USC Phd student Alex Leavitt followed her proposal by inviting other academics to make 2012 their “Year of Code.” Numerous people across the twitterverse are also participating in Codeacademy.com‘s #codeyear.

Davidson and Leavitt’s calls to code, both of which espouse a leftist politics of democratic or Do It Yourself coding, make me reflect on the different values that are currently competing in the software programming and academic spheres; proprietary models v. open access/open source models. In particular, the academic debate about open access to academic knowledge recently reared its head in Congress, when in December of 2011 the Research Works Act, an act that would block mandates of public access to federally-funded research, was introduced to the House of Representatives. This act is likely a response to recent moves on the part of the Obama administration toward better access to scientific publications (see the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 and the subsequent Request for Information on Public Access to Digital Data and Scientific Publications). While the Research Works Act will probably not pass, it speaks to the conflict inside and outside academia between privileging information and disseminating information, between profit and public interest.

What, one might wonder, might code coming from within the academy, produced, as Davidson envisions, by an educated public, look like? And, in terms of student grades or professional tenure, how would it be evaluated?

It is an interesting exercise to compare Google and Facebook with academia. Google and Facebook are widely successful because they are a contradiction–they are free to the public and friendly to the non-expert, yet their code is secret and they make money from said public through ads.  They are open but closed, profit-making but free. American academia, on the other hand, makes its “secrets” available, but only to those who pay large amounts of money and who strive to become experts.

Traditional academic tenure and evaluation is alien to the kind of collaborative (and proprietary) code farming that Google encourages. How could a tenure committee evaluate one coder out of a team of hundreds? Even with a trail of changes made by each individual, it would be almost impossible to separate that person’s work from that of others. Of course, not all coding is done collaboratively, but I would argue that most large scale projects with major impact are. As more examples of academic coding emerge, the tenure process will hopefully adjust to accommodate new modes of authorship in the digital age.

One high-profile academic seems frightened at the prospect of academia’s descent into the digital. Stanley Fish calls “‘blog’” “an ugly word” for its impermanence.  As someone who wants his critical insights to be “decisive” and “all [his],” Fish dislikes thinking of himself as a blogger–a figure who seems so interconnected with everything around him that he ceases to exist. Fish is disturbed by this possible loss of identity and “linearity,” by the web’s tendency to move “into a multi-directional experience in which voices (and images) enter, interact and proliferate in ways that decenter the authority of the author who becomes just another participant.” Poor Stanley Fish experiences this every time he opens his browser.

Fish goes on to quote Kathleen Fitzpatrick as affirming this death of the author:  “all of the texts published in a network environment will become multi-author by virtue of their interpenetration with the writings of others.”

I would argue that coding and other digital forms of authorship do often invoke this sense of the networked self to an even greater extent than traditional scholarship. In part that is probably because online social networks allow scholars to continually mix and concentrate their ideas with the ideas of others. Seeing one’s own voice as just one tweet in a tsunami of tweets can be a bit humbling. But then again, when people band together and find like ground, their accomplishments can be even grander than what one can do alone. There is a happy medium that can be found between solo pursuits and selfless proprietary software. I am optimistic to note that a vast amount of software developed through academic institutions is open access and open source, including as Sakai, Weka, and Stanford NLP software.

We can all stand witness to the ways in which social and news media can spread a movement within and across nations.  I know an Egyptian who claimed that her family and friends knew that the revolution was going to occur in the weeks and days before it actually happened.  How?  Just by the messages on social media and between individuals.  In a similar fashion, social media proposed and flamed the fires of the occupy wall street movement in the weeks before it emerged, grew, and took hold as a real story in mainstream media outlets.

The protest was set to start on the 17th.  At first, there was a kind of silence.  People questioned whether it was happening at all.

Interestingly, Al Jazeera was one of the media outlets which first recognized the plan for a protest.  Other small news organizations online followed the story from September 17th on.  The New York Times City Room blog picked up the story on September 19th, while nothing was put into print until September 25th, when a version of a September 23rd online article titled “Protesters Are Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim“  and beginning with the sentence “By late morning on Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street, a noble but fractured and airy movement of rightly frustrated young people, had a default ambassador in a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka,” was published.

Since then the General Assembly of the occupation has released a declaration and the movement has its own subreddit.  However, the lack of specific demands, particularly from the outset, has been seen as a weakness and has led some people to propose their own.

