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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.

I was reminded today that I once drafted a set of learning goals for writing and speaking at the undergraduate level for a project headed up by our office of advisement and orientation. While these goals implicitly inform the curricular support and development work of the institute, they have not been codified beyond the document I created in 2006 (before I learned about Bloom’s taxonomy). These goals have not seen the light of day beyond their very limited original context. With that, I thought I’d post them for discussion. Take a look and let us know if you find these useful and/or whether you’d recommend revisions. Here we go:

By the end of their undergraduate experience students should be able to:

• comfortably pose pertinent questions to faculty both in and out of class
• demonstrate proficiency in a number of everyday written genres (email, letter, etc.)
• demonstrate sensitivity to audience in oral and written communication – write and speak in a manner appropriate to audience – articulate similarities and differences in addressing different audiences (email to peer vs. email to faculty, conversation with parent vs. conversation with prospective employer)
• demonstrate awareness that all communication is purposeful – each individual communication is meant to accomplish a particular goal or set of goals – sensitivity to purpose
• grasp rhetorical purpose of own written work (what is this paper, email, memo, etc. meant to accomplish? What do I need it to do? What should it accomplish?)
• articulate how they might go about accomplishing purpose of given communication (in order to accomplish X in my email to my professor, I need to make clear that Y and establish Z before making the argument that A)
• work responsibly and productively as a member of a group – to communicate appropriately with all group members
• comfortably speak before an audience – impromptu and prepared presentations
• articulate own understanding of how they can become better communicators (what do I need to work on to become a better writer/speaker?)

Discuss.

The Finance Economics team recently experimented with using the Turning Point Technology. It is an audience response system which allows students to participate in presentations or lectures by submitting responses to interactive questions.

Each student holds one of the thin little clickers and answers the questions you placed in your Power Point slides. You can see the results immediately (or hide them from the class if you choose).

We were apprehensive about having to learn new software and then adjusting it to work with a Power Point presentation and a workshop we have been working on for months already. But it worked very well. The IT resources tech support person was happy to train us, it took barley half and hour. A little experimenting later and we were able to figure out how to make it work for us. It was as easy as creating additional slides to add to our Power Point. But the benefits were clear: we were able to ask students to respond to questions which then allowed us to introduce a related element of the workshop, or helped us explain a point we were making, or, at the end of the session, we were able to ask student to asses the workshop: what they learned, found useful, found challenging. After the session, with a click of a button, we printed out a report with percentage and graphical representation of the answers (see the fragment of it at the picture attached to this post). We designed very simple “yes” and “no” questions but the possibilities are endless.

The added bonus is that the box of clickers for students is brought to the classroom and then taken away after the class is over, by an IT person. You don’t even have to pick it up. Hopefully, some of our Institute’s PCs will have the Turning Point installed. You can also try it on your home PC. Give me a holler if you need help figuring it out.

I love this quirky little how-to clip, mostly because the audio doesn’t match up to the video, making poor Leila look like she needs her own mandated visit to the house of corrections. But I can relate to Leila and her message, and I’m willing to admit that I stumbled upon this video in a moment of desperation, when I was brainstorming different approaches to this question of encouraging solid eye contact in oral communicating.

As most of us have probably discovered by now, when we’re providing feedback on speeches, merely repeating “you need to make more eye contact” doesn’t do the trick. (And really, why should it?) Most of the speakers we work with know full well that eye contact is something they should shoot for—they’ve seen this on speech evaluation forms and read about it dutifully in their Intro to Public Speaking class way back when. But if they commit this same “offense” in every presentation they make—staring at the PP screen, or at the floor, or at their hands, or note cards—when does the practice actually come in?

And, just as importantly, how do we invigorate our own approach to this thorny delivery snag? Some days, “make more eye contact” becomes the easy go-to, that dull phrase you know you’ll probably say before the student even begins. But isn’t commenting on eye contact just another way of saying that they didn’t make a connection with their audience? If we wanted to get all Eckhart Tolle on this post, we could extend it into the idea of being fully present (which has plenty of resonances in actor training). We all know how magical it can be when someone gives really great eye—that mixture of confidence, care, and connection– but how is it best learned?

I’ve tried a few new things in my recent quest to investigate the power of the Connecting Eyes. In the classroom, I’ve become more emboldened to push away the chairs and try out some of the better eye contact exercises that I know of, forcing people to get used to going eyeball-to-eyeball. Some of these exercises transform the room into a sort of communications gym class, which is a little hard to get used to, but not a bad thing at all. Does this have more successful outcomes in student performance? Hard to tell, exactly. But it certainly increases comfort and community among the students.

And during my BPL sessions with student groups, I’ve changed my approach. Instead of allowing the students to run through their entire presentations before I provide my feedback, I now occasionally stop them mid-stream, prompting them to re-do an entire section, this time focusing on, say, sustained eye contact. I know some of you out there have run your practice sessions like this for quite a while, but I’m just now catching on to its real benefits. I had been skeptical of the logic of isolating one element and potentially distracting the speaker with it, but I’m now thinking of these sessions as true rehearsals; if they can’t “run through” their work multiple times, what are the chances that a pattern of poor delivery will be broken?

