We were very unlucky in that we could not get the live stream to work.  But we’re happy to be able to bring Clay’s talk to you now:

Performing Diasporas is centered around artists-in-residence — in 2010-2011, Maya Lilly; in 2011-2012, Randy Weston; and, both years, Mahayana Landowne — each of whom’s work engages questions of group and individual identity formation. These artists will perform throughout their residencies, and also lead and participate in workshops. Much of the programming, however, will be directed at incoming students. The first year experience for the next two years will revolve in large part around exploration of the project theme: the Freshman Text will be about diasporic identity, the artists-in-residence will perform at August’s Convocation, and significant components of Freshman Seminar and the curricula of selected Learning Communities will be devoted to the theme.

As part of the Steering Committee planning this project, I’m especially excited by a few particulars. Too often the administrative labor of higher education falls into silos whose work is narrowly focused and lacks programmatic coordination with other initiatives at the College. This project is structured to counter that impulse by drawing several partners into a collaborative effort to inject consideration of both the arts and the themes of identity and diaspora into the curriculum. Obviously, this will most directly impact our first year students. But it’s also good for everyone at the College for the various moving administrative parts to find synergies. The project will raise the profile of BPAC, inject the first year experience with a variety of new ideas, and dovetails nicely with Dean Jeff Peck’s Global Studies Initiative.

The project also will also help lead Blogs@Baruch into its next phase. Last Fall, we began supporting Freshman Seminar. 1200 first year students wrote more than 6500 blog posts to 60 weblogs, all of which were aggregated ultimately into a single space. FRO Blogging was a success, if solely because we were able to pull it off with little time to plan. Feedback from last Fall’s students and the Peer Mentors who led the seminars suggested the desire for more creative leeway and fewer required blog posts (students were expected to author at least six reflections on enrichment workshops they attended over the course of the term). The feedback also showed appreciation for the social component of the project; students used their blogging to get to know each other and to form community, something that’s always a challenge at a commuter campus like Baruch.

We’ve redesigned FRO Blogging to incorporate this feedback and to intersect with the goals of Performing Diasporas. There will be three specific components to FRO Blogging in Fall 2010:

• Students will be required to write blog posts at the beginning and end of the semester reflecting on their adjustment to college and, in the middle of the semester, will post monologues about their own backgrounds that they develop with their Peer Mentors (who will receive training). Selected monologues will be shaped and then performed by professional actors at an end-of-the-semester event: “Baruch’s Voices.” In Spring 2011, students who are interested in performing their own monologues will workshop them and then perform at a series of Coffee Houses.
• Each seminar will be asked to develop its blog over the course of the Fall semester. We will push this process along by crafting prompts that are distributed weekly and that encourage students to reflect upon and share their own stories. Peer Mentors will guide the process, with assistance, and students will be nudged, but not required. At the end of the semester, the most fully developed sites will be recognized with an award. This is an experiment in voluntary buy-in, and we realize that student investment of effort will be uneven. Yet, the constraints of a non-credit course make this approach necessary, and the goal is less to have students develop polished public spaces than to get their feet wet thinking critically about how to present artistic and intellectual material on the open web.
• Finally, I’m excited to note that we’ll be rolling out BuddyPress this Fall, which will add a social networking layer to Blogs@Baruch, and afford students additional opportunities to connect with and get to know one another.

Ultimately, what I like most about this project is that it treats our students as creators and makers of knowledge, not merely as consumers. Baruch students are among the most interesting students in the world, and yet few of them seem to realize this (in fact, that’s one of the things that makes them interesting). Performing Diasporas, because it will draw our students inside productive processes and creates multiple opportunities for them to see and share the art in their own lives, is going to be something special to watch.

The potential answers are vast. They include, but are not limited to, extending the classroom by tying together face-to-face meetings; creating opportunities for the social consideration of course material; imagining a range of audiences; staging larger assignments; inviting and providing a platform for students to easily create and share work that is visual and/or aural in nature; providing a tool for nurturing, reinforcing, and tapping into the sense of community in a course; and, of course, easily sharing course materials with students.

Faculty who are relatively new to teaching with technology usually design course sites that take advantage of one or maybe two of the possibilities above. So, I have to give it up for Mikhail Gershovich and his students, who are absolutely killing it on the course blog for “Topics in Film: Fear, Anxiety, and Paranoia.” I’ve tried not to blog about this course blog because I don’t want to be seen as buttering up the boss. But when students showed up this week for a presentation dressed as zombies and attacked one of their classmates, I simply had to bite the bullet and write about this awesomeness.

They’re using their blog for a variety of purposes:

First, Mikhail uses it to share information with his students so that they can easily access course readings and find their way to a wide range of required and recommended films, compiled from disparate locations.

Second, the students are posting in a rotation to very specific prompts that he spent much time designing, and which mix an emphasis on close readings of text and film, allow students to write to reflect, and encourage students to find visual representations of their ideas.

Third, Mikhail has very much constructed the blog as a kind of social glue, tying students together by encouraging all to get Gravatars (though only some have… I’m surprised Dr. G hasn’t docked their grades), to comment regularly, and to write freely.

Fourth, the students will be using the blog to develop and present remixes or re-enactments of short sections of films they’ve engaged this semester, and will write to reflect upon how going inside the productive process impacts their perspectives on both the themes of the course, and the art of film overall.

So, kudos to this group: this is a ton of work they’ve taken on, and they’ve done so openly, creatively, and collaboratively. Mikhail has taken advantage of various support services in the most productive way, from the library’s subscription to the film repository Swank.com, to his Twitter network (where he crowd sourced ideas for films, readings, and discussion), to his awesome educational technologist — me — who he’s consulted on both technology and assignment design. We’re lucky to have their model to build upon.

I encourage you all to check out the site, and to scare the students by leaving some spooky comments.

*note: Jim Groom posted about this course blog simultaneously.

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.

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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!

Mikhail Gershovich accepts the Mike Ribaudo Award at the 8th Annual CUNY IT Conference

Two events over the last ten days drew into sharp focus what we have accomplished and also some of the challenges we face. At the 8th Annual CUNY IT Conference, the Schwartz Institute was awarded the Michael Ribaudo Award for Innovation in Technology. Mikhail, Suzanne, Tom, and I were recognized along with administrative teams from John Jay and the CUNY First project, as well as our good friend Matt Gold, Project Director for the CUNY Academic Commons. The Commons is like a sister project to Blogs@Baruch, since we’re using the same software, and we share ideas, labor, and a philosophy about what support for technology at the university level should entail.

It was an honor to be recognized for our innovations and, especially, to share the honor with Matt, since it signaled to the broader CUNY community that the work we’re undertaking is not only viable, but forward-looking and vital to the work of the University. At the risk of sounding like an ingrate, though, I noted that the certificates we received read that this was an “Information Technology” award. I’ve made the point before, and will make it again: instructional technology is not information technology. This is actually acknowledged in how the Ribaudo is awarded, as it’s split between the two areas (even if the split is not represented on the certificate). This is more than a semantic argument: we need to encourage our communities to understand the differences and to constantly reexamine how the University’s information technology architecture relates to and interacts with the deployment of technology in the service of teaching, learning, and scholarship.

It’s always nice to get an award, and last week brought hearty congratulations from inside and outside the Baruch community. In the midst of these pats on the back, however, I learned a little bit more about the difference between information technology and instructional technology. At approximately 7pm on Wednesday evening I happened to look at one of our blogs, and saw the dreaded:

(What follows is a bit technical: click here to jump to the rub).

The error appeared on all subdirectory blogs, while the main blog was completely white. I logged into the command line, verified that MYSQL was running, and saw that the load on our server was fine. The documentation I was able to find suggested either a MYSQL problem or a plugin conflict; I deleted all plugins, with no improvement. Now, instead of the “Error Establishing a Database Connection” I was getting what geeks refer to as the “White Screen of Death” across the entire installation. Having exhausted pretty much the extent of my command line knowledge, I sent out emails to our contacts at BCTC, and waited for a response.

A couple hours later, I was contacted by a sysadmin at BCTC; he had gamely returned to work on his way home from the gym to take a look at our server. He immediately noticed that the directory that holds Blogs@Baruch was about 98% full. We knew that we were approaching space limits, but I had (mis)calculated that we could make it to the end of the semester (when we’ll be moving the entire installation over to a new server). I was puzzled, however, because we had this issue once before and it didn’t cause an outage– it just caused an error in our database backups that resolved as soon as we opened up space. I hoped opening space would clear up our problem, but it did not.

We both thought that the database needed to be repaired, but neither of us were comfortable issuing the repair commands. The admin at BCTC contacted MYSQL, and got assistance repairing and then restarting MYSQL. 1 am, no improvement. We’d have to wait until morning.

At 6 am I took another look at the server to see if I had missed anything, and began to respond to users who were emailing about the site. I posted a query to our premium support forum with Automattic describing the problem, and got a quick response from Donncha, the lead developer of WPMu. Unfortunately, my question included a distracting error that I found in the log that was caused by a bad Phpinfo file I had put on our server (in my haste I wrote the file in Text Edit at home, which put additional characters into the file that I wasn’t able to see). Donncha thought we might have been hacked, and asked me to check our .htaccess files, which looked ok. I caught my mistake, and explained it (along with a note apologizing for not being a system administrator). Apparently I wasn’t clear, because Donncha kept pursuing the PHP error… we weren’t communicating well. He suggested I use error_log() to track down where the PHP problem was.

In the meantime, emails and phone calls from users were flowing in, and I did my best to explain to as many as possible that we were investigating the problem and should be live again soon. Internally, though, I wasn’t so sure; we had exhausted our knowledge and the knowledge in the free forums, and the premium forum to which I was posting wasn’t yielding results. Jim Groom suggested we contact Ron and Andrea Rennick, who I refer to as the “WPMu Wonder Couple,” to see if they might be able to help us out.

Within 3 hrs of Jim’s suggestion, BCTC had vetted Ron and granted him temporary access to our server; he located and fixed the problem in about 20 minutes. In the meantime, Barry Abrahamson, who runs the servers for WordPress.com and also posts to the premium support forum, had offered to do the same.

Turns out the problem was one that I had caused while trying to fix the space issue. When I deleted the plugins in mu-plugins, I failed to delete the Supercache file that sits outside of the plugins folder, inside of wp-content. I also deleted the existing cached pages. Ron concluded that:

Once you ran out of disk space, pages expiring in supercache were being refreshed as empty files. Eventually nearly all of your pages were cached as empty files. I disabled supercache by renaming advanced-cache.php in wp-content. MU checks for the file and includes it in the processing if it exists.

He later added:

I did some testing locally and reproduced the white screen by deleting the contents of the cached version of the index.

Here’s the rub: we got through it. Ultimately this was two small problems masquerading as a big one. We ran out of space, then I failed to properly disable a powerful plugin running on our system, which disabled the entire install. We were down less than 20hrs, and that was only because I wasn’t systematic enough to pick up on the way Supercache works. To a certain extent, something like this was inevitable. All sites go down, even the Big G. It’s the risk you run when you work online, and reasonable end users can accept it– it helps if those running the site aspire towards transparency.