Clearly, social media has played a key role in this movement.  Yet, ultimately, social media doesn’t stray very far from a standard news cycle.  Here are Google searches and news stories for occupy wall street:

(courtesy of Google Trends)

And here are the tweets containing occupywallstreet:

(taken from Trendistic)

The tweets, Google searches, and news reference frequency all have peaks on the first day of the protest, on Sept. 25 when images of pepper spray being used by the NYPD spread and a high number of arrests occured, and on Oct. 1 when 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.  Eventually, though, whether the movement has succeeded or not, it will fall out of the news cycle and off of people’s radar.  Even though as I type this Egyptians are protesting military rule in Tahrir Square, not many Americans do searches related to Egypt these days:

It’s unfortunate, but it appears that social media news runs alongside the news cycle.  Facebook posts can catch our attention, but only for so long, and what seems to be fueling tweets about the protest are acts of violence rather than its actual rationale.  Also, isn’t there a risk that we are beginning to confuse posting items on Facebook with really exercising our civic duty?  Last week five or more of my friends posted about the execution of Troy Davis, but how many actually took action in contacting local representatives or representatives in Georgia?

In fact, a Yale student recently claimed to have proven that, based on what occurred in Egypt, a “sudden interruption of mass communication accelerates revolutionary mobilization and proliferates decentralized contention.”  A journalist quickly used the study to point out how mass media, even as it spreads consciousness, can create a passive public.

Paradox Number Two:  Social media brings networks of people with like interests together, but in doing so it can create information bubbles.

In May of this year Eli Pariser presented a TED Talk in which he warned about how Google, Facebook, and other online companies use algorithms that customize what information is presented to people based on their individual tastes:

Thus, just by virtue of being ourselves, our internet is filtered.  We go further to filter our own experience when we read websites that cater to our cultural background or to our political interests.  Despite a study which seems to indicate that this personal filtering is not an issue, Bill Davidow and Ethan Zuckerman have argued that online media can give too much attention to extreme groups and views, and that “positive feedback” loops might push us to take more extreme views ourselves.  Eric E. Schmidt, the chief of Google, takes a middle ground view on the issue, acknowledging that for those who don’t know how to curate their own information, the internet can be a breeding ground of ignorance.

In the classroom, discussing and giving assignments that reflect on how media is curated, either invisibly or explicitly, in different contexts (on Wikipedia, in academic journals, on Facebook, in Google Scholar) can give students a wake-up call regarding how they navigate the web (and increasingly, how the web navigates them).

We will talk about sources, citations, designing plagiarism-resistant assignments, using technology in research, turnitin.com, and more.

The subject has me reflecting on a book that I read months ago but has yet to release me of its coiling grip. It seems absurd to say this, but The Culture of the Copy, by Hillel Schwartz (Zone Books, 1996), is utterly original. It’s hard to imagine a more kaleidoscopically visionary 565 pages. Maybe I exaggerate, for irony’s sake, but this is essentially a cultural history of copies, fakes, forgeries, doubles, twins, reproductions, and the like. The focus is a sidelong view of our obsession (and ambiguity) vis-a-vis originality, authenticity, singularity, and identity. Its central argument is, I think, that our human nature, the making of ourselves, has always been the making of doubles and likenesses. Schwartz is keenly interested in moments when facsimiles stand in for originals, when duplicates dupe, when samples take on their own lives. The book’s introduction (cleverly titled “Refrain”) is the story of the man known as the Real McCoy, and this biographical story itself also functions as a recapitulation of the rest of the book. It’s an entertaining read, letting the myriad curiosities and strange tales speak for themselves, and yet the back of the book contains more than 150 pages of endnotes to satisfy the scholar.

I will stop short of a book review here. There are some very provocative insights throughout, but I will stick to the several pages Schwartz discusses plagiarism, which comes on the heels of this conclusion about sampling: “Sampling is what imperialists did when they colonized ‘undeveloped’ lands, calling theft ‘development’; sampling is what ghettoized colonies do in revolt against property laws wired around them” (310).

Schwartz traces complaints of plagiarism back into antiquity, suggesting that it is not a feature solely of literate societies. There are audacious examples galore: “Samuel Taylor Coleridge rabidly charged others with theft, but his own perpetual plagiary he considered a form of spirit possession: ‘I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist. I care not whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed…” I doubt many Baruch students can claim the right to rip off with such transcendental air, perhaps underlining how plagiarism is defined morally as a debased form of copying. Appropriating in the name of poetry is not quite plagiarism?

Plenty of ironic cases in the history of plagiarism:

• A passage on seeing double was stolen repeatedly by 18th-century scientists.
• The first book on photography published in the US retouched an English book.
• Victorian ministers hand copied sermons on honesty from printed books to make them look like originally penned texts.
• The Boston Globe ran a story on a plagiarized 1991 commencement speech that was published in the New York Times.
• Lexicographers responsible for defining plagiarism were accused of plagiarizing definitions.
• A University of Oregon booklet plagiarized its section on plagiarism. (312-13)

Schwartz is gloomy about defending against plagiarism: “our culture of the copy tends to make plagiarism a necessity, and the more we look for replays to be superior to originals, the more we will embrace plagiarism as elemental.” (313)

The radical left has offered solutions: “the 1988 Festivals of Plagiarism in Glasgow, London, San Francisco, and Berlin exalted plagiarism as a defiance of capitalism, whose commodification of the world and of art proceeds upon the pretense of originality and the projection of uniqueness… plagiarism must be a thoughtful assault upon privilege, retaking that which should belong to everyone” (314).