For your edification, we give you a 1953 instructional film for IBM  by Ray and Charles Eames entitled “A Communications Primer.” Music by Elmer Bernstein. Great stuff.

Via Laughing Squid.

We here at the Institute are very excited about this bit of publicity: the current issue of Change Magazine, published in cooperation with The Carnegie Foundation For the Advancement of Teaching, features a profile of the Schwartz Institute written by Fara Warner, whom some of you may remember from last year’s Symposium. Fara’s article, entitled “Improving Communication is Everyone’s Responsibility” is a lengthy, in-depth discussion of the Institute and the tremendously varied work that we do here at Baruch College. Take a look. Here’s a snippet:

The Institute
To understand how the Institute was created—and has grown into a model for developing and supporting communication-intensive curricula—you have to look at the college’s history and its extraordinarily diverse student body.

Baruch’s beginnings stretch back to 1847. Its Newman Vertical Campus is now located at Lexington and 24th Street in Manhattan, one block from the original site of the Free Academy, the country’s first free institution of higher education. In 1919, the City University system created a school of business and civic administration on the site of the Academy. The next year, it added a master’s degree in business administration. In 1953, the college was renamed in honor of Bernard M. Baruch, the statesman and financier who had been instrumental in the college’s creation. In 1968, Baruch College became a freestanding college within the City University of New York. The College currently encompasses the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Public Affairs, and the Zicklin School of Business—now the largest school of business in the nation.

Even in its early years, the college was known for its diversity, drawing its student body from the immigrant populations that called New York City home. Over the years, those populations have changed from Italian, Jewish, and German to today’s immigrants from countries such as Turkey, Uzbekistan, and China. Approximately one-third of Baruch students were born outside the U.S., and half are the children of immigrants. About 90 percent of Baruch’s undergraduate students graduated from New York City’s public and parochial high schools, and more than half come from families with an income of less than $44,000 annually. The college’s nearly 16,000 students speak 110 languages and come from 160 countries—prompting publications such as U.S. News and World Report and the Princeton Review to name it “the most diverse university in the U.S.”

“The college always had to operate with the knowledge that for many of its students English wasn’t just their second language but sometimes their third or fourth,” says Professor Paula Berggren, who has worked extensively with the Institute to enhance students’ writing and oral communication skills in Great Works of Literature courses, which all Baruch students are required to take. Moreover, “in the U.S., we don’t know how to communicate even if we’re native English speakers.” By the mid-1990s, the combination of a school devoted to teaching business skills and a diverse and underprepared student body had created a situation in which “Baruch was turning out competent vocationally trained students who lacked an ease with communication,” Berggren says.

Baruch faculty members weren’t the only ones who noticed the problem. Over the decades, Baruch had gained a reputation for turning out highly capable business majors who got very desirable jobs in accounting and other business sectors. But major employers reported that Baruch graduates sometimes lacked confidence, sophistication, and facility in business communication. The problem wasn’t lost on the college’s alumni either—including Bernard L. Schwartz, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Loral Space & Communication, who had graduated from Baruch with a bachelor’s of science degree in finance. He believed that Baruch needed to do a better job of teaching students real-world communication skills in addition to their core studies. In 1997 he donated the initial funding to create the Institute that now bears his name, with the expressed wish to help Baruch students become more effective communicators.

There are a number of ways to teach and enhance oral and written communication, from required communication-specific courses and formal academic support units to loose, informal programs driven primarily by individual faculty members. Baruch created an organization that operated somewhere between those two extremes. A few core principles and organizing structures were set down that have guided the Institute, but room was left for creativity and evolution stimulated by the changing needs of faculty and students and by technological developments.

The Institute isn’t housed under a specific department—English or communication studies, for instance. In keeping with the idea that communication is everyone’s responsibility, it operates under the Office of the Provost and remains independent of any one department’s requirements or direct control. It also receives private funds (including ongoing support from Schwartz), giving it flexibility in the breadth, depth, and scope of the programs it offers. It invites outsiders, most notably from the business world, to discuss communication issues that are of importance to the employers who hire Baruch students. Each year, the Institute hosts an annual symposium that brings together faculty and business executives to explore areas of mutual concern, such as the role of new technologies in shaping criteria for effective communication in academic and business contexts.

(Read the rest here)

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.

Cacophony’s good friend Jim Groom (right) has recently coined a term that has the edublogosphere all atwitter: edupunk. It probably runs counter to the meaning behind the word to note, impressed, that The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog, “Wired Campus,” picked up Jim’s phrase. Punks probably don’t care much what the Chronicle’s got to say.

