This semester, I will run workshops for Professor Cherny’s ACCT 5400 (Principles of Auditing) in preparation for the students’ final paper project, a ‘lessons-learned’ assessment of an audit failure. It is different from my last semester’s work on oral presentations for ACCT4100 (Advanced Accounting) in the sense that the assignment focuses on writing (and not speaking), but the two do share a common goal: the coursework is designed to help the students develop as a more effective business communicator. My workshops will review principles of writing (the writing process, organizing the paper, how to do citations etc.) and move on to a (hopefully) in-depth look on the essence of an effective business paper. Even though this assignment may appear to be somewhat ‘old-school’ to some of the students, I hope that they will realize that writing is still an important part of business communication (just as much as the oral communication they practiced in ACCT4100) and they will learn a lot through this assignment. I am looking forward to meeting them at a workshop and hear what they have to say about their coursework. I will report back on the workshop in one of my next posts.
Digital Learning and The Schwartz Institute: Northern Voice 2008
collage by injenuity
Earlier this week I returned from my first Northern Voice, a remarkable conference on social media at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. (The keynote speaker was none other than Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer of WordPress, the open-source blogging platform we have started to use here at Baruch, but that’s for another post.) I spent most of my time at NV around a great group of Canadian and American edubloggers and instructional technologists who have channeled their energies towards exploring how the technologies and media that facilitate all manner of social interaction online might be harnessed to transform teaching and learning. Alan Levine, Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman, Scott Leslie, Chris Lott, Jen Jones, Bill Fitzgerald, and our old friend Jim Groom made me feel welcome at NV and helped me gain invaluable insight into some of the IT projects we’ve taken on at the Schwartz Communication Institute. Most of all, they helped facilitate my thinking through of some of the more salient work we’ve been undertaking lately as well as new directions in which we might move .
For the last 10 years, we have described what we’re trying to do at the Schwartz Institute as “infusing oral, written and computer mediated communication-intensive activities” into Baruch’s undergraduate curriculum. What exactly we mean by the terms in italics above has mutated and evolved over the years as we’ve experimented with new pedagogies and played around with our ideas of what it means to communicate purposefully and effectively.
What we mean when we talk about “computer-mediated communication” has changed most in meaning. At first it was just a way of modifying “written communication”: writing but on computers, mostly email and asynchronous chat via Blackboard. It merely acknowledged the generic differences between the kinds of writing our students did that ended up on paper and those which were both transmitted electronically and read on a screen. This included a limited notion of blogging as simply an occasion for writing and not so much of interacting within any broader community of knowledge producers.
Since our engagement with the key ideas that inform the conversations at Northern Voice, what we mean by “computer mediated communication” has changed to the point that “mediated” is no longer appropriate or especially useful (even “computer” seems limiting). It’s not mediated, it’s facilitated, even transformed by the tools we use. (Medium=Message, etc. etc.) What we’re concerned with now is not just writing with a computer but something much more complex, nuanced, and more exciting: something social. And it no longer involves just writing but other media as well. We have started to encourage faculty to allow students to compose not only in words but also with sound, images, moving and still, and all manner of found objects from the vast vast universe that is the internet. We have started to play around with ways of aggregating the knowledge students produce and encouraging them to offer it up to other community members while maintaining a sense of ownership and of responsibility for their own work.
Kathy Davidson’s distinction between Instructional Technology and Digital Learning has been helpful in illuminating where the Institute has been and where we’re going with electronic media in the work we do with students and faculty. Davidson says:
IT is usually institutionalized from the top down whereas digital learning is shared, contributory, collective, collaborative, customizable. With IT, teachers or, even more typically, administrators propose and implement and often require other teachers and students to use a particular new instructional tool in a certain way and to certain ends. In digital media and learning, the outcomes are less clear, the teachers have less of a determining role, and technology isn’t something delivered to others but is intrinsic to the larger learning project. Its building and application are part of the collective learning experience. The purpose of IT is to facilitate instruction. Digital learning can happen in school–but is as likely to take place at recess or in the lunch room as in the classroom. . . . Digital learning enhances and takes advantage of all the various ways we do things on line, allows us to customize and remix and repurpose online tools, communities, games, and other media, and, wherever possible, also makes us think about the implications and applications of the technologies we use so that we can learn, think, and act better together.
