment” to me. Of course, how could I expect my students to feel comfortable being “creative,” imagining and owning their own manifestos, when they were probably taught to do just the opposite.

I left the session, sought out some WIFI and immediately blogged on our course site. My post included the following questions: “How often do you feel that you are able to be creative? How does that manifest itself? What does it look like? And, how comfortable do you feel “living with ambiguity”? Do you feel okay not understanding something from time to time? Is it exciting to be confused? Why?”

I also offered them links to the following videos:

Daniel Pink: Education and the Changing World of Work

Teaching the Action Horizon

Ken Robinson Says \”Schools Kill Creativity\”

I felt certain that my students would respond. As we all know, blogging is very different from paper writing. My students occupy this space fairly comfortably. I do not think they would describe blogging in the same way that they described their experiences writing the paper one manifesto. However, it is rare that I give them a specific prompt to blog about. In this medium, the ambiguous is somehow okay.

A sampling of responses: “classes that support creativity are usually joke classes”; “before college we were always taught to pass standardized tests”; “I keep everything within certain acceptable boundaries”; “I always perceived creativity as being something worthless”; and “I am not that creative at all (or at the very least, a person whose creative instincts were not nurtured and was left to wither and die in a small, desolate place in my mind).” The students who (reluctantly) admitted to being creative said that it manifested itself in “doodling and daydreaming.”

My students’ writing about not being “creative” was overwhelmingly creative. They used images and media, they “showed” instead of “telling.” I am tempted to attribute all of these things to the medium that they were composing in, but at the same time, I wonder how often we take a step back and ask ourselves and our students how often we/they are creative? Or, perhaps the real question is…what does creativity look like today, particularly in a space where so much of what we do exists in “virtual”? Do our students even connect the words “creative” and “writing” anymore?

For me, the composition classroom represents a rare opportunity for students to re-engage with “the composing process…as a continuum of making meaning” (Berthoff, “Learning the Uses of Chaos”), and to rediscover or discover the real “pleasure of the text,” always keeping in mind Roland Barthes’ definition of “pleasure,” “there will always be a margin of indecision…the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be precarious, revocable, reversible, the discourse incomplete.” And, for me, this rare opportunity is creative and demands creativity from its participants. But, am I the only one in my proverbial classroom subscribing to that definition?

A few wagers in the form of quotes:

from Joan Retallack’s “The Woman in the Chinese Room”

She-1.
now that we think we know that the world is not all that is the case the case in question the space of the case sad but fierce with light upholds the dark it seems to utter itself must there be subtitles must there be translation she thinks she knows but doesn’t want to accept that in order to write or read or speak there must be a division between light and dark

from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons

NOTHING ELEGANT.

A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest.

Filed Under: Art, Asides, Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging

Dear Cac.ophony

April 14, 2011 By 5 Comments

This was in my inbox this morning.

Dear Cac.ophony,

My name is XXXXXX from XXXXXXXXXX. We have a client who would like to pay you for the opportunity to sponsor a blog post that you have recently written. We know that blogs can be expensive to run and our client would like to opportunity to support you in that endeavor.

In return our client is asking for one link that they specify placed into the body of the blog post(no porn or gambling). Feel free to contact me with any concerns or clarifications you may have.

If you would have any questions or would like to start the process, please email me at XXXXXX@XXXXXXX so we can begin.

Sincerely,

XXXXXXXX
Outreach Manager – XXXXXXXX

Product placement? Not here. Sorry. Though I am curious about which is the post in question and who the client might be. My revulsion to this aside, it seems that this sort of thing is quite common, especially on sites that feature product reviews. See this 2009 NYT article on sponsored blogging.

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Fun, Internet

The Anxiety of Print This Out

November 1, 2010 By 2 Comments

I have one student this semester whose first paper was one of the most befuddling pieces of writing I’ve ever read—literally every single word must have been a direct thesaurus transfer. I could tell that the student had a lot of really interesting ideas, but had fallen victim to the temptation to “invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language” (Bartholomae), and what was clear to me from reading this paper, was that the language of the university was incomprehensible to this student.

