Monthly Archives: May 2010

Lakers vs. (yawn) Celtics

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The Lakers will meet the Celtics in the NBA Finals starting Thursday. I come at the Lakers-Celtics rivalry from a deeply personal place. Earvin Johnson grew up about a mile from where I was raised, and was slotted to go to the high school I attended until a bussing initiative sent him across town to Everett High School. For most folks, going from being a West-side Winner to being a South-side Sucker would have been devastating, and Earvin has stated that he was initially pretty bummed out about it. But he was a winner wherever he went, and soon led the Vikings to a state championship, picked up the nickname “Magic,” and became the hottest basketball recruit in the country. He signed with hometown Michigan State, and my parents, like so many other locals, immediately purchased seasons tickets to watch Magic lead Jud Heathcote’s Spartans at Jenison Fieldhouse.

I was a pup at the time, and my memories of MSU’s run to the 1979 National Championship over Larry Bird and Indiana State are fuzzy at best. I remember everyone was happy, and to this day I don’t recall a time before I was conscious of Magic. In 1980 I was somewhat conscious of Larry Bird, too. When he became a Celtic, though, I remember being confused that there had been a black guy who wore number 33 in green and white and whose poster was on my bedroom wall who dominated on the court, and then the following year there was a white guy who wore number 33 in green and white and dominated on the court.

Magic was a major a presence in 1980s Lansing, from the “Magic Johnson Donuts” at local bakery chain Quality Dairy (gold frosting with a purple “32″ drawn on top), to the softball team he played for in the summer that would draw hundreds of spectators, to the constant reporting on the trajectory of his career. If you didn’t know him personally, you knew someone who did, and I met him multiple times as a kid. He visited my elementary school on a couple of occasions, and in fourth grade I won a competition for a full scholarship to the local basketball camp he ran with his agent, Charles Tucker. I attended the camp two consecutive years, spending a week each year in the presence of Magic and other stars of the 1980s NBA: Isaiah Thomas, Dominique Wilkins, Spud Webb, Tiny Archibald, Mark Aguirre, Herb Williams, Jay and Sam Vincent. Roy Tarpley and William Bedford, two talented big men who would soon snort themselves out of the NBA, served as counselors (I remember Bedford being especially nice). I remember two specific encounters with Magic: one, a left-handed lay up drill done without a ball, so you would concentrate on your form. Magic stood under the basket and if you did it wrong, he made you do 20 push-ups. I was absolutely terrified, but somehow managed to fluidly lift off my right foot and pass the test (though I could never make a left-handed lay up in a game). The second was my second year, when I made the All-Star team for my age group. I hit a 15 foot jumper in the All-Star game and Magic, who was reffing the game along with Herb Williams, gave me a high five as I ran back down the court.

It’s from within this context that I approached the Lakers-Celtics rivalry, which reached its rabid apex in the 1980s. (To learn more about the rivalry between Magic and Bird, see the terrific documentary “Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals”). Everyone I knew rooted for the Lakers, mostly because they loved Magic. But there was a broader national breakdown along racial and social lines, crudely constructed as follows: If you were black or liberal or hip, you rooted for the showtime Lakers, and delighted in Magic’s daring passes to Worthy and Scott, and Kareem’s skyhook. But if you were working-class white, or conservative, or lame, you rooted for the Celtics, and celebrated Bird’s grit, McHale’s low post moves and wet hairy armpits, the Chief’s stoic gaze, and whatever the hell Danny Ainge did. Of course, regional allegiance played a large role in who you rooted for, but the sense that the breakdown was as described above did much to invigorate the rivalry by embedding it within the broader political narratives of Reagan’s America. Both teams represented elements of that transitional decade: the Lakers were glitz and excess, and the Celtics were a resurgent conservativism and traditionalism. If nothing else, the rivalry revealed the resilience of the racialized lens through which much of the American public saw sport (and thus life). Yet at the heart of it all was a deep truth: these were two fundamentally brilliant basketball teams, with styles fully realized and stars in constant search of another challenge to conquer.