The outage confirmed my belief in open source applications, and particularly the communal ethos that (often) animates them. Three friends: Boone Gorges, Jim, and Zach Davis, offered assistance as soon as they learned of the problem, and moral support because they’ve each been in similar situations. The offers of hands-on help were reassuring, but I didn’t really need them because I was already in contact with the three most knowledgeable WPMu people in the world.

The outage also reminded me that being able to type stuff at the command line and get stuff in return does not make one a system administrator. I’m a humble educational technologist, and I depend on information technology to get my work done. When the lines are blurred– and I blurred them here more out of necessity than conceit– trouble may ensue. Had I been able to look holistically at the problem and troubleshoot it methodically, I probably could have caught the error. But inexperience and the pressure of supporting 3k+ users clouded my vision and convinced me the solution to the problem was out of my reach. These are valuable lessons to carry forward on this project.

Within an hour of Blogs@Baruch going backup, Baruch College’s enews arrived in my mailbox, containing a congratulations to the Institute on the Ribaudo Award. I clicked on a link and landed happily at our pretty little homepage, which was humming nicely along. When I closed my laptop, I still managed to feel pretty good about the week.

PS: I’ve learned that the following cultural artifact can help one oversee an enterprise publishing platform:

The LUC was founded by Michael Pinto-Fernandes and Sarwat Joarder, two Baruch undergrads who have worked tirelessly to get their journal off the ground, recruiting writers and editors from Baruch and other campuses. They’ve been an absolute joy to work with, and have thought deeply about everything from the design of their journal, to the intellectual property considerations of online publishing, to recruiting and managing a stable of writers, to integration and growth within the Baruch community.  The writing on the site is serious, thoughtful, well-sourced and solidly argued. Currently, there are 5 pieces published, and you’ll likely find much to both agree and disagree with.

The LUC — when combined with the recent transition of Dollars & Sense and the pending move of iMagazine to our system– marks the beginning of a new phase of self-publishing at Baruch College, where Blogs@Baruch supports members of our community as they make their unmediated voices heard. While I’ve worked closely with the LUC crew on the creation of their journal, and helped them think through both the implications and mechanics of online publishing, we’ve always agreed that the content is theirs, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s Left or Right, whether it’s right or wrong.  Therein lies one of the best arguments behind Blogs@Baruch: this is a tool to help our students thoughtfully navigate the world of web, and to do so on their own terms.

So, congratulations, Michael, Sarwat, and the rest of the LUC crew: we look forward to following the LUC as it grows (and we might chime in with a comment or two), and we commend you on your ambition!

Also: as always, Lessig provides a captivating model for integrating text, images, and art into a presentation.

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.

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.

Stephen Francoeur

(By the way, I published this through an email to Posterous).

((tag: online-publishing, webtools))

Posted via email from Luke’s posterous

LW add from inside Cacophony: I had to come into the Cacophony post to clean up the links and image… seems as though keeping the html formatting and attachments elegant through the push might take some work.  Further, it looks as though the tags didn’t talk to the Cacophony tag function.  So, the push is janky… but the potential is still there.

photo credit: tantek

I was excited to get the Call For Papers for the CUNY IT Conference, scheduled for December 4.  This year’s theme will be “Information Technology/Instructional Technology in CUNY: Managing Complexity,” and the presentations will ask:

1. What works? How has technology not just changed but improved our instructional and administrative practices? What tests have been met? What value added? What innovations deserve to be extended and duplicated?
2. What works together? What mixtures of modes or services are available? Are we moving to the use of “mash-ups” in teaching and administration, combinations of applications that work together? How do we manage and sustain such combinations?
3. What helps us work together? What innovations allow us to be mutually supportive? What are we doing in the way of training and mentoring? How are we spreading the word to colleagues, introducing them to new methods and technologies?
4. What points to a shared direction? What changes on our horizon are most promising, most scalable and sustainable? What developments call for collaborative and strategic thinking? What changes are especially important to a multi-campus university?

Themes the past four years (there doesn’t seem to have been a theme in 2006) have included: “Instructional/Information Technology in CUNY: The Catalyst for Transformational Change,” “Instructional/Information Technology in CUNY: Future Present,” and “Instructional/Information Technology in CUNY: How Is Change for the Better?”

The notion of “Managing Complexity,” when combined with the questions italicized above, contains more of an argument than did themes from previous years.  Yesterday George Otte, CUNY’s Director of Academic Technology and a former Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, wrote a post that details much of the thinking behind “Managing Complexity,” and that also effectively shoots dead the notion that any single service can meet the edtech needs of our campuses.  This is a very important administrative recognition of the argument that’s been at the core of our experimentation with personal publishing platforms for the past few years at the Schwartz Institute.

The 2009 CUNY IT Conference promises to be yet another in the series of events that has sustained and further distributed throughout CUNY the energetic consideration of the role of technology in the university of the future.  I hope to see more panels that explore the relationships between information technology and instructional technology, that challenge and complicate the client-services model of technology that prevails throughout much of the university, and that highlight and celebrate the innovative teaching, learning, and research projects sprouting up at the campuses.

One additional note: David Pogue, who keynoted the most recent IT Conference, will come back for a return engagement.  While he was certainly an entertaining presenter, it might have been nice if we had someone who could draw into sharper focus for the community just what’s at stake in the reimagination of the role of technology at the university.

The tag cloud above was generated by participants at CUNY WordCampEd, which took place last week at the Macaulay Honors College (click to enlarge).  Mikhail and I co-organized the event with Joe Ugoretz of Macaulay and Matt Gold of New York City Tech, and we were astounded that we had to close registration a week ahead of time.  When we started planning, we thought we might get 50 registrants, bringing together the folks like ourselves who’ve experimented with WordPress throughout CUNY and who believe deeply in the core components of our mission on Blogs@Baruch.  Instead, we had well over 100 folks who wanted to come, and though we had an overflow room with audio/video connections to accommodate the hordes during morning and afternoon keynote sessions, we still had to turn some away.

The desire to take part in this event — and, even more, the energy palpable at Macaulay throughout the day — are testament that something is happening at CUNY.  This feeling was present in December at the CUNY I(nformation) T(echnology) Conference, which paid more attention to instructional technology than it ever has before.  I think some of the same spirit and energy infused the 9th Annual Symposium, which for the first time, in my opinion, captured the richness and opportunity embedded in our shifting modes of communication.  At all three events, the Twitter backchannel produced what Boone Gorges has called a “catalytic effect” on the proceedings: collective reflection on the presentations by those on Twitter filtered back into the participation of the audience, which found its way back into the tweets, and so on.  I felt very little passivity at these meetings. (Here you can see Tweets for the Symposium and CUNY WordCampEd).

But Twitter only deserves a splash of credit for the sea of enthusiasm present at Macaulay last Friday.  CUNY’s BlackBoard disaster this semester (which you can read about in this piece from The Clarion) no doubt shifted some energy our way as committed teachers and administrators look for alternative edtech solutions.

We welcomed that sort of attention.

In the morning presentations, Jane Wells, from Automattic, pitched WordPress (a bit tongue-in-cheekly) as a “BlackBoard Killer” and emphasized the openness of the WordPress community to input from its users.  Her presentation captured all that we like about experimenting with WordPress: embrace of perpetual beta, humility, the celebration of collectivist approaches to problem solving, and the constant striving to improve. Dave Lester, from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason, presented ScholarPress, a suite of WordPress plugins that map course management functionality onto WordPress blogs (doing what BlackBoard does, but much more elegantly and affordably), and also talked about integrating Zotero’s research tools into WordPress.  Baruch’s own Zoe Sheehan Zaldana then wowed the audience with her wonderfully imaginative use of WordPress in photography and digital animation courses, embraced the potential of “shame” on the open web as a pedagogical tool, and emphasized the useful energy created when students participate in a unique space whose aesthetic reflects the work of their course.

Our good friend Jim Groom returned to CUNY like a prodigal son to give the afternoon keynote (“Open By Design”), and spoke eloquently and powerfully about how the role of the instructional technologist should be refined in today’s university, the centrality of “openness” to the mission of CUNY and how that should be reflected in our approach to supporting teaching with technology, and the opportunities self-publishing offer universities to train their students for the future.  He also threw a few good shots at BlackBoard, and raised the very important and underexamined question of why CUNY pours millions– that’s right, millions– of dollars into this clunker of a software instead of investing in the people who build the relationships and the models that inject such powerful energy into events like the IT Conference, the Symposium, and CUNY WordCampEd.  Thanks to Dave Lester, Jim’s talk is archived here.

This was a generative event, and it represented the congealing of a community around the shared idea that our institutions’ weight should be behind a scaling approach to support for educational technology that necessarily goes well beyond BlackBoard.  That box is simply not enough.  Rather than helping us explore knowledge and identity, nurture community, and pass on to our students critical approaches to engaging with information  — core components of a liberal arts education –  BlackBoard argues that education is a marketplace.  Here’s my money.  Give me my single sign on and my learning.

Clearly, the participants at CUNY WordCampEd have had just about enough of this, and are looking to Blogs@Baruch, ePortfolio@Macaualay, the CUNY Academic Commons, and each other for alternatives. With that in mind, I’d suggest that the next stage of edtech at CUNY hold the following core principles.

Instructional Technology is not Information Technology
For too long, instructional technology has been enveloped within the broader notion of information technology.  We need to drive a permanent wedge between those two areas of university life in the understandings of our communities.  Information technology makes our phones and networks and computers and smart boards work, and collects and protects student, staff, and faculty data so that we can get credits and get paid. This is crucial stuff.  But it’s not about teaching and learning.

Instructional technology is about pedagogy, about building community, about collaboration and helping each other imagine and realize teaching and learning goals with the assistance of technology.

There must be a close working relationship between CUNY’s information technology shops and instructional technologists, and they must respect each others’ concerns and interests.  But they must be separate.  When information technologists choose instructional technology solutions, you may get something like BlackBoard, and a community that feels as though the only relationship to technology should be a client-service one.   When instructional technologists administer servers, you may get something like less-than-ideal load times, plugins that expose vulnerabilities, and a system that bursts at the seams when you scale.

We need to acknowledge our strengths and weaknesses, to work with and learn from one another, and also to complicate our community’s understanding of technology.  Some components — like phones and networks — should be, above all, reliable.  Some others — like blended courses, or the integration of made multimedia into a course — require more thought, investment, and understanding from students and faculty.  Making clear the separation between information and instructional technology can help nurture this understanding.

But we must remember… the central mission of a university revolves around teaching, learning, and scholarship.

The Community is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts
The most exciting component of CUNY WordCamp Ed was the connection and sharing that took place at the event, a feeling that’s also present on the Academic Commons.  There was the implicit recognition that we have much to learn from each other, that there are many interesting projects popping up around CUNY, and that we can only benefit from making public and sharing our work.  The Commons can provide a canvas for this, but it will not run on its own… it requires, above all, a commitment to sharing, to both taking and giving.  We also should harness and seek to reproduce the generative energy of events such as WordCamp Ed, not only with end-of-the-year conferences and symposia, but with meet ups and sharecases throughout the academic year that disperse that energy.