Before we’d even gotten the chance to sit down and discuss this paper in office hours, this same student posted to our class blog. The blog post was excellent—thoughtful and thought-provoking questions about Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” were raised and parallels between Melville and the narrator were drawn (both of which showed a lot of critical thinking and perhaps even some outside research).  In other words, this student wrote one of the best blog posts of the semester.

I have many students who seem to inhabit many personalities as writers—the writer who keeps notes in his/her notebook, the blogger/social media aficionado, and the typed-up high stakes essay and hand in hoping for a good grade writer.  But, this phenomenon is nothing new—it is the “same old song” of multi-modal composing, and what Cynthia Selfe defines as “the literacy of technology,” or in other words, “the way people create and respond to information.” What is new to me, however, is this level of engagement and blogging proficiency. The last time I posted on here, I was trying to figure out why my students that semester were adamantly resisting my desire for us to blog. This semester, the blog holds some of the best writing my students do. In fact, I actually am not really able to imagine teaching without the blogging component because of the success I’ve had this semester.

Some observations:

  1. Students who are reticent in class are often the most active on the blog. Each student must blog at least once per semester, but this semester, students are just blogging whenever they want to–and it is all related to the course material.
  2. Students seem to be quick to comment and to ask each other questions. They also are quick to connect the course material to other things they experience in an average week–whether it be Jersey Shore or Carl Paladino.
  3. This course is a Great Works course. The literature we study is from the 17th Century to the present. The blog has enabled students to really connect with the material in an interesting way–they feel committed to its relevance to their own daily experience, despite the age and date of the writing.
  4. Students love to share media. They will force themselves into unexpected connections just to show their colleagues a youtube clip.

But, back to the writing. Is a blog’s real gift the ability to show students that they too can contribute invaluable ideas into a larger discourse community? How can we encourage students to take the writing they already do on the computer and bring it into their papers–substituting thesaurus-heavy prose for the natural critical narratives that emerge in a wordpress environment?

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Pedagogy, Technology, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction

Audio of “Teaching With Blogs” Presentation

August 25, 2010 By 1 Comment

This past Spring I was pleased to moderate a panel at the Baruch Teaching with Technology Conference featuring three of Baruch’s most accomplished blogfessors: Mikhail Gershovich, whose Fear, Anxiety, and Paranoia course site made wide-ranging use of Blogs@Baruch; Paula Berggren, who’s done some of the most focused and interesting work on the system; and Zoe Sheehan Saldana, who’s a two-time reigning Blogfessor of the Year.

The session was well-attended and full of energy, and I think we touched on most if not all of the issues implicated in administering an online publishing platform at the College including pedagogy, resources, administration, and learning outcomes. BCTC was generous enough to record audio of the presentation and to post it to iTunes U, and it’s available below for your listening pleasure. For those of you who wonder what Blogs@Baruch is all about or just what it is I do around here, the audio below should answer some of your questions.

Teaching With Blogs

If you’d like to download this to your portable device for mobile edification, you can get the file here (if I link Cacophony will turn the link into an audio player): http://cac.ophony.org/audio/teachingwblogs.mp3.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Conferences, EdTech Tagged With:

Once Again Back it’s the Incredible…

May 18, 2010 By 3 Comments

the blog animal, ZOE, blogfessor number one.

For the second straight year, we’re awarding the Blogfessor of the Year Award to Zoe Sheehan Saldana, of Baruch’s Fine and Performing Arts Department. The award comes with priority support from the Schwartz Institute on all online publishing endeavors. Of course, Zoe already has that because she’s so awesome.

Zoe developed three sites on Blogs@Baruch this academic year.  Last Fall, she did a Do-it-Yourself Publishing site that used FeedWordPress to syndicate nineteen individual journals where students documented making their own books from scratch (some digital, some not).