After more citations of students and scholars caught plagiarizing papers and exasperatedly insisting they thought it was their own words, Schwartz concludes: “Plagiarism in our culture of the copy is sticky with feelings of originality-through-repetition, revelation-through-simulation. That plagiarism should be taken up on all sides–as a means for subverting the System and as a means for getting an edge in business, science, or politics–is proof of its centrality and the reason why plagiarism is treated so gingerly, defended so boldly, resumed so intemperately. Like forgery, plagiarism is a personal addiction… Plagiarism is, moreover, a cultural addiction, and I use that word with malice, for the ubiquity of the metaphor of addiction is itself a clue to our embrace of the rhetoric of replay despite a professional anxiety about disorders of repetition” (315).

Do you think plagiarism is not an epidemic but endemic not only to the academic world but also scientific, political, business, and cultural life? If so, do we need a new paradigm to deal with the matter of intellectual and cultural property in an age of mass duplication and duplicity?

• Present participles: This seems to be a symptom of the interest in and championing of processual approaches, that is, to present the world as in motion, in circulation, always becoming. The title of this post is parodying this cliché of the -ing verb. I am looking at my bookshelf right now and can spot them everywhere: Re-Presenting the City, Losing Control, Colonising Egypt, Exploring the City… I also see some clever variations on the theme: for example, where the title referencing another, more famous title (Coming of Age in Second Life), or where the present participle suggests multiple meanings (Enduring Innocence). Generally, however, the present participle has become a tired trend in titles. (I credit a former boss in publishing for bringing this to my attention and making it a minor obsession of mine.) Moving on…

• The colon: You know you’re reading academic work when the title is cloven in two by the two dots. There’s not a precise anatomy, but generally the title proper is allusive in tone. The subtitle buttresses it with an explicatory phrase, as in: Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. The latter part is the only bit you really need to get a sense of the topic of the book. Usually the title itself is, ironically, a stylistic flourish, as if to communicate that the book also contains some panache and wit (not a guarantee).
• Quote as title: I feel like this became vogue during the 1990s when high postmodernism celebrated the voice of the Other and pastiche between high and low culture. But you will still encounter titles, especially in anthropology, that headline a pithy phrase uttered by an ethnographic informant, or a Biblical or other textual bit. I suppose the function of this strategy is to convey some sense of the author’s egalitarianism vis-a-vis her subject.

• The casual approach: This can go either way. “Notes on…” or “Reflections on…” or even “Some thoughts on…” can communicate the sense that the text will not be especially pedantic, written merely as some loose ideas that suggest more than they argue. Of course, if upon reading the piece disappoints and betrays the airy mood of the title, it can become a marker of pretentiousness.

In a winking gesture, I’ve tried to incorporate all these features in the title to this post. But I wonder what the undergraduate novice, wading through vast oceans of titles, makes of these kinds of conventions, if she makes anything at all of them. The title is not only the first thing you see about an article or book, but in the case of those you don’t actually sit down with–that is, the majority, the title can also be the last thing you read.

WPMu continues to provide a flexible platform for our faculty members to structure and explore online communication and composition in their courses. Course blogs this semester have been used to aggregate individual student portfolios in a Do-It-Yourself Publishing course, for students to share and comment upon Shakespeare Scene Studies, to blog about journalism internships (password protected), to write about food and sustainable agriculture, and to show off their multi-media reporting. Students have debated current events on a blog devoted to reading and discussing the New York Times (password protected), blogged about blogging as journalists, and added stories to Writing New York. Some faculty members have been using Blogs@Baruch as their course management system, while others have used it to try to create public writing opportunities for their students.

For a full listing of course blogs, see our “projects” page.

One project in particular embodied the excitement some faculty members and students bring to their work on Blogs@Baruch. Professor Shelly Eversley, in the English Department, had her American Literature students produce pod and vodcasts that analyzed texts they had encountered over the course of the semester. Buoyed by Cogdog’s “The Fifty Tools”, I did an hour in class on free digital story telling tools (including Voice Thread, Yodio, Gabcast, and Podcast People), and also gave some advice on how to construct a story that balanced narrative, analysis, and style. The students produced amazing work, which they collected here in advance of their voting for the initial American Literature Podcast Awards (the ALPs). They ended the semester with an awards ceremony, and have continued to post their thoughts about the class to the blog in the week since.

