cac.ophony.org

Once, a student told me that he couldn’t present his final assignment for my public speaking class because he had to take the CPA exam. It was understood that the exam would take precedence as a kind of gateway to gainful employment, but I was still a little surprised at how compelled I felt to step aside. As an adjunct, I’ve been made aware of the connection between public speaking and employment for Baruch students. Several teachers work in public relations firms or as corporate consultants outside the college, and students seem to respect and learn from they way they both model and teach the conventions of business professional comportment and conventions.

I’ve told my students that public speaking assignments should prepare them for the corporate world in terms of how to coherently present their work, and how to be poised, authoritative, and collegial doing it. I’d like to have more to say than this, but less to say than the broad justification of humanities that I’ve heard before (and largely believe). While I haven’t had any interest in the business world before, after teaching at Baruch for a few years, I’ve become more and more aware of how much I don’t know about it. I feel kind of hampered in my ability to figure out how what I am trying to offer (my own work research is in democracy and culture) might connect to their lives outside college. And hampered from connecting what I’m doing to what I guess makes up the majority of their classtime. I looked up ‘what can the humanities do for business’ and found a Stanford webpage from early this year, in which several people respond to Stanley Fish’s (he’s like academia’s Joe Liberman!). John Bender says, “Not too long ago, the New York Times reported interviews with a number of CEOs who connected their ability as managers to their long-term engagement with books of all kinds, including fiction and poetry.” Bryan Wolf responds that Fish is “trying to save the humanities from instrumentalization.” But I’m actually curious about what, in terms of business, that instrumentalization might be.

The Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity has hosted some interesting panels, one on corporate failures that may have led to the current crisis called, “Did we get what we deserve?” And another one I wish I’d seen that featured alumni Edward Zinbarg, who wrote a book called Faith, Morals, and Money. So, I vow in 2010 to go to this center’s events, and meanwhile I’m working on a list of my favorite novels and plays, and the different ways they address money. So far, I’ve got: Aristophanes, The Acharnians, which stars a merchant who argues against an idealistic warmonger; anything by Charles Dickens; Easter, a play about debt and Christianity by Strindberg; Jerry McGuire (money and success is love); and Slumdog Millionaire. The more I read, the more leftward I seem to drift. And, while I refuse to read anymore Ayn Rand, I’m interested in literature that views neoliberalism and capitalism critically as well as positively. So far, Jerry McGuire is all I can think of. I’d like to find some writing on connection between literature and economics. So far, all I can think of is the passage in Capital when Marx talks about the lace-maker’s death notice, and how much it reminded me of Dickens. I’d like to read some fiction over winter break, even though I should be working and working. And I would like a booklist of fiction on money.

I came accross a very interesting blog post entitled “Borat is no Ali G” in 3Quarksdaily.

Ram Manikkalingam, a professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam, makes an important cultural argument about communication:

“The way we get along in strange places is by depending on the interpretive charity of strangers. We expect that they will make amends for our mistakes – linguistic and/or cultural – and assist us in interpreting a different world. What is remarkable is how well this works, seldom leading to complete failure to comprehend each other in the midst of linguistic and cultural difference. It works because when we come across people with whom we struggle to communicate, they also struggle back.”

After reading this blog post,  I revisited some of the scenes from Borat, which made me realize how much people go out of their ways to help “others” (whether they are in England, USA or Kazakhstan).

Manikkalingam reminds us that this mutual struggle is also about “suspending the judgement” and is the basis of the success of communication:

“Success in communicating depends on the willingness to suspend judgment during those crucial initial moments when you are not certain that you understand exactly what the other person is saying. And this is exactly what Borat exploits to pull his stunt – the human propensity to communicate in ways that make us seek to understand each other better, even if we may not ultimately agree. He does this by exaggerating exactly the kind of cultural difference – accent, gesture, walk and attitude – that would make any interlocutor assume a high likelihood of miscommunication, thus ensuring that they would give him even more latitude in making the most outrageous comments about women, Jews, Muslims and others, who may come to mind.”