I pulled for the Lakers through their championship years until they met my Detroit Pistons in the Finals in 1988, when I maturely said to Magic: you’ve won enough. It’s the D’s turn. My Magic love persisted, though, so much so that November 7, 1991 is just as seared into my memory as January 28, 1986. But as Magic’s career ended awkwardly over several years, I lost interest in the Lakers.

The NBA has changed significantly since the 1980s, when Magic and Bird rescued the league from its image as a refuge for drug-addled social miscreants, and handed to Michael Jordan and David Stern a “product” primed for global expansion and resonance, and set to churn out megarich icons. The game has changed, too, from an era when big stars regularly threw down in pursuit of a win to a league where accruing too many physical fouls well get you suspended. Fact is, college basketball is a much more physical game than the NBA, which is part of the reason that it’s more watchable.

It’s also part of the reason that we don’t have rivalries like what we had with the Lakers and Celtics in the 1980s. Too many players and coaches are mercenaries, playing for their next contract. These guys are professionals, to be sure, and most care deeply about winning (no one can tell me Kobe Bryant wants to win any less than Magic or Bird). The skill level and physical ability is amazing, and the game is played at as high a level as ever. But, the context has clearly changed; the game is too clean, too corporate, too image conscious, and exceedingly concerned with being family friendly. As a result, the politics that infused Lakers-Celtics in the 1980s are absent from the contemporary game and hard to imagine ever being so prominent again. Rivalries now only gain intensity from tight contests in the immediate past.

I’ll watch the upcoming Finals, but it won’t be must-see tv in my house. I’m sure these guys’ll play great basketball, and the networks will roll out references to the “Memorial Day Massacre” and the “Baby Hook” in an attempt to infuse these games with the weight of history. Personally, though, I don’t really care who wins, and unless something unexpected and remarkable happens, I’ll probably forget this year’s Finals as quickly as I forgot the 2008 Finals. The fact that I can barely bring myself to hate the Celtics anymore probably has something to do with the fact that I’ve aged and mellowed and have better priorities more widely dispersed. But it also has something to do with the game, which is at least as responsible for my connection to it as I am.

Guerrillas in the Midst

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One of the secret missions behind my work with Mikhail Gershovich in developing an open source publishing platform at Baruch College is to gradually integrate into the school’s general education curriculum the deep, critical examination of how digital tools are changing the way we think and live. This curricular purpose is not currently present on any kind of scale at our college. Because of political realities at the school, we’ve very much built Blogs@Baruch in a haphazard, take-what-we-can-get kind of way, and we haven’t had the luxury of being systematic about the thing. But we’re now two years into our experiment, and we’re widely established enough throughout the college that we’re confident we will continue to operate. We’re now able to theorize what we’ve done and to strengthen our case for more attention to the types of curricular innovation we’d like to see.

Creative Commons License photo credit: jectre

Of course, we’re far from the only ones considering these questions, and we’re certainly not the only ones who’ve borrowed the terminology of revolution to cheekily make our case. Matt Gold has already done a fantastic job creating a hit-and-run guide to guerrilla pedagogy that delineates the tools, philosophy, and connective processes requisite at its core. Gardner Campbell has argued for a trajectory in liberal education towards the development of media fluency and in favor of a shift from both “signature pedagogies” to “pedagogies of signature” and from general education to generalizable education. Gardner has also spoken passionately about the role of movements around the integration of digital tools into the work of higher education in destabilizing the institutions at our center. Joss Winn and Mike Neary have written of “The Student as Producer,” connecting pedagogies that place the student squarely in the role of knowledge-maker within broader efforts to combat the corporatization of higher education and to reimagine a university that for once might be fully committed to the development of humanistic thinkers. Jeff McClurken has argued smartly that digital literacy is something that should be developed within the disciplines and shown how, though I’d guess he’d agree that such an approach does not preclude a broader college-wide addressing of these questions. And besides being actively involved in building the tools from the ground up, Boone Gorges has brilliantly theorized the structural similarities between the types of communication and personalized connections that happen within social media and the specific goals of a college’s general education program.

