Talons: A Case Study in DIY Educational Technology

June 17, 2011 By 2 Comments

On June 9, 2011, students in the music program at Gleneagle Secondary School, a high school in Vancouver suburb Coquitam, BC, played its spring concert to a packed house in a 450 seat auditorium. A first in Gleneagle history, the performance was broadcast live over Internet radio to listeners all over the world. And while  that might sound like a huge undertaking requiring serious AV and IT infrastructure, it was not. Not at all. In a brilliant feat of do-it-yourself EdTech (or what some folks might have once called edupunk), the concert was streamed live by Bryan Jackson, a Music and English teacher in the school’s TALONS program, and graduating senior Olga Belikov, with a Macbook, some free software and a USB microphone. That’s it. That’s all it took to broadcast the spring concert to anyone anywhere who wanted to hear it. And it sounded great.

Gleneagle’s Principal was aware of what was going on but wasn’t entirely clear on the details. During one point in the concert, he  walked backstage where Bryan explained all the moving parts: the unremarkable laptop and microphone, the free software, the web radio station (DS106Radio — read about it in my last post and here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), how he and Olga used Twitter to build a live audience of listeners from from all over the US and Canada, and  that the broadcast was being recorded and would be posted for posterity to Soundcloud, a free audio sharing site, so that anyone in the Gleneagle community or anyone else anywhere could listen to and respond to any part of the performance. Bryan also explained how he had been using various other social media tools at Gleneagle including YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, blogs, and web radio to enhance lessons, to share performances, and to communicate with students and colleagues. His Principal was duly impressed. The administration had been aware of and supported Bryan’s and other teachers’ use of social media but had never up to this point fully engaged their potential to increase engagement, promote programs, and share and interact with parents, teachers, students, and district administrators or anyone else. While they had an inkling of what teachers were doing with free web tools, this broadcast, its recording, and the new interest at the school in webcasting were, according to Bryan, probably the first tangible outcomes of Gleneagle teachers’ experiments with creating and sharing on the web. Here is a one minute audio clip of Bryan describing the Principal’s visit backstage:

Bryan Jackson on Broadcasting the Spring Concert

I love the irony here: Bryan tells us that he was able to experiment with various social media and web publishing tools and explore how their use might benefit his program and school only because one of the school’s IT people gave him his computer’s administrative password, which he really wasn’t supposed to have. It’s fairly common practice for IT departments in companies and educational institutions to withhold admin access to computers from end users for fear that they will go messing where they shouldn’t and damage the computer, contract a virus, install unauthorized software, or do things on their machines of which the IT department or the institution does not approve. This also ensures that end users have to rely upon IT personnel to perform simple maintenance tasks, modify configurations, and to update or install software. This is the traditional model where IT is in control of who has access and who does not while the end users are disempowered and must rely upon IT to make any changes to their machines. Here’s a wonderful example of a teacher who was trusted with full access to his computer and was able to use it to break new ground without hinderances imposed from above. When creative teachers have the latitude to experiment with the technology that’s readily available to them, wonderful things can happen. If there was ever an argument in favor of rethinking the model of how and to whom administrative access is granted at educational institutions, this is it.

I don’t know much about the general feeling at Gleneagle toward the privacy and security implications of web publishing and social media in instruction and for promotional purposes so I can’t speak to that. But it seems to me that, generally, there’s still quite a bit of trepidation about such things among educators. That trepidation, I’ll argue, tends to grow out of 20th Century notions of public exposure and our relationship with mass media and their roles in our lives. Privacy and security are certainly real concerns (FERPA exists for a reason), but it does appear that the discourse around them is often animated by outdated ideas about the production and consumption of media. It used to be that if you appeared on TV or radio, or in print, you had done or were involved in something a small group of editors and producers felt it was their imperative to broadcast. It had to be fairly remarkable, for good or for ill, to make the papers. Having your image or story broadcast to the world via a mass medium like radio or television, was special — something fairly unusual in the “look, Mom, I’m on TV!” sort of a way, unless you were among the relatively few who made a living in front of a camera or microphone.