EdTech Solutions Should Grow from the Bottom Up and then Transplant
Experimentation with WordPress at CUNY has been a bottom-up process, which serves as a counterpoint to the imposition of BlackBoard, a top-down solution.  Blogs@Baruch, ePortfolio@Macaulay, and the Commons each began small and grew as they integrated more users and diversified their functionality in response to the needs of the communities they serve.  As such, they each reflect those communities in certain visible ways.  Blogs@Baruch provides public space for Baruch’s strong journalism, writing, and arts programs, and is making inroads into the Zicklin School of Business and the Freshman Seminar; ePortfolios foreground the unique experiences of the Macaulay student; and the Commons is a vibrant and evolving location for all of CUNY to meet and organize.

A new edtech model for CUNY should acknowledge this progression from the bottom up, and imagine ways to project it outwards throughout the university.  One of the arguments for centralizing administration of BlackBoard was that the community colleges had fewer resources than senior colleges, and centralization of course management software was assumed to make resources more equitably distributed.  Of course, now every school has an equally bad solution.  But the notion that those of us with resources should share the wealth with the colleges who have less is an important one.  I can see a model where senior colleges host WPMu installations for community colleges (using domain mapping), and share support– though, the community colleges– many of which have as many instructional technologists as does Baruch– must pony up support and resources when they can.

Grow from the bottom up and then transplant.

End Users Need to Take Ownership of Online Teaching and Learning Tools
Let’s not be shy about reminding our users of their responsibilities, and our users shouldn’t be shy about asking for help, clarification, or if something is possible.  WPMu and other open source solutions not only benefit from a “do it yourself“ ethos, they require such an approach.  They can’t function and grow without the investment of the community.

A course management system — BlackBoard (at a fraction of the current price), or, preferably, Moodle — could be one component of a tiered support sytem for instructional technology.  Users should have access to an easy way to post documents, access class rosters, and keep a gradebook.  But this is not teaching and learning.  A second tier could exist via distribtued canvases like WPMu or Mediawiki or cloud applications like Flickr and YouTube, where faculty and students can maintain their own spaces and depend on asynchronous support– with a solid server and documentation, such a process can run itself.  A third tier would offer customized solutions for more advances users– Zoe’s rotating flash headers on Blogs@Baruch, or customized spaces to show off class projects or for special departments or programs.  A fourth tier would be a research tier, and entail the imagination and realization of native solutions (such as the Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool) or the exploration of the next wave of innovations (semantic web comes to mind).  You could cover all of the edtech needs of your community with such an approach; all that’s needed, as Jim said, are the instructional technologists and community understanding to shape it and make it operate.

Integrate Digital and Media Literacy into General Education
Universities are constantly updating their general education programs. If they’re not, they should be.  Far too few clear out space for coursework that focuses on exploring how the ways that information is produced and consumed are changing in the digital age.  Such work is often outsourced to librarians, who are generally on the leading edge of a campus’s understanding of these trends, and do yeoman’s (and, often under appreciated) work.  Or students get trickling components of digital literacy spread haphazardly through their work in the disciplines.

Why not, at a place like CUNY, have 1st year seminars devoted to nurturing critical research skills, understanding online information and identity, learning to look and listen, and mastering how to negotiate the digital life of the campus and the city?  Set students up with eportfolios, and teach them how to cultivate their spaces.  Introduce them to scholarly uses of tools with which they are already familiar, but which they perhaps haven’t learned to use critically or with rigor.  Make them write; help them connect, share, and explore the visual, the textual, and the aural experience of the web.  This is something that will be useful to them throughout college and beyond.

As Jim has eloquently argued, CUNY is so well-positioned to harness the energy of the participants in CUNY WordCamp Ed, and to put it to good use.  Let’s keep working.

(IMAGE CREDITS: Thanks to Joe Ugoretz for conceiving, compiling, and sharing the CUNY WordCampEd Tag Cloud.  The other images are from Flickr, in order of appearance: Pip, D’arcy Norman, Ohad, and the Seattle Municipal Archives).

Keynote

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Q&A

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This video is 12 minutes long.

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This video is 10 minutes long.

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In response to a question about how these tools have altered or challenged our sense of time, Gardner offers this wise nugget, which just about sums up his approach to thinking about all of this stuff:

Thinking at that meta level as much as we can without driving ourselves bananas is the only kind of thinking that persists through whatever the next tool is going to be.

This clip is about 25 minutes.

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“Truck Stop,” from 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould.

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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.

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I thought I’d share a few thoughts about how I use and perceive the service, which I joined about a year ago.

I’m not a Twitter evangelist; I don’t think it’s for everyone. If you’re using it and you don’t know why, maybe you shouldn’t be using it?

Twitter is not a platform, it’s an application that allows you to construct and dip in and out of conversations. You should @ often.

Anyone analyzing tweets only as stand alone statements will see self-absorption and “innate incoherence.” They miss the point.

Yet it’s easy to be misled by how Twitter works, because most answers to the question “What are you doing?” aren’t interesting.

But that’s not how the people I follow or I use it. Most of the people I follow instead answer the question “what are you thinking?”

If you follow interesting people who think interesting things, then it follows to think that their tweets might be interesting.

Over time your mind’s eye will learn to identify tweeters who have something relevant to say and to find yet others. Read critically.

The people I follow on Twitter aren’t necessarily my “friends.” Some people are comfortable with 100% virtual friendships. I’m not.

(I’m not raining on online friendships, I’m just saying they’re not for me).

The people who aren’t my friends whom I follow on Twitter I consider “acquaintances.” I think that’s a fairer name for what we share.

I’m willing to bore friends, but I try not to bore acquaintances, because some day, I might want them to be my friends.

I don’t — or try not to — complain about traffic or the academic #jobmarket, because, really, who’s interested in my bitching?

I bitch about traffic and the #jobmarket to my friends, and rarely think twice about confronting them when we’re hanging out.

I always think twice about confronting someone on Twitter. It’s not polite to disagree with acquaintances, though sometimes it must be done.

Mostly, though, I avoid confronting others because arguments in Twitter are unsatisfying. Neither party gets sufficiently into it.

So when I disagree with a tweet, I resolve the disagreement by reading and thinking more, writing a blog post, or talking with friends.

As a result, my tweetline offers a path into my life, reading, and thinking that’s perhaps a tad more upbeat than the real thing.

Ultimately, Twitter works for me because through it I am exposed to people that push and prod me to think and read more deeply and broadly.

I follow links from educators & historians & journalists & technologists whose judgments I respect. I learn. Hopefully, I also contribute.

“Blog to reflect, tweet to connect.” @bgblogging Claim anything more for Twitter, you’re either selling something or setting up a straw man.

As such, Twitter is not for people who have uttered the following statements:

“Twitter won’t work because it’s not profitable.” “Twitter can’t save journalism.” “Twitter encourages our worst impulses.”

Those statements are usually uttered by people with closed worldviews, with minds already made up.

Twitter, like everything else, is purposeful only if you use it with a purpose.

Last week the class abandoned its use of Blogs@Baruch to instead use a group on Facebook called “Baruch Blogs Down!”

photo credit: Squid P. Quo

The name of the group is a reference to server problems we had at the beginning of the term, which were resolved almost two months ago; we’ve been up without interruption for almost 60 days. In fact, members of the class were posting to their blogs without problem for a good six weeks before they switched to Facebook.

The faculty member apologized when it was pointed out to him that the name of the Facebook group was insulting and mocked the work that had gone into building our system and supporting his course, last semester and this. He noted that the switch wasn’t planned, that his students suggested the move and the group name, and that they were more comfortable using Facebook to exchange thoughts about course material. So he went with it.

I have problems with this on a few levels, even beyond the insulting group name. First, the only argument to go to Facebook — which I accept is completely the faculty member’s prerogative — seems to be that the students “felt more comfortable” with the application than they did Blogs@Baruch. Comfort with a medium has pedagogical value, for sure; but you’d like to think that more than students’ comfort would determine the choosing of a technological solution.  I’m not sure that it did.

Second, there’s the implications of using Facebook in an instructional setting given the recent conflicts over their Terms of Service and assertions of ownership over user content. I don’t think the class discussed what was to be gained and lost from switching platforms; the students just lobbied the professor to use something “easier,” not better.  These points are both problematic in no small part because this is an Internet Marketing class!

Finally, there’s the inaccurate implication embedded in the group’s name, which appeared in a public forum. I’ve thought a bit about this, since I, too, have been guilty of snarking a piece of software. Blogs@Baruch was down periodically early in the semester, and that had a negative impact on some courses’ use of the system. We DO deserve to get called out for failing to deliver what we promised to deliver.

Yet, there’s a difference between mocking us and mocking a behemoth corporation with a closed source product.   The difference embodies one of the core issues in instructional technology, which is often seen as a subset of information technology rather than as its own unique area of university life that requires the establishment of relationships and understanding across the disciplines.

If Blackboard goes down, users of the system are helpless, and can only wait for word that the system is back up.  They can call someone, but that person can only tell them that a ticket has been submitted.  Users of Blogs@Baruch have a name, and a number, and someone who can explain to them what the problem is and how it is being addressed. If something on the system isn’t working the way they want it to work, they can speak with someone about hacking it, adapting it, fixing it, strengthening it. Blackboard is a closed box without a face, whereas Blogs@Baruch is an open sandbox that gives back in proportion to what you put in. Blackboard is primarily an administrative system that allows the delivery of information. Blogs@Baruch is primarily a tool for the creative use of technology in instruction.

The faculty member (who has graciously apologized and changed the Facebook’s group’s name) should have realized this; he had benefited from our close support in the past and had been told to contact us if and as problems arose. He never did.  Instead, he treated Blogs@Baruch as information technology, as a data delivery service, and wasn’t really interested in bringing the system and its flexibility to his pedagogy. He and his students saw no difference between Blogs@Baruch and Blackboard or the escalators in the Vertical Campus.

So, I’ve learned a couple things from this episode. First: snark is fine, but if you’re gonna snark, do it in an informed way or in a hidden place, or you going to be called out.  Second: we need to do a better job of explaining to members of our community what Blogs@Baruch is and what it isn’t. If you can’t see any difference between what this system potentially provides and what Blackboard or Facebook provide, then those systems will probably work just fine for you.

Everywhere I look, and, it seems, in everything I read, folks are trying to understand, articulate, or make their mark upon these changes. The “change” we’re living through is much deeper than the promises put forth by Barack Obama in the construction of a positive message for his campaign. Packer spoke of a “tectonic shift” that’s impacting every area of American life.

Journalism is transforming before our eyes. Newspaper after newspaper is folding, altering its processes, or drastically reducing its staff and, as a result, the depth and quality of its coverage.  Newsrooms everywhere are being forced by executives and bean counters to do “more with less.”  Yet as David Simon and others have noted, the notion that you can possibly do “more with less” is, for want of a better term, bullshit.  You do “less with less.”