Here’s two of my favorite videos from the class:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcU6_WH6mVI[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVXa_MM19-w[/youtube]

Prof. Eversley’s project exemplifies the useful energy that multimedia tools can help students invest in their coursework. These projects are not substitutes for the critical engagement with a text or a canon that some might argue can only be attained through writing an essay; rather, they are additional paths towards that engagement. These students were excited about showing off their work, used the city as a laboratory and an archive, helped each other master the technology, and showed deep engagement with their chosen texts. This is good teaching and learning, and we’re happy to support any faculty member who challenges herself and her students to use a variety of tools and literacies in their effort to produce knowledge.

Kudos to all of our intrepid faculty and their students for providing us with yet more examples of innovative pedagogy on Blogs@Baruch. We look forward to Spring 2010, and in particular two film courses that will be taught on the system. Blogfessors, come on down!

As I noted a couple of months ago, we had severe constraints in launching this project, so we focused primarily on the technological implications of getting it off the ground. We didn’t have sufficient time to either develop a well thought-out curriculum or to work with the Peer Mentors who oversaw the sections to help them pedagogically manage the work of their students. We might have had we gone with a pilot project, but for various reasons that suggestion was scuttled, and we proceeded full-bore.

These caveats aside, I think the project was a resounding success. It’s generated a staggering amount of data and also some important questions for us to address, and also helped us see what’s possible with more thoughtful design and oversight.

More than 6200 posts have been authored by first year students and aggregated into a single space. The vast majority of these posts are student reactions to a variety of “Enrichment Workshops” that they were required to attend. As you might imagine, many of the posts are more descriptive than analytical, and some come across as check boxes to be completed on the way to a requirement. The best posts, however, evidence deep and enthusiastic engagement with the workshops or with other elements of transitioning to life at Baruch.

We’ve already begun to discuss with our colleagues Mark Spergel and Shadia Sachedina how we can encourage posts that students are excited to write and also to read and comment upon. We plan to come up with a range of models and prompts that students can choose from that intersect with some of our broader goals for the project: cultivating digital literacy in our students (I plan to talk and think more with Boone Gorges about this), easing their social and intellectual transition to college, and helping them more nimbly and thoughtfully integrate social media into academic work. I envision a series of assignments that build towards these curricular goals, while also generating the kind of shared reflection that our colleagues in Student Life want to see. I also think we have the great opportunity to show off what interesting lives our students lead. This is a unique institution, and blogging in Freshman Seminar can show the world just what Baruch College and CUNY are about.

The Peer Mentors are key to this improved design.  We’ll expand the training that they get so they’re better prepared to guide their charges. Next semester, four sections of Freshman Seminar are running, so we finally get to run that pilot project we originally envisioned, though with the implications of scaling the thing up already known.  In the summer we’ll likely do some outreach directly to incoming students before school starts so that they are aware of this component of Freshman Seminar, and can hit the ground blogging.

As we plan a new design, we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to make sense of all of the data we’ve collected. It’s difficult, though not impossible, to design an assessment of data that’s been collected without assessment forefront in mind. Ryan Androsiglio, a psychologist in the Baruch Counseling Center, is helping us look at the project to see what questions can reasonably be asked of it.

We were able to perform a much less formal assessment of the program by soliciting feedback from Peer Mentors and First Year Students themselves. Both groups were between lukewarm and mildly-positive in their feedback, and each desired more leeway in what was blogged about and how.  The Peer Mentors I spoke with were quite clear that the strongest component of the project was the social cohesion it encouraged among the students in their seminars.

For a commuter campus like Baruch, FRO blogging has become a powerful tool simply because it creates more opportunities to interact. To encourage this, we’re seriously considering integrating BuddyPress into FRO 2010.

The social benefits of FRO blogging are already crystal clear; we now need to work on defining reasonable curricular goals, and a plan to implement them.

Last summer a student in my public speaking class said that “Cloverfield” was ‘pretty good for an action movie.’ And then he said, ‘I mean it’s a disaster movie, which is a kind of action movie.’  I asked him to tell me what an action movie is as a form or genre, what its properties are. This led to a conversation in which we put the film into context, so rather than just sketch the plot, describe a spectacular scene or two, and name the actors, we talked about the form of a disaster film, its history, and the range of locations and themes it has traversed so far.

When I was an undergrad, my professor Heidi Krueger sent us to look at pointillism paintings at the Moma, then read Gertrude Stein’s attempts to translate pointillism into writing. Stein dispersed units of description throughout a paragraph the way Seurat’s paintings disperse dots of color throughout the frame. After years of reading transparently, without reflecting on the mechanism of the forms of writing, this exercise was a kind of “Matrix” moment for me. I began to see the way forms and genres impose structure, and I began to see representation as a kind of translation of experience or thought which is never complete or direct. In any translation there is adaptation, even distortion, and maybe even loss. I guess translation can be alienating, as well. And I wonder if this is what might be partly what is happening when I hear students mimic the style of the texts they’re assigned in class, or the style of their professor’s lecture.