This Spring, she used a site in her Basic Graphic Communication course… here’s a description of her course and how she used her course blog from her “About” page:

…this course

This course introduces the graphic design process and methodology. Conceptual and creative thinking is stressed and understood through problem-solving assignments based on research, readings, and classroom demonstrations. The student is introduced to graphic design principles and exposed to historical and contemporary models and current standards of advertising and design. The Macintosh computer is included as the primary graphic design environment. This class is a prerequisite for all advanced Graphic Communication courses. Complete course guide available here, as a PDF file.

…this blog

This blog is a venue for presenting, exploring, and discussing work, ideas, and topics pertaining to the course.

And, finally, together we developed a site for the Focus on Photography Exhibit which served initially as a processing space for members of the Baruch community to submit photos that they wished to be considered for a physical exhibit (which opened last week at the Mishkin Gallery).  The site’s since evolved into an online companion displaying close to 200 images submitted by Baruch students, faculty, and staff.  The submissions process used the TDO Mini Forms plugin to collect information from applicants, allow them to upload their images, and then it published those images to password protected pages where the exhibit judges could asses them. After decisions had been made about which images were accepted for the physical exhibit and which were not, Zoe hacked the Monotone WordPress theme (ideal for photo blogging) to create the online exhibit, which will live beyond the one at Miskhin. The amazing photographic ability of Baruch folks is a topic for another post, but I encourage you to take your time and click through the exhibit to see the fantastic images these folks have captured.

What’s so great about Zoe, beyond her gracious personality and charm, is that she’s exactly what an educational technologist like me needs to get better at what I do: someone who asks questions that I don’t know the answers to, patiently awaits the answer, and works to arrive at a consensus around what can be done with the tools, time, and resources available.  She’s a great collaborator and a creative teacher.  And, as she showed in talks she gave at last year’s CUNY WordCampEd and this year at the Baruch Teaching and Technology Conference, she has a strong grasp of the pedagogical, political, and philosophical impulse behind what we’re trying to do with educational technology at the Schwartz Institute.  As her course blogs and her own art show, she’s an O.E.: Original Edupunk, and both Baruch and the Schwartz Institute are lucky to have her around.

image credit: lumax art

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, BLSCI, Pedagogy Tagged With:

Irresistible Prompts: Engineering Participation

May 11, 2010 By 3 Comments

In early April, Luke Waltzer wrote a post introducing Performing Diasporas: Identities in Motion, an initiative that seeks to raise the profile of the Baruch Performing Arts Center and to infuse the performing arts into the curriculum. To this end, artists-in-residence Maya Lilly, Randy Weston, and Mahayana Landowne will lead a series of workshops for incoming students that interrogate issues of culture and identity in the context of globalization and late capitalism.

This is where Blogs@Baruch enters the picture. I joined Luke in a training session to introduce WordPress to the 2010 peer mentors, each of whom will lead a section of Freshman Seminar come September. Before our session with the peer mentors, we discussed some of the high and low points of the 2009 blogging season in Freshman Seminar. It should be said at the outset that Blogs@Baruch’s support of Freshman Seminar was amazingly successful in 2009 especially in light of the limited time for planning. Blogs@Baruch supported 60 section blogs with 20 students a week for a total of 1200 freshman bloggers, each of whom were tasked with writing six blog posts over the course of the semester, one after each of the required workshops.

But feedback from the peer mentors indicated that buy-in was low among freshmen. Last year’s peer mentors expressed frustration at having to chase after freshmen and repeatedly remind them to complete their blogging assignments. They also told us that the blogging assignments themselves left something to be desired, and that their procedural nature (to report back on the workshop just attended) tended to put a damper on students’ enthusiasm for the task. And finally, the peer mentors expressed a desire to customize the look of the section blogs.

