How Disruptive is Digital Publishing?

October 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

E-books are booming. Similar to Gutenberg’s printing technology that replaced handwritten manuscripts, digital technology is replacing printed books.

E-books are not new. They existed in various formats, PDFs mainly, for a number of years. However, the launch of Amazon Kindle in 2007 changed the game. Light, easy to carry Kindle could hold hundreds of books. A year after, Barnes and Noble followed with a Nook reader. Later, Borders joined the contest by partnering with Kobo, Toronto-based e-reader manufacturer. In 2010 Apple’s device iPad was released, providing a more efficient way to buy e-books from various providers including the Apple’s own iBooks app. Android tablets followed the suit. By the end of 2010, Amazon reported for the first time that they sold 115 e-books for every 100 paperbacks, excluding free book downloads.

17-05-10 I Got Tagged
While Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Apple’s iBooks reap the most benefits from e-book sales, publishing houses have to face the most dramatic change since Gutenberg’s times. Traditionally, publishers have not worked with end consumers. Instead, they employed a middleman – a bookstore. But bookstores have their own agenda. The Internet makes everything cheaper. Amazon, a dominant book retailer, deliberately reduced e-book prices in order to increase its market share and sales of Kindle devices. For example, if a book retailed for $26, Amazon would pay a wholesale price $13 to a publisher, and sell the book for $9.99 to an Amazon customer. By taking losses, Amazon ensured cheaper prices of e-books.

Apple proposed a different pricing model. Apple allowed e-book sales through their iBooks App by charging 30% per transaction. Publishers liked a new model as it let them set the price of the book rather than dealing with Amazon’s draconian methods. As a result e-books became more expensive. Amazon did not have a choice but to adopt a new agency pricing model. At the same time, Amazon did not forget to innovate. In September 2011, Amazon announced a new Kindle Library lending program. Library users with access to Kindle software can borrow Amazon books for free from their local libraries. In addition, the majority of libraries offer free Kindle instruction sessions ensuring that e-book opponents can receive guidance and sufficient training on how to use e-books.

eBook Readers Galore
Publishers have fewer outlets to sell books at a regular hardcover price. However the costs of running a publishing house did not change. Publishers spend money on author advances, royalties, printing, advertising and distribution, facilities and operations, editors and so on. In addition, more and more authors prefer self-publishing. By avoiding a publishing house, authors reach out to consumers by offering books mainly in 99c range. Moreover, all classic literature is available for free to download due to expired copyright protection rights. How can publishers put up with disruptive digital publishing?

Guido Lang, VP of Business Development at MintRight, Inc., a global e-book distribution platform, says: “Publishers have to answer the question of how they add value. In a world where you can publish online in real time and at little or no cost, it is hard to convince someone to pay for a publisher. On the flip side, publishers have great experience in identifying, developing, and marketing great stories, which will remain a key skill. However, publishers have to adopt the new tools of their trade – e-books, apps, and social media.”

Of course, opponents of e-books may claim that an e-book will never replace a ‘real’ paper book. However, what is real? The first books known to humanity were set in stone, written on papyrus scrolls, clay tablets, parchment and silk. Paper books replaced ancient forms of book making, and Gutenberg’s printing technology replaced handwritten books. Digital technology and e-readers are ready to transform the whole industry of publishing.

Will paper books cease to exist? Probably not. While everything that is released in paperbacks can be easily digitized, books with colorful illustrations, such as cooking books or art books are perceived better in paper formats and are great gifts. As an analogy, mass produced prints did not replace handmade paintings. The challenge for publishers is to update their existing business model and innovate.

Filed Under: Marketing, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

more thoughts on technology in the classroom

October 27, 2011 By 1 Comment

I’d like to continue on the topic of technology in the classroom that James brought up in his blog post of the other day and that Erica continued with on Wednesday. These two posts and the responses they elicited in the comments section are fascinating and have helped me think through my deep ambivalence to technology in the classroom (in this case the college classroom) and I figured I’d jot down some questions and ideas in this post.

Like one of the commenters on James’s blog post, I ask my students to keep their computers and phones in their bags or out of sight. In the same way that I don’t want someone checking their phone while we’re talking, I don’t want my students to be distracted by an open website while one of their peers is engaging in the often extremely revealing process of speaking up in class.

That said, I do use technology in my classroom. For the past two semesters, I’ve created a blog for a survey course I teach called Great Works of Literature I (which ranges from the beginning of time to around 1600 CE). Over the course of the semester, each student is responsible for writing three 2-page posts (so on any given class day, four or five students have written and posted a short but complex argument on the text we’re reading for that day) and they are also expected to comment on each other’s posts. The work on the blog counts for a fifth of their final grade (5% per post, 5% for commenting) so it is a hefty part of what I am asking them to do for the class.

A snapshot of my course blog this semester

Above I said that I do use technology in the classroom. However, the blogging I ask students to do takes place outside the actual classroom.

Part of me really likes the fact that it’s done outside of class. It allows shy students to speak up in the comments section. It exponentially multiplies class-time (something they probably have mixed feelings about!). It puts the students at the center of a large part of the production of the class, since they’re the ones who write on the blog, not me. (I write prompts in a special “prompts” section of the blog and occasionally make an announcement using the blog, but they do all the posting and commenting otherwise.)

But I do want to find ways to better incorporate what they do at home into what we do in class. I’ve been feeling lately that the blog sometimes feels irrelevant to the students during class. Sometimes, depending on how the conversation goes, the blog goes unmentioned and all the work that went into the posts and comments for that day might seem unnoticed or unimportant to the writers or to the readers of the posts. While I’m reading and commenting on everything (I email the students my responses to their posts, partially in order to keep the comments section strictly for the students) I sometimes wonder how often the other students are actually reading all of the posts. Reading four or five posts in addition to the day’s reading is a lot of work, and unless I find ways to bring the blog posts into the classroom in a more comprehensive and integrated way, I fear they’ll be writing just for me, not for each other.

So how can I keep laptops from popping up on every desk while still honoring the work they’ve done on the blog and keeping student responses at the center of the class’s production of ideas and knowledge?