At the Writing Across the Curriculum Conference last week, two fellows described teaching with different forms. In her class on personality psychology Valerie Futch highlights the way research questions and methodology determine results by assigning personality questionnaires to her students. Doug Singsen taught a class on comics in which he assigned his students to diagram a page, indicating different logics connecting one frame to another: character-to-character, aspect-to-aspect, etc. I was struck by the way both of them seemed to foreground the form, of comic or psychological study, and the way this foregrounding moved their students past a book-report kind of absorption and summarization, to an awareness of the way form works as a kind of structuring logic.

I’ve heard the phrase “writing is thinking” in my experiences with Writing Across the Curriculum, and after the last WAC colloquium I thought about other kinds of work that friends of mine have described: photography, contracting, pattern-making. If these are all forms of thinking, maybe we could say that writing is the academically consecrated form of thinking. Or, that writing is a representation of thinking, one that requires translation into a specific form.

I’ve noticed a tendency among students to parrot or mimic the style of the texts they use in class, and I wonder if this is because for them, unlike grad students and professors, writing is not thinking. Instead, expressing thinking through writing might for some students be an act of extreme translation, from the thinking they already do (in forms other than writing) into the form of writing. After all, academics write and read all the time, we think in it like fish in water. Writing and text is perhaps transparent to us, but more or less opaque others.

The conversation with my student about “Cloverfield” made me want to integrate other forms that we all encounter all the time into academic work, as a way to make the structure opaque to both student and teacher, and allow different levels of competence and levels of analysis into the classroom. I’d like to assign students to write “Cloverfield”  in the form of the first few pages of Pride and Prejudice; or draw the argument of an academic essay as a comic strip; or make a news report of a poem, explaining logical, structural mechanisms across different forms.

In my first year as a WAC fellow, I’ve learned about integrating journals and blogs into academic assignments, and this seems like a great way to connect writing to the thinking that students are already doing outside of college. (If we agree that people generally write emails, and read blogs).

Photo by Shannon Ebner.

I could think of them all these forms as representations of thinking. That’s the way that Derrida and post-structuralism has real world resonance for me. I wonder if by making several forms opaque, we might give students a sense of analytical and expressive competence, which could provide a kind of transition to academic writing. And I wonder if an alienation from popular forms like movies, songs, and news reports might work well with an alienation from academic forms like essays. So we could spread the alienation around, and categorize writing as another form of thinking among many. After all, we arrive at college already schooled in, even experts in, movies, songs, and news reports. And with Blogs@Baruch available here it is possible to integrate many forms into an assignment, or ongoing assignments in a class. (The Baruch blog projects I’ve peeked in on, from classes on food, Chaucer, journalism, etc. are compelling to me, and I imagine they would be to students too.) What if there was a class that didn’t focus on a specific content, but instead was about forms. Is there? I gathered from the WAC colloquium that teachers are assigning writing exercises that highlight the methods and styles of different disciplines, but I’m looking for ways that other teachers might be doing this kind of work. It is my current dream class, working title: “Forms, Forms, Forms!” or maybe, “Post-structuralism and You.”

Now, when I first read about this approach, I immediately thought of my number one pet peeve: students’ use of texting lingo in their writing.  You know, “Marx wants u 2 throw off ur chains but Durkheim says those chains are solidarity LOL.”

But according to David Crystal, author of txtng: the gr8 db8, text-messaging is a new linguistic form that helps build literacy.  He writes,

All the popular beliefs about texting are wrong, or at least debatable. Its graphic distinctiveness is not a totally new phenomenon. Nor is its use restricted to the young generation. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy. And only a very tiny part of the language uses its distinctive orthography. A trillion text messages may seem a lot, but when we set these alongside the multi-trillion instances of standard orthography in everyday life, they appear as no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language. Texting has added a new dimension to language use, indeed, but its long-term impact on the already existing varieties of language is likely to be negligible. It is not a bad thing.

So, am I being a technophobic Luddite every time I want to circle in bright red pen every single instance of txt-speak in my students’ papers?  You can read an excerpt of his book and hear Crystal expound on this more at NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

Here’s an example.  As soon as Sarah Palin got selected as McCain’s running mate, I started getting emails circulating this photo of her:

My first thought was, “how can a middle-aged woman who’s borne several children look that good in a bikini?!”  The people who forwarded this were trustworthy enough, but I knew you can’t always believe what you see, when it comes to online images.  So, I did a little digging and came up with this original, on the blog ‘Urban Legends‘:

The blog author notes that “the resulting montage was obviously intended to satirize Sarah Palin’s image as a ‘gun-toting beauty queen.’” It was an early entry in the contest to come up with the funniest sendup of this suddenly buzz-worthy candidate, though it was soon trumped by the Tina Fey imitations, which used video to even greater effect.