We took each of these critiques seriously and decided to rethink the approach of Blogs@Baruch to Freshman Seminar in light of the concerns raised by peer mentors.  Luke already had plays to open up the WordPress blogging environment, including giving more control to peer mentors over theme selection and plug-in activation, and incorporating social networking functionality through BuddyPress to create a more networked and collegial environment for peer mentors and first year students alike. Luke invited me to join the team that oversees Freshman Seminar to help him address the second critique, that is, to rethink the role of blogging in the Freshman Seminar curriculum. And so last Friday we collaboratively facilitated two sessions with peer mentors, part of which was a brainstorming session to develop more compelling blog post prompts.

Idle brainstorm moment
Creative Commons License photo credit: everdred

The blog post prompts that follow invite students to reflect on the processes of identity construction through various lenses. In different ways, these blog post prompts encourage students to integrate online, social, and multimedia tools into their student identities, and to consider how aspects of their personal history can inform and ultimately enrich their academic work. If they seem repetitive, that’s because they are. Students are actually not required to complete any of them — which is a whole different issue — but in any case, we are hoping to entice them to do some. The idea is to make the blog post prompts so interesting that students feel compelled to do them!

This is what we’ve come up with so far:

1. If you were an iPhone app, which one would be you and why?

2. Use Grooveshark to make a playlist, a soundtrack for your life, and write a blog post explaining the significance of each song.

3. Cheap eats: Write a restaurant review of a inexpensive lunch spot in the Baruch area or around where you live. Include a photograph of the food.

4. Audit your Facebook account, and write about it; OR Google yourself, and share what’s true and what’s not.

5. Pick a stereotype that you think you embody and expand upon, shatter, or embrace it.

6. Consumer identities: What are the five most important brands that you use throughout the day? Why do you think you are drawn to these brands.

7. Choose a cartoon character that is in some way like you, post a picture or a video of this character, and write a blog post explaining your reasoning.

8. Using Paint or a similar program, paint how you see yourself, and post it with an explanation.

9. Record everything you eat in a day and share it. Reflect on what this reveals about your culture and identity.

10. Take photos or record a video of your commute to school. Describe the various spaces you pass through during this process. For instance you might compare the experience of being on the street in your neighborhood, versus being on the bus or the train, versus at Baruch. What stands out to you?

11. Find images related to your heritage on Flickr, and write a blog post explaining their significance.

12. Write a post about your favorite genre of art, and share an example.

13. Take and share a photo of something at Baruch that doesn’t work OR of some ironically defaced signage in the city at large.

14. If you had $1m and had to give it to a charity, which  and why? OR Respond to an open ended, critical thinking philosophical/ethical question, like for example: Is it acceptable to lie under certain circumstances?

15. Search for your name or an idea about you on flickr, and post the first photo that comes up. Compare it to a photo that you think more resembles you.

I plan to revise this list of prompts based on the feedback of the ever-supportive edtech community at CUNY and beyond. Any suggestions? Help me make these prompts irresistible!

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, CUNY, EdTech Tagged With: , ,

Adventures in Blogland

April 13, 2010 By 4 Comments

I currently teach two sections of a Composition II class here at Baruch College. My course theme is “Happiness,” and prior to the semester’s beginning, I’d been thinking a lot about the point that Daniel Gilbert makes in Stumbling on Happiness—that all humans need to have relationships with others in order to feel “happy.” Whether or not I agree with this statement is not as important as the idea that perhaps one way to approach the course theme might be to really think about communication and relationships that are constructed purely by language—not by the physical space of the classroom. So, to make a long story short, I began the semester with the idea that our blog would be an active space where the two sections of the one class could meet, write, and think.

I structured my syllabus so that, out of my 54 students, each week, two students from each section would be in charge of posting to the blog, and two per section would be in charge of commenting. I also provided “optional assignments” that students could either use as prompts for writing, or choose to ignore. But, about a month into our foray into blogging, I still felt disappointed by the space. It even felt tense, a huge problem for a class with the theme of “happiness.”

