cac.ophony.org

During the fall of 2009, I took a course at the Graduate Center with Prof. Jean Graham-Jones, “Contemporary Latin American Theatre and Performance.” Going in, I had assumed that much of the archival material we would be referencing would be from the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL), a collaboration between New York University Libraries and NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. This digital venue brings together videos of performance throughout the Americas that would otherwise be “inaccessible to scholars.”

While it’s true that this is a respected and reliable one-stop reference place to find (and preserve) such materials, given the contemporary focus of the class, YouTube offered hours of browsing enjoyment. The two resources serve very difficult functions—and have very different levels of functionality. (Especially since the Hemispheric Insititute’s archive is frequently restricted to performances that they themselves have had filmed at their own events.)

I don’t know if it counts as procrastination or further research, but I whittled away many evenings that semester watching clips of the dynamic performers we had been studying.

First, here’s a link to a performance by Mexican cabaret performer, Astrid Hadad, from the HIDVL. Her performance, ‘Amores Pelos,’ was filmed in Monterrey, Mexico, in July 2001, as part of the Second Annual Hemispheric Institute Seminar. It’s a long clip, but worth the time to see the costumes changes involved in the “wearable art” of her hair. The site provides a bit of context for those first meeting this artist’s work: “Hadad blends popular songs and ranchero, son and bolero music and political satire with highly theatrical precision to create a genre of music she calls ‘Heavy Nopal’.”

And then, below, is another unique Hadad performance, this time from YouTube (and featuring some well-placed self-flagellation). It brings us into the actual performance space, and is part of a larger documentary about Hadad.

We often rag on our students for their poor writing abilities, but here’s a tool from the Writing Program of the University of Chicago that pokes fun at the (sometimes) incomprehensible and bloated writing of academics:

Make Your Own Academic Sentence

After playing around a bit, I came up with “The (re)formation of post-capitalist hegemony asks to be read as the systemization of the nation-state.” Excellent! I can’t wait to put that into my dissertation!

You can spend some good time procrastinating on your actual writing by making sentences containing random phrases like “history as such” and “poetics.” The site also has some excellent writing sources for students and academics alike, such as The Sentence of the Week, where a published sentence is thoroughly critiqued for its positives and negatives, giving us a great sense of what makes a well-written sentence. There’s also this guide to college writing that I’ll surely point out to my students.

But, if procrastinating with random word generators is more your thing, you can always play with the classic Wu-Tang Clan name generator.

Yours,

Tha Eurythmic King of Nowhere

“Everyone is reading short-form text. Literature has not made that jump.” This is a key line from a recent NYT article “Serving Literature by the Tweet” which concerns a new literary magazine Electric Literature. The name of the magazine startled me at first, as I’m a big believer in the old fashioned way of reading literature precisely as a long-form text printed on a page where I can make notes in the margins. The editors of this new magazine, Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum, make their texts available in multiple mediums: print, Kindle, e-book, iPhone, Twitter, and even audio books. They publish such well-known authors as Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard.

As I continued reading the article, I realized, despite my initial reservations, how promising this project really is. For instance, the authors are asked to select a line from their work to be animated and posted on YouTube. This is a new and very creative form of literary expression that allows for imaginative possibilities and, as Michael Cunningham pointed out, “maintain[s] the integrity of the written word and extend[s] its range.”

I was reminded of a few students in our in-class workshops in the past few weeks whose eyes were constantly on their iPhones. The same happens on the subway, in gym classes, etc. As much as I’m reluctant to accept the pervasive presence of the electronic world, I must admit that it can indeed create what Rick Moody has called “new envelopes for [literature’s] message.”

The following is a guest post from Professor Elisabeth Garies, of Baruch College’s Department of Communication Studies. She can be reached at Elisabeth.Gareis@baruch.cuny.edu.

Oral communication instruction is traditionally somewhat neglected in the ESL curricula and services of colleges. Many programs focus on reading/writing proficiency and give only nominal, if any attention to listening/speaking skills. The imbalance is due to a great extent to college entrance requirements and grading practices in college classes: Students are often only tested for reading and writing proficiency but not for speaking skills. With the correlation between spoken and written proficiency in nonnative speakers being only moderate, it is no surprise then that some students graduate with low proficiency in spoken English.

This status quo is in stark contrast to the skills needed for integration into the college community and success in the workplace. In fact, oral communication skills are consistently ranked most important by employers of business as well as liberal arts graduates. Yet, every semester, nonnative students report that they are being asked by teammates not to speak during group presentations so that team grades are jeopardized. They also report being dismissed from job interviews due to comprehension-inhibiting accents.

It is paramount, therefore, that we address oral-communication competence. Two services are available for students at Baruch College: (1) Students can go to the Student Academic Consulting Center (SACC, VC 2-116) and make an appointment for free one-on-one tutorials with a professional speech tutor. (2) Students can visit the new ESL Lab (VC6-121, enter through VC6-120) and practice with the excellent software, audio, and video materials there. See http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab for hours, instructions, and materials.

To give an example: It’s the beginning of a semester. An (ideal) instructor collects writing samples and engages his/her students in speaking activities to determine whether a student may need assistance. The student is then encouraged (required?) to make an appointment with one of the speech tutors at SACC (the tutors, by the way, are all professionally trained speech pathologists and ESL specialists). During the first meeting, a diagnostic conversation/reading takes place, and the tutor determines which speech patterns are the cause of he students comprehensibility problems.

