Archive for the 'Conferences' Category

CLASP Colloquium

Published
by
Suzanne
on April 14, 2008
in CUNY, Conferences, Fun and Oral Communication
. 0 Comments

The CUNY League of Active Speech Professors (CLASP) is an association of the speech professors at CUNY. Every year CLASP organizes a colloquium to discuss and investigate all levels of teaching and initiating speech and oral communication across the curriculum at CUNY. This year’s theme was Teaching and Learning, and Community.

A tradition at the CLASP gatherings is intensive discussion on the most innovative and creative ways to teach and influence different disciplines with Speech theory and practice. There were two panels that dealt with the creative use of technology in the classroom where faculty from Communication Studies, History, Theater and English presented their different ways of using technologies in the classroom.

Professor Thomas Regan took a camera on class field trips for his intercultural communication course. He had the students take pictures or film themselves, the theaters and neighborhoods they were visiting and whatever else interested them. He then put the pictures or films on blackboard and the students would then use that visual input and memory as a starting point for their research papers on New York experimental theater and intercultural theory.

field trip

Urban Studies professor Hugo Fernandez and English professor Ellen Quish demonstrated how they had the students make urban folktales using all kinds of free software such as Audacity, and I-movie or Moviemaker, both embedded in any PC or Mac computer. Many of the LAGCC faculty is working with digital story telling and experimenting with final projects being team written, edited and fully produced digital stories.

Digital Storytelling

Or, once again, the projects were used as a process to get the students to do more advanced research and writing and were not counted as the final project but a step on the way to a term paper. The work and the projects were all very creative and done with extremely low-tech materials and seemingly very easy to use technology, almost everything the faculty used was free or very low budget. The highest cost cited was $25 for a web cam. There was a constant free exchange of websites where free software, free images, music and even short films are available. And for the technologically challenged a professor presented G-cast, a free service, where you call into a toll free number which records your speech and then emails it to you as an MP3 file! Apparently you can even sign up your class to this free service.

Story Resources

What struck me the most was the use of this technology as a process to get the students into deeper work and research. And how at the end of a semester there is visual knowledge as well as written knowledge from each student. How many members of the faculty just jumped into this technology also impressed me and though they all said they were not tech-savvy they all produced relatively sophisticated and interesting student work. The pedagogy and the outcomes were clear and well substantiated from each panel member but I really walked away with a sense of how much fun they were all having.

Digital Learning and The Schwartz Institute: Northern Voice 2008

Published
by
Mikhail
on February 29, 2008
in Blogs and Blogging, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Conferences, ESL, Higher Education, Literacy, Pedagogy, Technology, Web 2.0, Writing Instruction, northernvoice and nv08
. 2 Comments

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.

Creative Commons License photo credits: injenuity and penmachine

Important Questions from the CUNY IT Conference

Published
by
Luke
on December 2, 2007
in Conferences, Pedagogy and Technology
. 2 Comments

I broke away from productive dissertating last Friday to attend a panel on innovating with open source at the 2007 CUNY IT Conference featuring our fearless leader, Mikhail Gershovich, City Tech English Professor Matt Gold, and University of Mary Washington Instructional Technologist and frequent cac.ophony reference, Reverend Jim Groom. Each brought his “A” game.

Mikhail showed off this blog and some of the course blogs we’ve been running, and also demoed to oohs and ahhs VOCAT (which, hopefully, will get a more detailed presentation on this blog once it’s rolled out) while touching on the benefits of “soft money” when trying to break out of traditional teaching and learning molds. Matt talked about his experiences teaching through Wordpress, MediaWiki, and SMF Discussion Boards in the CUNY Online BA program and in a traditional face-to-face class, and displayed how distributed class blogs (each student has his/her own) empower students to see their educations as tied into broader communities of knowledge. These approaches also helped his students develop technological “fluency” as they mastered the material of the course, a project that colleges should be grappling with when they discuss their general education curricula. Jim played the part of the prodigal son, sharing with us what he’s achieved using WordPress MultiUser at UMW. In a community of approximately 3200 teachers and learners, UMW has 800 individual and course blogs up and running on one installation of this software. “Running” is the key word. With Jim as their muse, users–students and faculty–are finding creative ways to connect within courses, across disciplines, and beyond the boundaries of the university. To explore this fantastic project, click here.