In the movie Borat, Cohen takes advantage of this human effort to communicate with the “other” in a variety of settings: in the Hamptons vs. in a village in Kazakhstan. But the effect is very different. In the Hamptons we laugh at the homophobic attitudes of the members of a priviledged class, in the village in Kazakhstan we laugh at the “strange” habits and the empoverished living conditions. It is clear that the laughter does not erase the inequalities (by making both sides equally ridiculous). On the contrary, it deepens the divide.

However, the question about communication remains: what to do with our preconceived ideas when we communicate with others?

Each year, the Oxford American Dictionary names a neologism the “word of the year,” and this year it’s “unfriend,” a verb that means “to remove a friend from a social networking site.”  Pretty underwhelming.  I think we can do better.

Last week, Hyewon and David each wrote a post that registered some anxiety about the academic job market.  They reminded me that I need to jazz up my CV if I want to be among the mere 50% of the English Ph.D.s who receive a tenured professorship.  Unfortunately, I have no authentic edge over my brilliant competitors, so I have to stretch.  How about a new CV section, one that no one else will have?  “Neologisms Coined; or, My Personal Impact on the American Lexicon.”  Arranged chronologically, it will elaborate all the word inventions and new usages I have helped pioneer.

Rough Draft

2000: “seinfeld” [verb]: to interpret a real-life occurrence through the lens of the sitcom Seinfeld.  Often pejorative, meaning to analyze complex situations reductively in order to conform them to the plot-lines of a sitcom.  E.g. “This is the kind of situation that simply cannot be seinfelded.”

2006: “prebound” [verb]: to actively seek a new partner while still in a relationship; to delay a breakup until a rebound relationship is within view.  E.g. “I think Jeffrey and Tara will break up as soon as one of them finds someone new.  They’re both obviously prebounding.”

2009: “oblogation” [noun]: the obligation to contribute to a blog, often attached to a job or a casual agreement.  E.g. “The workload is light, except for a twice-a-week oblogation.” Or “I was excited to contribute to Antonio’s blog at first, but it’s become a burdensome oblogation.”

Well, that ought to impress the hiring committees, right?  There’s more work to be done with this inadequate language of ours, though.  Here’s a list of phenomena that still need words: when you introduce yourself to someone you’ve already met several times; when you realize halfway through telling a long story that you’re being rather dull; the weird but delightful way people act on an unseasonably warm winter day; etc.  Any suggestions?  Any words you’ve coined or repurposed?

And, how about a word for a blog post that’s gone on too long?

Blogs@Baruch was used in approximately two dozen courses this semester, in disciplines that included Fine and Performing Arts, English, Sociology/Anthropology, Journalism, Library Information Systems, Communication, History, and Management.

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:

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!

photo credit: andysternberg

Recently a Baruch undergraduate student, after listening to my advice on her Sociology 1000 paper, asked me, “So, what are you?”  I replied in the usual way, explaining that I’m a Writing Fellow at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute and that my role is to help students with specific writing assignments in their Sociology/Anthropology courses.

The student looked at me, still confused.  ”Yeah, but, are you a professor?  Or a student?  Or what?”  At this point I extrapolated my role even further, describing each step of the graduate school journey, regaling her with such terms as “adjuncting,” “Level III,” “dissertation committee” and, of course, “tenure-track.”  After shaking the glaze of catatonic boredom from her eyes, she asked me a follow-up question that ended up stumping me completely:  ”Should I go to graduate school?”

This brings me to the (intended) subject of this post, which is the sometimes difficult task of answering students’ questions about graduate school and academia as a career. Of course, every academic has different ideas about WHY they became an academic, with some I’m sure regretting the entire enterprise, but I think that answering these kinds of questions presents an excellent opportunity to clarify your own ideas about academia, career, your particular discipline, and even your sense of self.  Particularly for those “Level III” graduate students looking at impending job interviews, this may be a good time, as scary as it can seem, to practice formally justifying your major life decisions.

For reasons that remain unclear, lots of students ask me about graduate school.  Below are three typical student concerns, and a few ideas for how to approach them:

1.  ”Will I be able to make money?”

This question comes most often from one of Baruch’s numerous business-oriented students.  I often will engage them in a conversation about current events, particularly developments in the world of finance since say, oh, last October.  I try to honestly explain that academia is an industry like any other, subject to booms and busts, internal corruption, and strained budgets. However, in general, education is also a field with considerably more historical permanence than, for instance, day-trading.  With this question, you would do best to take a middle route.  It’s probably a bad idea to reinforce the whole teleology of the “job at the end of the college tunnel” anyway.  Say something about learning for learning’s sake, but don’t get preachy.