While the student may already have an idea about some patterns (e.g., differentiating between /r/ and /l/), some problems are more difficult to determine. For example, many languages have a syllable-timed rhythm (i.e., syllables have the same length); English, however, is a stressed-timed language (i.e., the rhythm of a sentence is determined by the regular beat of the stressed syllables only). Try to say the following sentences out loud as you clap your hands on the stressed syllables. You will notice that the sentences take the same amount of time, although the first one is much shorter than the last one. This is because of the stress-timed nature of English.

The lion came.
The lioness came.
The lionesses came.
The lionesses arrived.
The lionesses have arrived.

Comprehensibility problems often arise from stress problems; e.g., when a speaker from a syllable-timed language used his/her native rhythm to speak English. A staccato delivery ensues that makes it difficult for English listeners–who are used to listening for word and sentence stress–to follow the speaker.

In any case, once the student is diagnosed, the tutor will help the student produce the speech pattern correctly in one-on-one tutorials. When the student can produce the speech pattern, he/she needs to practice to commit the new pattern to muscle memory. It is said that our body has to practice a new movement (including speech organ movement) 1,000 times before the movement becomes muscle memory. Please see the Accent Reduction FAQs at http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab for more information.

Ideally, a student should see a speech tutor once a week and practice individually in the lab several times a week. With regular practice, significant progress can be made, even in the course of one semester. Please alert your students to these services. and remind them that, to change speech patterns, regular practice is necessary

I recently stumbled upon the work of Alexandra Juhasz, a media studies professor and “femi-digi practitioner.” While her writings on activist video interested me from the get-go, her blog persona, MP:me, has some interesting things to say about media theory and pedagogy, and more than a few choice words for the “leprous” stuff of YouTube. Knowing the incredible fervor with which our students race to imbibe pretty much anything they see on YouTube, the experiments she and her students engage in when analyzing YouTube were intriguing.

Speaking of which, I happened to meet someone the other day who works for iCue, which has thousands of video clips, news archives, and, by extension, sample speeches. I felt a little embarrassed that I’d never found it myself, since I regularly use YouTube for on-the-fly speech sample videos in class– and even specific assignments– and thereby end up modeling this YouTube over-reliance for my students. Finding a range of high quality sites for video content is something I would like to make one of my New Year’s resolutions, rather than acting surprised when students head to Youtube as the first and last stop for any kind of video content.

MP:me recently put out a call requesting help in her search for what she calls “productive fake docs” on YouTube. Maybe you’re more familiar than me with this sub-genre? The deadline for contributions is January:

I recently led a workshop in an intro class where all the readings are from a textbook. These are frequently used in Sociology and Anthropology and I assume other disciplines as well. I myself never had textbooks when I was in college, and I’ve never used them to teach with. Frankly, I find them bland and overwhelming. They seem to present boiled down and flattened information as a series of facts.

To my credit I came up with an in-class exercise based on a segment of a chapter that allowed students to enter the content imaginatively, and I think it was rather successful.

However, I still have this major misgiving about how to use these books to foster critical thinking and I was wondering if anyone had thoughts or ideas about this. For instance, what are the benefits of using them? How can you liven them up? Where does argumentative and critical thinking come in?

We’ve all come across a CAPTCHA, a challenge response test that web sites give viewers who are trying to register for an account, leave a comment, or perform some other task that might be vulnerable to spammers or bots.  They are useful because they can differentiate human from machine (Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart… don’t ask me how “turing” became a “P” in that acronym).

They look something like this:

These things are a minor nuisance, the price we pay to protect the sites we need from bombardment by unwanted traffic or use as a launching pad for spam attacks.  According to researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, “about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.”

What if the time spent solving CAPTCHAs could be harnessed for productive purposes?  Thanks to reCAPTCHA, it can.

Carnegie Mellon is currently working with two organizations (the Internet Archive and the New York Times) to employ humans to decipher scans of text that are unreadable by OCR software (Optical Character Recognition).  If your site uses reCAPTCHA, your users can contribute to a major digitization project.  For details on how the technology works, click here.

This is the latest innovative effort to maximize productivity in a focused way by taking advantage of the reach of the web to congeal a distributed knowledge network.  reCAPTCHA has tapped into existing knowledge and processes to build yet more knowledge through another process.  All of us together are smarter than we are added up.

Brilliant work.

(Nod to Mikhail for the heads up about this technology.)

From the Dept. of We Stole It From Lifehacker: Here’s a great idea for those of us needing to focus for chunks of time. An application for Mac OS X called Freedom helps keep your nose to the grindstone and away from Facebook, email, LOLCATZ, or whatever by disabling your internet connectivity for a designated period of time up to 6 hours. The developers have yet to figure out how to make an allowance for online library catalogs, the ability to IM your friend who knows everything, and the Olympics medal count.

Now that’s American ingenuity.

Is there room for the CPE exam in humanities and social sciences classrooms? Should there be room?

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. 

 On November 30^th, Cheryl Smith and I will be giving a revision workshop at the CUNY’s WAC meeting.  The description of the workshop is pasted below.  We were thinking about distributing a bibliography of current research on the subject.  We’re just beginning to put it together and would welcome any suggestions.  

Working with the Draft: Techniques for Helping Students Revise