This was a truly inspiring panel, and raised some important issues. Though Jim put his finger most solidly on the question (and just built it out here), each presenter touched on the tension between administrative concerns that usually favor proprietary software solutions and innovative teaching and learning achieved through open source. For instance, Blackboard is successful primarily because of its strength as an administrative tool– students are auto-enrolled, grades can be calculated and submitted, it links with e-Reserve. Blackboard, however, rarely wows or gets students excited about participating, and applications like the blog and wiki feature in JournalLX simply fake the funk when it comes to the malleability and connectedness we saw displayed by the presenters. Applications like Wordpress, MediaWiki, and SMF each empower users to shape information and experience however they need to.

Jim argues in his post that this tension is at the very core of what it means to be an instructional technologist. Joe Ugoretz, who is the Director of Instructional Technology at the Macaulay Honors College (Jim’s and my former stomping ground) echoes the question, and points out that information technology and instructional technology aren’t the same thing. Joe hopes that a more mutually beneficial balance of power between “administrating” and “teaching and learning” can be worked out. The MHC is a hotbed of experimentation in teaching and learning, like the BLSCI, and with Joe now running the show over there it would be great if we could explore connections and partnerships. There is great work being done on teaching, learning, and technology throughout CUNY but, in part because the ultimate target of such work is the classroom, few apparatuses exist for such knowledge to really resonate out and through the lives of CUNY folk. That the panel on open source at the CUNY IT Conference was much more highly attended than last year was promising. Perhaps next year these questions can be better represented in the design of the conference.

Symposium Video Now Online

Published
by
Mikhail
on May 23, 2007
in Baruch College, Conferences and Symposium
. 0 Comments

Videos of the keynote presentations and afternoon plenary session at the 7th Annual Symposium are now up on Baruch’s Digital Media Library (DML). Please have a look. We are working on the video of Bernard Schwartz’s dinner address and should have that up soon.

Alan Webber’s keynote (the transcript is here) and Bernard Schwartz’s dinner address at the 4th Symposium as well as the full program of the 6th Symposium are also up on the DML.

Speaking of the Symposium, have a look at a few reflections on the day’s events here and here.

The Symposium is Coming Up Fast!

Published
by
Mikhail
on April 10, 2007
in Baruch College, Conferences and Symposium
. 1 Comment

Speaking of New Rules . . . Here are some details re: the Symposium, coming your way on April 27th. Less than three weeks to go!

The Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College, CUNY presents the 7th Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction, “New Rules: Convention and Change in Communication.”

Friday, April 27, 2007. 14th Floor Conference Center, Baruch College, 55 Lexington Ave., New York, New York.

FEATURING

Kathleen Waldron
President, Baruch College, CUNY

Bernard L. Schwartz
Chairman and CEO, BLS Investments, LLC

Chris M. Anson
Professor of English; Director of Campus Writing and Speaking Program, North Carolina State University

Scott Kirsner
Contributing Writer, Wired, Fast Company, and Contributor to Newsweek, Salon, and the New York Times

William C. Taylor
Co-Founder, Fast Company Magazine, and Co-Author of Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win

THE PROGRAM
This Seventh annual meeting of leaders in business and education sponsored by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, will provide a unique, interactive venue for educators and business professionals to engage in a dialogue on the changing rules and conventions of communication in academic and business settings.

Sessions will be hands-on and interactive. Symposium participants will take part in two round-table discussions led by two co-moderators — a business executive and an educator. In each round-table discussion, the group will explore critical questions, share individual views and experiences, and then bring the conversation back to the larger group in two moderated plenary sessions.

FACILITATORS INCLUDE

Jana O’Keefe-Bazzoni, Chair, Dept. of Comm-unication Studies, Baruch College, CUNY
David Birdsell, Dean of School of Public Affairs, Baruch College
Daniel Black, Director, Americas Recruiting, Ernst and Young LLP
Deborah Bosley, Director, Center for Writing, Language, and Literacy, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Ellen Cahill, co-founder, Cahill Associates
Patrick Curtin, Executive Vice President, Bank of New York
Raymond von Dran, Dean, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University
James Drogan, Lecturer in Global Business and Transportation, SUNY Maritime College
John K. Gillespie, President, Gillespie Global Group
Virginia Malone, Dean, Reuters Academy, Reuters America Client Training
George Otte, Director, Instructional Technology, CUNY; Academic Director CUNY Online Baccalaureate
Ruth-Ellen H. Simmonds, Executive Director, One Stop Senior Services
Judith Summerfield, University Dean, Undergraduate Education, CUNY
Donna Reiss, Department of English, Clemson University
Phyllis White-Thorne, Manager of Public Information, Brooklyn Public Affairs, Con Edison
Art Young, Robert S. Campbell Chair in Technical Communication and Professor of Engineering and English, Clemson University

