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.
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.
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.
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.











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.


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