Some brief ideas in response to my own questions:

1.    Use the overhead projector more to simply display blog posts and address specific points raised in them. Plan before class which parts of each blog post might be relevant and referenced.
2.    Prompt students to include video or music or other media that relates to the reading in their blog posts. Play these found connections in class on the overhead projector and solicit responses from the rest of the students.
3.    Ask students to come to class with questions for the authors of the posts. Split the “commenting” requirement into comments on the blog and comments in class. Maybe also do in-class writing that involves the text and the blog posts in response to that text, thus reinforcing the idea that they have to come prepared having read their peers’ posts.
4.    Make games/role-plays using the blog. For example, ask a student who didn’t blog to “be” one of the bloggers and explain “her” position. Then have the real blogger respond with a counter-argument, thus asking the blogger to rethink or elaborate on or qualify his original claims.

And some more ideas about generally using technology in the classroom, aside from using the course blog:
1.    Intersperse class discussion, group activities, in-class writing, and mini-lectures (or anything else one does in class) with clips from youtube and elsewhere. I’m currently thinking up ways to use these two videos to communicate to students what I mean when I talk about tone:

2.     Digital story-telling, DIY radio. Lots to learn here from colleagues here at cac.ophony.
3.     Videos. Students can make videos with their phones, or borrow video cameras from their schools if possible (n.b. like Erica, I’m not going to get into questions of cost and privilege here). I’m envisioning students filming the process of memorizing a short poem (and including some of the bloopers), putting on scenes from plays we read and then proving surrounding material as if the video is a Criterion Collection edition, and  filming interactions with texts in non-classroom environments (filming a staged reading of Antigone at Occupy Wall Street, for example, or filming an interview with some yoga instructors  and practitioners about the Bhagavad Gita). We could then watch these videos together in class and discuss the results.

This has become essentially a long riff so I’ll stop here. I’d love ideas from cac.ophony readers. How do you use technology in or around your college classroom?

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, BLSCI, Pedagogy, Technology

What if we only see the gorilla?

October 26, 2011 By 1 Comment

Part One:

At last year’s Symposium, during the morning roundtable discussions, my table got into a conversation about how to manage students on laptops in the classroom. Are they really writing? How do you know they aren’t on Facebook? I think I said something like, “well, some days I just have to say: ok, today let’s write with our pens.” Composing by hand in a notebook and directly onto or into a computer are distinctly different processes (for me at least), and I think a lot about how one’s attention span and outlook on the task at hand changes depending on the medium used.

In James’ recent cac.ophony post, he pointed us towards the recent New York Times articles on “education without technology.” While I certainly do use a lot of technology in my courses, I also realize that sometimes we need to unplug. So, for me, the question is not so much about the value of technology (which is more about the teacher than the tool in many cases), but rather an inquiry into how our “Net Generation” students’ brains create and process information.  I can’t help but think of  two early moments in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains:

  1. “In using the word processor, I had become something of a word processor myself” (13).
  2. “The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing…But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it–and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became” (16).

It seems like Carr is blaming the “immediate gratification” of the web for impatience or for his own fading attention span. And, I’m not sure I agree with him. Can we really blame technology for the inability to read a book from cover to cover?

When I heard Cathy Davidson speak at the Graduate Center in September, I found myself quickly obsessed with the “invisible gorilla” video we watched (and is referred to in the opening of her newest book, Now You See it).

\”The Invisible Gorilla\”

The video is an experiment made to test “selective attention”–viewers are supposed to count balls being tossed and focus on the act of counting so thoroughly that many viewers fail to see the charming person in the gorilla suit frolicking about. Davidson writes, “By concentrating so hard on the confusing counting task, we had managed to miss the main event: the gorilla in the midst” (2). Some people do see the gorilla, however. Davidson saw it, and I only really noticed the gorilla. Davidson continues, “without focus, the world is chaos…Fortunately, given the interactive nature of most of our lives in the digital age, we have the tools to harness our different forms of attention and take advantage of them” (2). Davidson sees potential in the fact that technology enables us to play with and against distractions and to really discover where our own focus can be most productive.

I began to really think about the classroom and technology, the page and the keyboard, and the student(s). If we all pay attention differently, is there any way to know who sees the gorilla at any moment in the classroom? And, if technology does indeed empower our different “forms of attention,” what does this tell us about the writing process? Do we uniformly move from page to screen?

Part Two:

This semester I’ve been playing around with something that I loosely call “The Artifact Project.” When I bring technology + writing by hand into the classroom, it is often the sort of thing where we watch something (music video, short film, feature film, etc.) and write while watching. The writing can come in a number of different forms–but what I am interested in is what happens when we write (by hand in a notebook) while engaged in paying attention to something else. Initially, I had a number of videos I wanted to show–mostly hip hop videos where there is a combination of narration, word play, and persuasive/jarring images. But, after the first week of classes, I decided it might be more productive to see what the students do. So, every class period we begin with 2 “artifacts”. These things need to be multimedia, class appropriate, and the student/presenter/ researcher needs to come to class with a writing prompt/activity that he or she will guide us through.

What I’ve noticed (some preliminary observations):

  1. My students pay attention/focus/observe in a very different way than I do. They notice more.
  2. I thought that when given the freedom to have a sort of show & tell (ultimately youtube dependent), the majority of students would automatically go to the music video. They didn’t or haven’t. The students do a lot more research–they’ve found a variety of different relics (or “real” artifacts) from the past to explore–they are really interested in unpacking commercials, in particular–comparing advertising from the past with that of the present.
  3. They do understand that technology is not all good. Many of my students prefer to write by hand–they use e-readers and notebooks.
  4. When given the opportunity to create their own writing-based activities, students really seem to come up with very analytical tasks–they want to think about what they see specifically versus sweeping assumptions (which populate their formal papers).

So, what does any of this have to do with the gorilla?

I’ve intentionally focused on focus and attention and the role of technology in how I see my students pay attention. I’ve stayed away from cost and privilege. But, the question still lingers…how much equipment belongs in the room? Who should ultimately decide?