I have used this type of Photoshopped image to help students recognize that they should be cautious about the source and substance of material they find online, including images, and just because they agree with the politics of the sender does not absolve them of the need to think critically.  The not-too-difficult search for the origin of the image also makes a useful, topical lesson for students in how we can use the vast amount of chat, data, news, and info online to check facts against many reliable sources until we come up with something close to ‘the truth.’

Now I have to sign off and go catch up on the news, from my favorite hard news source, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart!

As most of us would agree, however, school is not about teaching, but about learning, and I have a feeling that many a “good” teacher is not necessarily helping their students to be good learners, and often the students themselves are the last ones to realize this, especially in classes like literature where quantitative measurements are impossible. How many times, after all, have we heard our students say to each other: “you should totally take a class with professor so and so, he’s a really cool guy”? For me, the point of teaching has always been very simple: make sure that the students think and learn, and it is the open response sections of the student evaluations that I actually find most helpful when re-evaluating the methods I use to achieve this goal. Sadly, most students skip this part of the evaluation, but those who do respond often offer a constructive view of their own experiences and struggles in the class. Many students say nice things, some occasionally complain, and others less frequently express anger. I have come to realize that those expressing anger are usually unhappy about the fact that the course was too difficult, that the reading was too boring, and most often, that there was just too much writing. In fact, one of the most common laments I have heard from my literature students (who are generally required to write two 10 page essays over the semester and regular 1-2 page informal responses for each class) is that it is unfair for me to require so much writing in a class that is not writing intensive.

This argument is perplexing. Although there is a part of me that sympathizes—after all, CUNY students have incredibly busy lives outside of school—I cannot help but think that if these students really feel this way, what does that say about their expectations about college work, and what do those expectations mean for the future of higher education more broadly? Should we, after all, require less work when our students complain or should we hold our ground? Is less work going to help them learn more and is the amount of work required for a class really up for negotiation? Where do we draw the line? And how much writing is the right amount of writing?

But these student complaints also raise a question that is specific to the work that we do here at the institute, and that is: has the creation and promotion of writing and communication intensive classes actually done as much harm as good? After all, aren’t writing and communication the very means of learning, and aren’t good writing and communications skills, the hallmarks of a good education? Shouldn’t every class be writing and communication intensive?

Despite the labors of countless writing program directors overseeing vast armies of composition and Rhetoric PhDs, there are always those students who seem to have a hostile relationship to writing: they don’t like it and they want to do as little of it as possible. Perhaps this resistance is natural for some people; as Frank O’Hara says of poetry: “if they don’t need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too. And Only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the Americans are better than the movies.” To this I would add Stevens, but I digress. No one said students have to like writing, and bully for them if they would prefer to become filmmakers or beauticians, or whatever, but in a liberal university that values expression, eloquence, and clarity of thought, they should at least be asked to think write and communicate, and to do it often. How well they choose to write and with how much love and enthusiasm, is up to them. Writing and communication should not be a requirement, but a method and an expectation, like doing the assigned reading, or preparing for an exam. We should ask students to write not so we can evaluate them after all, but so that they can put their ideas into words, helping to improve their writing skills while simultaneously reinforcing the course material and making it their own. To expect students to fulfill a writing requirement or to fulfill a communication requirement only twice during their college career, only underlines the idea that the classes that emphasize these skills are just another hoop to jump through, like the general arts and science requirements: “Rocks for Jocks” geology classes or “Music Appreciation.”

I have always thought that writing intensive curricula were a good idea in principle, and still do. However, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the way we have used writing and communication intensive classes are maybe not the best way to get students to learn. Instead of spending our time developing specific writing and communication intensive courses, which, in my experience are all too often not very intensive at all (some in-class writing and a few extra pages a semester tend to qualify as writing intensive for some courses), administrations should also be working with students and faculty to devise college-wide expectations for the kinds of writing, speaking, and interpersonal communication that should be practiced in all courses as often as possible. Courses in the humanities and social sciences, for instance, should automatically be designated as writing intensive, and professors should be encouraged to assign a minimum amount of regular written work for each. Likewise, instructors in professional programs and the sciences should be encouraged to integrate more speaking and interpersonal communication activities into their classrooms.

It seems clear to me that it has become all too easy for students to regard writing and communication as something distinct from the learning process, as a requirement to be fulfilled rather than a method of learning. Writing and communication intensive curricula, by compartmentalizing these activities, only reinforce the false dichotomy between writing and learning. If students are to learn to write, they must be required to write to learn.