There are others, many others, who’ve been doing this type of work and thinking, and their models and theories are very much the fuel that propels us along our path.

Che Groom

Creative Commons License photo credit: 5tein

Blogs@Baruch has evolved along three broad publishing contours in its first two years, and each can be seen as a step towards developing a foundation upon which those in power at the College might do some tough thinking about how the general education could be reimagined. This said, I have no idea whether or not they might do this, or even when the gen ed was last revisited. But if they call, we’ll be ready to contribute what we’re learning.

Non-Course Publishing
We’ve become the go-to shop for folks at the College who want to get stuff online. Student publications, online magazines, faculty development sites, exhibits, extra-curricular project journals, document reviews using CommentPress, grant competitions and committee sites… we host them all.

Members of our community now recognize that they no longer need HTML skills to be able to publish to the web or CSS skills to control how what they publish looks. On the flip side, each of the individuals and groups involved in these projects has been forced to confront questions of audience, tone, purpose, tools, design, and connectedness. This has spurred conversations that otherwise might have been offloaded to a contracted web group, or might not have happened at all. The Schwartz Institute, through our nurturing of these conversations, has joined the staff of the Newman Library at the center of thinking on campus about the role of digital tools in the varied work of the college. This broad “culture of self-publishing” is raising the overall digital literacy of staff, faculty, and administrators at the College by creating and sustaining unavoidable engagement with the implications of doing professional and intellectual work on the open web. This engagement has been more incidental than systematic, but it’s been ongoing and persistent, and more and more people are taking part.

Course-based Publishing
Our most exciting work is taking place inside of courses. We’ve supported more than a hundred course sections over the last two years, and they are inspiring faculty members towards more experimental and experiential pedagogy. We’ve featured much of this work at Cac.ophony.org. Some courses are using Blogs@Baruch as little more than an open CMS, taking advantage of a flexible aesthetic to create a more intimate relationship between students and their engagement with course materials online. Others have used the system to explode students’ prevailing understandings of audience by creating and capturing collaborative writing through the integration of wikis, scaffolding research papers in public groups, or bringing in the voices of outside authorities. Many have used the power of writing for classmates’ consumption (and beyond) to raise the stakes of an assignment. Some have staged engagement with a difficult text through a dialogic close reading that evolves into performed knowledge about the themes of the work. Many have taken advantage of lowered barriers of entry to the production of multi-media work to create opportunities for students to engage with course themes and texts through video and other media, and then to write about how the process impacts their understanding of the genres studied in the course. Most have embraced the connectedness of the web to integrate additional resources into their teaching and expose students to a range of critical research methods.

These courses have done three types of work. First, they’ve produced models that are replicable within this college and beyond, and fueled a buzz and interest in teaching with digital tools that hadn’t been very present on campus until recently. Second, they’re helping us develop a local “community of practice” committed to dialogue around the implications of digital pedagogy, which has filtered into the faculty development initiatives already afoot at the Schwartz Institute. And, third and most importantly, these courses have worked to instill in students a critical sense of how to exist intellectually and professionally on the Web by spurring dozens of small conversations about online ethics, linking, sharing, identity, performance, knowledge building, collaboration, mashing, hacking, looking, listening, and learning. These conversations have not been systematized, but they’re most definitely happening.

Social Publishing
The third contour in which we’ve been working is social publishing. This is an infant compared to the two toddlers described above, and is based primarily in our work supporting Freshman Seminar, which draws all incoming students into conversations on Blogs@Baruch. I’ll spare you the details of how the project has evolved, which you can read up on by following this tag on Cac.ophony.org. We hope that our pending integration of BuddyPress will both challenge some of the alienation that happens on a purely commuter campus, and enable what Matt Gold has called “serendipitous connections” around shared interests that otherwise might not happen. Matt and George Otte’s framing and stewardship of the CUNY Academic Commons is very much our model for structuring and naming such a possibility. This coming Fall our first year students will be writing creative blog posts that integrate freely-available digital tools to examine their own processes of identity formation. In doing so, they will be sharing and connecting their experiences to others at the school and beyond, and also reflecting upon the choices they make and tools they use. This is non-credit bearing work, but we hope that it will provide for our students a critical base from which to use the web to engage and learn that they will carry through their four years at the College.