Now, when anyone can shoot a video on a mobile phone and upload it immediately to YouTube, where it can potentially be seen by thousands, if not millions of people within just a few days, there’s a real banality to this sort of exposure. Most of our students share their lives on the internet in some way  every day. More and more of them live their lives in both physical and virtual space — this is something that those of us in their 30s and 40s who teach and administer programs are just now getting our heads around. Whats more, the means of media production, it has been said again and again by new media thinkers like Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky and a host of others, are now in the hands of everyday people, no longer just media professionals. With relatively little effort and technical expertise, anyone can publish to the web. Anyone can broadcast audio or video to the internet on a mobile phone and an application that costs almost nothing. Heck, a bunch of us edtechhers built an open community radio station out of nothing more than a $25/mo server and a desire to play radio DJ.

Bryan Jackson and his colleagues at Gleneagle understand this well and are making amazing use of it. Thanks to a leadership that seems to appreciate the possibility the new media order offers educators, they have been empowered to use a combination of social media to do on their own what once was the province of AV professionals and marketing departments and required substantial infrastructure. While we’re by now used to seeing inklings of this sort of thing on the post-secondary level, it is encouraging and inspiring to see in happen in K-12. Bravo, Gleneagle Music! Bravo!

[This post is cross posted at my personal blog, thisevilempire.com]

Filed Under: Audience, Computer Mediated Instruction, EdTech, Education, edupunk, Internet, Media, Music, Social Media, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Careful What You Ask For

April 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment
As a strangely apropos segue from my previous post about the potential dwindling of long-form writing assignments, I am happy to announce an upcoming event at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, organized by Linell and myself. We have invited Dr. Ken Nielsen to spend the afternoon with us in an interactive workshop session that attempts to tie together questions of designing writing assignments and communication-intensive pedagogy. Can we have it all? Can we have it all without running ourselves ragged?

Dr. Nielsen will be returning to his old stomping grounds for this special event; he is a proud graduate of the CUNY Graduate Center’s PhD program in Theatre, and a former Assistant Director of Writing at Queens College. He currently teaches in the Writing Program at Princeton University. We hope you can join us for an afternoon of questioning and strategy sharing.

Careful What You Ask For:  Designing Efficient Writing Assignments for Communication-Intensive Courses

Wednesday, April 13, 3-4:30pm, 137 East 25th Street, Room 323

Writing assignments are one crucial way to manage the quality of writing instruction in classes that are supposed to teach both content and communication skills. By carefully designing assignments of varying degrees of difficulty—from simple low-stakes in-class writing to the final research essay—and implementing them throughout the semester, writing becomes not simply a mode of evaluation but of learning. When we analyze writing assignments from across the curriculum it often becomes clear that the reason our students are not performing to their fullest capability is partly due to the assignments they are given. The old warning to be “careful what you ask for, because you may end up getting it,” will guide us as we discuss our own writing assignments, balancing and incorporating writing with oral communication, and using the assignments strategically to balance our own workload.

Presented by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute and led by Dr. Ken Nielsen, Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program, this hands-on workshop will address best practices in writing assignment design. Participants are encouraged to bring a copy of one of their writing assignments to this workshop.

Tea and refreshments will be served. Adjunct faculty will be paid at the non-teaching rate for their participation.

RSVP by email to hillary.miller [at] baruch.cuny.edu

Presenter

Ken Nielsen, lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program, has taught communication-intensive theater classes at Baruch College, writing-intensive American literature and composition classes at Queens College, and is currently teaching his interdisciplinary writing seminar, “Secrets and Confessions,” at Princeton University. Nielsen was previously the Assistant Director of Writing at Queens College.

Filed Under: Baruch College, BLSCI, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Faculty Development, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction Tagged With: , , , , ,

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s course?

May 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

coney island // astroland
Creative Commons License photo credit: mandyxclear

Each year, as the spring semester comes to an end, my thoughts inevitably turn to the whims of summer in New York City: long bike rides to Coney Island, rooftop parties and, unfortunately, two-and-a-half hours in a classroom at least three days a week. I am a summer adjunct!

It might seem counter-intuitive to the whole concept of, you know, “enjoying your summer,” but I actually kind of look forward to my summer courses. The main difference, of course, is one of time: In the summer, you only spend five weeks with your students, though the actual class time is usually double that of fall/spring classes. This means that the class becomes effectively super-concentrated; material must be adjusted to fit the new time parameters, and this can often present something of a challenge. After all, two-and-a-half hours is a long time! Without diversifying classroom activities, the experience is going to be grueling for everyone involved.

