Archive for the 'Symposium' Category

Technical Changes Causing Cultural Changes. Yes and/or No.

Published
by
Szidonia
on May 13, 2010
in Baruch College, Symposium and Technology
. 3 Comments

This blog post is prompted by Clay Shirky’s argument at our 10th Annual Symposium. In his keynote speech, Shirky addressed the fast technical advancement we are experiencing globally and argued that these speedy technical changes are “causing cultural changes.” His thought-provoking point has stayed with me because I think that this cause and effect relationship deserves some untangling.

Doubtless that, as Shirky showed in his speech, as well as in his book, Here Comes Everybody, the increased access to the public fora of the internet has led to increased awareness of a vox populi able to perform organized action and carry out successful grassroots movements. The internet and sites like Facebook or Meetup has also contributed to a dramatic re-definition of the personal and the private by making public information hitherto perceived off-limits. Yet, do these changes amount to “cultural changes” indeed? Does the unprecedented flow of information via technical innovations affect our moral and ethical values, causing a profound shift in cultural norms, or does it lead “only” to changes in the way we continue to perform these values, adding speed and efficiency perhaps, without altering the basic structures of our various cultures? And shouldn’t we argue that, instead of having a unidirectional relationship between technical changes and cultural changes, these changes are mutually influential, meaning that given cultural norms also determine how technical innovations are being put to use in a given cultural context? Yes, there is a universalizing, levelling and westernizing effect that reaches across the globe affecting those with access to the internet while leaving what I assume is still the larger part of the world’s population relatively immune to such changes. And then we again end up with a rather elite western notion of things going our way without really bothering to note that while we do have a large share in the monopoly over the information highways, there are still many sideroads that remain unaffected by us.

Storytelling and business ethics

Published
by
Linell
on May 12, 2010
in Baruch College and Symposium
. 0 Comments

Bernard L. Schwartz spoke at the Schwartz Communications Institute symposium on April 30th. “I’m a capitalist,” he said, and a “big D democrat.” Schwartz narrated the financial crisis from the perspective of his own political and moral values, that a company has a responsibility to its employers, shareholders, and the public at large. He spoke about capitalism as a system in which work supports safety and human flourishing. This, I thought like a person seeing something she’d only read about in books for the first time, is a capitalist social democrat. But I heard the story Schwartz told first, not the ideology, the way he told the story was my introduction to a particular perspective, formed by experience and knowledge that I myself do not have.

This semester, a professor whose class I’m supporting asked his students to give their opinion on whether or not technological development should be regulated, if it should be up to corporations and market demand, or if government should intervene. The students’ opinions, values, and beliefs varied widely. I found everyone’s perspective intriguing and compelling. As with Schwartz, hearing individuals speak about their economic values and opinions humanized what have predominantly been abstract or historical economic concepts to me. Cass Sunstein’s point that the proliferation of media is making it less likely for people with different political affiliations to talk to each other seemed right, as I realized how exceptional this situation was for me.

While each of the students seemed insightful, willing to probe and test their ideas against other opinions and contradicting evidence, entirely capable of reflective judgment about economics and ethics, it was very clear to me that this was the first time they’d been asked this question in their time at Baruch. I looked at the listing of courses, and found a course called “Ethics, Economics and the Business System,” in the Philosophy Department, a 3000 level class. I wanted to make it a general requirement.

On a recent Charlie Rose show about Goldman Sachs, Newsweek writer and Princeton journalism and writing professor Evan Thomas was asked if the recent scandal is going to keep “the best and brightest” students from the firm.

April 27, Charlie Rose.

Charlie Rose: Is Goldman Sachs a place that the brightest that the smartest people coming out of universities want to go to work, if they want to go to Wall Street, that’s where they want to go?

Evan Thomas: I teach at Princeton, believe me Princeton kids want to go to Goldman. Oh yes, overwhelmingly, even more now. The message that’s Goldman is bad news has not filtered down to the class at Princeton, lemme tell ya. At Princeton pretty much everybody wants to go to Goldman Sachs.

Charlie Rose: What does that say about the values of kids in college today? That’s a question for a whole other show.