All of the above work intersects only incidentally with the formal general education curriculum at the College. And, yet, I think we can safely say that what we’ve built with Blogs@Baruch has impacted the generalizable education that our students are getting. What’s needed, however, is more systematization, more points of reflection and articulation, more staging towards digital and media fluency, and more buy-in across the curriculum. As guerrillas, we’ve made and built our critique while modeling an alternative approach to supporting educational technology that saves the College money and raises its profile. If we are indeed in the midst of the revolution that will remake higher education, then we stand with our colleagues at the vanguard, arguing that universities must embrace the core values of the open web, and work them systematically into curricula.

The Luck of Essien

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We’re less than two weeks away from the World Cup, and football fans — Ghanaians in particular (sorry, Mo) — are cringing from the news that Michael Essien won’t recover from a January knee injury in time to participate in the first Cup to take place in Africa. I’ll assume that this blog is read by folks (both of you) who don’t know much about world football, and will warn you now that I’m going to use this space to document my thoughts on the tournament as the anticipation builds and the drama unfolds.

Over the past five years, Ghana’s Essien has become one of my favorite players, despite playing for a club team — Chelsea — who I don’t particularly care for. Nicknamed “The Bison” for his exceptional speed and strength, he’s the prototypical defensive midfielder (or “holding midfielder”). Essien is beautiful to watch because he’s always involved in the action, and glides across the field from goal box to goal box, exploding towards the ball when it’s available. The defensive midfielder is tasked with breaking up the other team’s attack and linking the ball between the defense and the offense. This player must be tough, possess great stamina, and be able to anticipate and take the right angle on the ball. Since the defensive midfielder plays just behind the attack, he/she should be able to shoot the ball on goal with power from range, and should also be able to win balls at every level of the field. In short, the defensive midfielder has to do everything that’s required of a soccer player, and do it well. Michael Bradley and Ricardo Clark share that position for the United States, and they’re both solid and sometimes better than that. Bradley is a great tackler and able distributor, and Clark is a fantastic athlete who covers a lot of ground.

Without Essien, Ghana is going to have a tough time advancing from a difficult group that includes Germany, Australia, and Serbia, but I still think and hope they will (they have another fantastic player in Stephen Appia). Going in, I thought that Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire were the two African sides with the best chances to advance deep into the tournament. But Didier Drogba’s Les Elephants have the toughest draw of all, facing Portugal and Brazil in the opening round (and North Korea, which should be interesting).

Here’s a video of Essien’s brilliance, which I’ll be sad not to see in South Africa. Warning: the soundtrack is hideous, so turn it off and put on some Nas or Bach or Tribe Called Quest (“Brother brother brother, Essien you’re like no other.”)

Sorry, Michael.

The Scariest Story Ever; or, the Tyranny of Taxomony

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It was night time. I was in bed. I was awakened by a bump. I got out of bed. I looked under my bed. YIKES! I saw a monster. He growled at me. I growled bake. He got agry. I ran away he did to. I ran in my mom’s and dad’s room. The monster ran to the closet. In the morning my mom and dad asked me why I was in ther bed. I told them it all.