So I decided to confront them, and the quieter of the two sections surprised me by presenting a very interesting critique of our class blog. I asked the class to begin with a “focused freewrite” in which they needed to reflect on how they were engaging with the class blog thus far. Some comments included:

  • “I hate how teachers think that they can become cool by forcing us to use spaces we think are fun to produce more academic prose.”
  • “The blog is nothing more than another assignment. In fact, you even assign us when to write on it!”
  • “I talk in class, I don’t want to talk at home.”
  • “Aren’t these sites public? I heard that no matter how many years pass, if you write poorly on a blog, you won’t get a job.”

I then asked them to reflect on what a class blog should look like (making it clear that I believe in class blogs and have used them for years with a huge amount of success and student enthusiasm). The responses were not all that different:

  • “Nothing can make blogging for class fun.”
  • “Even if you don’t grade us on the blog, we still know that if we don’t write we’ll get penalized.”
  • “I have my own blog, I don’t need another one to write on.”
  • “Why should we have to participate in a communal blog when you, the professor, don’t do anything?”

I was really intrigued by this conversation and thought a lot about it. Why all the resistance, particularly from a class that is on the quiet side, but is also full of students who email me regularly? And, was the other section just being nice? Did they agree? If so, why didn’t they voice their discontent as openly? And, perhaps most importantly, where did I go wrong? What next?

James Hoff posted on a similar topic a while back. He made the interesting point that “despite our increasingly technological lives, or perhaps because of them, the creation and conservation of technology-free spaces where people can, and are encouraged to communicate face-to-face, free of distraction, with nothing more than their unique temperaments and their private store of knowledge and eloquence, seems more and more important to me.” Were the students reacting against the technology or against the pedagogy I’d laid out? To assign or not to assign…is that the real question?

My general belief is that students tend to enter a Composition classroom dreading the act of writing, let alone spending an entire semester doing just that. When I ask my students if they write outside of class they usually uniformly say “no.” But, they also uniformly admit to authoring thousands of text messages, instant messages, emails, blog posts, Facebook comments, etc. And, these things are all forms of writing. So, by using a blog I want to enable students to see “academic writing” differently, to lower the stakes perhaps, or to at least allow them a space where writing for school can masquerade as being fun.

I decided to change the environment. Not the look of the blog, but the look of my pedagogical hand. I sent both classes an email announcing the “rebirth of the Happiness blog”! An excerpt:

  1. The main purpose of this space is for all of us to share ideas and thoughts, and to start conversations across classes. This is an informal writing space—write on what you want, how you want to, just make sure you keep it class/school appropriate.
  2. From this point onwards, there are no specific “blogging” or “commenting” assignments. Since we all lead active lives and must have a lot on our minds, let’s use this space to share some of these things—many of which will organically relate to the theme of our course. Share things you’ve seen, heard, read that you found exciting. Share ideas you might be having. Pieces of creative work…Use videos, images, etc…In other words–just post. Enjoy. Have fun. Play with language.
  3. You are each assigned to blog at least once this semester, and comment at least once, and that schedule still stands. I would encourage you to blog and comment more than that of course.
  4. I will participate in this blogging endeavor in the same way that you do. I’ll make the occasional posts, sharing things that I find interesting, appropriate, exciting. And, I’ll say hello in the comment boxes.

The result—students are posting actively, unpredictably, visually. They are commenting and talking to each other in the comment boxes (although still not as much as I’d hoped). They are sharing Youtube videos, analyzing songs, reviewing movies, etc. The students who say little in class have been posting the most frequently. They are writing well and writing frequently. They are voluntarily sharing their critical ideas about readings from class. So, my lingering question is: can a transparently optional assignment really do that much harm?

Filed Under: Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Pedagogy, Writing Instruction

Performing Diasporas: Identities in Motion

April 9, 2010 By 2 Comments

Several units at Baruch College, including the Schwartz Institute, are planning an initiative for the next two academic years: Performing Diasporas: Identities in Motion. The broad goal of the project is to raise the profile of the Baruch Performing Arts Center while more deeply integrating the performing arts into the curriculum and the life of the College. We are finalists for a Creative Campus Grant, a competition funded by the Doris Duke Foundation, and organized by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. The project will proceed even if we don’t get the grant (winners will be announced in August), although the programming will be more robust with the additional resources.

