Tag Archive for ‘Baruch-College’ at cac.ophony.org

Tag Archive for 'Baruch-College'

Irresistible Prompts: Engineering Participation

Published

on May 11, 2010

in Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, CUNY and EdTech

. 2 Comments

In early April, Luke Waltzer wrote a post introducing Performing Diasporas: Identities in Motion, an initiative that seeks to raise the profile of the Baruch Performing Arts Center and to infuse the performing arts into the curriculum. To this end, artists-in-residence Maya Lilly, Randy Weston, and Mahayana Landowne will lead a series of workshops for incoming students that interrogate issues of culture and identity in the context of globalization and late capitalism.

This is where Blogs@Baruch enters the picture. I joined Luke in a training session to introduce WordPress to the 2010 peer mentors, each of whom will lead a section of Freshman Seminar come September. Before our session with the peer mentors, we discussed some of the high and low points of the 2009 blogging season in Freshman Seminar. It should be said at the outset that Blogs@Baruch’s support of Freshman Seminar was amazingly successful in 2009 especially in light of the limited time for planning. Blogs@Baruch supported 60 section blogs with 20 students a week for a total of 1200 freshman bloggers, each of whom were tasked with writing six blog posts over the course of the semester, one after each of the required workshops.

But feedback from the peer mentors indicated that buy-in was low among freshmen. Last year’s peer mentors expressed frustration at having to chase after freshmen and repeatedly remind them to complete their blogging assignments. They also told us that the blogging assignments themselves left something to be desired, and that their procedural nature (to report back on the workshop just attended) tended to put a damper on students’ enthusiasm for the task. And finally, the peer mentors expressed a desire to customize the look of the section blogs.

We took each of these critiques seriously and decided to rethink the approach of Blogs@Baruch to Freshman Seminar in light of the concerns raised by peer mentors. Luke already had plays to open up the WordPress blogging environment, including giving more control to peer mentors over theme selection and plug-in activation, and incorporating social networking functionality through BuddyPress to create a more networked and collegial environment for peer mentors and first year students alike. Luke invited me to join the team that oversees Freshman Seminar to help him address the second critique, that is, to rethink the role of blogging in the Freshman Seminar curriculum. And so last Friday we collaboratively facilitated two sessions with peer mentors, part of which was a brainstorming session to develop more compelling blog post prompts.

photo credit: everdred

The blog post prompts that follow invite students to reflect on the processes of identity construction through various lenses. In different ways, these blog post prompts encourage students to integrate online, social, and multimedia tools into their student identities, and to consider how aspects of their personal history can inform and ultimately enrich their academic work. If they seem repetitive, that’s because they are. Students are actually not required to complete any of them — which is a whole different issue — but in any case, we are hoping to entice them to do some. The idea is to make the blog post prompts so interesting that students feel compelled to do them!

This is what we’ve come up with so far:

1. If you were an iPhone app, which one would be you and why?

2. Use Grooveshark to make a playlist, a soundtrack for your life, and write a blog post explaining the significance of each song.

3. Cheap eats: Write a restaurant review of a inexpensive lunch spot in the Baruch area or around where you live. Include a photograph of the food.

4. Audit your Facebook account, and write about it; OR Google yourself, and share what’s true and what’s not.

5. Pick a stereotype that you think you embody and expand upon, shatter, or embrace it.

6. Consumer identities: What are the five most important brands that you use throughout the day? Why do you think you are drawn to these brands.

7. Choose a cartoon character that is in some way like you, post a picture or a video of this character, and write a blog post explaining your reasoning.

8. Using Paint or a similar program, paint how you see yourself, and post it with an explanation.

9. Record everything you eat in a day and share it. Reflect on what this reveals about your culture and identity.

10. Take photos or record a video of your commute to school. Describe the various spaces you pass through during this process. For instance you might compare the experience of being on the street in your neighborhood, versus being on the bus or the train, versus at Baruch. What stands out to you?

11. Find images related to your heritage on Flickr, and write a blog post explaining their significance.

12. Write a post about your favorite genre of art, and share an example.

13. Take and share a photo of something at Baruch that doesn’t work OR of some ironically defaced signage in the city at large.

14. If you had $1m and had to give it to a charity, which and why? OR Respond to an open ended, critical thinking philosophical/ethical question, like for example: Is it acceptable to lie under certain circumstances?

15. Search for your name or an idea about you on flickr, and post the first photo that comes up. Compare it to a photo that you think more resembles you.

I plan to revise this list of prompts based on the feedback of the ever-supportive edtech community at CUNY and beyond. Any suggestions? Help me make these prompts irresistible!