- “The Monster,” written precisely as above by a kindergartner I know

My oldest child is completing her first year of public school.  While I was mostly pleased with her experience, there are certain components of it that, projecting forward, make me uneasy. Primary among them is the administrative impulse within public education to categorize children. Her classmates have all been divided into groups, and the groups will be evenly distributed across the various first grade classes next year. Boys and girls are each a group. Special needs children are a group, as are the “troublemakers.” Then there are the average kids, the “brights,” and the few who have horrifyingly been deemed “gifted and talented.” They’ll all be spread across 10 or so classes, with the “gifted and talenteds” collected in one lucky classroom that gets a visit from an outside teacher once a week. Once you’ve entered into the “gifted and talented” group, thanks to your performance on a secret test and assessment formula, you stay there for the duration of elementary school, like some sandbox mafia to which other children are occasionally extended an invitation. There’s also a special arts program, which pulls students out to work on projects with a district art teacher, who handpicked the kids, herself, based on her interactions with them this year.

I understand the need to assess students, to identify those who need extra help and to ensure that all are challenged. I understand that in order to distribute students across classes and distribute resources effectively within a system, divisions and choices must be made. But what I am seeing first-hand, which should come as no surprise to anyone who pays attention to public education, is a system that creates giant cracks connected by shoddy netting. Forward, forward, forward the students are marched, their teachers sympathetic drill sergeants who can get them a little help and extra attention within certain confines, but not really much more than that. My state, like many others, doubles down by incentivizing a system that reifies taxonomies that I’ve been shocked out of my naivete to find start immediately. I have these misgivings even though we live in a very good school district and even though our daughter has done very well.

I’m familiar with but not expert in theories of elementary education, and there is much I don’t know. What I do know is that I wish we could send our child to a school where she was marched on the path projected forward by the thinking in the story above, not by a system that sorted her by its expectations of what she should be able to do when. There’s a creativity and focus in “The Monster” which I fear will only be tapped and harnessed incidentally given the current trajectory of public schooling, whether she’s in a “gifted and talented” program or not. I want her to get help at school nurturing that ability, mining it and turning it into the base from which she can develop the literacy required to be a well-rounded adult. But the hegemony of quantitative assessment and the taxonomies that it leaves in its wake make me worry that such creativity will be given space to flourish less regularly than it should.

Approaches like what I want exist, to be sure, but we can’t afford to have our kids attend the nearest Montessori, and home schooling isn’t practical given our situation (and sense of what we’re capable of doing). We also care deeply about public education, and would rather contribute to its richness and successes through the unique perspectives we know our children will bring than to remove ourselves from it all together.

Ultimately, we’ll plan to supplement and support our children’s pursuit of their passions, and while we’re confident they’ll come out the other side whole, talented, adjusted young adults, we’re also increasingly resigned to the fact that no matter where we are it will take a certain amount of navigation, and that we’ll see things along they way that don’t sit well with us. In fact, that’s already begun.

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Creative Commons License photo credit: minowa*naitoh

“Write the Future”

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The 2010 World Cup is less than three weeks away, and Nike has released a dramatic three-minute movie directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu that features some of the game’s best players: Drogba, Ronaldo, Rooney, Cannavaro, Ribery, Iniesta, Fabregas, Walcott, Evra, Pique, Ronaldinho, Donovan, Howard and Silva. Non-footballers Roger Federer, Kobe Bryant, and Homer Simpson also make appearances.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idLG6jh23yE

The ad is pretty remarkable, cramming in knowing riffs on the personalities and national implications of the performances of many of the players listed above. Cannavaro’s celebrated glitz, Rooney’s mercurial personality (and England’s tabloid obsession with him and his teammates), Howard’s slyness, the Brazilians’ joyful dancing on and off the ball, Ronaldo’s statuesque physique and persona: it’s all in there. So is the “one worldness” that the Cup quadrennially creates as people around the world tune in to the same series of events and experience them together even as they’re filtered through local perspectives.

Unsurprisingly, though, Nike elevates the role of the individual over the team. Italy, Brazil, and France won the last three Cups because of how they functioned as units, not only because of the play of Pirlo, Ronaldo, or Zidane. Yet, making and marketing icons has been key to Nike’s business model since it brought Michael Jordan into the fold, and it was so eager to release this thing that it included one towering figure, Ronaldinho, who didn’t even make the cut for his national team!

Gestures towards the way that futbol embodies a nation’s character, culture, and personality are in the ad, though they’re backgrounded to the celebration of the individual. One of the joys of watching this tournament will be observing and celebrating and theorizing the relationship between individual brilliance and the collaborative coherence of a team. Watch for how the Germans defend, the Brazilian’s creatively move the ball to space, the Italians work as a tight unit, the Americans scrap, the Dutch fly up the field, the French mix styles, and the Portuguese play dramatically. Individual brilliance will rightly be celebrated, as it will be on full and glorious display in South Africa next month. But the best teams will move forward, and their work will be just as beautiful.

ProfPacker

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It’s the Spring conference season, and if your graduate school experience was anything like mine, nobody talked to you about how to pack for the semiannual excursions you’ll have to take to meet up with colleagues from other institutions. This blog post offers a checklist of the questions I ask myself as I prepare for academic travel, and hopefully they can help you too!

First question: where am I going?

There’s a big difference between going to a conference at, say, University of Minnesota, and going to one at University of Miami. The respective climates of these destinations impacts how you should prepare. If you’re going to be in Miami, you’ll likely need linen pants, a bathing suit, and to start doing sit-ups at least six weeks ahead of time. If you’re going to Minnesota, you’ll probably need to bring extra sweaters, more books, and either anti-depressants or Advil for the specific type of Midwestern hangover caused by drinking cheap beer.

Second question: who else is going to attend?

There’s also a big difference between going to a militantly casual hippie love fest in Fairfax or Vancouver and going to a professional meeting of staid veterans in your discipline at a big conference center. When attending the former taking a shower, ironing your clothes, or even preparing intellectually in any significant way will just make you look like a square. When attending the latter, you’ll need to dress as close to the way that the old white men who hold named professorships in your field at the Best Colleges dress (even if you’re a young brown woman. Actually, probably especially if you’re a young brown woman).

Third question: what’s my role at this event?

If you’re going to present your work at the conference, it’s worth thinking about how your dress accompanies or contradicts the thesis of your presentation. If you’re making an argument embracing the chaos and revolutionary potential of the open web, jeans, a ripped tee-shirt, and a baseball hat are probably the best outfit (though, avoid wearing a Yankee hat, since that particular organization is seen by many as the embodiment of corporate hegemony). If you’re making an argument about the role of flora in Emily Dickinson’s pre-Civil War years, then perhaps consider wearing a suit with a bright colored tie or — if you’re a woman or transgendered male — a long floral-print skirt and a subdued blouse.

If you’re not presenting, it’s worth thinking about how your dress accompanies or contradicts your goal in attending the conference. If you’re there to attract the attention of senior scholars in your field, get a haircut and dress boldly so that they notice you in the hotel bar and remember that earlier you were sitting eagerly in the front row as they read their paper out loud for forty-five minutes. If you’re there to try to hook up with another attendee, any other attendee, then you might bring leather pants to change into for evening events. If you’re tenured, your department is picking up your registration fees, and you really just want to hear a few interesting conversations and eat free finger food, then the only reason not to wear sweat pants is that you’ll be remembered at the following year’s conference as the person who wore sweat pants in 2010. If that doesn’t matter to you: go for it!

Fourth question: I’m flying. Should I check my bag, or carry it on?

If you’re used to traveling with children, this is an opportunity to travel light, and your packing skills are probably evolved enough so that you can fit all your things into a carry-on. But be aware: this will place certain limitations on what you can and cannot pack. If you’re bringing a suit, you’ll probably need a garment bag, though those are kind of expensive, break easily, and hold fewer items than other types of luggage. If you’re using traditional carry-on luggage, consider choosing a single color scheme for your outfits for the weekend, which will limit the number of items you have to take. For instance, if you’re wearing a black outfit one day, but a brown one the next, you’d probably need to bring two pairs of shoes and two belts (that is if you are the kind of academic who cares about things like “matching”). Avoid such situations at all costs!

It would also help to think about the various places you might find yourself while on the trip. Might you lounge by the pool? Will you have considerable downtime in your hotel, when you might write, grade papers, or do yoga? Do participants in your discipline favor medieval theme restaurants or strip clubs? Each of these endeavors will require a change of clothes you should anticipate. If you’re a runner, and you can’t possibly function unless you get your miles in, factor this into your overall planning, but think long and hard about whether or not your running shoes might also work for the more casual moments on your trip. Bringing a third pair of shoes which occupy the great distance between formal footwear and dedicated exercise footwear can really put a crimp in your packing efficiency.

Thinking about these questions really helps me get through conference season with minimal packing agita. Even still, sometimes you just can’t prepare for the unexpected: a torrential downpour, the spilled glass of wine or marinara, or the ripped pant leg. But as long as you keep a happy outlook, and keep in mind that this conference experience is only one element of what will determine your success as an academic, you’ll be just fine!

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H/t to Tom Woodward for first satirizing The Chronicle.

Creative Commons License photo credit: bgblogging

The ArchAndroid

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Janelle Monáe has released her first full-length album — The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III of IV) — and she’s a syncretic force to be reckoned with. She’s got all the flair and outness of Lady Gaga, but brings serious chops and conceptual courage to the table.  I’ve listened to the album once all the way through, and in every song I hear a dozen influences mashed up into something new and challenging.  I hear mid-1980s Prince and Michael Jackson, classic Jackie Wilson, punk-era Blondie to Daft Punk to the retro-swing of the Stray Cats, Lauren Hill, Jessye Norman, Debussy, high concept prog rock, and on and on and on.  It’s experimental, narrative, androgynous, boldly original. Much of it is really weird, some of it is a bit off-putting; most of it is funky. One song scared my 10 month-old son, and then the next had him bouncing up and down to the beat.

Brentin Mock writes on TheAtlantic.com:

Monáe has given pop music its first Toni Morrison moment, where fantasy, funk, and the ancestors come together for an experience that evolves one’s soul. It’s been attempted before: Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, I think, but that failed because it lacked the courage to carry its struggle to the finish, too often interrupted by gooey songs (“Escapade”) that reminded us she’s still a mere mortal who believes girls just wanna have fun, just like you. Listening to Monáe, I felt a chromatic charge, like Aunty Entity laughing while pointing a crossbow at my heart in the middle of Thunderdome. Yet I still recognized it as blues and funk—a smothered funk, though perhaps at times too thick, too inaccessible, but not so much I didn’t want to shake my ass. It was like the first time I read Beloved, or better Song of Solomon—I didn’t quite know what to make of it, but I knew I felt 100 feet taller after reading it.

You can get a sense of her style (as well as her moves) in this video for the first single off the album, “Tightrope,” a funky dance number that quotes Ingmar Bergman and features Outkast’s Big Boi in all his aesthetic glory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc

Listen to the whole album here. Buy it here. Below is a playlist of a few tracks that immediately jumped out at me.

Once Again Back it’s the Incredible…

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the blog animal, ZOE, blogfessor number one.

For the second straight year, we’re awarding the Blogfessor of the Year Award to Zoe Sheehan Saldana, of Baruch’s Fine and Performing Arts Department. The award comes with priority support from the Schwartz Institute on all online publishing endeavors. Of course, Zoe already has that because she’s so awesome.

Zoe developed three sites on Blogs@Baruch this academic year.  Last Fall, she did a Do-it-Yourself Publishing site that used FeedWordPress to syndicate nineteen individual journals where students documented making their own books from scratch (some digital, some not).

This Spring, she used a site in her Basic Graphic Communication course… here’s a description of her course and how she used her course blog from her “About” page:

…this course

This course introduces the graphic design process and methodology. Conceptual and creative thinking is stressed and understood through problem-solving assignments based on research, readings, and classroom demonstrations. The student is introduced to graphic design principles and exposed to historical and contemporary models and current standards of advertising and design. The Macintosh computer is included as the primary graphic design environment. This class is a prerequisite for all advanced Graphic Communication courses. Complete course guide available here, as a PDF file.

…this blog

This blog is a venue for presenting, exploring, and discussing work, ideas, and topics pertaining to the course.

And, finally, together we developed a site for the Focus on Photography Exhibit which served initially as a processing space for members of the Baruch community to submit photos that they wished to be considered for a physical exhibit (which opened last week at the Mishkin Gallery).  The site’s since evolved into an online companion displaying close to 200 images submitted by Baruch students, faculty, and staff.  The submissions process used the TDO Mini Forms plugin to collect information from applicants, allow them to upload their images, and then it published those images to password protected pages where the exhibit judges could asses them. After decisions had been made about which images were accepted for the physical exhibit and which were not, Zoe hacked the Monotone WordPress theme (ideal for photo blogging) to create the online exhibit, which will live beyond the one at Miskhin. The amazing photographic ability of Baruch folks is a topic for another post, but I encourage you to take your time and click through the exhibit to see the fantastic images these folks have captured.

What’s so great about Zoe, beyond her gracious personality and charm, is that she’s exactly what an educational technologist like me needs to get better at what I do: someone who asks questions that I don’t know the answers to, patiently awaits the answer, and works to arrive at a consensus around what can be done with the tools, time, and resources available.  She’s a great collaborator and a creative teacher.  And, as she showed in talks she gave at last year’s CUNY WordCampEd and this year at the Baruch Teaching and Technology Conference, she has a strong grasp of the pedagogical, political, and philosophical impulse behind what we’re trying to do with educational technology at the Schwartz Institute.  As her course blogs and her own art show, she’s an O.E.: Original Edupunk, and both Baruch and the Schwartz Institute are lucky to have her around.

image credit: lumax art

“You’ve Got to Be A Real Fat Man…”

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Sometime last month Jeff Swain asked on Twitter “what makes something funny?” I replied with one of the foundational statements of my world view, from Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors: “If it bends, it’s funny. If it breaks, it’s not funny.”

This exchange came to mind when I was listening to Elvis Mitchell’s interview with one of my favorite actors, Michael Caine, which included the following snippet:

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(You’ve gotta base everything on truth and reality. Even comedy has gotta be real.  You know,  you’ve gotta be a real fat man, and the people gotta know the banana skin’s there, and you’ve gotta fall over properly.)

00046fBesides being a fantastic turn of phrase elegantly spun, there’s a fundamental truth here not only about comedy and acting but also about many types of communicative endeavors, including blogging. My nemesis Jim Groom wrote a bang-up post today about the concept of personal branding and the inflated role it seems to have in the work of those at the intersection of technology and education.  My hero CogDog chimed in with a dismissal of the phrase for elevating “the attention itself as the goal.” CogDog notes that there is something there though, something that comes in the “wake” of the ship that’s good work built up and out the right way over time.  Call it intellectual capital, call it a reputation, call it a professional persona, whatever.  Calling it a “brand” though suggests it’s the end in and of itself.  Whatever it is should be organic, earned, and reciprocated, not cultivated, nurtured, and proclaimed. D’Arcy Norman’s reaction to someone noting he had “built his brand” was right-on.

This is on my mind because I’m just starting off trying to do this stuff at a regular clip and I want to try to stay focused on the reasons that I think I’m doing it.  I’m writing because I like to write to engage with my ideas and other folks’ and I haven’t been doing enough of that on my own terms recently. I’m writing because I have a couple of bigger projects that I want to get to and I feel I need to write regularly to prepare.

But I’m writing also to test some of my theories about the roles of openness and honesty in the formation of knowledge. What I love most about the blogs of the guys I cite above is that they very much use their spaces to think through ideas in process. Jim is especially not afraid of being extremely wrong, and I only hope that if I can keep this space alive for even a short while I’ll have a sliver of the same courage. If you base “everything on truth and reality,” and if when you fall you fall over properly, it seems to me that whether or not you have a “brand” becomes irrelevant. Your work’ll be right there.

Creative Commons License photo credit: crazyoctopus