I know that I only see the gorilla, but my students see everything at once, it seems, what are the implications of that for a writing classroom? How quickly can we challenge them to move from medium to medium, even if I (as teacher) lag behind?

 

Filed Under: EdTech, Higher Education, Internet, Media, Pedagogy, Writing, Writing Instruction

The History of Communication Courses (Part One)

October 25, 2011 By 1 Comment

The utilization of the theories behind the Writing Across the Curriculum movement varies at the institutional level, meaning, for example, that the duties and goals of WAC fellows differ across CUNY. Likewise, Baruch’s definition of Communication Across the Curriculum is uniquely situated within the college as an institution.

Yet, when I came to the Schwartz Communication Institute, I wondered about the origins of Communication Across the Curriculum as a movement and Communication Intensive Courses. I’d like to spend two to three posts looking at how the theory behind communication courses emerged and changed over a number of decades.

Using the chart feature of JSTOR’s Data for Research, I first took a look at how many articles have been published each year which contain the term “communication courses.” This does not include all articles ever published, but rather the articles published within publications archived by JSTOR.

The above graph shows the raw number of articles published containing that term. Clearly, most articles that reference communication courses were published in the mid 1940s to mid 1960s.

The second graph above shows the number of articles published that reference “communication courses” relative to the total number of articles published on any topic. Again, the obvious peak occurs in the mid 1940s to the mid 1960s.

Happily, the above data concurs with the usual “old school” explanation of the rise and fall of communication courses.

As you can see from the above graphs, the idea of communication courses existed prior to their rise in the 1940s. In his 1987 book Rhetoric and Reality, James Berlin associates early communication courses in the 1930s with Alfred Korzybski’s notion of “General Semantics,” an approach which sought to teach students to discern the ways in which rhetoric can distort reality (10). General Semantics rose “when the United States was concerned about the threat posed by Germany,” and was therefore largely “a device for propaganda analysis” (10). Specifically, Berlin writes that “Semanticist rhetoric was also highly influential in the communications course—the course that combined instruction in reading, writing, speaking, and listening, occupying a large place in the general education movement in the thirties, forties, and fifties” (10).

Yet, as we know, communication courses didn’t really take off until the mid 1940s, igniting what Berlin terms the “Communications Emphasis” which he claims spanned from 1940-1960. To be more accurate, I would argue (based on the data), that it spanned from 1945-1965. As a side note, the Conference on College Composition and Communication was founded in 1949, at the beginning of the wave. And what is the meaning of this rise and fall? The rise was largely occasioned by an influx of WWII veterans who went to college after the war concluded on the GI Bill.  Berlin writes that “the communications approach gave composition courses a new identity, placing them in a special program that carried with it a commitment to democracy and to the welfare of students who had just suffered the horrors of war” (106). These courses were “commonly interdepartmental” and “combined writing instruction with lessons in speaking, in reading, and sometimes even in listening” (93).

Movements in college instruction do not have neat beginning and end points. As I wrote previously, Berlin dates the Communications Emphasis from 1940-1960; he also says that there was a Renaissance of Rhetoric from 1960-1975; and there is a turn towards a student’s personal development and expression which occurs in the late 1960s.

I would attribute the fall of communication courses in the late 1960s to the last development, the rise of a style of instruction centered around a student’s personal growth and expression. This movement is alternately called “subjective rhetoric” or the “expressionistic approach” by Berlin (139). Its beginnings can be charted in the 1966 Dartmouth conference which produced John Dixon’s Growth  through English, a report which emphasized writing as a tool for  “’personal growth’” and “’the use of English studies for building an ‘inner world’” (Dixon qtd. in Berlin 149). I should note, however, that I do not have any evidence to show that the rise of subjective rhetoric caused a decline in interest in communication courses. To argue that one caused the other would likely be a logical fallacy; yet I think it is telling that the fall in discourse around communication courses coincided with the rise in discourse around subjective rhetoric.

Along with this interest in personal expression came attacks on traditional education. Berlin describes how “In a 1967 essay entitled ‘English Composition as a Happening,’ Charles Deemer attacks the university, charging that it is opposed to education because it fragments and alienates students.  Citing such figures as Normon O. Brown, John Dewey, Paul Goodman, Marshall McLuhan, and Susan Sontag, Deemer calls for the composition course to become ‘an experience’ in which the teacher’s authority is removed by having the student become an equal participant in learning” (150).

Naturally, this interest in free expression and in overturning traditional education emerged alongside the various social movements of the late 1960s.

Here, funnily enough, we can see a dramatic rise in the number of articles in JSTOR which refer to “personal growth” beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s (again, this is relative to all articles published).

So the emphasis on communication courses did decline in the late 1960s, but as we can see from the first two graphs, discourse around communication courses came back not long after. In my next post, I want to look at the ways in which communication courses were framed in the succeeding decades. Also, if I have time, I want to examine the beginnings of the Communication Across the Curriculum movement.

Filed Under: cac, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Pedagogy, Politics, Scholarship, Writing Instruction

Teaching the Mind AND the Body: Education without Technology

October 24, 2011 By 3 Comments

As a recent New York Times article wryly explains, it turns out that even the nation’s technological elites—the same engineers, software designers, and idea people, who brought us Google, E-Bay, and Facebook—would prefer that their children grow up and learn in a technology-free environment.

Ostensibly a profile piece about the experience-centered and technology-free Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Los Altos California, the article interviews several parents about why they chose to send their kids to a school without any computers or other media, thus setting the scene for a discussion of the potential benefits of technology-free instruction. Situated in the heart of Silicon Valley, one would not expect the Waldorf School to be very popular. However, it turns out that many parents who make their living designing the latest technologies are not too keen on their children using them. As one parent quoted in the article succinctly put it, “If I worked at Miramax and made good, artsy, rated R movies, I wouldn’t want my kids to see them until they were 17.” This aversion to technology in the classroom, however, is not held by most other parents and educators across the nation. So what do these parents know that others do not? It turns out quite a bit. For one, they know that education is not only about learning facts, but about becoming a well-adjusted and emotionally dynamic individual. They know, as one of them put it, that “teaching is a human experience,” and they know that technology, though incredibly useful in day to day life, can be a distraction in the classroom.