One of the reasons I enjoy the summer schedule is because of the longer class time, which I find allows me much more room to experiment, improvise, and develop the pedagogical techniques I’ve encountered as a Writing Fellow at Baruch. While I might not have time to do so in the fall or spring, in the summer I feel freer to break my students into groups and have them work on oral presentations together, or to show brief movie clips and “scaffold” low stakes writing assignments from the discussion that ensues (an example can be found here). Either way, the extended class time provides an opportunity to practice new teaching methodologies while staving off the beasts of boredom and exhaustion.

In contrast to the longer class time, the summer session itself is exceedingly brief. How much can a student really absorb in only five weeks? Should a teacher automatically reduce the scope of a class during summer sessions? Since I teach American history, does this mean that I should cut out a few decades, to have the class cover less material in the interest of time? There are of course, different philosophies on this, but I would like to suggest that “covering less material” is not necessarily the best solution to the five-week course problem.

In fact, just as the longer class time provides room to experiment, the shorter overall semester can also be employed to distinct pedagogical advantage. This summer I am teaching a course on the Vietnam War, whose fall and spring permutations contain a much wider “survey-style” approach to all the varied aspects of the era. I plan to have the summer version focus on just a few aspects of the war, in much greater detail, hoping that the students will have an equivalently useful experience through their deeper engagement with smaller bits of material. This way, I can shape the course to the imperatives of the summer schedule without (hopefully) shorting students in the process.

What are your tips for getting through the summer?

Filed Under: CUNY, teaching Tagged With: ,

in defense of traditional pedagogy (?)

April 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I’m aware that many forward-thinking educators, particularly those of the WAC-oriented ilk, take a critical, if not perhaps disdainful, view of the standard compare-contrast essay. I’m actually not sure what the specific criticisms are, and am hoping this post will spark more discussion about this genre’s merits and problems.

I strongly feel that the compare-contrast essay is, or can be, an excellent way for students to practice, hone, and demonstrate analytic skills. This essay requires them to show mastery and comprehension of material, a grasp of the larger, more abstract concepts, an understanding of the relationship between these concepts, and a recognition of the significance of these similarities and differences.

Apples & Oranges - They Don't Compare
Creative Commons License photo credit: TheBusyBrain

That said, I am often very disappointed in the work that students submit in response to this type of assignment. The majority lack a clear thesis statement, suffer from weak overall organization, show a difficulty identifying the authors’ thesis, struggle with concise yet relevant summaries, and most significantly, seem to break down when it comes to articulating the relationship between concepts. I work hard to help my students make connections between readings, to see multiple perspectives, to understand that every thesis has a counter-thesis, and I’m not sure to what extent I see these efforts pay off in their written work.

Having said that, I ask, am I barking up the wrong tree, clinging to this type of assignment? Is there a better way to help students develop stronger reading, writing, and thinking skills? Perhaps there are ways of framing the traditional assignment that better facilitate the type of end product I am expecting?

(I did use an involved in-class writing assignment today, that was then used for small group work, and which lead to an involved class discussion about relationships between four readings. I think this was successful; however, I’m not sure how that work will be reflected in their formal written assignments.)
Cakewalk Plasma CakeWalk Home Studio Sonar 4 Producer Edition Cakewalk Project 5

Filed Under: Pedagogy, teaching, Writing Instruction Tagged With:

Metaphor for Baruch: A Beehive

March 1, 2010 By 2 Comments

This week I sat in for a professor in her Managerial Communication course, and I taught a class on the classical theorists of organizational and scientific management. As the overall metaphor for these early theories is a machine I designed an exercise for the students using metaphors to conceptualize various companies and work related systems. I got this idea from Gareth Morgan’s book, Images of an Organization, which looks at the use of metaphor as a conceptual tool to understand and study organizations. Much of Gareth Morgan’s work is in the use of creative imagery combined with organizational theory to better understand modern management structures.

After having discussed the classical theory approach with the students and asking them to examine why the machine was the metaphor used to describe these theories, I then asked them to come up with a metaphor for Baruch College. The first metaphor they shared was a beehive.  The students thought that there was a Queen Bee, who directed everything at Baruch though nobody really knew who that was. The students and the faculty were all of the busy worker bees that came and went, offering their work up to the hive at all times. The whole class, myself included, thought this metaphor worked well for conceptualizing Baruch. I then asked the students what did this beehive produce, what was Baruch’s main production? With not much enthusiasm, one student answered ” well..um… I guess it is knowledge or something like that” I couldn’t stop from laughing out loud. The next metaphor was a labyrinth…

Filed Under: teaching Tagged With:

How blunt is too blunt?