PROGRAM SCHEDULE
The Program will begin at 9:30am with a welcoming address by Dr. Kathleen Waldron, President of Baruch College and an opening keynote by William C. Taylor, a founding editor of Fast Company Magazine and co-author of Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win. The first round-table discussion will begin at 11:00am and the second at 2:30pm, following a lunchtime keynote by Chris M. Anson, Professor of English and Director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North Carolina State University. After the program, please plan to join us for cocktails and dinner at the Players’ Club on Gramercy Park, where we will mark the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Institute and hear a closing keynote by Bernard L. Schwartz.

For more information, please send an email to symposium@baruch.cuny.edu.

Blogging the CUNY IT Conference

Published
by
Luke
on December 5, 2006
in Conferences and Technology
. 0 Comments

The CUNY IT Conference has grown significantly since its inception five years ago, from a few hundred attendees at the first conference to well over a thousand this past Friday. Seemingly, every IT person from within CUNY attended, lol (did you ever notice that when “lol” is used, most often nothing funny has preceded it?).

The conference is an interesting convergence of the separate areas of IT at CUNY, with attendees ranging from registrars to systems administrators to instructional designers to, yikes, historians. I attended three panel discussions, in addition to the keynote address, and each event raised important questions about the state of information technology in higher education, generally, and at CUNY specifically. In anticipation of questions and discussion that I hope will come, I’m dividing reviews of each panel into their own posts below. My apologies for taking over the top of the blog, but there was a lot that I found interesting and thus a lot to share.

The CUNY IT Conference: The CUNY Online Baccalaureate

Published
by
Luke
on December 5, 2006
in Conferences and Technology
. 15 Comments

The first panel was a presentation of the work of the CUNY Online Baccalaureate Program. This was likely the most highly attended session at the conference, and also the most densely populated panel (I believe there were thirty-seven presenters limited to forty-five seconds each… or at least it seemed that way). The speed of the presentation and the minimum time allowed for questions made it difficult to come to any conclusions about the program. The presenters also, more than once, positioned their experiences as “one-hundred eighty degrees” different from one another concerning this pedagogical conundrum or that, so it seems that the faculty teaching in the program also haven’t yet reached any synthesized conclusions. That, I suppose, is to be expected from something so young and experimental. Each course in the program, which offers a degree in Communication and Culture, is taught entirely online through Blackboard and Learning Objects, Inc. extensions to it. While some of the faculty felt that Blackboard did a fine job of facilitating their classes, others felt stifled by the software and its proprietary logic, and have looked for outside solutions.

The short presentations combined with the Blackboard wall between the public and the program make it difficult for me to assess exactly how effective the online instruction is. The faculty do seem to feel as though they are teaching and reaching many of their students… this, it seems to me, is the most you can really hope for from a program that’s taught entirely online. Clearly, there are a lot of talented faculty involved in the program and a lot of resources invested, so it seems likely to me that a lot of good work is happening. Hopefully, we’ll hear more about the CUNY Online BA in the future.

No faculty member really wants to teach a course entirely online, but I do feel that this program allows students to complete a degree who, due to work and family commitments, might otherwise find it impossible. The program fits well within the CUNY mission of providing affordable, quality higher education for the diverse population of the city and, judging from what I saw, the instruction is rigorous and demanding. In this case, technology is entirely responsible for making it possible.

The most astounding factoid to come out of this session was the claim made, privately to me, that there hasn’t been a single instance where a student has needed technical aid, because the program orientation covered every possible potential problem. I have a hard time believing this, but if it’s true, that must have been the Best Orientation Ever.