The article is, in fact, part of a series of recent New York Times articles exploring the use of technology in the classroom that offers a much needed critical analysis of what has thus far been a very one-sided policy debate. The belief in the value of technology in the classroom has become a kind of sacred cow of public education debates, and there are few incentives for administrators or school principals to question this orthodoxy. In fact, there are many hard-to-resist political and monetary incentives (mostly from the corporate world) that encourage technology use in public schools. While it turns out it’s very difficult to actually improve student learning and attention through the use of technology, purchasing a set of new Dells or IPads for the classroom, or signing students up for Facebook or Twitter, is an easy way to show parents and politicians that their schools are on the cutting edge; and who doesn’t want to be on the cutting edge? Indeed, even as many public schools struggle to keep teachers and restrict class sizes, they seem more than willing to continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on corporate-manufactured technologies for the classroom in an attempt to demonstrate that they care about their students. Like an absent parent, who compensates by buying their child all of the latest gadgetry—with which they can then entertain themselves in their parents’ absence—our public schools seem trapped in a cycle of simultaneous neglect and harmful overcompensation. But as this particular article makes plain, the most important forms of learning do not actually require any technology.

Indeed, as it turns out, technology might even get in the way of important forms of learning. The Waldorf schools, which value human interaction and emotional development, have been around for a long time. However, their ability to continue to thrive and grow within a world that is increasingly technologically focused says something about the still small voice of emotion and the animal desire for physical forms of connection and meaning that persist within human communities. And what is most interesting about the Waldorf schools’ approach to learning—its emphasis upon the body—is precisely what is missing from so much recent technology-centered pedagogy. Teachers in the Waldorf schools encourage children to integrate physical activity into the curriculum, thus reintegrating body and mind in the process of learning. In contrast, technology-centered pedagogies, which require little physical movement and lots of focused mental attention, actually encourage a split between the body and the mind, privileging the mental, linguistic, and visual aspects of our experience over the interpersonal, intuitive, and somatic aspects. The negative effects of this split will no doubt become increasingly apparent as generation upon generation of children are increasingly raised in the constant presence of computer screens and digital forms of entertainment and information that encourage interaction without the complications of interpersonal communication; information without any organic context; and isolation without introspection.

In a world where children’s emotional experiences are increasingly manufactured and often mediated through technology, the Waldorf School’s emphasis upon the body as a vital part of experience and learning is more necessary than ever. Sadly, at least according to the reporting in this article, those benefitting most from the lack of technology in their schools also appear to be among the wealthiest and most privileged. Meanwhile the rest of the nation’s children, whose parents cannot afford the $17,000 a year price tag to attend a Waldorf school, remain the victims of a system whose desire to appease corporate and political interests seems to have overwhelmed their ability to actually teach. As schools in historically underprivileged districts spend their resources in a vain attempt to keep up with the latest technology, they are throwing away perhaps their one chance to offer a real solution to the increasing opportunity gap between the rich and the poor. As technology becomes more efficient and simultaneously more self-evidently easy to use, the real winners will be those who have the deep emotional and imaginative skills to navigate the pitfalls of this new world. Those trained only in the use of technology on the other hand, will likely find themselves its unwitting victims.

Filed Under: Education, Pedagogy, Technology

Being versus becoming bi/multilingual

October 21, 2011 By 2 Comments

In my today’s post I will return to the topic already discussed here: growing up multilingual, the topic personally close to my heart (and to several other fellows e.g. see Agnieszka’s past post Ciao! Bye! Do widzenia! Tschüss!) as I have a daughter who is becoming trilingual.

Yes, the word becoming is focus of my post.

Besides the fact that I ‘live’ the trilingualism of my daughter daily I came across an article Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Languageby Perri Klass , in NYT last week that mentions some of the bonuses of growing up bilingual, and reports on research that further confirms that kids learn language in social interactions rather than from audiotape or TV programs, and an interesting talk at the GC last September by Erika Hoff, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University. I think both of these references are worthwhile of attention.

I am one of those parents of bi/trilingual kids who are “hungry for more information” as Perri Klass, the author of the mentioned NYT article puts it. Given the fact that I am a developmental psychologist (also in becoming) makes the topic even more interesting to me. If one, as a parent of bilingual child is not satisfied with what is known about development of bilingual children, well, try trilingualism. Conducting research with children who grow up as trilingual is quite complicated given the possible combination of languages and the ways how languages at home and outside of home are used and acquired. For instance, questions like: do both parents speak all three languages; what languages do individual parents speak to child and to each other; what are the linguistic and other cultural contexts of the child outside of the family; what three languages is child learning; etc. make any research design complex and complicated even in case if researched children learn the same three languages, because children usually grow up in quite different contexts that makes any comparisons problematic.

To give you an idea of complexity of trilingualism let me briefly describe our family situation. My five and half year old daughter is learning Slovak from me, Portuguese from her Brazilian dad, and English in school, from both of us and in most other cultural contexts. As parents we talk to her in our mother languages, however we speak predominantly in English to each other. Her exposure to English was somewhat limited and indirect before she started school because most of the time we addressed our daughter in either Slovak or Portuguese. Until this month, when my daughter started two and half hour program in Slovak, I was pretty much the only person who talked to her in Slovak on everyday basis. Importantly, she does not hear me speaking Slovak to anybody else, so most of her Slovak vocabulary she acquired is almost exclusively learned from our interactions. (Sometimes I feel that Slovak is our secret language or that I am conducting a real-life experiment on the role of social environment in language development).

On the other hand, her opportunities communicating in Portuguese have been much more frequent (she has a bilingual cousin and aunt who both speak Portuguese, more frequent visits from family from Brazil, and several friends who are also bilingual, and it is quite easy to run into Portuguese speaking kid in the playground in NYC), in sum she has had much more exposure to Portuguese in various context than to Slovak language and culture. Once she started school, English was quickly becoming her focus and dominant language. When she started school her limited English was an issue, after a few months in pre-K maintaining the other two languages became a concern. All these are extremely important and constitutive factors of her language development.