February 24, 2010 By 4 Comments

Untitled
Creative Commons License photo credit: morgan childers

A professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway, recently sent an email that has gone viral, due largely to its unique approach in response to a student’s particularly obnoxious behavior.  The student, who remains anonymous, had arrived an hour late to class and been denied admission, and later emailed the professor to explain that he was late because he had been “sampling” different classes, the last of which was Professor Galloway’s, and that it was within his rights to explore different options at the beginning of the semester.

Galloway’s response has caught attention because of his brutal honesty in addressing what he sees as the student’s overall functional weaknesses.   In short, he takes him down a few notches.  You can read the full exchange here, but I wanted to focus on a specific piece of Galloway’s final advice:

“Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance…these are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential which, by virtue of you being admitted  to Stern, you must have in spades. It’s not too late xxxx…”

Opinion on the web seems split, mainly centered on Galloway’s known personality quirks.  The entire controversy, though, provides an opportunity to think about the appropriate tone and level of “honesty” in student-teacher communications.  As an adjunct at Baruch for five years, I’ve certainly felt the occasional urge to respond to particularly ridiculous requests with a similar sense of disbelief.  Galloway’s message, however, takes the impulse a step further, directly and personally addressing what he perceives to be the student’s overall failures.  His main point seems to be that, by exhibiting such a lack of decorum, the student is effectively handicapping himself, making it impossible to succeed in college or the larger world.

I find Galloway’s response generally appropriate considering the student’s rather arrogant assumption that “sampling” courses (by walking in and out of several classes mid-lecture) was a reasonable behavior.  His most memorable advice (“get your shit together”), while perhaps obscene, communicates an underlying truth.  If the student wishes to succeed in the business world, his presumed career direction, he will have to drastically adjust the attitude and expectations reflected in his brief interaction with Professor Galloway.

On the other hand, is it right to draw larger conclusions about a student’s chances of future success from one embarrassing incident?  Further, is it even within a professor’s rights or responsibilities to dole out such “advice” at all?  How can we effectively steer our students toward more appropriate and “successful” behavior without being too harsh or judgmental?

Filed Under: Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication Tagged With: ,

Studio H

October 8, 2009 By 1 Comment

Professor Vera Haller gave Tom and me a tour of the Baruch Journalism Department’s spanking new Studio H yesterday. We were blown away. The room, made possible by a generous donation from the Harnisch Foundation (overseen by Baruch graduate William Harnisch, class of 1968, and his wife Ruth Ann) provides a space for our talented journalism instructors to explore the future of the field with their students.

studioh

The room features 24 new large screen iMacs, loaded with the latest productivity software. A quarter of the machines have dv-decks, a dozen have microphones, all have nice Sony headphones, and students can arrange to borrow HD cameras for their assignments. The faculty workstation controls a beautiful projector and two flat panel displays, which can be tuned show cable news or the screen of any computer. JBL speakers in the ceiling provide terrific sound.

What struck Tom and I most, however, was how the space was laid out, with workstations on the exterior and a seminar table in the middle. Talia’s post last week wondered about the impact of computers on the writing classroom. Space was conceived in Studio H in such a way that everyone can see what everyone else is doing… there’s simply no hiding. The class can move from the workstations to the table for discussions, editing sessions, or workshops. This flexible approach to classroom design is terrific, and reflects the goal of the Journalism Department to create a newsroom-like atmosphere for the students.

In a conversation with Vera, we imagined an assignment where students could watch a YouTube clip of a breaking news story — a press conference, perhaps — and then attack it like a newsroom would on deadline. This is not a new assignment idea, but Studio H allows faculty members to more realistically mimic the conditions of a news room, with noise, movement, openness, connectivity, chaos, and even a large digital clock counting down to deadline. What a great example of how space can create pedagogical opportunity.