2.  ”Are you glad YOU went to graduate school?”

Ooh.  Hmm.  This can be a tricky one, especially if caught on a bad day.  First of all, as academics, we already have a tendency to make answers to questions like these extraordinarily complicated.  But there’s no need to confuse a student with all those shades of grey.  Here, then, is the best place for you to articulate your career goals, your internal philosophy, your academic raison d’être.  While everyone’s graduate school experience has been mixed (I can personally, nearly instantly, think of dozens of wonderful aspects it has added to my life, while simultaneously considering the many drawbacks), a student really wants to hear your honest, overall evaluation of a significant portion of your life and whether or not it was “worth it.”  Again, this is a good opportunity to justify yourself and, not unimportantly, to sound convincing while you’re doing it.  Even if you’re only convincing yourself, and barely.

3.  ”Should I go to graduate school?”

Ultimately, you can’t answer this question for a student.  Each person needs to come to these kinds of decisions on their own terms, but you can certainly give them advice as seems appropriate, without necessarily saying “yes” or “no.”  It should also be mentioned that just because a student is interested in graduate school doesn’t mean the impulse should be automatically encouraged.  Sometimes, students are just asking because they are curious.  Others are fishing for feedback, wanting to know if you think they are “smart enough” for graduate school.  Either way, these conversations collectively point to yet another process in the academic’s journey:  becoming a mentor.  Just like we had figures in our undergraduate years who pointed out the paths to us, so too must we become mentors and guides for our students.  That process of transformation, from student to teacher, is arguably lifelong.  In talking to students about graduate school and the vast range of experience that comes with it, we can begin to consider our own steps and the many reasons behind them.  At the very least, you should be able to ask yourself the question “why am I an academic?” without it sounding in your head like it’s being screamed to the gods.

In a recent Business Policy rehearsal, we were discussing anxieties about public speaking when one group member made the following statement:

“I’m concerned about my accent. The only way to get a good job in the U.S., is to not have an accent.”

I was stunned…. firstly, because this student did not have an accent that was impeding her ability to communicate effectively; and secondly, because I had never heard that this attribute would prevent someone from getting a “good” job.

The Baruch Campus is incredibly diverse, multilingual campus. Everyone has an accent of some sort, right? In this global economy, could this attribute truly prevent one from getting a job?

I bring this issue up again, link it to previous Cac.ophony thread discussions, the Baruch Teaching Blog, and Baruch resources…

• Accent Reduction (3 May 2006)
• Accent Reduction: Take 2 (5 June 2007)
• Teaching Blog at Baruch: A+…despite heavy accent (11 March 2009)
• Link to Baruch ESL Language Lab

A pertinent and persistent student issue!

Today I ran a writing workshop in a Great Works literature class, and I was surprised to find the class is held in a computer lab.

photo credit: ·júbilo·haku·

Don’t get me wrong: I heart the web.  My students and I blog together and exchange links, and I’ve been a longtime Blackboard defender.  But computers in my actual classroom?  I’m not so sure.

For the first five to ten minutes of the class, as I introduced myself and gave an overview of our objectives for the day, I was interrupted by thirty deafening renditions of the little tonal song Microsoft has chosen to indicate “Windows is starting up!!”  Then, when I put the students into groups, the long, u-shaped computer tables forced them to sit in awkward rows, and I found it difficult to rove from group to group to answer questions.  By the end of the workshop, I could see that some students were dividing their attention between me and the screens in front of them.

Rather than simply conclude that computers don’t work in a discussion-based classroom, I’m seeking some suggestions for how to make them work.  How could we use computers to keep students focused on content, rather than making content compete with the computers?

There is a difference between a Qisakhaan (storyteller) and Nawisenda (writer) among Afghans.  The qisakhani (storytelling) is an old time honored tradition; a skill every Afghan is trained in whether these are fairy tales, religious lessons, family legends or neighborhood gossip.  The nawisenda, the fiction writer, is a new kind of literary profession, that gained respectability after Modernist fiction was translated into Farsi for Afghans in the 1930s by the intellectual visionary Mahmud Tarzi.  Translations of James Joyce inspired a new genre of Afghan literature, the novel, which hoped to cut ties to the qisa, (stories), and build a narrative style that was based more on the psychology of the characters rather than the fantastical adventures in fairy tales.

The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 created a break in this budding style of story writing.  In 1990s, when the children of Afghan refugees began writing in English, the rift between storyteller and writer was ignored.  The careful path that Tarzi had started for a new literary form was lost on a generation raised (and many born) abroad, who could not read these novels.  The new genre, the Afghan American literary genre returned to the qisa and braided these rich myths into their own life histories.  Suddenly fairy tales of journeys began ways to tell their own stories of migration and survival.  The mute princess became the young woman who had lost her ability to speak in her native tongue.

Why this post on Afghanistan’s literary tradition?  Well, it is all to celebrate the completion of the first anthology of Afghan American literature.  My friend and co-editor, Sahar Muradi and I just completed editing the manuscript.  The title is still awaiting approval.  The project began 8 years ago, months before 9/11 and was meant to be a self-published anthology that would entertain ourselves.   However, the September 11th Attacks transformed this small project and gave it international attention.  With this attention came submissions that took 8 years to complete!   Yes, it took this long to create a robust and varied collection of perspectives and literary styles.  More than thirty writers have been part of this groundbreaking collection.  And the qisa tradition makes up the heart of many of these pieces whether the it is memoir, poetry or fiction.

Perhaps it is not surprising, in order to mark our migration from there to here, we lean back, back, back to the poetry and myths of our grandparents, who whether they were from villages or from cities, had set to memory entire libraries of Afghan literature.  It is in the space between storytellers and story-listeners that Afghan American literature was born.

Stay tuned for an update on other details of the anthology…

Stephen Francoeur, one of Baruch’s many awesome librarians, turned me on to Posterous yesterday.  This is a service that allows you to publish to the web via a simple email to post@posterous.com; your posts will compile in your own space on posterous.com or can be configured to push out to your blog, Facebook or Twitter feeds, Flickr account, etc.  The process elegantly handles image files, mp3s, and videos, and allows for tagging via “tag:” enclosed in double parentheses.  Posterous also offers support for group blogs and custom domains, and it’s easy to see this is a good tool for publishing while mobile or even for enabling those who are reticent to go through the trauma of learning the administrative interface of WordPress to publish easily from their Hotmail or AOL email accounts.

(By the way, I published this through an email to Posterous).

((tag: online-publishing, webtools))

Posted via email from Luke’s posterous

LW add from inside Cacophony: I had to come into the Cacophony post to clean up the links and image… seems as though keeping the html formatting and attachments elegant through the push might take some work.  Further, it looks as though the tags didn’t talk to the Cacophony tag function.  So, the push is janky… but the potential is still there.

The Finance Economics team recently experimented with using the Turning Point Technology. It is an audience response system which allows students to participate in presentations or lectures by submitting responses to interactive questions.

Each student holds one of the thin little clickers and answers the questions you placed in your Power Point slides. You can see the results immediately (or hide them from the class if you choose).

We were apprehensive about having to learn new software and then adjusting it to work with a Power Point presentation and a workshop we have been working on for months already. But it worked very well. The IT resources tech support person was happy to train us, it took barley half and hour. A little experimenting later and we were able to figure out how to make it work for us. It was as easy as creating additional slides to add to our Power Point. But the benefits were clear: we were able to ask students to respond to questions which then allowed us to introduce a related element of the workshop, or helped us explain a point we were making, or, at the end of the session, we were able to ask student to asses the workshop: what they learned, found useful, found challenging. After the session, with a click of a button, we printed out a report with percentage and graphical representation of the answers (see the fragment of it at the picture attached to this post). We designed very simple “yes” and “no” questions but the possibilities are endless.

The added bonus is that the box of clickers for students is brought to the classroom and then taken away after the class is over, by an IT person. You don’t even have to pick it up. Hopefully, some of our Institute’s PCs will have the Turning Point installed. You can also try it on your home PC. Give me a holler if you need help figuring it out.