So what is my point about becoming?

Whenever I am to describe my daughter, especially for more formal and institutional audiences such as any educational setting, her ‘trilinguilism’ is one of the first characteristics and “identity descriptors” I refer to because it is such an integral part of who she is. The usual reaction is admiration and praise for her and us as parents, and the vision of her bright future as a person proficient in three (very different) languages. I often try to add something about the fact that she is not quite yet trilingual, rather that she is learning all three languages, which by the way turned out to be quite complicated, complex and not as easy process for her and us as a) we expected it to be; b) is commonly believed, and c) is practiced and approached by educational and many other institutions.

The reaction to any of my references to complexity and difficulty I express regarding the whole process is often quickly and optimistically dismissed by people stating something like “ah, children are like sponges, they learn quickly”.

I am fully aware that my daughter will quite possibly not, and simply cannot, master all three languages equally (regardless her cognitive and any other individual abilities) unless she has an opportunity to engage with each of three languages and cultures with the same intensity, e.g. the most probably she will not learn all school subjects in all three languages and most of her instructions will be limited to one or two languages.

However hard it may be to accept the fact that my daughter might never speak her mother’s mother tongue well enough, I am struggling much more with the myths around multilingualism, or what I call the “linear sponge understanding of human development”.

Despite quite extensive and progressive research on bilingualism, language and identity development of bilingual kids, the common beliefs and practices of educational institutions, and the way they approach bilingualism is as a cumulative process of learning two separate languages, i.e. the language development of these kids simply equals development of monolingual child plus learning another language. This is fully reflected in the way a bi/multilingual child’s language development is assessed, the kid is tested in every language separately and the test results are compared against typical monolingual child language development. The earlier the child is tested in his or her development the more ‘delays’ can be detected. (Commonly, based on parents experience multilingual kids catch up in their language proficiency to monolingual kids by the age of seven or eight.)

This practice might come as a surprise given the fact that researchers do know that bi/multilingual children often start speaking later and this fact is now commonly known, and that learning three or more languages is even more complex and actually represents a different process that learning two languages. Unfortunately, the way things work, the different developmental trajectory of bi- and multilingual children is approached and referred to not simply as different but often as delayed, abnormal and pathological. In case child is to receive any support, e.g. speech therapy, the child has to be diagnosed as disabled, only such diagnosis enables him or her to receive the services and support.

What I consistently find amusing is a disconnect between the general societal admiration and recognition of the benefits (which by the way some are also myths) of being bilingual, and at the same time no or minimal recognition and acknowledgement of the complexity of the process of becoming bilingual. I consistently experience all kinds of judgements, dire lack of openness and flexibility among professionals and institutions, and lack of embracement of the complexity of the process of our (or any other) child becoming multilingual.

No child is simply born bilingual, not even every bilingual child is born and growing up in a bilingual family and their bilingualism is closely tied to their environment outside of the family. The kids can only become bi/multilingual, which takes time and effort and often taking developmental detours or shortcuts, mostly depending on the tools available to them and to their families.

Therefore I was glad to hear from Prof. Erika Hoff, presenting the findings of her research that contradict some common views “that exposure to two languages confuses children and the view children as magical language learners who can acquire two languages as quickly as one”, in another words no sponge kids that follow a blueprint of linear development, (well not even the monolingual ones develop along some linear blueprint). Instead, a complex developmental trajectory that might be quite messy and different from any other kid.

So for now in my discussions about our experience of bringing up a child in trilingual environment I try to explain how being different is quite normal, (mostly through talking about all anomalies).

Filed Under: Language

Finding #ds106radio

October 20, 2011 By

I really dug the DIY Radio for Teaching and Learning session that Mikhail Gershovich organized last night at Baruch College. I’ve been following the evolution of the community that’s emerged around the digital storytelling courses (named ds106) begun at University of Mary Washington and joined by folks all over the world, and have watched with interest as that community has explored the integration of web radio over the past year. But I’ve refrained from jumping in for a number of reasons. First, I’m not much of a joiner. Second, I saw that ds106 radio seemed to have taken over the lives of many of the folks involved, and I simply don’t have time. Third, as a self-diagnosed enthusiasthmatic, I didn’t feel I have the stamina to participate in a movement whose mood generally puts the good vibes in the digital humanities community to shame. Fourth, when confronted with evangelism, which I often find boring, my instinct is to turn the other way. And fifth and by far the most important, I’m not particularly interested in punk, and ds106radio plays a lot of punk.

These reservations aside, I did know from the get that ds106 was on to something interesting and that radio is just a part of that, and last night’s presentation gave me a firmer sense of just what that is. I was reminded last night of the emergence of Found Magazine, which was created by Davy Rothbart, who I attended college (and played a lot of hoop) with. Found collects “found stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, doodles– anything that gives a glimpse into someone else’s life. Anything goes.” Found’s finds reveal the poetry and humanity in the quotidian detritus of every day life. When my wife and I got our first issue of Found, it immediately changed the way we related to our lived environment. Random pieces of paper blowing across the sidewalk had real stories and real life behind. Binding them into a collection made a space for readers to creatively explore and imagine the voids left by the individual artifact’s isolation and abandonment.

I was similarly struck by the way ds106radio has altered the way that Grant Potter, GNA Garcia, Jim Groom, Michael Branson Smith and Mikhail – as well as several others – have integrated the possibilities of web radio into their interactions with the spaces around them. They seem absorbed by the experience of ds106radio, always imagining how to make use of it, constantly thinking of ways to bring what’s around them to the network, and doing so in deeply personalized ways. Grant is focused on creating, expanding, and simplifying the technical capabilities of the experience, drawing upon his ability as a technologist interested in telephony. GNA is an educational psychologist, and her interest in the space seems to revolve around mindfulness and nurturing a sense of community. Mikhail has embraced the role of deejay for its own sake, but has also shown the promise of the medium for capturing oral history and begun to imagine curricular integration around a set of tools like these. Michael has taken the first difficult stab at bringing the ds106 world into the curriculum of a CUNY college over at York, and while he’s made amazing artistic contributions (and to the ds106 ecosystem, he’s also made use of his connections to expand the set of tools ds106ers can draw upon in their audio production and brought #ows on air. And Jim, whose work with ds106 inspired this whole thing, has started to imagine the range of ways that a web radio station might be integrated across the curriculum at UMW.