Facilitating digital learning is where we’re headed and I thank everyone I spoke to at NV for helping me get my head around that and showing me some of key tools and approaches that will become indispensable to our work.
photo credits: injenuity and penmachine
som thawtz on cmUnik8shn
Each semester, as I introduce myself and the Schwartz Institute to new students, I talk briefly about our philosophy and the importance of communication in all disciplines. I also think about how political and empowering it is to teach communication. Socrates believed that: “to become eloquent is to activate one’s humanity, to apply the imagination, and to solve the practical problems of human living.” We at the Institute stress the Holy Trinity of the written, oral and computer-mediated communication.
But Socrates believed (or maybe he just liked to postulate…) that the young should not learn how to read until they learn to prove, analyze and internalize knowledge (leading them ultimately to posses wisdom and virtue). Literacy would undercut that effort by allowing students to merely decode information, without the necessary skill of internalizing it.
Cognitive neuroscientist, Maryanne Wolf, thinks that Socrates’ concerns warrant a second look as we enter a historical transition in prevalent modes of communication.
She writes (“Socrates’ nightmare”, The Boston Globe, September 6, 2007) about “the plight of the reading brain as it encounters this technologically rich society.” She argues that literacy – as a “miracle” and a skill that transformed the neural circuitry of the brain and the intellectual development of the species – is threatened. This is supposedly “a consequence of the transition to a digital epoch that is affecting every aspect of our lives, including the intellectual development of each new reader.” From the neuroscience vintage point, there is apparently not enough research to answer the questions: Will the students become so accustomed to immediate access to escalating on-screen information that they will fail to probe beyond the information given to the deeper layers of insight, imagination and knowledge that have led us to this stage of human thought? Or, will the new demands of information technologies to multitask, integrate and prioritize vast amounts of information help to develop equally, if not more valuable, skills that will increase human intellectual capacities, quality of life and collective wisdom as a species?” Brain research shows that learning to read (a skill by no means natural to our species) may help us “to go beyond the decoded text to think new thoughts of our own.”
But, would Socrates argue that we should forbid the use of technology until the students learn to be critical thinkers? C’mon, don’t tell me that you are not just a tiny bit tempted by this idea, especially when you receive an email from one of your students, sent via a Blackberry and filled with symbols and emoticons.
Creative Writing as a Communication Intensive Course
We want our students to be able to write. We want them to write well. We want for them to be able to articulate eloquently their thoughts on what they have written and what they have read. Educators seem to agree, rather vehemently at times, that students lack critical skills and, when it comes to discussion, are unable to back up any claims they have or argue their points in an intelligent and effective way.
Composition 101 has long been regarded, almost without question, as the “required writing course.” Yet, students don’t really learn how to think more critically in these courses and therefore continue to churn out, in all of their coures, poorly written essays with lukewarm thoughts and little substance.
Creative writing courses, on the other hand, are regarded as “electives”–courses that only “artistic” types take or, mistakenly, a way to get an easy A. The creative writing course, however, seems to strive towards effective communication, analysis, argument and thesis development, critical thinking, eloquence, articulation, and correct writing.
In a typical creative writing class, students will read difficult works of fiction and poetry. They will be asked to discuss the most minor details of these works and be able to back up any statement they make with not only textual references but also with interpretive skills that may call on what they have read before.
Additionally, students will “workshop” their classmates’ writings, applying the same critical and analytical skills that they will have gained by reading and discussing published works of literature, both contemporary and canonical.
(During a typical workshop, the student whose work is being discussed is not allowed to speak until the end, at which time she may ask questions. I find, however, that most students want to defend their writings or say, “This is what my writing means,” a practice that I discourage.)
A good creative writing teacher will not allow her students to merely say, “I really liked this” or “I didn’t like this.” Students must say why. The writing workshop is an exercise in close reading and critical commentary. I make my students read and comment directly on their classmates’ writing before the workshop. They must come to the class prepared to speak. The workshop, therefore, requires that students both write and orally communicate their thoughts.