Unused newspaper racks clutter a storage yard in San Francisco, California. From Boston.com; image taken March 13, 2009. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

As stark and clear as that point may seem, some legitimately see opportunity in the restructuring of American newsrooms. “Crowd-sourcing” and “citizen journalism” seek to take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies to tap into existing pools of knowledge to generate and disseminate information. Journalists — those still in the business — break into camps that are either horrified or energized by the prospect of outsourcing society’s news gathering responsibilities. The most serious of them struggle through the implications of such a direction, asking what will be lost, what will be gained, and what professionalization means in an era that empowers the voice of the amateur.

Clay Shirky recently published a much-discussed blog post about the state of newspapers, comparing our moment to the moment when the printing press was invented, and focusing on the chaotic nature of the transition from one world to another.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen…

Shirky concludes that we don’t know, and won’t know for some time, what the future of journalism is going to look like.  The most important thing is that “we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’.”  Then, “the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’”  What we need is lots of spaghetti against the wall, for “any experiment designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.”  He acknowledges what’s lost by the death of newspapers, allows us space to mourn, but ultimately settles on the point that what matters most is journalism, not the form that it takes.  He also lays the lie to those who, in the name of entrepreneurship, self-servingly claim that they have a crystal ball rather than a handful of wet spaghetti.

Journalism is not the only realm in American life that’s standing upon shifting ground; higher education is also in the midst of a wrenching transition.  In The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, Frank Donoghue argues that the humanities professor many readers of this blog aspire to become is going the way of the newspaper, swept into the dustbin of history by the market forces and corporatization that increasingly restrict the choices available to well-meaning university administrators. He argues that the humanities aren’t in crisis; this would imply some future return to normalcy. Rather, a liberal arts education as a requisite component in the formation of an informed citizen, and the celebration of the university as the location where that process takes place, with the professor as a central figure, is dead.  A liberal arts education will increasingly become a luxury rather than the norm, replaced by vocational training and the transfer of skills that have only direct and measurable correlations to bottom lines.

Stanley Fish posted a reaction to Donaghue’s book in January, highlighing the rising percentages of undergraduate courses taught by part-time labor and the ascendancy of the “for profit” university, where information delivery is all that matters.  An earlier blog post from Fish glibly dismissed the value of studying the humanities altogether.  Doing so is its own argument, he says, providing or needing no external justification.  If the study of the humanities instilled in one the desire to learn the great moral lessons of the ages, Fish lamely argues, “the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts… as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so.”

Fish finishes his meditation on The Last Professor with the observation that, thank goodness, he was born at the right time.  “Just lucky, I guess.”  Fish’s landing ultimately on his own good fortune contains none of the perspective evident in Shirky’s post. The possibility never dawns upon him that he might actually be in a position, from his lofty perch nestled just off the front page of the New York Times website and his influential provenance at two universities, to highlight or even demand an alternative trajectory in higher education.  He doesn’t seem to want one or think one is necessary.  He accepts the notion that the humanities has little “value added,” and returns to his study, satisfied by his ability to find support for his arguments in the schmuck-like behavior of some of his colleagues.

Does the sea change pinpointed by Packer and Shirky have relevance to the university of the future?  If Donaghue and Fish are correct, that future has been written, and those of us who’ve chosen to make our life studying and helping others study the humanities are just plain out of luck.

There’s ample evidence however that something similar to the revolution in journalism is happening in academia, though perhaps not so publicly and at a pace that’s less compressed.  This week the University of Michigan Press announced that it was going digital, a move that has consequences for the intense and troubled world of academic publishing.  Also, Mark Bauerlein, whose work on “kids these days” I have significant problems with, wrote a provocative paper about the future of higher education in which he argues “the coverage project is complete,” and that graduate schools and P&T committees should be putting more of an emphasis on good teaching.  I disagree with the first argument (admittedly, his statement was about literature and not history, which is my field, and which hasn’t been “covered”); but I concur wholeheartedly with the second.  Donaghue argues something similar when he notes that the culture of the professoriate, to its own detriment, has integrated an emphasis on competitive achievement and productivity that internalizes the values of the very market forces external to the university that find no use for the liberal arts.  Ultimately, Fish’s “I got mine” conclusions are frustrating because this is a moment when humanists should be reasserting the value of their disciplines to the intellectual life of the nation and, like Bauerlein attempts, proposing directions for the university of the future.

Implicit in the distributed community of educational technologists that I’m a part of — some have called us “edupunks,” but I no longer think that term is big or sufficient enough — is the sense that we are all together involved in shaping the best model of the future university.  I’ve long felt that the most compelling aspect of the 1960s — for all the positive and negative legacies that decade has bequeathed us — was the broadly dispersed sense that the future was up for grabs, and that one’s actions could help shape that future.

Each of the above examples is student-centered, yet also allows space for the researcher to grapple with and reflect upon large questions. They benefit from supportive administrations that recognize the importance of giving scholars the opportunity to explore and develop new ways of thinking, learning, teaching, and connecting. They don’t necessarily attack the university of the past, but rather imagine a future where participants break out of restrictive silos of departmental politics and disciplines and the campus as we knew it to explore relationships with the world that are, at their core, humanistic.  These, it seems, must be core components of any vision of the future of the humanities.

Then again, maybe Fish and Donaghue are spot on, and those of us creating new courses, constructing new modes of learning in and across our disciplines, and digging through archives are punchlines in some cosmic joke.  I acknowledge that these examples offer no direct answer to Fish and Donaghue’s argument that the humanities won’t be valued and funded because they don’t contribute in obvious ways to the creation of wealth and, like it or leave it, our society prioritizes that question.  Yet the continued broad exploration of the humanities, like  journalism, is absolutely crucial if our society is going to strive towards a better version of itself.

Shirky’s articulation of our moment as a transitional and perhaps revolutionary one reminds us that the future is yet to be written. We all have a profound stake in working towards our vision.  We all need to pick up some wet spaghetti.

The Ticker, the student newspaper at Baruch, just published Aaron Monteabaro’s very nice feature story on Miya Owens, who was the 1000th user to register. Ms. Owens embodies the strongest part of our argument for Blogs@Baruch: the more chances that students have to write, the better writers and communicators they will become.  She’s a student in Prof. Bridgett Davis’s “Journalistic Writing” course, and a contributor to Writing New York, a site devoted to reporting on local news that Prof. Davis and her colleagues Roz Bernstein, Vera Haller, and Andrea Gabor have built over the last two years.  Prof.  Davis notes that the “blog not only prepares her students for adapting to the challenges of the so-called ‘new media’ era, but also ignites in them ‘a passion that harks back to the old days of journalism.’”

Right on, Professor Davis, for embracing and employing passion as a pedagogical fuel.  And Ms. Owens — who is considering postgraduate study in business or law — is a student the Baruch community can be proud of.  She understands the centrality of writing to her education at Baruch and her career beyond school, and welcomes the opportunity to write in a space that’s read not only by her classmates and professor, but which is also open to the world at large.

So here’s to Miya Owens, Professors Davis, Bernstein, Gabor, Haller, and all the other students and faculty members who are making Blogs@Baruch go, go, go.

Image for art courtesy of Facebook.com

Rest easy, Cacophoners; I just removed the “Share on Facebook” option from the “Share This” widget that appears beneath every post.

For those who don’t know, Facebook changed its Terms of Service last week, asserting a perpetual claim to use however it wishes certain content that you post on FB or that is shared on their network via a hosted “Share on Facebook” button.   A similar policy was in place prior to the change in terms on February 4, but Facebook’s claims to your  content used to expired when you deleted items or deleted your account.  That option ultimately gave users control over their content.

No longer. Here’s the key passage from the new ToS:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

Here’s the clause that was removed:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

This has produced no shortage of outrage, as well as a totally inadequate response from FB honcho Mark Zuckerberg that essentially asserts the ToS does not reflect Facebook’s true feelings about user generated content (to which friend of the Institute Matt Gold responds: “What matters is what they *do* with user info, not how they “think” about it!”).

Amanda French of NYU posted a really helpful run down of various ToS’s on other user generated content web sites, which highlights just how off-base and egregious Facebook’s claims are.  Boone B. Gorges of Queens College wonders about the pedagogical ramifications of this change, and also about what Zuckerberg’s response teaches us about the concept of  “sharing” in the digital age.

Ultimately, I hope Facebook sees the error of its ways, because it provides a unique, valuable, and often elegant service.  I have a network on FB which is almost entirely separate and serves a different purpose for me than my networks on Twitter, Ning,  LinkedIn, or BuddyPress; I’d hate to see that diminished.  At the same, anyone who blogs on Facebook’s blog utility should think long and hard before continuing.  Photographers who share their photos through Facebook should reconsider, or at least start watermarking the hell out the images they share.  Musicians shouldn’t upload MP3s of their compositions.  Faculty should reconsider any educational uses of Facebook.  Our students should be informed (though that’s nothing new).  Web masters should zap those “Share on Facebook” buttons from their sites (for clarification, if you post a link directly into Facebook, the claim doesn’t apply).  And those of us who have posted pictures of our kids on Facebook so that cousins abroad and childhood friends can follow their growth should be prepared to see those images used without our notification or permission.

Oral communication instruction is traditionally somewhat neglected in the ESL curricula and services of colleges. Many programs focus on reading/writing proficiency and give only nominal, if any attention to listening/speaking skills. The imbalance is due to a great extent to college entrance requirements and grading practices in college classes: Students are often only tested for reading and writing proficiency but not for speaking skills. With the correlation between spoken and written proficiency in nonnative speakers being only moderate, it is no surprise then that some students graduate with low proficiency in spoken English.

This status quo is in stark contrast to the skills needed for integration into the college community and success in the workplace. In fact, oral communication skills are consistently ranked most important by employers of business as well as liberal arts graduates. Yet, every semester, nonnative students report that they are being asked by teammates not to speak during group presentations so that team grades are jeopardized. They also report being dismissed from job interviews due to comprehension-inhibiting accents.

It is paramount, therefore, that we address oral-communication competence. Two services are available for students at Baruch College: (1) Students can go to the Student Academic Consulting Center (SACC, VC 2-116) and make an appointment for free one-on-one tutorials with a professional speech tutor. (2) Students can visit the new ESL Lab (VC6-121, enter through VC6-120) and practice with the excellent software, audio, and video materials there. See http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab for hours, instructions, and materials.

To give an example: It’s the beginning of a semester. An (ideal) instructor collects writing samples and engages his/her students in speaking activities to determine whether a student may need assistance. The student is then encouraged (required?) to make an appointment with one of the speech tutors at SACC (the tutors, by the way, are all professionally trained speech pathologists and ESL specialists). During the first meeting, a diagnostic conversation/reading takes place, and the tutor determines which speech patterns are the cause of he students comprehensibility problems.