The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking.

This brings up a lot of interesting questions as educators are increasingly trying to incorporate some of these technologies into the classroom and publishers are pushing textbook content into more profitable eBooks.  Are we actually helping students by doing all of this?  Some initial studies of middle and high school students suggest that technology-intensive curricula do not improve student achievement.

Bauerlein has many interesting points in the article and makes a good case for “unplugging” some aspects of teaching and learning.  However, in my opinion, the question of whether or not technology in general improves/impairs student learning is not that interesting.  Instead, we should be focusing our assessments on understanding which technologies can be usefully employed in which aspects of the curricula.  Finding pedagogical fit for relevant technologies seems to be what we are striving towards at BLSCI.  Thus, as an institute, we undoubtedly have much to contribute to this important discussion.

Tiger Stadium photo credit: hassgocubs

I hadn’t been to a game in Detroit since I left Michigan after college. Since then, the Tigers have changed ballparks, lost 119 games in a season (one short of the record), and dramatically turned things around to win a pennant in 2006. They’re hovering a few games under .500 right now, but have enough firepower and pitching to make a run in the second half of the season.

So I was excited to go to Comerica, which I’d heard was a great place to watch a game. It’s a beautiful structure, framing the skyline of old Detroit in a way that obscures the deep economic and political troubles that plague the city.

Comerica Park photo credit: kw111786

As we settled into our seats along the first base line, I was as giddy as I had been as an 8 year-old. I even called the lifelong buddy who I used to go to games with back then, just to let him know where I was.

Watching the game was a different experience from those trips in the past. I still had a blast, enjoying the company of my siblings-in-law, and appreciating the talent on the field (even as the Tigers lost to the Angels). I was struck, though, by the intensity of the messages flying around the ballpark. If I wasn’t paying attention to the action, an advertisement was unavoidably forced upon my gaze. I’m not sure if I felt more like PIerre Bourdieu or Hunter S. Thompson; either way, I felt like I was captive in Vegas.

Every line of sight offered something different. A giant fountain, sponsored by General Motors, dangled two shiny sedans beyond the outfield. Vendors, hawking $7 beers and $5 pretzels, were easy to spot throughout the stadium, marked by fluorescent yellow shirts. Even bases on balls — of which the Tigers issued too many — were sponsored: as the batter trotted down to first base, an ad blared through the speakers and in the slim screens that lined the upper deck inviting ticket holders to “walk down” to a local establishment for a haircut.

The most astonishing structure in the stadium, more striking even than the ferris wheel in the concourse and the giant tiger statues out front, is the gargantuan Comerica Park scoreboard. Roughly ten stories tall, the scoreboard serves over a dozen distinct advertisements, as well as two giant screens that play commercials when not showing player photos and statistics. In the center of all of this chaos is the actual score and game information, which take up no more than a quarter of the scoreboard’s mass.

Comerica Park Scoreboard photo credit: McPhloyd

One of the beautiful things about baseball is the way that one can read the story of a game through a box score. A young fan develops that particular literacy and carries it forward through life, forever able to regard a score line and imagine the events that led to it. At a ballpark, the scoreboard tells you in familiar code where you are, what’s happened to get you there, and how much space is left for your team to rally or survive. A scoreboard centers the fan within the experience of watching a game.

At Comerica, with competing flashing lights grabbing for my vision, separating out the scores from the messages on the board took dizzying effort. At Tiger Stadium, there had mostly been the game and the camaraderie in the stands, and it was a purer experience: fan meets game. Of course there were hawkers and ads and plenty of consumption; but they were nowhere near as loud or as intrusive as they’ve become.

Yes, there are economics behind all of this, and a straight line from the $7 beer and intense advertising to the giant contract that locked Miguel Cabrera up as a Tiger for the next eight years. If I’m bemoaning anything, then, it’s how the experience of going to a ballgame has changed, and the license that the powers that be feel to barrage the senses of a captive audience with an endless series of pitches. I felt assaulted, and so cheaply. I had to seek ways to tune out the barrage and actively create the experience that I wanted when I bought those $40 box seats.

At the 8th Annual Symposium, many of us discussed how we have been forced by new and more intensive modes of communication to “filter” the information that comes our way. This style of engagement with information requires a certain media literacy that, I believe, needs to be cultivated by colleges in order to better equip our students to navigate the messages, both literal and figurative, that bombard them in public spaces– and, increasingly, in private ones too.

The successful development of that literacy impacts matters large, like being an informed citizen, and small(er), like trying to enjoy a ballgame. New technologies, such as digital video recorders and RSS feeds, empower us to shape and filter the information and messages that come at us. At times, these tools feel like weapons in a battle that’s intensifying, and which increasingly threatens the purity of certain experiences. That’s too bad.