And I don’t let anyone hide. In a typical workshop, a student will have articulated his or her thoughts an average of five times. If four workshops are conducted in a two hour class, each student will have spoken 20 times.
There certainly are enough MFA in Creative Writing graduates to fill the demands of the writing curriculum at American colleges, but I can already hear the cries of our composition-rhetoric colleagues protesting that creative writing is not a critical or academically rigorous discipline. I read more during my two-years as a MFA student than I have as my four years as Ph.D. student in English. A typical Tuesday assignment (for Thursday’s class) from my creative writing professor was: read George Steiner’s After Babel, Robert Lowell’s Imitations, Stanley Burnshaw’s The Poem Itself; find a poem and translate it in the three modes of translation according to Steiner; find three different translations of Dante’s Inferno and report back on which translation is more effective and why based on content and prosody (prosody being my professor’s seemingly harmless way of saying “every poetic device,” so you had better scan the poems before coming to class because you might be asked about how a certain trochee affected the poem); and email, by Wednesday midnight, a three-page essay on one poet in The Poem Itself and how you might read this poet according to After Babel.
On Thursday, we would discuss all of this and more. We would read and analyze our classmate’s translations. We would have to eloquently articulate our thoughts and integrate, into our conversation, our readings throughout the semester.
We polished our poems before we photocopied them for our professor and classmates. We went over them endlessly, revising and perfecting, taking into account the comments of our teacher and classmates and our own developing artistic and critical sensibilities. We questioned our revision choices; sometimes we went back to our original plans. But we were revising, and we were revising in a way that was intended to please us, not to get a higher grade.
For us, revising was high stakes: it was on a level that was critical, personal, artistic. The revisions we made seemed to change the world, or our places in that world. It seems to me that this is the way writing, critical thinking, and communicating ought to be taught.
Is PowerPoint Evil?
Just recently, each of us at the Communication Institute has been granted a copy of Edward Tufte’s slim and visually appealing manifesto against PowerPoint, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. [PowerPoint from here on out is referred to as PP.] I am about three-quarters of the way through this nifty subway read, and so far find it thought-provoking as anything. Although one of his main complaints is that PP dumbs down detailed and dense arguments, he himself does a nice job of making a pretty strong argument in thirty-one 8 1/2 X 11 pages. I am in the process of compiling my list of Agreements/Disagreements, and I promise not to publish them later here in bullet format.
It is particularly interesting to think about his argument in light of the work that those of us who support communication intensive Business Policy Courses do. We work with students who are required to incorporate a PP presentation into their final analysis of a company’s strategies, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and position in the industry. I expect to write more on how I think Tufte’s problems with the so-called ‘cognitive style’ of PP relate to our work with students. But in the meantime, check out these nifty links:
Mathematics and Communication
The current issue of Bostonia (Spring 2007) includes a look at a fascinating new initiative aimed at helping immigrant elementary schoolchildren in Chelsea, Massachusetts. “Project Challenge” is a mathematics program that “makes talk in the classroom the central component of learning.”
The basic idea behind the program is that students can gain a firm grip on mathematical concepts by discussing them. Instead of being told outright whether a particular equation or solution works, for example, children are encouraged to discuss whether a proposed approach seems viable, and to explain why they think the way they do.
The results are impressive: “After three years, Project Challenge students were scoring in the nintieth percentile on standardized math tests, even better than their counterparts in wealthy Boston suburbs. Not only that, but their English and language arts scores shot up.”
This interactive approach to learning is of course familiar to those of us who teach writing. That the “workshop”-oriented classroom could be so beneficial to children learning mathematics provides particularly strong support (in case any were needed) for the advancement of communications-intensive education.
Baruch Blogs: Writing New York
Our old friend Jim Groom of Bavatuesdays, a renowned edublog, just put up a nice post acknowledging the fine work of our very own Luke on Writing New York, a blog for two Journalism courses at Baruch. Subtitled “Posts from the Boroughs and Beyond,” the blog showcases some of the work of students in Prof. Roz Bernstein’s and Prof. Brigette Davis’ classes and is one of the growing number of course blogs the Institute currently supports. Take a look.
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