As much as Jim might recoil in horror at the term, he’s an academic through and through, and in and only in the best sense of the word. After his presentation with Mike Neary and Joss Winn last week, I felt that the MOOCification of ds106 and the attention to the community beyond UWM embedded a implicit critique of the institutional limitations of the university. While I think these awesome projects suggest a dynamic about the nature of change and innovation within higher ed that we would benefit from teasing out better understanding, Jim’s presentations these past two weeks have reiterated to me yet again that more than anything he’s deeply committed to the idea of curricular innovation and evolution using free, open, powerful tools in a way that specifically and systematically fosters digital and networked literacies. Jim wants you to think he’s crazy and unpredictable and unbound, so he references heroin and porn in his presentations. But his work can’t help but reveal that he is in fact something much more radical and profound: an intensely committed educator. (Not that I ever doubted that. But I don’t think I’ve ever written it, and it’s only fair given the millions of keys he’s struck professing his love for me).

Rock on #ds106radio. I’ll likely call mic check at some point. And much more importantly, I’ll be rolling the possibilites of web radio into my thinking about ways educators can stretch, invigorate, and revolutionize the classroom.

If you missed it, here’s the presentation, which lays out with much more passion and clarity than I can what ds106 and ds106radio are:

DIY Web Radio, Part 1 of 2

DIY Web Radio, Part 2 of 2

Filed Under: Art, cac, EdTech, Education

Playing with Communication

October 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I came across the work of Kate Hartman while watching a whole bunch of TED talks in preparation for a semester of teaching communication studies to both college students and high-schoolers.  I was hoping to find presentations that would get my classes excited about the possibilities of oral presentations, both through their content and the quality of the speakers’ delivery.  Ideally, these would be examples of innovative, critical thinking, presented to an audience in a creative way, with enthusiasm and well-utilized visuals aids.

That Kate Hartman’s work is all about communication—with oneself, with others, with nature, with inanimate objects—was so much the better.  Hartman creates what she calls “wearable communications” and is a Professor of Wearable and Mobile Technology at the Ontario College of Art and Design.  Here’s an example of one of her designs, the Muttering Hat, which externalizes the process of thinking and also enables you share it with a friend:

http://www.katehartman.com/projects/mutteringhat/

Kate Hartman's Muttering Hat

I was first struck by the way that her objects make concrete and a little strange (in a Formalist way—as in making us suddenly aware, making visible) the possibilities and challenges of communication and relationship in various contexts.  I like how her designs experiment at the interface of body and communication device, sometimes seeking to fit the device a little more easily to the flesh by making electronics more cushy and comfortable to wear (see her work on “soft and flexible” circuits) and sometimes acknowledging a huge gulf that needs traversing between our bodies and the natural world.  Her sweet, almost tender design for an interface for communicating with glaciers is an example of the later.  She describes the suits she has designed for this project as “intended for awkward introductory glacier encounters…enabling a person to lie prone on the surface of the glacier and give it a hug.” (See “Initial Investigatory Research for Glacier-Human Communication Techniques.”)  Here are some views of her glacier communication device:

http://www.boulderpavement.ca/issue001/glacier-human-communication-techniques/

Hartman's Glacier Communication Suit

All of her designs highlight awkwardness is some way, as she brings into view the weirdness and circuitousness of our attempts to listen to/communicate with other beings and natural things, but also the beauty and the vulnerability of those attempts.  But these works are also tapping into some big issues swirling around right now, like the uneasy integration of technology with nature, or how some scholars are engaged in rethinking the position of the human being in relation to the technological and natural worlds—a project driven by urgent ecological and ethical imperatives.  The more I look at and think about her work, the more I notice how it attempts to facilitate communication between humans and the non-human other by utilizing the newer communication tools, like Twitter, that we’ve become so accustomed to—thus throwing the limits and the possibilities of these tools into relief.  (Three of her works are featured in the current exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, “Talk to Me,” which is all about the ways people and things communicate. You can read here, for example, about the “Botanicalls” project she co-created, in which houseplants can send tweets to their owners when they need to be watered.)

Because of how resonant and current I found the ideas behind her designs, I was fairly surprised, during a leisurely scan of the viewer comments under her TED talk, to find so many viewers dismissing her work as childish, frivolous, and unworthy of the platform the  producers had given her.  Yes, she is kind of a funny, irreverent speaker, but her creations clearly are engaging on multiples levels with contemporary concerns.  So I was left with a few questions, which spurned some further musings about how I teach communications.

Maybe what I was reading in the comments speaks to the difficulty of getting different disciplines talk to each other, and to what happens when someone decides to work through a variety of disciplines—between art and design, technology, and teaching as well.  And perhaps because Hartman is playing around with her concepts, as in really being playful and having a good time about it, it might be harder for some to see the heavier intellectual work behind her explorations.  Hartman herself has spoken about the need to balance enthusiasm and criticalness.  She said in an interview: “I think we need both. It’s really important to lower the barrier for entry to get people involved but that shouldn’t subsume maintaining a sense of criticality in the ways in which we use technology and the ways we view art and design.”  So I’m left wondering: is there a way to create spaces in my Comm. 1010 classroom for both play and critical thought?  I often struggle with wanting to encourage my students to become inquisitive, receptive listeners, to be able to let down some of their filters and be open to radically new or different perspectives.  At the same time, I want to give them the tools to be critical listeners, sharp and adept at evaluating claims and assessing evidence.  Because honestly, I think they need help becoming both (as do I).  But don’t students have to master the forms before they can play with them, push at their edges?  I plan to show Hartman’s talk to both my classes, and not just to mine it for examples of good delivery, or strong argumentation, but also to begin a conversation about how to approach novel concepts with both an open and a discerning mind.