Congrats to the Baruch Journalism Department and its students on this wonderful new addition. We have a long history of supporting the department’s blogging and multimedia reporting initiatives, and their students do fantastic work. We look forward to seeing and helping publish the work that Studio H helps makes possible.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Higher Education, Writing Instruction Tagged With: ,

Confronting Tom Cruise in the Classroom

September 15, 2009 By 5 Comments

The Cruiser
Creative Commons License photo credit: xrrr

My course on the history of the Vietnam War necessarily contains a great deal of visual media, most often in the form of newsreel footage and clips from documentaries. However, since the Vietnam War has inspired dozens of fictional Hollywood films, I also have students watch clips from several of the most canonical films on the subject.  As any instructor knows, showing a “movie” in class has its advantages and pitfalls, the latter most often expressed in a sort of collective disengagement from an academic mindset, as students naturally fall into the more passive role of viewer.  How do we break through that passivity and get students to engage critically when watching a form of media that they are accustomed to consuming as entertainment?

Oliver Stone‘s 1989 film Born on the Fourth of July often ends up being a critical text in my course, simply because the narrative (and the ways that director Oliver Stone presents that narrative) engages some of the war’s most fundamental historical issues. The film also, however, stars Tom Cruise, a celebrity with a considerable amount of pop cultural baggage whose name often elicits rounds of giggling from students.  Since my goal is to avoid having them fall into the passive receiver role of pop culture consumers, I find it is useful to play along with the jokes for a bit before subtly steering the discussion into more “academic” areas.  In a matter of  five minutes, a joke about Cruise jumping on the couch on Oprah can become a conversation about  American male celebrities, which leads us to John Wayne, which leads into issues of American masculinity and directly into the critical aspects of the film we are about to watch.

Despite these pre-watching efforts though, students often can’t help but get caught up in what they are watching, particularly when it takes the form, essentially, of an action film.  This is why I think it is vital to avoid turning on the movie and letting it run for more than five minutes at a time.  After all, if you are asking students to consume this text in a different way than they are used to,  it is important that you present the text in a different way.  One way that I found effective is to break the film up into tiny clips that are watched and then written about (or discussed) in low stakes exercises.  This way, students are constantly forced out of the role of viewer and back into their role as critical thinkers approaching a text.  Even if that text includes Tom Cruise and machine guns.

Here’s a quick clip from another Oliver Stone film, Platoon (1986), followed by an example of the kind of free writing prompt that I have found useful for stimulating discussion and leading into more complex writing assignments.  By limiting the viewing experience to this short scene, one that has been selected carefully for its density of critical material, I hope to focus the students’ attention on just a few important elements.  As you can see from watching the clip and reading the prompt below, assignments like this contain more than enough historical, sociological, and ethical issues to keep everyone busy and, more importantly, to demonstrate how to begin unpacking the complex mechanics underlying popular culture:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_dNxlnFKA&feature=related[/youtube]

Exercise

The character Barnes is presented as the ultimate cynical warrior, immune even to death, and his character is contrasted with Taylor and Elias, who are ostensibly “good” warriors.  What makes a soldier “good” or “bad” in the context of this scene?

Barnes’ statement “there’s the way things ought to be, and the way things are” seems to apply to the Vietnam War and history in general.  Do you agree with his attitude?  Why or why not?

Filed Under: Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy Tagged With: , ,

Gardner Teaches, Part I

May 6, 2009 By 7 Comments

This is the first in a series of posts presenting video from our 9th Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication-Intensive Instruction.

We’re going to start off with four videos (we’ll publish them over the next four days) from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World.”

What I love about this particular workshop is the generous balance in Gardner’s approach to Web 2.0: he talks with equal interest about the inanity present in much online conversation and the new implications for connectedness offered by the Web 2.0 world. Unlike many thinkers who’ve chimed in on communication in a Web 2.0 world, he sees it as neither a panacea or a harbinger of doom. His interest is in exploring the broad, rich ideas generated by these new methods of communication, and in generating more questions than answers.

We were so fortunate to have Gardner play such a significant role in our Symposium for the second straight year. His enthusiasm was infectious, and his social note taking was prodigious.

In this first segment, Gardner and the attendees of his workshop explore Twistori and Twittervision, two Twitter apps that offer provocative examples of how “connectedness” is changing in the Web 2.0 world. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to catch the beginning of this workshop; we pick things up a few minutes in, and this first video is a shade under 20 minutes long.

Filed Under: Symposium, Technology, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , ,