cac.ophony.org

The Times recently ran a video about the pressures of high school advanced placement courses. This video questions the value of cramming an extreme amount of content into one high school class, and explores the motivations students have for taking these high-pressure classes.

I do not know a lot about advanced placement courses, other than the fact that high school students who pass them are eligible for college credit (?). From the video it appears that quality is definitely sacrificed for quantity in terms of learning, and this leads me to wonder what exactly the learning objectives of these programs are. Are they to challenge bright students who might be otherwise under-stimulated by their curriculum? To provide early exposure to college level material?

I’m also curious about college professors’ experiences with students who have taken AP courses. Are these students actually more prepared? Do they have an “edge” over other students?

The issue of AP courses is particularly salient to me at the moment, as I am teaching a “College Now” course. These courses are held at CUNY campuses and the form, content, and expectations are all the same as with any other college course. However, the students are all in high school. I am only into my second week of the first semester of this experience, and so far things are going very well. Of course it’s too soon to have formulated any opinion, and I look forward to posting more about this innovative program later in the semester.

In the meantime, please share your thoughts about AP work and similar programs. I also hope this post opens up a discussion about the differences between high school and college level teaching and learning.

I was saddened deeply yesterday to learn that a colleague, an old and great friend of the Schwartz Institute, Jerry Bornstein passed away suddenly. A true champion of communication-intensive instruction and information literacy, Jerry was the Deputy Chief Librarian at Baruch College. There from the very the start, he was instrumental in making our Newman Library the incredible resource we now know it to be. His intelligence, warmth, and dedication to serving the needs of Baruch students made a huge impression on me and on all of us who had the pleasure to know and work closely with him. Here’s a video of Jerry being Jerry, talking about why he loves his job on the occasion of the 10 millionth visitor to the Newman Library in 2003.

Link to the full video with some wonderful stories from Jerry’s long tenure at the library.

The Pew Institute recently released a report on young adults and social media use. Here’s the summary page.Pew Internet and American Life Project

It breaks down the various age groups starting with young teens – 12-17, the college years – 18-29, and the 30 and above – adults. There is some interesting data about which age groups use what and how certain social media falls out of grace with different age groups. It seems that  ¾ of young teens have cell phones and 31% get information about health and intimacy online. Young teens and college age young adults are blogging less than adults but sending and receiving text messages more than any other online activity. Texting is the major social communication online for both young teens and young adults. Twitter is big with the adult crowd but not hip with pre-teens or college age youth.

I was especially interested to see that young teens (12-17) create content or remix content more than any other demographic. It makes me think that their sense of creativity and play is still at the heart of their interest in the internet. At least I hope so…

Throughout his long career, Japanese Writer Yasunari Kawabata wrote a series of short short stories, which he referred to as his “Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.” Kawabata produced 146 of these stories, becoming a true “palmist,” even if his notoriety in the West is focused on his novels.  As described by the editors of the published collection, Kawabata believed that these little stories expressed the “essence of his art.”

I first read these stories in an experimental prose writing course a bunch of years ago, and the concept of these one-to-three page gems intrigued me. I was reminded of these stories this past semester, when, through my work supporting Advanced Accounting, a Communication Intensive Course, I found myself confronting palm-of-the-hand speeches. When I first learned that students had only two-to-three minutes to present their assigned material, I was skeptical. Two minutes to discuss a contemporary concept in accountancy?

As the semester progressed, and I struggled to help students condense the finer points of recording intangible assets on balance sheets, I necessarily focused on the benefits of these l’il speeches. Just as Kawabata’s stories are deeply complex while also being succinct, shorter speeches have the same potential. Translator J. Martin Holman could be talking about ACC 4100 speeches when he writes of the relationship between Kawabata’s small stories and his longer works:

“The palm-of-the-hand story appears to have been Kawabata’s basic unit of composition from which his longer works were built, after the manner of linked-verse poetry, in which discrete verses are joined to form a longer poem, the linkage between each dependent on subtle shifts as the poem continues.”

While longer speaking opportunities are still crucial for our students, these palm-of-the-hand speeches can give students a better familiarity with the basic units of composition required for larger speeches. I used to think of two minute speeches as a good exercise in summarizing, editing and brevity, but they do have their structural benefits, as well.  According to Holman, Kawabata mastered this form using certain elements (the same ones that would make any Palmist speech exiting); “juxtaposition of images,” “unique perception,” and “intriguing and memorable” plots– not reductions, but distillations of larger worlds.

There are clear positives and negatives to assigning such a short presentation, but on certain days, the luxury of having a lot of time to concentrate on just two minutes of material did seem like a very Palmist exercise. Students themselves, however, don’t always see the merits of this, and, rather than viewing it as the essence of their art, are more apt to view the assignment as the gnat buzzing around their schoolwork.  How might it be possible to elevate and enliven these palm-of-the-hand speeches to the place that Kawabata realized they deserve?

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?

The Baruch College community has begun to see Blogs@Baruch not just as a blogging platform or substitute course management system, but also as powerful tool for meeting a wide range of self-publishing needs.

A variety of constituencies at the College have begun using the system for a range of internal and external communication. We have some fantastic librarians at the Newman Library, and they’re using Blogs@Baruch for a Reference Blog, an Idea Lab, and a Graduate Research Blog. They’ve also begun using CommentPress to discuss a Library Planning document. The Institute shares many interests and goals with the College’s librarians, and we have so much to learn from them. I’m particularly interested in collaborating with them to explore the role of technology and self-publishing in cultivating digital literacies among our students. This semester’s conversations were a great start.

The Baruch College Honors Program has begun using Blogs@Baruch this semester for a number of projects. They’re now hosting their homepage on the site, taking advantage of Wordpress’ elegant content management features, and offering the staff an easy way to stay in contact with students (current and prospective). Also, first year Baruch Scholars have been given their own blogs to cultivate over their careers here, and their posts aggregate here. This is envisioned as a kind-of low stakes eportfolio project: give the students the space, and encourage (but don’t require) them to explore it. Another interesting Honors publishing initiative is the Change For Kids blog, where students working as reading tutors in a number of New York City elementary schools are blogging about their experiences, taking advantage of the opportunity to collaboratively reflect on and work through the challenges of working with children. Kudos to the Baruch Honors Program!

Frank Fletcher, the Executive Director of the Graduate Programs at the Zicklin School of Business, has been spearheading the business school’s move towards self-publishing. Frank has been encouraging his colleagues in Zicklin to explore a variety of initiatives on Blogs@Baruch over the past six months, and is now publishing to Lexington 24:25, where he’ll highlights developments in the MBA program and “identify emerging needs and trends in management education.” We look forward to supporting Zicklin, particularly in their efforts to connect Baruch students with potential employers and alumni.

Three journals are now hosted on Blogs@Baruch. Lexington Universal Circuit: A Journal of Economics and Politics is edited and authored by Baruch undergrads, launched last month (see details here), and we look forward to seeing that project continue to evolve. Dollars & Sense, which used to publish the selected journalism of Baruch students once a year as a beautiful (but costly to produce) magazine, now publishes on a rolling basis, for free, using Blogs@Baruch. While I myself miss the bound hard copy version, and see this transition as a microcosm of the larger troubles facing journalism, I’m happy that the faculty members who oversee the project– Josh Mills and Andrea Gabor– see the opportunities that are made available by self-publishing. For instance, student work produced in the fall doesn’t need to wait until the spring for publication; a wider range of work can be featured; and it’s now easier to share the work of our students with a much broader audience. Finally, iMagazine, the journal of student writing overseen by the Baruch College Writing Center, is in the process of migrating to Blogs@Baruch; stay tuned for a launch early next calendar year at this url.

There are other ongoing initiatives: the journalism department is using Blogs@Baruch to plan a new The East 20s, a food news site being created by the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch, and to serve the multimedia reporting of its students. The Baruch College Teaching Blog remains active. And, well, we can even include Cac.ophony.org as a Blogs@Baruch initiative; our fellows have simply been killing it this semester.

These are just a few of the most exciting non course-based uses of Blogs@Baruch; there are others in the planning stages that promise to take advantage of the power of this publishing platform to create unique opportunities for members of the Baruch community to interact with each other and audiences beyond the campus. One is our plan to support selected student bloggers who’ll be tasked with chronicling their lives at the College for a broader audience. I’ve often said that we have the most interesting students in the world, but few of them know just how interesting they are. Blogs@Baruch, by providing multiple paths into the work our students and faculty are doing, makes the case more powerfully than I ever could.

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!

Approximately 1200 incoming first year students at Baruch participated in the first phase of our experimental integration of Blogs@Baruch into the Freshman Orientation Seminar. They wrote to blogs in approximately sixty individual sections, and their posts were syndicated on the FRO Motherblog.

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.