Filed Under: Art, Technology

Don’t Write Like A Cop

October 18, 2011 By 4 Comments

Officer Joe Friday from Dragnet–famous for getting straight to the point:

I teach in the NYPD Leadership program at John Jay College. This job comes with special challenges that other professors do not encounter. For example, my students, all active duty NYPD officers are often asked to work mandatory overtime. This semester between the September 11 10th anniversary, increased activity at the United Nations surrounding Palestine’s efforts to obtain UN membership, and lately Occupy Wall Street, there have been many empty seats.

I walk into the class and begin to tell them about the final assignment and simply start, “Don’t write like a cop, and don’t interview them like a cop.” For this assignment, I tell them, you are anthropologists and historians and not the famed officer Joe Friday.[1] For this assignment we need more than “just the facts ma’am.”

When I tell others that all my students are current police officers, they usually look at me confused not knowing whether or not to feel sorry for me. There is nothing to feel sorry about. I love doing this and the cops are some of the best students I have ever had. I have to admit though, I had no idea what to expect when I agreed to join the program last year. Now, each semester, I teach a roomful of officers who are taking classes to finish their bachelor’s degrees. The program is funded by City Council and the content is multi-cultural, anti-racist and fosters professionalism and respect.

In my course on Ethnicity and Immigration I require the students to do a series of interviews with a recent immigrant, and to write an ethnography or oral history style paper about that person’s immigration experience. This puts all of the readings about waves of immigration, huddled masses and the challenges of integration in the context of one person’s life. However, when I tell them to think like anthropologists, most imagine this:

Ethnography doesn't look like this anymore. Bronislaw Malinkowski. Original Copyright unknown

The NYPD is probably the most diverse police force in the world; many of the officers are recent immigrants themselves and very quickly realize that they are learning about their own families as well as other immigrants. Probably the most surprising thing for me is that so far, in each class there are family members of officers who came to this country illegally, sometimes fathers and mothers who were looking for a better life for their children. Often, the officers remember coming to this country themselves either as children or even as adults. It is inspiring to be able to help these officers connect to their own roots and to see them in the process of making their family’s own “American Dream.”

So far, the assignment has been very successful. Last year students interviewed Mexican landscapers, Korean nail salon employees, police officers from the Caribbean and one particularly ambitious student went to a local home improvement store and tried to pick up a day laborer to interview. While effort (predictably) failed and the man all but fled on foot, the student got a firsthand look at the fear that immigrants, especially undocumented ones feel. Even though NYPD does not enforce federal immigration laws and only reports immigration violations when they are discovered in connection with other criminal activity, the man in the parking lot did not know any of that and saw the well-meaning officer as a threat. The young officer told the class the next week, with slightly hurt feelings, because the man was too afraid to speak to him, even though he was out of uniform and doing it for a class.

So what do I mean when I say “don’t write like a cop?” Besides getting a rise out of the students, it is to get them thinking about different types of writing. Of course, all officers do not write the same. Some are tremendously gifted creative writers. One of my students this semester is a published poet while others write in terse, but clear prose that’s more appropriate for police reports than for a social science class. It is not that this style of writing is “wrong,” it is well-suited to the demands of their careers. However, in order to capture the immigrant’s humanity and convey their difficulties, hopes and dreams a different approach is needed. So once again this semester, twenty of New York’s finest will be asking questions of NYC immigrants not about crime but instead about what is was like coming to America and what the American dream means to them.

[1] Joe Friday of Dragnet never said exactly “Just the facts ma’am.”

Filed Under: New York, Pedagogy, Politics, Writing Instruction

The Politics of Specialized Knowledge

October 17, 2011 By 1 Comment

What are the possible relations between knowledge and power?

On the one hand, it is obvious how specialized knowledges frequently become intertwined with social hierarchies and used to prop up unjust divisions of class, race, and gender, among others. On the other hand, as someone dedicated to the preservation and development of certain fields of knowledge both academic and artistic, I cannot accept any simple equation between power and knowledge.

The idea that power and knowledge are two sides of the same coin has been powerfully articulated by Michel Foucault. Another way to say this, using the language of Pierre Bourdieu, would be that specialized knowledge is a kind of cultural capital, a form of power distinct from but analogous to money. Many of the contributors of Hacking the Academy seem to subscribe to this idea: Understand the political uses of knowledge, and you’ve understood knowledge itself.

Cartoon by Mark Stivers

I don’t agree with this.

Knowledge is political, but it is more than an incarnation of politics. This goes not only for dominant fields of knowledge but also for subjugated knowledge of every kind: neither can be reduced to the power relations that surround them. What then is knowledge, besides power? What is the internal structure of subjugated knowledge? Can such knowledge also be highly specialized and refined? And, on the other hand, can institutionally supported knowledges be extricated from the power that supports them?

In this post, I want to ask about the relationship between areas of knowledge and categories of political identity. In other words, I want to bring together some thoughts on democracy and social justice with some thoughts on epistemology. In doing so, it seems to me that there is an immediate problem: The structure inherently leads to specialization. This is a fundamental characteristic of knowledge and one that works against any easy integration between the impulse to research and the impulse to democratize.

What I mean by specialization is that knowledge is differentially accessible. Knowledge is structured in branching pathways because it is a confrontation with a reality that is not purely invented. Whether this reality is the abstract patterning of mathematics, the detailed records of historical archives, or the physiology of human anatomy, knowledge is exploration and discovery as well as creativity and invention. If you go down one path, you cannot go as far down another.

Drawing by Laura Lee

This means that fields of knowledge have depth. In order to understand advanced algebra, one should know how to count from zero to ten. In order to grasp advanced theoretical arguments, one must learn the vocabulary used in that field. Knowledge makes possible further, more specific, more specialized knowledge. While all knowledge is potentially available, it is not all equally accessible. Knowledge is not like a menu from which you can order any item. It is rather like a territory in which some places are easier to get to than others, given any particular starting point.