While the student may already have an idea about some patterns (e.g., differentiating between /r/ and /l/), some problems are more difficult to determine. For example, many languages have a syllable-timed rhythm (i.e., syllables have the same length); English, however, is a stressed-timed language (i.e., the rhythm of a sentence is determined by the regular beat of the stressed syllables only). Try to say the following sentences out loud as you clap your hands on the stressed syllables. You will notice that the sentences take the same amount of time, although the first one is much shorter than the last one. This is because of the stress-timed nature of English.

The lion came.
The lioness came.
The lionesses came.
The lionesses arrived.
The lionesses have arrived.

Comprehensibility problems often arise from stress problems; e.g., when a speaker from a syllable-timed language used his/her native rhythm to speak English. A staccato delivery ensues that makes it difficult for English listeners–who are used to listening for word and sentence stress–to follow the speaker.

In any case, once the student is diagnosed, the tutor will help the student produce the speech pattern correctly in one-on-one tutorials. When the student can produce the speech pattern, he/she needs to practice to commit the new pattern to muscle memory. It is said that our body has to practice a new movement (including speech organ movement) 1,000 times before the movement becomes muscle memory. Please see the Accent Reduction FAQs at http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab for more information.

Ideally, a student should see a speech tutor once a week and practice individually in the lab several times a week. With regular practice, significant progress can be made, even in the course of one semester. Please alert your students to these services. and remind them that, to change speech patterns, regular practice is necessary

How sweet of Autoland to capitalize upon the Obama-inspired can-do spirit in the country in an attempt to separate me from my credit.

This Sunday is the Super Bowl — that annual bacchanalia of gluttonous consumption — and as many of us settle in to watch the Steelers and the Cardinals (in what should be a very good game), we’ll be scratching our heads at subtle and not-so-subtle attempts to tap into the national mood, for profit.  Commercials during the Super Bowl cost $100,000 a second, and while a few are clever and original, most treat viewers as pigs who like nothing more than bikinis, chicken wings, beer, and trucks.  Cultural and consumer trends tend to filter into these ads, threaded through anthropomorphized animals and talking babies.  Clips last year mocked wine tasting, mismatched celebrities, showed how easy it is to buy stocks, and hawked GPS systems.

I’ve got two predictions.  One: Christine and the Loyalty Team at Autoland aren’t the last folks who’ll invoke Obama in a sales pitch to me this week.  And, Two: Steelers 24, Cardinals 20.

* 10-minute post-post update. Just sent to me by my wfe, who was much more diligent in her research… check out this Pepsi ad that will run Sunday, especially the logo at the end:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The bulk of the study is focused on describing, analyzing, and sharing prime examples of six “technologies to watch,” which are organized by their “time-to-adoption.” Click the image above to download a copy of the report; it’s interesting reading for techies and non-techies alike. Here’s a summary of the “technologies to watch”:

Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less

• Mobiles: making services and information readily available to students and staff on portable devices such as iPhones and Blackberrys. For an example of what this looks like, see Stanford’s iApps Homepage.
  
• Cloud Computing: a new way to think about computers, software, and files, which takes advantage of “data farms,” or collections of computers that distribute processing and storage. You no longer need to run productivity software on your hard drive; Google Apps, for instance, supports word processing, presentations, spreadsheet design, and calendars that are accessible, shareable, and functional through a web browser, wherever you are. The vanguard in this development is data intensive cloud computing used by the hard sciences, but this also has implications for students and staff, who, perhaps, need not rely so heavily on Microsoft Office in coming years. (Though not mentioned in the Horizon Report, last September, CUNY’s Online Baccalaureate began a “Virtual Application Streaming Pilot Project,” a local cloud computing experiment).
  

Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years

• Geo-Everything: mobile phones, cameras, and other handheld devices can now automatically attach “geolocative” information to data they produce, such as photographs and videos. Researchers and teachers are exploring ways to integrate this functionality into their work via annotated maps, visual narratives, and game-based learning. See Community Walk and Paint Map for examples.
• The Personal Web: individuals and groups are exploring the “creation of customized, personal web-based environments to support their social, professional, and learning activities using whatever tools they prefer.” At the Institute, we call this “personal publishing,” and it is the core idea behind Blogs@Baruch, which was mentioned as one of five exemplary “Scholarly Community Blogs” cited in this section. Other examples of “The Personal Web” include Omeka, an open source software developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which allows anyone with access to a server and a MYSQL installation to build and share online collections of artifacts; and SMARTHistory, an “edited online art history resource to augment or replace traditional art history texts.”

Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years

• Semantic-Aware Applications: the “semantic web,” according to Wikipedia, “is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.” Some refer to this as Web 3.0, or “using the web as what to write with.” Educause sees the development of “tools that can simply gather the context in which information is couched, and that use that context to extract imbedded meaning.” Woah. Few examples of the semantic web in higher education exist. Patrick Murray-John, an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington, is exploring what opportunities new tools that look treat online materials as data may have for the studying of teaching, learning, and thinking.
• Smart Objects: “a smart object is simply any physical object that includes a unique identifier that can track information about the object.” Think about a package that’s tagged with a bar code that is scanned and allows you to track it; or the library book you have that’s way overdue. Products based on this idea are entering the consumer market, and could be used in archaeology, medicine, and in combination with Geo-Everything approaches. An example being developed by researchers at the University of Florida would continuously monitor patients for a variety of conditions as they went about their normal lives.

We’re pleased to be included in a report of this magnitude, and to see such a wide variety of innovative deployments of technology. These are interesting times!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Via RateYourStudents.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hat tip to Hillary Miller, via Facebook.

Click to See Full Size

According to The Gothamist, the flyer on the right was scattered around the campus of New York University last week.

The flyer announced NYU’s “In and Of the City Financial Aid Plan,” in which students who were unable to fork out 50k/year were told their families could save more than $43k annually if they instead attended CUNY.

Turns out the thing was a fake, produced by a group that calls itself “Students Creating Radical Change,” who “made up the flyer to encourage discussion about NYU’s treatment of its students, and to encourage students to question their university’s priorities.”  Essentially, the group protests that NYU does not provide sufficient financial support for its students, and focuses instead on expansionist behavior in the real estate market.

The letter to The Gothamist in which the students claim responsibility ends: “Oh, one other thing: we have nothing against CUNY. We just thought a ‘go to CUNY’ plan would make a neat flier. In fact, CUNY is facing its own financial problems these days – check out http://www.cunysocialforum.com/ for info on the student resistance to budget cuts and tuition hikes in the state higher-ed system.”

I might rant about the fetishization of protest embodied by this episode, which is more performative Yippie distractionism than the purposeful speaking of truth to power.  I might compare the postscript about CUNY to the utterances of folks who use phrases like “I have lots of black friends” or “I don’t mean to cast aspersions” when saying objectionable things.  I might snark about grammatical errors contained within the group’s statement, or attack the snobby implication that to go to CUNY is to slum it.

The fact of the matter is, especially in this economy, the group has a point (even if it isn’t really their point).  The cost of NYU is ridiculous, and is an education there really 8-10 times better than what one could get at CUNY?  From anecdotal evidence, applications for early admission to the Macaulay Honors College are up more than 30% from last year.  I think it’s pretty safe to say we’ll see an increase in CUNY and SUNY enrollments over the next couple of years.

So, give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.  I’m not sure there’s that big a difference between an underpaid adjunct teaching a course with 40 students and and an underpaid adjunct teaching a course with 55 students.  Bring it on.

h/t BooneBGorges

Jim, the 6th of 7th children, was aware of only one photograph of himself as a baby. One. But last week a Facebook friend from his old neighborhood tagged an image of him at 3. Jim’s post praises Facebook for being good at connecting people with the past, and at making the sharing of memories so much easier than it was just a few years ago. This would have been possible without Facebook; but it would have been more difficult, perhaps to such an extent that it wouldn’t have happened at all. There’s a powerful argument in there that connectivity tools don’t just impact the way that we relate to one another, but also can impact the way we relate to our individual and collective pasts.

This post was on my mind when I began playing with Google Street View, a component of Google Maps that offers street level views of particular locales. This isn’t a new tool, but Google has been steadily adding images as its van tours and shoots different localities (here’s a list of what’s been added). I was surprised to see that the neighborhood in which I grew up has been photographed. North Genesee Drive is of no great consequence — beyond being sandwiched between the neighborhoods that produced Magic Johnson and Malcolm X — but there it is, ready for your virtual tour.

I haven’t been back to my old neighborhood in years, and was pleased that I was able to recreate the bike rides and explorations of my youth, even if through a somehwat antiseptic, Googleized filter. There was no cutting through yards, lemonade sales, or bullies to run from. My memory can fill those things in. Mostly, it was pleasant to visit from my desk in New York.

Here’s a gallery of screen captures; click through for captions.

I recognize that this particular application of the tool appeals to me on a nostalgic level, and while that’s fine for personal blogging and Facebooking and all that, it’s hardly a pedagogical argument. The images above affect me and the kids I grew up with more than they’ll affect you.

But it’s also pretty easy to see how tools like this, free tools available from your desktop, can be integrated into college curricula. Studying the Lower East Side at the turn of the century? Compare the built environment of Hester Street from Jacob Riis’s photographs to images of the area on Google Maps. Use Google Maps to explore planning and architecture in urban, suburban, and exurban neighborhoods. What can we learn about Barack Obama from a virtual tour of Hyde Park? Find images of parks in three different European cities; how does their location and construction reflect their usage? Locate five “Chinatowns.” How are they alike or similar in organization? Writing a term paper on the Atlantic Yards? Use Google Maps to show how construction will restrict traffic. The possibilities are endless. Google Maps won’t tell us everything we need to know about any of these topics; but then, no single source will. A virtual tour of a street or a neighborhood can impart a sense of location and feeling that can augment other information on the path to knowledge.  (I should also note that Jim is also ahead of the curve on this).

In the movie below, I use Google Maps to recreate the walk from my home to Verlinden Elementary School. Yes, again, I know, the nostalgia trap; but I was struck by the sheer number of possible jumping off points for discussion, reflection, and investigation produced just by reliving that two block walk. There’s something exciting about an exploratory process that encourages one to explore even more.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, I’ll let out a little secret: here’s where we get all those phrases we throw around that make most normal people feel like there’s a whole world out there they’ll never understand.  (hat tip Barbara Sawhill)

I tried to accomplish a few things with this redesign.  Mostly, I wanted to update the look of the site… the previous version was a bit clunky, a bit 2003 1999, and I didn’t feel it was popping.  As I usually say when Mikhail critiques my design (which is often): I’m no great aesthete, and certainly not a graphic artist.  But I think this version is markedly better, cleaner, and more inviting.  2008.  2009, even.

The inviting part is really the key, because we’d like to make this page not just a portal to the wide range of blogging being done throughout the Baruch College community, but as a sort of digital commons where ideas and resources and teaching and learning can be shared within the community and beyond.  So I’ve tried to structure the new site in a way that makes it easy to share a lot of different kinds of information, and for visitors to peer in and get a sense of how folks are using this technology at Baruch.