Edupunk (here are musings and run downs by Mike Caulfield, Stephen Downes, and D’Arcy Norman) is a new name for ideas that have been bouncing around the progressive edublogosphere for some time, namely, that higher education humanity needs an alternative to proprietary course management systems and the philosophy of teaching and learning that they implicitly promote. At the core of edupunk are older pedagogical stances unrelated to technology: an ethic of self-reliance, the valuation of student-centered experiential learning, and the rejection of the “banking concept of education.” Edupunk seeks to update and adapt these ideas within the rapidly evolving realm of edutech.

I’m coming a little late to this particular conversation (last week I was DIYing the walls of my house with a wallpaper steamer and buckets of paint– domesticpunk), and hope I can add something to the celebration/elaboration. Seems to me that “edupunk” is a useful term, though, like all metaphors, it breaks down in the end. It has successfully congealed and branded the thinking that’s at the core of the unease many of us working in this field have with the way things are done at most schools. It’s good that it’s been picked up by the Chronicle, and it’s fantastic that more people are finding their way to Jim’s blog these days.

I fear, however, that the attention to the phrase may distract from the work that produced it. For instance, I’ve been been trying to square the circle of my dislike for punk music and culture with my love and appreciation for the work of the cats who’ve rallied to this term. I see a rejectionist ethos and cliquish sense of superiority behind much punk music and culture, and I’m not sure that’s an accurate description of the edutech movement that I feel a part of. I’ve always been more of a funk and soul man myself, and think that the affirmation native to those genres, the love and depth of feeling at their center, are much more pleasant (and just as useful) rhetorical and political stances. A brilliant administrator I once worked with, wise enough to know what she didn’t know and to defer to folks like Jim and Zach Davis on all things digital, once said, “we want to use technology to seduce students to our pedagogical goals.” That seems more Barry White than Johnny Rotten.

In that spirit, I present: edufunk.

photo(shop) credit: skywaltzer

Or, how about yet another metaphor: edujazz.I sense in the discourse around edupunk an appreciation for messiness, even a distaste for form. I’m not sure this lends itself to the best teaching. The pedagogy that I’ve been exposed to and have practiced as a teacher of history is much more like jazz… lay down a structure, and leave plenty of space for improvisation. This allows a variety of types of learning to happen in a classroom, acknowledges that both facts and the skills to interpret them are important areas to work on, and encourages our students to explore from within material that we’ve laid out with a set of goals in mind. I’m all for the “guide-by-the-side” approach to teaching… but the work that went into the Ph.D. I’m about to earn does qualify me, I think, to do a bit more than that at times.

This metaphor is translatable to how we, as instructional technologists, nurture critical approaches to online learning, particularly in how we can “seduce” talented teachers to experiment with new forms. Our Institute is incredibly lucky to have the autonomy to deploy and develop whatever software we deem pedagogically appropriate, so to a certain extent we are isolated from Blackboard. Baruch’s IT shop also recognizes that an institution of higher learning should offer a range of solutions to its community, even if those solutions compete with one another. BCTC blesses and supports our experimentation.

Yet Blackboard still runs wild at this university, and we are constantly engaging with faculty members and administrators who refuse to see the differences between the solutions we promote and what BB offers. BB’s appeal is in its antiseptic pre-fabrication, in the very fact that it doesn’t force faculty to take the extra steps to really consider how Web 2.0 and distributed learning open up new pedagogical possibilities. As a result, many faculty graft onto it existing modes of learning, fearful of allowing technology to “get in the way.” They get on Blackboard, get off, and move on.

Some faculty members do use Blackboard quite successfully, particularly for collaborative projects. Good teaching is good teaching, no matter where it happens or how it happens. Our job as instructional technologists, I think, is to explore the new possibilities and modes of learning that Blackboard happens to work against. If that software gives faculty members what they need to accomplish what they want, then so be it. But if faculty are interested in making full use of distributed learning, in continuing to learn themselves, and especially in truly empowering students, they need other solutions.

Edujazz, emphasizing structure and improvisation, can help reach out to faculty who are reticent to give up their control and jump into the pit with the edupunks. This argument evolves from my work in an academic service unit, where my job is to help a wide-range of faculty members experiment with this stuff. Such work requires, and benefits from, sensitive responses to their concerns. An anti-authoritarian, anarchic response will ultimately accomplish little. The DIY approach of edupunk is a great goal, but often times DIT– Do It Together–is necessary, and even preferable. Helping faculty members translate their pedagogical structures to a new environment goes a long way towards mollifying their concerns about the impact of technology on their students’ learning. The students, if the structure is sound, can handle the improvisation.

Now, behind the scenes, hell yeah, I’ll cavort with the punks. Jim’s named a movement, even if the contours of that movement still haven’t yet been fully defined. The politics of this stuff and the consideration of the logic of capital are deeply important, and should constantly be a part of the conversation. If a university is going to spend millions on a limited and problematic application, it should probably be able to explain why that solution is better than cheaper alternatives. I haven’t seen that done yet.

Until it is, there’s work to be done. So, edupunks, edufunks, eduheads, or whomever: keep doing your thing.

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.

[click to enlarge] 

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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.

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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.

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.