If this is true, then we cannot hope to make knowledge democratic in the same way that a society can be democratic. Even as we fight to make education available to everyone, the structure of education entails some degree of specialization. A society can argue in the public sphere over which areas of knowledge should constitute its basic curriculum. But in doing so, it presupposes a “public” built on certain knowledges rather than others. There will always remain areas of specialized knowledge that are not common. Some will be aligned with the powerful and others with the powerless. So the relationship between power and knowledge will always be complex.

At a time when social protest and democracy are receiving new energy and attention through the chain of events that now extends from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, I want to ask about the intersection of political categories and specialized knowledges. A lot of excellent work has been done on intersectionality in politics, for example at the difficult but crucial intersection of feminist and anti-racist mobilization. It seems to me that specialized knowledge is another important piece of this puzzle.

Marya Wethers at Movement Research (photo: Ian Douglas)

This issue came up for me recently when Iele Paloumpis wrote about an evening of Movement Research at Judson Church. Paloumpis writes of being moved by Marya Wethers piece then goes on to criticize the rest of the evening (and the organization in general) for its apparent whiteness. I was reminded of this again when I sat at a meeting of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communications Institute and found myself internally critiquing its whiteness along the same vein. Yet I also found that could not put the Schwartz Institute and Movement Research into quite the same category when it came to this politicized critique.

Failure to diversify is a serious charge that can be applied to countless institutions ranging from Hollywood to the United States Senate. My goal here is not to interrogate either the Schwartz Institute or Movement Research on their particular successes, failures, or histories, but to draw attention to the politics of knowledge as it plays out in certain contexts of which these are two examples close to me personally. To begin with, I want to acknowledge that every successful contemporary institution has its own unique history necessarily tied to institutional power and that none can escape being more or less imbricated in the racist history of the United States.

What interests me here is that these two institutions are explicitly defined by their support of a particular field of knowledge: “movement” in one case and “communications” in the other. The Schwartz Institute draws its fellows from the CUNY doctoral pool, which means it reflects the demographics of doctoral students rather than undergraduates. And Movement Research, with its unique and in many ways politically radical history linked to avant-garde dance, likewise represents a specific community. Both communities tend strongly towards leftist politics while also depending on a significant degree of economic privilege to sustain themselves.

Ben Spatz at Movement Research (photo by Ian Douglas)

I am part of both communities and both organizations. I was one of the artists included in what Paloumpis called the “list of white choreographers” that made up the rest of that evening of Movement Research. And while I don’t mind being pointed to as an example of racial privilege, what was missing for me in Paloumpis’s analysis was the mission of Movement Research and what exactly it successfully represents. This is what brings me to the question of specialized knowledge.

At this point I can only offer a series of questions:

  • How should we think about the intersectionality between what are commonly called “identity” categories (race, gender, class — but also size, age, religion…) and what are more often thought of as fields of knowledge or craft (dance, movement, writing, communications — but also math, science, literature…)?
  • Is it possible to bring something to the ongoing and always controversial discussion of curriculum and pedagogy by approaching areas of knowledge as political (or politicizable) communities that intersect with those of “identity”?
  • For example, could the conversation about English literature — how to define the field coherently while working against the legacies of imperialism — benefit from some of the critical tools put forth by the analysis of political intersectionality?

I do not mean to suggest that we should simply equate having specialized knowledge with being part of an identity group or social class. That would be as wrong-headed as trying to develop equivalencies between different axes of oppression. The value of intersectionality is that it views such axes as a distinct dimension, each adding an irreducible layer of complexity to any given issue. It is difficult enough to analyze any given event (or book, or advertisement) in terms of its intersecting politics of gender, race, and class. What happens if we add the question of specialized knowledges to this analysis?

Map of intersecting identities from CALCASA

If I feel that Movement Research deserves less censure than the Schwartz Institute for its visible whiteness, this is because I believe the field of dance/movement (and especially experimental dance/movement) is far more marginal and endangered in our society than that of communications, especially when the latter is tied to business education. In fact, there is some common ground between them, as both focus on embodiment as a medium of communication. But there is also a difference between the two fields: one that has much to do with power but which is not simply reducible to any other political category. In this case, the axis of power I am talking about is not one of gender, race, class, or any conventional category of politicized identity. It is about different kinds of knowledge and which knowledges are considered important or unimportant in a given society.

Again, this is not to deny the importance of bringing to bear on such organizations a critique that examines injustice across the categories of political identity. Obviously, the question of which fields of knowledge are subsidized is profoundly linked to the question of which communities hold power. But the two questions are not identical.

It is difficult to speak about knowledge and politics in the same breath. From the perspective of politics, specialized knowledge can look like an elitist ruse; while from the perspective of research, politics can look like a distraction. This is the case not only for established academic disciplines of specialized knowledges, like particle physics or medieval history, but also for marginalized knowledges of all kinds. Even if one has no institutional support to pursue one’s research, by framing it as research one already takes a step away from a purely political mobilization that would demand more resources for reasons of social justice. Indeed, this may be one way to complicate the dilemma faced by political movements in defining their constituencies without relying on an essentialism that is ultimately counter-productive.

Boondocks cartoon by Aaron McGruder

To conclude: Although institutions that support fields of knowledge should be called out on their social politics, it seems to me that such critiques might also benefit from a more complex politics of knowledge, one that understands knowledge and power as interwoven but distinct. After all, even an utterly tyrannical power structure can harbor valuable knowledge, including some that may one day prove essential precisely to those people who are mobilized against the tyrannical or unjust institutions that helped to develop it. An obvious example is the use of social media and cellphones to organize democratic protests — but can’t the same thing be said about knowledge in other areas, including movement and communication?

If nothing else, I hope that I have shown here that knowledge is not equivalent to power, even if the question of which knowledges receive institutional support is always a political one. It seems to me that working on this paradox is a crucial and defining task for many institutions both within and beyond academia.

Filed Under: Art, BLSCI, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, CUNY, Education, edupunk, Gender, Higher Education, New York, Non-verbal Communication, Pedagogy, Politics, Social Media, To Ponder
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