The site includes:

A Home Page with featured blogs and links to recently updated and particularly active blogs on the system  At the bottom of the homepage, RSS feeds pull in posts from the CUNY News Wire, from the Baruch College Teaching Blog, from Cacophony, and from the Ticker.  I’m working on a links list that will be customized for particular pages within the site, and will be using this as a space to tinker, to play with, and to show off the functionality that the WordPress community is constantly building.  All of this is living, and will evolve.

An “About” page with a mission statement about this project :

Blogs@Baruch was built on the following core beliefs:

• College students should write regularly in all disciplines and in a variety of formats and genres
• Faculty should have available support for their efforts to create avenues for student communication
• Open-source technology has an important role to play in the future of higher education, and colleges will gain much from experimenting with a wide-range of open-source technology solutions
• Community users of centrally-administered software should share both the burden and excitement of innovating with technology.  While a strong support network is necessary, a do it yourself ethos should be prominent
• WordPress Multiuser is the most powerful and flexible blogging system available, and can be effectively customized to fulfill a wide range of the communicative needs of the college community

A “Projects” page where visitors can take a look at current and past blogs and sites supported by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute.  About three dozen blogs are linked, though some are password protected. Student blogs– we’ve got about 140 going right now– are not linked from this page.

A Blog where we’ll draw attention to specific things happening throughout the system and make announcement that might be of interest to our users.  This space will, over time, we hope, merge with what’s under the “Support” area, where I’m going to be adding to and refining what I hope are helpful materials– FAQs, a manual for WordPress customized for users of this system, suggestions for using weblogs in college teaching, instructional screencasts, and handouts for faculty to use and adapt.  The manual is in need of an overhaul, and this section will be tightened considerably in the coming weeks.

A “Contact” page for visitors to easily contact us.  Features a reCaptcha, for those curious.

Ultimately, we hope users and visitors will find this helpful, and will share in and contribute to the information it provides.  Scott Leslie recently wrote a powerhouse blog post on the ethics of and obstacles to sharing in higher education.  Leslie argues that institution-driven, overly-organized approaches to sharing tend to halt and stutter, while organic, individualized networks are more likely to thrive.  He posits lots of ideas about why and how this is, and concludes ultimately that planning to share gets in the way of actually doing it.  I take and sympathize with his point.

At the same time, I think the technology that eases sharing is still relatively underused and also undertheorized at Baruch and throughout CUNY.  One of our goals is to model just what a distributed learning environment is.  We’ll be using this new space to push, to compile, and to provide paths to useful information for our wildly diverse range of users.  It will ultimately be up to the users of the system to find value, and maybe to contribute some of their own.

The beauty is that they can do that just by getting a blog and sharing their work with the world.  If there’s value, and it’s put out there, it will be found.

In the interest of practicing what I preach– and since I totally relied on the fruits of the Google as I designed the new home for Blogs@Baruch– click beneath the fold for some techie detail on the redesign.  If the words “CSS,” “widgets,” “plugin,” “WordPress theme,” “hackalicious,” and “pwnd” mean nothing to you, no need to read on….

• This new site is based on the Thematic WordPress Theme Framework, which offers 13 different widgetized areas, and the ability to develop child themes using CSS that will allow you to maintain your customized style through theme upgrades.  I should have probably created a child style, but I didn’t figure out how to do so until I was already deep into hacking away at the some of the php and css files.  This might come back to bite me later on, but I’m rather sanguine at this point that I can dig myself out of holes I’ve dug myself into.
• Customization, made possible by a secured version of the Userthemes Management plugin: in the Thematic file structure, I’ve hacked the following files:
  • Sidebar.php: added search and login code
  • Header.php: added click to get home, hacked out the branding code, and tweaked the menu
  • Footer.php: added “Baruch is CUNY” logo, and moved site info down a div tag
  • Library/extensions/hooks-filters.php: added code to make “home” button appear in menu
  • Library/styles/default.css, I hacked to bits; I also an images folder to hold the footer and header images.. the header image is from the Baruch College Visual Standards library of images
  • I made a couple of changes to Library/layouts/2-c-r-fixed.css, which controls spacing of the different areas of the blog
  • I created two Page templates for displaying mediawiki pulls and screencasts without interference from sidebars
• Active plugins:
  • Dagon Design Mailer for the contact page, with reCaptcha active
  • Flickr Badge Widget, to show those Baruch photos on the front
  • Widget Logic, to control what widgets appear on what pages
  • Wiki Inc, to link to the wiki where our manual lives
    • I had some problem with the Wiki Inc plugin, so much of the support section is actually written directly into WordPress, save the FAQs and the screencasts.  For some reason, I can’t get images to pull.  Brian Lamb and Scott McMillan from the University of British Columbia, who work in the group that produced the plugin, generously gave me some of their time, but we couldn’t get it going.  I’ll return to that, because it’s a kick-ass function.

That’s all for my anatomy of a hack.  So easy, even a historian can do it.  If you have any ideas for additional enhancements, please share them.

When Obama took the stage last night, I was struck immediately by just how somber he looked.  He seemed both humbled by the moment and completely cognizant of the utter mess he’s set to inherit.  In the most soaring section of his speech, he cast the history of the past century through the eyes of Ann Nixon Cooper, born in Georgia in 1902 to a former slave.  He recounted the greatest American achievements of the last 100 years — women’s suffrage, the New Deal, World War II, the Black Freedom Movement, the moon landing, the fall of the Iron Curtain — interspersing, in the rhythm of the black church, the phrase “yes, we can” to connote that when Americans have faced existential challenges, the majority of them have repeatedly congealed around a shared, fundamental belief in the nation.  He then pivoted to the future, imagining his daughters looking back upon the 21st century, pitching this moment as the one where we chose to give them a history about which they could be proud.  This segment effectively situated the election in our national story and comfortably acknowledged its implications for the history of racism in this country, without letting the idea overwhelm the whole.  It was an “omni-American” moment, drawing upon the pain and richness in our national experience to present an integrative vision of history.

Yet, his sober body language cut somehow against this profound statement of hope, and did so in a way that actually gave me more confidence in his ability to become the greatest president in more than a generation.  This is a politician who is keenly self-aware, who said in May 2007, while reflecting upon his trouble in the earliest debates, “there’s a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It’s part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It’s not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.”  In an 180-degree turn from the current occupant of the White House, here is a man who struggles with ideas, who challenges himself to synthesize, who speaks to Americans as adults who can be trusted to see more than two diametrically opposed sides to an issue.  This is the temperament that allowed Obama to surge against the backdrop of an economic crisis, to soar above Rovian politics; it’s the persona that injected humility into his presentation last night, that led him to address in sympathetic terms those who disagree with him; and it’s the proper tone to lead the nation as it begins to face this next wave of existential challenges.

This man can’t solve all of our problems, doesn’t portend the end of race, and is bound by difficult choices.  But I can think of no better leader for this moment.

Some additional, random thoughts:

• Delano. S. Fitzgerald. Baines. Herbert Walker. Hussein.
• For the first time in my life, we have a President who may be able to convince some people that government is not the biggest problem in their lives.
• It will be fascinating to watch the Republican Party as it struggles to pick up the pieces and to find a voice.  It will be at war with itself.
• Obama will be the first president my and many of your kids will remember throughout their lives.
• It’s almost as remarkable for a former community organizer to win this office as it is an African-American.
• The passage of Proposition 8 in California should lessen the joy progressives take forward from yesterday.

They look something like this:

These things are a minor nuisance, the price we pay to protect the sites we need from bombardment by unwanted traffic or use as a launching pad for spam attacks.  According to researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, “about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.”

What if the time spent solving CAPTCHAs could be harnessed for productive purposes?  Thanks to reCAPTCHA, it can.

Carnegie Mellon is currently working with two organizations (the Internet Archive and the New York Times) to employ humans to decipher scans of text that are unreadable by OCR software (Optical Character Recognition).  If your site uses reCAPTCHA, your users can contribute to a major digitization project.  For details on how the technology works, click here.

This is the latest innovative effort to maximize productivity in a focused way by taking advantage of the reach of the web to congeal a distributed knowledge network.  reCAPTCHA has tapped into existing knowledge and processes to build yet more knowledge through another process.  All of us together are smarter than we are added up.

Brilliant work.

(Nod to Mikhail for the heads up about this technology.)

I was in Michigan this past weekend, and drove past the “North Oakland County Victory Office” of the McCain Campaign, just west of Pontiac, twenty miles north of Detroit. A placard near the street read “Get your McCain-Palin lawn signs here!” The building looked like a small bait shop, set back from the road, in the middle of a big parking lot with few cars. No one seemed to be there. On a Saturday afternoon. A month before the election.

This could have been a reaction against the McCain campaign deciding to give up on Michigan late last week. But when compared to what I’m reading about Obama’s organization, the two campaigns are running entirely different ground games. A few examples of what Obama’s been doing:

Here’s an ad that the bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley made in support of Obama. It’s in heavy radio rotation in Virginia:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUOfaIyv4Bs

Here’s a report from the Fulton (MO.) Sun, about the Obama campaign’s use of TTY devices to call hard-of-hearing voters.

Here’s a link to the iPhone Obama Application (pictured at right), which sorts contacts by state (putting battlegrounds at the top), and makes it easy for individuals to find their way to campaign events, make calls on behalf of Obama, or get details on the candidate’s take on particular issues.

The Obama campaign bought a tv channel on the Dish Network. Channel 73 will be playing all-Obama programming through the election.

Here’s some reporting on the campaigns from fivethirtyeight.com; a couple of bloggers have visited both campaigns’ offices throughout Colorado and Missouri. Key section:

Let’s be clear. We’ve observed no comparison between these ground campaigns. To begin with, there’s a 4-1 ratio of offices in most states. We walk into McCain offices to find them closed, empty, one person, two people, sometimes three people making calls. Many times one person is calling while the other small clutch of volunteers are chatting amongst themselves. In one state, McCain’s state field director sat in one of these offices and, sotto voce, complained to us that only one man was making calls while the others were talking to each other about how much they didn’t like Obama, which was true. But the field director made no effort to change this. This was the state field director.

The McCain offices are also calm, sedate. Little movement. No hustle. In the Obama offices, it’s a whirlwind. People move. It’s a dynamic bustle. You can feel it in our photos.

Finally, for those who think Obama’s been too reticent to hit McCain hard: think again. Much of the more aggressive and negative stuff is happening on a subterranean level (although that’s about to change with a national ad on McCain and the Keating Five). Spanish language commercials (radio and tv) are running in New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada tying McCain to Rush Limbaugh, saying he has “dos caras,” or “two faces.” This morning I heard a report featuring a call from a Virginia Obama-supporter to an undecided voter. It began with a reminder that John McCain would be the oldest President ever elected. The caller then brought up the specter of McCain’s death, talked about Sarah Palin’s embarrassing interview with Katie Couric, and then asked the person on the other line if they really want her as their President. In national tv appearances and the debates thus far, in recognition of Obama’s campaign against “politics as usual,” the candidate and his running mate have avoided a negative or derisive tone or even challenging Palin. I think Biden probably could have field dressed Palin last week had he wanted to. Instead, he treated her and her substanceless winking — to paraphrase Garry Shandling– like how “Johnny Carson treated Charo.” (It’s only fair when acknowledging Palin’s winking to also note Biden’s botox. He did, however, answer a few of the questions). At the local level, the Obama campaign has a bit tougher.