Blogs@Baruch Semester in Review: Part Four, Extra-Curricular Blogging

Published

Luke

on December 17, 2009

in Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education and Technology

. 0 Comments

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 Semester in Review: Part Three, Course Blogging

Published

Luke

on December 16, 2009

in Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Computer Mediated Instruction, EdTech, Faculty Development, Liberal Arts, Literacy, Technology, Uncategorized and edupunk

. 2 Comments

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:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcU6_WH6mVI[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVXa_MM19-w[/youtube]

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!

Freshbloggers

Published

Luke

on September 24, 2009

in Baruch College, Higher Education, Online Learning, Pedagogy, Syndicated Content and Web 2.0

. 10 Comments

This semester, we’re managing our largest lift on Blogs@Baruch yet. In addition to an increasing variety of projects that I’ll blog about in the coming weeks, every Freshman Seminar at Baruch currently is blogging. That’s roughly 60 sections, populated by over 1200 students.

Baruch Freshmen at Convocation, September 2009. Click to see photo in its original location.

Yowser.

Each Seminar is directed by a Peer Mentor, a talented upper level Baruch student responsible for helping newcomers adjust to life at Baruch. The seminars meet every other week, and Freshpersons are required to attend lectures, panels, exhibits, seminars, and trainings, distributed across six “enrichment” areas over the course of the term. Then they’re supposed to blog about their experiences, and discuss them when they meet with their classmates.

Launching the project was a bit of bear, as we had to create the blogs, get the users registered, tie the whole deal together, and give some training to the Peer Mentors, who are crucial to the project. Ultimately, I created a custom theme (built on Carrington Blog), with certain core components to which each section would have access– a List of Seminars and Peer Mentors, a Guide to Blogging for Freshmen (produced by the Office of Student Affairs, who directs FRO), a description of the six enrichment areas, and a Google Calendar that displays upcoming events. I then created a Mother Blog, which syndicates posts from across the sixty sections of FRO, using the FeedWordPress plugin. The Mother Blog collects and stores all of the posts in one place, allowing faculty and administrators to look in on the writing that’s happening in FRO. Students are thus contributing to small discussions in their seminars, and also to a broader discussion among all Freshmen.

Thus far, they’ve been writing quite willingly. In the fewer than three weeks since this thing was launched, we’ve aggregated about 900 posts; at the pace we’re going, we should reach well more than 4000 unique posts by the end of the semester. That doesn’t even begin to address the commenting, which has varied in intensity across the individual blogs. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to mirror comments between the original location of the post and the space where it is republished… if we did, and we hope to be able to do that soon, the level of dynamism would increase.

Needless to say, we’re looking at an awful lot of writing, and we’re trying to make sense of it in a few ways. We’ve created categories on the Mother Blog for each of the six enrichment areas so that posts directly pertaining to them can be easily sorted. This will allow the two administrators who oversee FRO– Mark Spergel, the Director of Student Orientation and Freshman Year Incentive, and Shadia Sachedina, the Associate Director of Student Life– to get student perspectives on the wide range of extra-curricular programs the school offers. Further, simple searches will allow certain segments of the Baruch community to see what students are saying about them. For instance, many of the early posts offered student perspective on tours of the library. Our librarians have already begun searching for “library” and “library tour” on the FRO blog to read student responses. Several blog posts have engaged Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, the Freshman text.

Other searches hold the potential to help identify students with like interests: “photography,” “history,” and “football” all offer returns. Such a use of the FRO Mother Blog suggests another function that this project can play, perhaps more effectively in future iterations: social networking. As a commuter campus, we constantly struggle to help our students see themselves as part of a community, and FRO attempts to address that tension. Integrating Blogs@Baruch into FRO makes that attempt much stronger, as students can more easily find, connect, and engage with their classmates through our platform. Next year, I’d love to get BuddyPress working in this project to foreground the social networking component… but, one step at a time.

At the end of the term, we’ll have, easily collected and archived, multiple writing samples from the majority of incoming students. With some more thinking and organization, this holds great potential for assessment, integration into writing instruction, early intervention, and assistance for ESL students. Ultimately, this project allows us the opportunity to further the core missions of Blogs@Baruch: increasing the amount and variety of writing that our students do, and nurturing critical thinking about the use of digital tools throughout the Baruch College community. Given the hectic nature of our launch this year, we weren’t able to spend enough time thinking collectively about the general education opportunities embedded in this project. I had argued that we should do a pilot with 20% of the sections so that we could be sure to more closely support our users and think more intensively about the implications of what we’re doing, but for various reasons, a small-scale pilot wasn’t feasible. But when we do this again, we know that the canvas works, what the challenges are in the mechanics of the thing, and how to improve our planning. We’ll be able to make a more significant investment in helping the Peer Mentors better understand the possibilities and implications of doing college work on the open web, crucial knowledge that they can then pass on to all Freshpersons.

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