Evan Thomas: But I’m telling you, the mystique of Wall Street has not died, even as Congress tries to destroy it. Kids still. You know why? Cause they think it’s a sure bet. They still think if you go to Goldman, Goldman is going to navigate these waters. I’m still going to have a house in Greenwich and a boat.

Charlie Rose: And a G5.

Evan Thomas and Charlie Rose laugh.

Gillian Tett: But they also join it thinking, I can do it for a couple of years, I’ll keep my soul, and then I can get out with the money. Now one of the reasons why these emails (from one of Golman’s traders) are so fascinating is they illustrate very graphically the kind of conflicts joining Goldman Sachs would actually face. He hasn’t been there that long, he can see the contradictions and the hypocrisy of what he’s doing, and yet he’s still playing the game.

I wonder how much opportunity Baruch students have to explore their own ethical perspective. I’m teaching a public speaking class this summer, and hoping to make it a personal essay assignment. I wonder how often it comes up for Baruch students, as they make their way to graduation, and if professors here would echo Evan Thomas’s “overwhelmingly, even more” characterization of Princeton. I was glad that, from my limited experience, I wouldn’t.

Clay Shirky at the 2010 Symposium

Published
by
Luke
on May 7, 2010
in Internet and Symposium
. 1 Comment

We were very lucky to have Clay Shirky provide the morning keynote at our Tenth Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction.

We were very unlucky in that we could not get the live stream to work.  But we’re happy to be able to bring Clay’s talk to you now:

Back to the Future

Published
by
Rebekah
on March 23, 2010
in Copyright, Symposium and Technology
. 1 Comment

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart presented a 90 minute demo at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) in San Francisco.  He and his research team from the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute had been developing an online system (called NLS for oN Line System) since 1962, and at the FJCC they debuted the first computer mouse and demonstrated hypertext, file linking and tele-conferencing to an audience of one thousand.  Engelbart was concerned with collective intelligence and networked knowledge; only these paradigms of shared thinking, he proposed, could effectively meet the urgency and fast-changing nature of contemporary problems.

Engelbart is oft-associated with firsts and technological history; in the photograph below, his 1966 workstation is complete with keyboard, monitor, and square black mouse on the far right.

But at the same time, many conversations about the future of technology and networked life invoke Engelbart’s theoretical positions and proposed practices as guiding principles and visions not-yet-achieved.  He is as much a part of the discourses of origins as he is with those of the future. I thought of Engelbart recently while reading about poet and essayist Lewis Hyde’s new project on intellectual property and the cultural commons.  Hyde argues that we have not yet spoken back to the market-driven gluttony of copyright law by articulating precisely where and how a limit should be set between public and private.

So it was somehow no surprise to learn that the mouse-maker himself awarded the first Collective Intelligence Recognition Award for an organization to Creative Commons, the non-profit dedicated to promoting sharing within the limits of copyright law, at the 2008 Program for the Future conference.  It was a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the famous 1968 demo — and a simultaneous anointment of Engelbart as oracle of what’s to come.

MOVEABLE TYPE

Published
by
Rebekah
on December 12, 2009
in Art and Symposium
. 0 Comments

Moveable Type

The forward-and-backward-oriented theme of the Institute’s upcoming tenth annual symposium–The Future of Communication: Where We’re Going, Where We’ve Been–captures the peculiar way nostalgia for old forms often gets integrated into and re-imagined in the most current technological creations. Moveable Type, artist Ben Rubin and statistician Mark Hansen’s permanent installation in the lobby of Renzo Piano’s New York Times building on Eighth Avenue, hearkens back to the earliest wood and metal typographical and printing systems in order to focus attention on the expanded language field of a 21st century newspaper. A grid of 560 small fluorescent screens displays fragments of text that have appeared in the newspaper from its 1851 founding until today, and that includes reader-generated remarks and search terms from the paper’s online home. Algorithms search, sift and sort the vast database of words in a variety of ways–looking for first sentences, for instance, or phrases that contain a particular word. In this way the installation becomes an ever-pulsing hybrid of historical and contemporary discourses and technologies.