There’s a direct correlation between the sophistication of the Obama ground game and the Democratic gains in affiliated voters. In Pennsylvania, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 486,000 in 2000 and 580,000 in 2004. Now? 1.15 million. In Nevada, four years ago Dems trailed by nearly 5000 registrants. They currently hold an 80,000 voter edge. In Florida, the Democrats have added 130,000 more voters than the Republicans over the past four years. If you’re an Obama supporter, those numbers are very encouraging.

Other factors explain this swing, including the unpopularity of the current administration and the downturn in the economy. But it would be foolish to discount the effectiveness of the Obama machine in organizing its base, supporting voter registration (especially among the young), employing technology, and effectively tailoring its message to particular constituencies. Obama and Biden know who their audiences are, and how to speak to them.

Admittedly, I haven’t been following the McCain campaign as closely as Obama’s, but I’ve seen no evidence that there’s much innovation or energy at its core. Yes, Palin has fired up the Republican base. But has that led to more organizing or a flock of volunteers in key locations? Aside from McCain’s increasingly negative ads and his hope that the economy becomes less central to the campaign, a few yard signs are all I’ve really seen.

* Late update: Ben Smith has a piece in Politico on Obama’s “quiet efforts” to target black voters… subterranean for real.

to: john.mccain@maverickymaverick.gov
from: dmccourt@youhavegottobekiddingme.edu [Sent On Behalf Of American Public]

subject: extension?

Dear John,

While I sympathize with the demands of balancing both legislative and campaign issues, I cannot, in accord with historical policy, grant your request for an extension on the debate. Dean’s excuses can only be granted in the cases of health or personal emergencies, and would need to be submitted to me in writing.  A physician’s note is also acceptable.

Regards,
Dana McCourt

---

On Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 12:00pm, John McCain wrote:

sorry to bother you and i know this request is late but i have been really busy and i want to call an emergency meeting with the president and understanding all the material is taking up a lot of my time so i find myself woefully underprepared and i am throwing myself on your mercy. can i get an extension over the weekend on the debate so i can present my best work to you? or should i get a dean’s excuse?

thanks,

john

Several faculty have agreed to post to the blog regularly, and to lead an ongoing conversation about teaching at Baruch College.  Surprisingly, there are very few blogs like this, which provide the opportunity for members of a college community to discuss pedagogy outside of their disciplines.  This is a unique and exciting development for the college and for CUNY, and I look forward to much interchange between the folks who post to and follow that blog and Cacophonites.

That said, the activity level on the two candidates’ Twitter pages does seem to back up the overarching thesis.

Check out these screenshots.

Obama’s:

McCain’s:

(Note the “Location” each has signified.  Obama sharply “outsiders” his online presence.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

He even wrote a song about his:

When I’m writing, my “little hater” tells me I need to find a fifth or a sixth corroborating piece of evidence before I can make a claim, and even after I do, the damn thing still comes out tentative.  He sometimes makes me think that the idea that I just came up with can’t be anywhere near as good as I originally thought because, well, I’m the one who came up with it.  Someone else probably wrote something similar somewhere else, and I just haven’t seen it yet.

I’ve about had enough of this bastard getting in my way.

Sometimes, when I need get a post up on this blog, I start writing about interests that I don’t get to explore when I write reports, papers, proposals, or emails.  It’s possible to tie almost anything into that topic taped up there across the header.  “Write what you know” isn’t useful just for getting our students to break through their shells.  It’s also a useful way to put your little hater on his heels, get the engine revving, and start a conversation.

Writing teachers everywhere: this is not change you can believe in.

(kudos to TPM)

Apart from Facebook’s support for connectedness and competitive word twisting, the site allows users to issue  “status” updates whenever they want.  This is a delicate but  powerful art form.  I’ve encountered the following kinds of updates:

Literal: “Luke is working on a blog post”
Self-promoting: “Luke just published this: http://cac.ophony.org/2008/07/24/status-anxiety/”
Philosophical: “Luke is”
Frustrated: “Luke is, but perhaps not according to Human Resources”
Resigned: “Luke isn’t”
Ironic: “Luke’s productivity is unaffected by the distractions of Facebook”
Literary (direct quote): “Luke is under the brown fog of a winter dawn”
Literary (reference): “Luke thinks the only thing keeping him visible is his whiteness”
Historical: “Luke thinks the run on Indymac echoes the Panic of 1893″
Informed: “Luke just got run over by Bob Novak”
Uninformed: “Luke thinks McCain is being too heavily scrutinized by the press”
Anticipatory: “Luke is looking forward to the new season of Mad Men”
Anguished: “Luke keeps writing the same &%#(*&@  sentence over and over again!”
Confessional: “Luke watched Steel Magnolias last night, and is still crying”
Curious: “Luke wonders how many kinds of status updates there are”
Evangelical: “Luke thinks there will never, ever, ever be anything like The Wire on TV again”
Nerdy: “Luke is a csstud and a phpimp”
Political: “Luke is chanting No Justice, No Peace”
Supportive: “Luke thinks that no matter what (redacted)’s dissertation adviser says, the work is top-notch”
Onomatopoeic: “Luke thump thump thumped three miles at the track” (that one is also alliterative)
Swinging: “Luke is be-bop-be-dee-bop”
Sporting: “Luke is yelling ‘Go Green’”
Stumped, Disinterested, or Over Forty: ” ”

Of course, there are other ways to announce your status, or lack thereof, to the world.  There’s Twitter, which gives you 140 characters to say what you’re up to (”microblogging,” they call it).  There’s the status menu feature of an instant messaging client.  There’s all sorts of ways to unify these statuses, to change them on the fly; or you can choose to keep them separate.

Yet, I imagine the following uttered in the border-state twang of a dear BLSCI comrade: “who cares?  I don’t want to know what you’re doing, and I don’t want you to know what I’m doing.”  Of course not.  A status update is not really a status update, but rather a chance to blast your friends with a small dose of personality to break up the monotony of the day.  It’s fun, it’s a challenge to be creative, and it’s a chance to stay connected with a community.

Understandably, the Obamas ain’t pleased, finding it tasteless and degrading.  The fear is that this image, widely distributed, may give credence to the misinformation going around about the couple.  As someone put it to me, “this plays into the suspicions of the morons who ‘don’t do nuance.’”  To which I replied: “Since when has the New Yorker cared about those folks?”

People will be talking about this cover, and though it may not reach the level attained by Saul Steinberg’s “New Yorker’s View of the World” or Maira Kalman’s “New Yorkistan,” it will be getting the magazine some attention.  So, perhaps as far as the magazine is concerned, it’s effective communication… but it’s also requiring the reader/listener to bring a lot of context to the table.

* Late update: in the interest of “Equal Time,” Edge of the American West offers this:

Peter O’Toole, on Fresh Air, telling Terry Gross about shooting the dangerous scene pictured above for Lawrence of Arabia.

I love how O’Toole takes her question and turns it into a narrative, reveling in the details, painting a picture, and ending with a bang. As is often the case, Gross asks a follow-up question that leads to a coda by O’Toole that sums up not only the moment and the story, but also his entire approach to life.

Tiger Stadium photo credit: hassgocubs

I hadn’t been to a game in Detroit since I left Michigan after college. Since then, the Tigers have changed ballparks, lost 119 games in a season (one short of the record), and dramatically turned things around to win a pennant in 2006. They’re hovering a few games under .500 right now, but have enough firepower and pitching to make a run in the second half of the season.

So I was excited to go to Comerica, which I’d heard was a great place to watch a game. It’s a beautiful structure, framing the skyline of old Detroit in a way that obscures the deep economic and political troubles that plague the city.

Comerica Park photo credit: kw111786

As we settled into our seats along the first base line, I was as giddy as I had been as an 8 year-old. I even called the lifelong buddy who I used to go to games with back then, just to let him know where I was.

Watching the game was a different experience from those trips in the past. I still had a blast, enjoying the company of my siblings-in-law, and appreciating the talent on the field (even as the Tigers lost to the Angels). I was struck, though, by the intensity of the messages flying around the ballpark. If I wasn’t paying attention to the action, an advertisement was unavoidably forced upon my gaze. I’m not sure if I felt more like PIerre Bourdieu or Hunter S. Thompson; either way, I felt like I was captive in Vegas.

Every line of sight offered something different. A giant fountain, sponsored by General Motors, dangled two shiny sedans beyond the outfield. Vendors, hawking $7 beers and $5 pretzels, were easy to spot throughout the stadium, marked by fluorescent yellow shirts. Even bases on balls — of which the Tigers issued too many — were sponsored: as the batter trotted down to first base, an ad blared through the speakers and in the slim screens that lined the upper deck inviting ticket holders to “walk down” to a local establishment for a haircut.

The most astonishing structure in the stadium, more striking even than the ferris wheel in the concourse and the giant tiger statues out front, is the gargantuan Comerica Park scoreboard. Roughly ten stories tall, the scoreboard serves over a dozen distinct advertisements, as well as two giant screens that play commercials when not showing player photos and statistics. In the center of all of this chaos is the actual score and game information, which take up no more than a quarter of the scoreboard’s mass.

Comerica Park Scoreboard photo credit: McPhloyd

One of the beautiful things about baseball is the way that one can read the story of a game through a box score. A young fan develops that particular literacy and carries it forward through life, forever able to regard a score line and imagine the events that led to it. At a ballpark, the scoreboard tells you in familiar code where you are, what’s happened to get you there, and how much space is left for your team to rally or survive. A scoreboard centers the fan within the experience of watching a game.

At Comerica, with competing flashing lights grabbing for my vision, separating out the scores from the messages on the board took dizzying effort. At Tiger Stadium, there had mostly been the game and the camaraderie in the stands, and it was a purer experience: fan meets game. Of course there were hawkers and ads and plenty of consumption; but they were nowhere near as loud or as intrusive as they’ve become.

Yes, there are economics behind all of this, and a straight line from the $7 beer and intense advertising to the giant contract that locked Miguel Cabrera up as a Tiger for the next eight years. If I’m bemoaning anything, then, it’s how the experience of going to a ballgame has changed, and the license that the powers that be feel to barrage the senses of a captive audience with an endless series of pitches. I felt assaulted, and so cheaply. I had to seek ways to tune out the barrage and actively create the experience that I wanted when I bought those $40 box seats.

At the 8th Annual Symposium, many of us discussed how we have been forced by new and more intensive modes of communication to “filter” the information that comes our way. This style of engagement with information requires a certain media literacy that, I believe, needs to be cultivated by colleges in order to better equip our students to navigate the messages, both literal and figurative, that bombard them in public spaces– and, increasingly, in private ones too.