Performing Diasporas is centered around artists-in-residence — in 2010-2011, Maya Lilly; in 2011-2012, Randy Weston; and, both years, Mahayana Landowne — each of whom’s work engages questions of group and individual identity formation. These artists will perform throughout their residencies, and also lead and participate in workshops. Much of the programming, however, will be directed at incoming students. The first year experience for the next two years will revolve in large part around exploration of the project theme: the Freshman Text will be about diasporic identity, the artists-in-residence will perform at August’s Convocation, and significant components of Freshman Seminar and the curricula of selected Learning Communities will be devoted to the theme.

As part of the Steering Committee planning this project, I’m especially excited by a few particulars. Too often the administrative labor of higher education falls into silos whose work is narrowly focused and lacks programmatic coordination with other initiatives at the College. This project is structured to counter that impulse by drawing several partners into a collaborative effort to inject consideration of both the arts and the themes of identity and diaspora into the curriculum. Obviously, this will most directly impact our first year students. But it’s also good for everyone at the College for the various moving administrative parts to find synergies. The project will raise the profile of BPAC, inject the first year experience with a variety of new ideas, and dovetails nicely with Dean Jeff Peck’s Global Studies Initiative.

The project also will also help lead Blogs@Baruch into its next phase. Last Fall, we began supporting Freshman Seminar. 1200 first year students wrote more than 6500 blog posts to 60 weblogs, all of which were aggregated ultimately into a single space. FRO Blogging was a success, if solely because we were able to pull it off with little time to plan. Feedback from last Fall’s students and the Peer Mentors who led the seminars suggested the desire for more creative leeway and fewer required blog posts (students were expected to author at least six reflections on enrichment workshops they attended over the course of the term). The feedback also showed appreciation for the social component of the project; students used their blogging to get to know each other and to form community, something that’s always a challenge at a commuter campus like Baruch.

We’ve redesigned FRO Blogging to incorporate this feedback and to intersect with the goals of Performing Diasporas. There will be three specific components to FRO Blogging in Fall 2010:

  • Students will be required to write blog posts at the beginning and end of the semester reflecting on their adjustment to college and, in the middle of the semester, will post monologues about their own backgrounds that they develop with their Peer Mentors (who will receive training). Selected monologues will be shaped and then performed by professional actors at an end-of-the-semester event: “Baruch’s Voices.” In Spring 2011, students who are interested in performing their own monologues will workshop them and then perform at a series of Coffee Houses.
  • Each seminar will be asked to develop its blog over the course of the Fall semester. We will push this process along by crafting prompts that are distributed weekly and that encourage students to reflect upon and share their own stories. Peer Mentors will guide the process, with assistance, and students will be nudged, but not required. At the end of the semester, the most fully developed sites will be recognized with an award. This is an experiment in voluntary buy-in, and we realize that student investment of effort will be uneven. Yet, the constraints of a non-credit course make this approach necessary, and the goal is less to have students develop polished public spaces than to get their feet wet thinking critically about how to present artistic and intellectual material on the open web.
  • Finally, I’m excited to note that we’ll be rolling out BuddyPress this Fall, which will add a social networking layer to Blogs@Baruch, and afford students additional opportunities to connect with and get to know one another.

Ultimately, what I like most about this project is that it treats our students as creators and makers of knowledge, not merely as consumers. Baruch students are among the most interesting students in the world, and yet few of them seem to realize this (in fact, that’s one of the things that makes them interesting). Performing Diasporas, because it will draw our students inside productive processes and creates multiple opportunities for them to see and share the art in their own lives, is going to be something special to watch.

Filed Under: Administration, Art, Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, CUNY, Higher Education, Liberal Arts, Media Tagged With: , ,
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