Blackboard, This Song is Not About You: More on CUNY WordCampEd

Published
by
Mikhail Gershovich
on June 5, 2009
in Blogs and Blogging, Conferences, EdTech, Higher Education, Internet, Language, Symposium, Technology, Web 2.0, Writing Instruction and edupunk
. 13 Comments

It has been two weeks since the first ever CUNY WordCampEd, an event co-sponsored by us at the Schwartz Institute, New York City College of Technology, and the Macaulay Honors College. I have been meaning to reflect on this remarkable conference in this space but, seeing as how way leads on to way, I haven’t been able to get around to it. Plus, the need for yet another reflection seemed to diminish as the days passed since several smart and insightful people have already blogged the event. NYCCT’s Matt Gold, York College’s Michael Cripps, and Dave Lester of George Mason University have posted excellent recaps of the conference. Jim Groom, our inimitable keynote speaker, wrote a powerful, very personal reflection on the day’s conversations and why they matter to CUNY, and our own Luke Waltzer recently posted to this blog a terrifically engaging and forward looking exploration of some of the ideas that animated the events of that day and, most importantly, what they mean to the future of instructional technology at CUNY.

This week, though, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece by Jeff Young on CUNY WordCampEd. Since the picture the Chronicle paints of CUNY WordCampEd doesn’t fully jibe with my experience of the event, I figured this was reason enough to enter the fray.

What’s especially striking about the Chronicle piece is that it presents CUNY WordCampEd as motivated by the flight of a cadre of CUNY professors from Blackboard to blogging software as an ad-hoc alternative. “The meeting’s focus,” writes Jeff Young, “was an idea that is catching on at a handful of colleges and universities around the country: Instead of using a course-management system to distribute materials and run class discussions, why not use free blogging software — the same kind that popular gadflies use for entertainment sites?”

I take issue with this description on a number of levels, not the least of which is that it trivializes the tremendous pedagogical power and content management capabilities of a fully-realized, highly extensible, open source web publishing platform like WordPress and characterizes the event as animated by a simple opposition: blogs vs. Blackboard. In fact, CUNY WordCampEd was driven by something much much bigger and far less simple: a collective recognition that 1) the open, social web offers rich possibilities for transforming teaching, learning and the sharing of knowledge and creative work that we are only beginning to tap in a meaningful way here at CUNY and 2) that proprietary, closed learning management systems (LMS), in addition to their various other deficiencies, cannot keep up with the ways in which the social web is continually changing.

A good deal of the conversation at CUNY WordCampEd revolved around three very different yet exemplary projects, all of which are either built on or incorporate WordPress Multi User (WPMu), the “blogging software” to which the Chronicle refers. These are the CUNY Academic Commons, a multi-faceted online community space for CUNY faculty and students that seamlessly integrates WPMu as well as several other open source tools; our own Blogs@Baruch, a publishing platform for Baruch College intended initially to enable faculty to facilitate additional occasions for student writing and founded on the principle that that any opportunity to write is potentially an opportunity to grow as a writer; and Eportfolios@Macaulay, an adaptation of WPMu that allows Honors College students to collect their work, reflect upon it, share it with others if they choose to, and keep it for posterity — it likewise allows faculty to holistically assess student work. None of these important projects were mentioned in the Chronicle piece. Neither was ScholarPress, a set of impressive course management tools for WordPress developed by Dave Lester and his team at George Mason University (the same folks that gave us Zotero and Omeka), which Dave demonstrated at the opening of the event. (If there was a true, similarly capable alternative to Blackboard as LMS discussed at the conference, this was it, gradebook and all.) By excluding any discussion (or even a mention) of these projects, the article reduces and simplifies the thrust of day’s discussion of open source tools so that it ultimately comes off as merely speculative and not rooted in actual, substantive work already underway here at CUNY (excepting, of course, of the recognition of the wonderful work Zoë Sheehan Saldaña is doing here at Baruch).