Why am I surprised when she is reluctant to reference her sources then? And, how do you reference 50 images from Google that are glued to index cards?  

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

Perhaps it is a common or at least recommended practice among professors to integrate CPE-like assignments into their courses if many of their students either have not yet taken or failed the exam.  Until recently I have not encountered in regular classes any assignments that came close to the CPE prompts.  I was in fact very surprised when the professor teaching the section of Great Works for ESL students shared with me her two-fold writing assignment that articulates the same goals and criteria as the CPE.  The subjects of this compare/contrast essay are of course literary texts.   I have not yet discussed the assignment with the students, but I am sure they’ll appreciate their professor’s effort to bridge the cold and scary CUNY testing world with the comfort of classroom learning.

Why bother when surely the tasks involved in the CPE exam require the level of critical thinking and writing abilities that develop gradually in different classes and through different activities in the course of their first few years in college?  But many students still dread the exam and postpone it for as long as possible.  Many do not always realize that attending a CPE workshop plays just one part, and probably not the largest one, in their exam preparation.  It is the work they do in their classes that truly prepares them for this test.  And perhaps reminding them about this through course materials that share the exam’s rhetoric would create a more positive and serious attitude not only toward the exam, but  toward college work in general. 

At Baruch, ESL students receive strong support in handling the curriculum of English and literature courses.  There are now several sections of Composition and Intro. to Literature courses (2100 and 2150) designed specifically for ESL students who attend a one-hour tutorial every week as a part of their class.  It was interesting and extremely rewarding for me to lead these tutorials as a Writing Center Consultant last semester.  This current semester I learned about the existence of 2800 “T” (Great Works of Literature with a Tutorial).  In fact, a big part of my Writing Fellow work now is 1 ½ – hour weekly meetings with 2800 “T” students.  Even though the population of this class can hardly be called ESL – there has been a registration glitch, and many students who don’t need the tutorial rushed to get into this section because it was open.  In my next post(s), I’ll gladly share my difficulties and pleasures in leading this unusual tutorial.  For now, I want to dwell on the place of ESL students in classes across disciplines. 

Transfer students from foreign schools who “fall through the cracks” and enroll in regular English and other courses with intensive reading and writing; freshmen who struggle in exhausting summer Immersion classes; continuing students who are making gradual progress in learning English – they all find their way into classrooms where they want to “sound American” and eliminate all grammar problems that prevent them from succeeding academically and socially.  They may be afraid to speak in class; they may want to get rid of their accents in speech and writing; they often simplify their thoughts because they can’t find the right words to articulate the full complexity of their thinking. They receive papers with many corrections and sadly agree that they don’t deserve to get above “B” because their “grammar is bad.” They run to the Writing Center or SACC for help, often hoping to get their papers cleaned up and polished.  They are used to hearing “Could you say that again?” or “I’m not sure I understand what you mean by ….”. 

Whether we set out to teach these students in our classrooms or lead workshops for them, we can’t overlook these interconnected issues.   I hope we can all exchange some constructive approaches to dealing with ESL writers and speakers.  I just want to share a few strategies that I found particularly useful: finding and praising a strong point in the writer’s/speaker’s thinking, resisting the urge to eliminate original formulations that do not “sound American,” and finally helping students see that the abundance of red marks in their papers does not mean that they make an abundant number of mistakes — it simply means they make a few recurrent ones. In my work as a tutor, I found it very useful to use a particular color for each type of error.  This way the student knew that he/she had 2 or 3 problem areas and not 20 or 30. 

One particular article has been especially helpful in my work with ESL students: “Editing Line by Line” by Cynthia Linville (ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors.  Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2004.  84-93.).  Linville explains that there are “[s]ix error types that are treatable and are often frequent or serious in ESL college compositions”; these include subject-verb agreement, verb tense, verb form, singular/plural noun endings, word form, sentence structure.  When we focus on what’s treatable and teachable, we will help students to learn English more efficiently, build their confidence and preserve their unique voices. 

This video, beyond showing off the amazing ability of practitioners of parkour, also reflects the multiple literacies of its producers and their familiarity with a variety of cultural forms. It was produced with practically no budget. We all are concerned about the writing and speaking ability of our students, and we should be. But we also, I think, should realize that students have other languages through which they can express themselves and generate knowledge, and most of them don’t think that they’re allowed to draw upon these forms at college. I think they should be, as long as it’s in the right pedagogical setting. We can help make this happen. I’d love to see Baruch students use the aural and the visual to explore themselves and each other, and to present their explorations to a broader audience. I have no doubt we’d all be impressed with the product. That, to me, is what teaching through Web 2.0 is all about, and it’s the perfect use of these new technologies at the most culturally diverse college in the country.