The CUNY IT Conference: The Keynote Address

Published
by
Luke
on December 5, 2006
in Conferences and Technology
. 0 Comments

The keynote at the CUNY IT Conference was an enjoyable presentation from Chuck Dziuban, the Principal Investigator of the Distributed Learning Impact Evaluation and Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Central Florida. Dziuban theorizes the emergence of new teaching technologies, and has a boatload of data to back up his conclusions. As a historian who fancies himself rigid, I’m no great fan of explaining historical developments through the concept of “generations,” though I have to admit I found Dziuban’s research that broke down satisfaction with online learning practices by age intriguing. The most interesting conclusion, to me, was that the younger a student, the less likely they are to be satisfied with what their faculty are doing in online courses. Since most college faculty are older, this very fact calls into question the ways that faculty evaluate their own online teaching, and illuminates the challenge we have going forward in designing online teaching tools that intimately connect with students. We keep getting older, while the students stay the same age. To download Dziuban’s Powerpoint, chock-full-of-stats, click here.

The CUNY IT Conference: Making Multimedia History

Published
by
Luke
on December 5, 2006
in Conferences and Pedagogy
. 0 Comments

Chuck Dziuban did a fine job, but as theory values the abstract over the concrete, his talk provoked thought more than it suggested actual, real uses of technology in the classroom. The second panel session I attended was a group of CUNY historians who designed online teaching modules as part of the “Investigating US History” project. The modules consist of scalable research projects that employ primary sources available via the Web. Students are directed to examine a series of historical documents—say, lithographs and advertisements related to the slave trade, or audio tapes of Lyndon Johnson’s conversations in the White House– and then to write responses, on a course Blackboard site, to the prompts of faculty members.

The historians involved in the project are top-notch, and both the scholarship directing the modules and the design of the site are strong. I was struck, however, by how methodologically similar the pedagogic process of these modules was to the ways in which primary sources have been mobilized in the teaching of history for years. The Web has drastically improved access to primary sources, and the success of these modules lies in how faculty have framed the sources for students and directed their exploration. The site harnesses the Web’s speed and ease of information exchange for high-level history teaching. In this case, new technologies have expanded what can be done in the classroom without significantly altering the processes of teaching and learning.

It seems to me that the next generation of technological teaching tools—the products of Web 2.0, which enable increased interactivity– may pose a challenge to traditional pedagogies. While I haven’t seen inside the Blackboard sites to the fruits of the “Investigating History” modules, they seem to work on the same tracks that the teaching of history has for some time. That is, a scholar/teacher provides materials and background for students to work through with guidance; as students do, they learn about the past and about participating in the historical project. These are sound pedagogical goals for any history course.

In other disciplines, blogs and wikis have upended traditional teaching methods and goals by empowering students with more accessible means to produce and disseminate knowledge. In the teaching of history, such empowering elements of the Web have been employed in this project to reinforce and strengthen one traditional model (while also enabling more robust discussions of visual culture due to the increased accessibility of images). Historians like those who presented at the conference sense that the future of teaching history lie in using technology to more vividly open up the worlds of the past to their students. It will be interesting to see if new technologies continue to reinforce traditional methods of teaching history, or if they challenge those methods. One example of how they might is here.

The CUNY IT Conference: Notes Towards an Open (Source) University

Published
by
Luke
on December 5, 2006
in Conferences and Technology
. 0 Comments

Finally, and fittingly, the last session I attended featured Famed Friend of the Institute James Groom, who offered his “Notes Towards an Open (Source) University.” Prof. Groom’s views have been well-represented on this blog, and though I urged him to rename his talk “Waging War on the Proprietary-Software University,” his diplomatic disposition clung to the more affirmative appellation. Groom’s presentation asked, in a way, why pay lots of dough for something mediocre when you can get something fantabulous for free? He presented and discussed a few cutting edge open source course management systems, showed how certain packages can be modified for use in the classroom, and asked the very important questions: why aren’t more folks exploring this stuff at a place like CUNY, and why is open source so underrepresented at this conference? The answer, it seems, was hinted at by one of the items raffled off at the close of the conference… Blackboard provided tee-shirts for the raffle! Drupal, Wordpress, and Sakai ask not what they can do for you, but what you can do for (and with) them. Who knew the open source movement was so selfish?

(note: A few audience members were flabbergasted when the gentleman who followed James Groom, Florian Lengyel, Assistant Director for Research Computing at the CUNY Graduate Center, showed us that open source has recently become a more significant presence at the Graduate Center. See here.)