Though the themes of Blackboard as 1) replicating an outdated pedagogical model and 2) and barely working recurred throughout the day, the conference was much more about experimenting with open source web tools based on their own merit than as any kind of real alternative to Blackboard that could or should be adopted centrally. As we have seen in the Clarion article which Luke cites, CUNY’s flirtations with alternatives to Blackboard in the wake of repeated outages seem to be more about showing Blackboard Inc. that CUNY means business and is not to be taken for granted than they are about finding a real, viable, working alternative that enhances both teaching and learning. Jim’s cry to “Open up CUNY!” did not mean “let’s all dump Blackboard and start blogging.” Rather, it was a call to breathe into our use of technology for teaching, learning, and sharing the spirit of free access and openness on which CUNY was built. CUNY WordCampEd was not an occasion to think through ways blogs could displace Blackboard in the classroom, but, in his words,

to imagine the possibilities of an open source CUNY, a CUNY that is not only re-investing in people rather than corporations to steer the future of education for this space, but a vision of imagining the technology as a way to make visible and accessible the work happening at the most diverse collection of urban campuses in the nation: a vision of open education that trumps courseware or videos or blog posts, a vision that brings 22 disparate campuses into some real communication with one another fueled by a community that believes in the irrefutable value of open, affordable, and relevant education in the 21st Century.

CUNY WordCampEd was not about blogs. It was not about Blackboard. It was about CUNY. This may not be of interest to those readers of the Chronicle who do not yet care about what is happening at The City University of New York, but it matters to me and to all of us who learned so much from the presentations and the conversations at CUNY WordCampEd.

Jeff Jarvis’s Keynote from the 9th Annual Symposium

Published
by
Luke
on May 26, 2009
in Symposium and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

Here’s Jeff Jarvis’s keynote address and Q&A session at the Schwartz Institute’s 9th Annual Symposium. He explains the argument that lay behind What Would Google Do?, explores the changing role of audience in the Web 2.0 world, and suggests some core components of establishing one’s professional presence on the web.

Keynote

Q&A


David Birdsell’s Symposium Closing

Published
by
Luke
on May 18, 2009
in Oral Communication and Symposium
. 0 Comments

In another of our series of videos from the 9th Annual Symposium, David Birdsell, Dean of Baruch’s School of Public Affairs, offers an incisive and cascading summation of the day’s conversation about “audience.”

Two Cultures, Two Kinds of Audiences, and Two Forms of Communication

Published
by
Hyewon
on May 11, 2009
in Audience, BLSCI and Symposium
. 3 Comments

Tuning into the current stream of our collective reflection upon last Friday’s symposium, here I put in my two cents. Like my fellow attendees, I found Jeff Jarvis’s Google speech extremely exciting and thought-provoking, which made him the perfect fit for the morning session. It is, however, Peter Elbow’s talk about the usefulness of occasional ignoring of the audience that resonates more deeply in my mind. I am currently reading his book, Writing with Power, and it allows me to think again about how the relationships between author/speaker and audience should change according to two different forms of communication, verbal and written. To reiterate the point he made, writing is more solitary and process-oriented than speaking is, so audience-forgetfulness can be a good strategy for early stages of writing. Elbow’s empiricist approach also classifies the different types of audiences such as safe or dangerous, caring or discouraging, real or imaginary, and so on. I found his notion of the ghost audience that we carry with us in our head particularly intriguing:

“The audience in our head usually affects us more when we write than when we speak. When we speak, the real audience is right there dominating our attention and drowning out other audiences. When we write, however, all audiences are in the head, even the real audience. In the dark of the brain a real audience is easily trampled by an insistent past audience” (187).

Elbow’s advice is that, in order to exorcize the demon of the dangerous internal audience that inhibits our words or thoughts, we need to actively “change” our audience and capitalize on the support of a loving audience that we once had or that we can imagine. I think that this suggestion could prove useful in improving our teaching methods, too.

Finally, attending the Institute’s symposium reminded me of C. P. Snow’s 1959 argument on the division of two cultures, the sciences and the humanities. I assume that in this case it is the division between business and academia whose cultures we try to bring together, as partly shown by Jarvis and Elbow. I see how these seemingly disparate fields can hit it off and have productive conversations in the right setting like this year’s symposium.

Gardner Teaches, Part 4

Published
by
Luke
on May 9, 2009
in Audience, Symposium and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

In this final segment from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World” from the 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, Gardner and the participants look at the “Mother of the All Funk Chords,” a Youtube mashup by the Israeli musician Kutiman, they discuss the implications of the notion that “you choose a channel; your audience will choose the channels after that.”

This video is 12 minutes long.