The successful development of that literacy impacts matters large, like being an informed citizen, and small(er), like trying to enjoy a ballgame. New technologies, such as digital video recorders and RSS feeds, empower us to shape and filter the information and messages that come at us. At times, these tools feel like weapons in a battle that’s intensifying, and which increasingly threatens the purity of certain experiences. That’s too bad.

Edupunk (here are musings and run downs by Mike Caulfield, Stephen Downes, and D’Arcy Norman) is a new name for ideas that have been bouncing around the progressive edublogosphere for some time, namely, that higher education humanity needs an alternative to proprietary course management systems and the philosophy of teaching and learning that they implicitly promote. At the core of edupunk are older pedagogical stances unrelated to technology: an ethic of self-reliance, the valuation of student-centered experiential learning, and the rejection of the “banking concept of education.” Edupunk seeks to update and adapt these ideas within the rapidly evolving realm of edutech.

I’m coming a little late to this particular conversation (last week I was DIYing the walls of my house with a wallpaper steamer and buckets of paint– domesticpunk), and hope I can add something to the celebration/elaboration. Seems to me that “edupunk” is a useful term, though, like all metaphors, it breaks down in the end. It has successfully congealed and branded the thinking that’s at the core of the unease many of us working in this field have with the way things are done at most schools. It’s good that it’s been picked up by the Chronicle, and it’s fantastic that more people are finding their way to Jim’s blog these days.

I fear, however, that the attention to the phrase may distract from the work that produced it. For instance, I’ve been been trying to square the circle of my dislike for punk music and culture with my love and appreciation for the work of the cats who’ve rallied to this term. I see a rejectionist ethos and cliquish sense of superiority behind much punk music and culture, and I’m not sure that’s an accurate description of the edutech movement that I feel a part of. I’ve always been more of a funk and soul man myself, and think that the affirmation native to those genres, the love and depth of feeling at their center, are much more pleasant (and just as useful) rhetorical and political stances. A brilliant administrator I once worked with, wise enough to know what she didn’t know and to defer to folks like Jim and Zach Davis on all things digital, once said, “we want to use technology to seduce students to our pedagogical goals.” That seems more Barry White than Johnny Rotten.

In that spirit, I present: edufunk.

photo(shop) credit: skywaltzer

Or, how about yet another metaphor: edujazz.I sense in the discourse around edupunk an appreciation for messiness, even a distaste for form. I’m not sure this lends itself to the best teaching. The pedagogy that I’ve been exposed to and have practiced as a teacher of history is much more like jazz… lay down a structure, and leave plenty of space for improvisation. This allows a variety of types of learning to happen in a classroom, acknowledges that both facts and the skills to interpret them are important areas to work on, and encourages our students to explore from within material that we’ve laid out with a set of goals in mind. I’m all for the “guide-by-the-side” approach to teaching… but the work that went into the Ph.D. I’m about to earn does qualify me, I think, to do a bit more than that at times.

This metaphor is translatable to how we, as instructional technologists, nurture critical approaches to online learning, particularly in how we can “seduce” talented teachers to experiment with new forms. Our Institute is incredibly lucky to have the autonomy to deploy and develop whatever software we deem pedagogically appropriate, so to a certain extent we are isolated from Blackboard. Baruch’s IT shop also recognizes that an institution of higher learning should offer a range of solutions to its community, even if those solutions compete with one another. BCTC blesses and supports our experimentation.

Yet Blackboard still runs wild at this university, and we are constantly engaging with faculty members and administrators who refuse to see the differences between the solutions we promote and what BB offers. BB’s appeal is in its antiseptic pre-fabrication, in the very fact that it doesn’t force faculty to take the extra steps to really consider how Web 2.0 and distributed learning open up new pedagogical possibilities. As a result, many faculty graft onto it existing modes of learning, fearful of allowing technology to “get in the way.” They get on Blackboard, get off, and move on.

Some faculty members do use Blackboard quite successfully, particularly for collaborative projects. Good teaching is good teaching, no matter where it happens or how it happens. Our job as instructional technologists, I think, is to explore the new possibilities and modes of learning that Blackboard happens to work against. If that software gives faculty members what they need to accomplish what they want, then so be it. But if faculty are interested in making full use of distributed learning, in continuing to learn themselves, and especially in truly empowering students, they need other solutions.

Edujazz, emphasizing structure and improvisation, can help reach out to faculty who are reticent to give up their control and jump into the pit with the edupunks. This argument evolves from my work in an academic service unit, where my job is to help a wide-range of faculty members experiment with this stuff. Such work requires, and benefits from, sensitive responses to their concerns. An anti-authoritarian, anarchic response will ultimately accomplish little. The DIY approach of edupunk is a great goal, but often times DIT– Do It Together–is necessary, and even preferable. Helping faculty members translate their pedagogical structures to a new environment goes a long way towards mollifying their concerns about the impact of technology on their students’ learning. The students, if the structure is sound, can handle the improvisation.

Now, behind the scenes, hell yeah, I’ll cavort with the punks. Jim’s named a movement, even if the contours of that movement still haven’t yet been fully defined. The politics of this stuff and the consideration of the logic of capital are deeply important, and should constantly be a part of the conversation. If a university is going to spend millions on a limited and problematic application, it should probably be able to explain why that solution is better than cheaper alternatives. I haven’t seen that done yet.

Until it is, there’s work to be done. So, edupunks, edufunks, eduheads, or whomever: keep doing your thing.

Of course, she’s allowed her own music.  I know our tastes will likely diverge through her adolescence, and we’ll have less of a chance during those years to connect over common sounds.  That’s part of why I’m so glad that she’s worked the Dino-5 into her rotation recently.  This collection of hip-hop heads is organized by Prince Paul, who produced the landmark De La Soul albums 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul is Dead, and Buhloone Mind State, and features Ladybug Mecca (formerly of the Digable Planets), Chali 2na (Jurassic Five), Wordsworth (an underground Brooklyn MC who appeared on records by A Tribe Called Quest and Blackstar), and Scratch (the vocal turntable, formerly of the Roots).  Their debut album is a storybook, narrated by the poet Ursula Rucker, about 5 dino friends at their dino school.  My kid is now walking around, rapping in the deep voice of 2na’s character, T-Rex, “I may be big and scary, but I’m really pretty nice.”

What’s so striking about the Dino 5 for me is the way they capture the essence of hip-hop as it was during its golden era in the late 1980s-mid 1990s, before capital swooped in and co-opted what was once predominantly an alternative and oppositional art form.  Popping off about your fly Adidas or your adversary’s nappy head and rotund relatives, rapping about dancing, music, girls, boys, friends, enemies, and the neighborhood.  Most of that gave way to Big Pimpin’, bling bling, and baseless braggadacio.

Hip-hop is still a vibrant art form, always will be, but there’s a reason that the areas of the music that challenge listeners aurally, poetically, and politically moved “underground,” out of site from the casual observer who doesn’t have the time or the passion to dig for those sounds.  Hip-hop ain’t dead, y’all, far from it; it’s been integrated in interesting ways into other forms, it’s been globalized, and there’s still plenty of innovation happening.  Yet hip-hop’s foundational meaning has been clouded over the past generation by its loudest voices.

So I’m happy to share with my daughter a feeling similar to what I got during my adolescence, listening to De La transmit live from Mars.  The Dino 5 represent the best of hip-hop: role playing, storytelling, deep danceable beats, learned references and musical quotations, wicked flow, and lyrical playfulness.  Their music is both nice enough for a four year-old and “nice” enough for her purist dad.  Kid tested, pops approved.

As my daughter takes her first tentative steps towards reading, it heartens me to be able to introduce her to the poetry and artistry of hip-hop with something that’s her speed.  Soon enough, she’ll be barraged with beats and words and sounds.  The Dino 5’s album gives her hip-hop that’s more sophisticated than the corny rapping on Sesame Street.  Hopefully, it will help her sort through the cacophony that she’ll meet as she grows, and find something that’s as meaningful to her as the music of my youth is to me.

Here’s a couple of brief clips to tack sound onto my words.

T-Rex struggles with how other kids see him, and hopes that they can think twice about how nice he may be:

Tracy Triceratops has a tough time keeping her voice down:

Posdnous introduces the “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” on De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (1989):

I’ve become interested in this question while following our Anthropology/Sociology working group, and also through my own surfing.  A relatively new blog–The Edge of the American West–run by historians Eric Rauchway and Ari Kelman from U.C. Davis, has quickly become one of the better U.S. history blogs.  What makes it good is a steady flow of mixed content: scholarship and book reviews, “This Day in History” posts, pick-ups on contemporary political issues and reporting, and some discussion of teaching.  Mix in the authors’ fine senses of humor and an occasional reference to sports and, voila, you get pretty good insight into just what it is historians do.

Early in The Edge’s life, Rauchway answered the question, “Why Blog?”  I was particularly struck by his fourth reason:

To change the profession: be the academic discourse you want to see in the world. You want historiography to move quickly, have relevance, be sharper? You can’t make it that way book review by book review: but you can if you blog.

This argument supports the notion of a blog as a personal publishing platform, as an opportunity to get your name and voice out there, and to contribute to the shaping of the discourse in your field.

So, how about it, BLSCI fellows?  Your very own blog, and all the opportunity that comes with it, is now just a click away.

Anthropology/Sociology Faculty Working Group

Diana Rickard, Melis Ece, and I have been running a disciplinary working group with five faculty from Anthropology/Sociology who are using weblogs in their courses for the first time. The project includes seven individual course blogs, and the faculty also contribute their thoughts about using weblogs in their discipline to a shared online space. This project is a fascinating example of how course blogs, even in one discipline, can achieve a range of goals, from pre-writing for in-class presentations, to scaffolding research papers, to extending the classroom, to sharing and exploring related materials in an informal way. Each faculty member has a vision, and has structured their course blog(s) accordingly. It’s exciting to see a group of committed young faculty think through the implications of bringing their courses and pedagogical goals online. The home blog features commentary by our participants, and also houses both links to the individual course blogs and recent posts, which are fed in via RSS syndication.

Leonard Sussman: Digital Photography

One of the great strengths of open source products such as WordPress is the elegant ease with which participants in a course can share their work with one another. Prof. Leonard Sussman, of the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Baruch, gets major props for his willingness to run a prototype of a blog linked to and driven by Flickr.com, the image-sharing site (poetically, the Flickr blog is itself powered by WordPress). Prof. Sussman was unhappy with the quality of in-class critiques his students have been delivering, and desired a space where they could share their work with one another, and, when prompted, do some pre-writing to develop the language with which to talk about photography.

Each student registered for his/her own Flickr account, and then joined a Flickr group called “Sussman Images.” When they submit an image from their own account to the group, that image automatically feeds into the course gallery, which displays images through a lightbox. The images also appear randomly in a sidebar on the front page of the blog, and Prof. Sussman can pull individual images into the main area of the blog for students to comment upon. He hasn’t gotten them writing just yet, but we’re happy to get the data flow set up, and think that this type of sharing, taking advantage of free tools readily available, provides one innovative model for bringing arts classes online.

Zoe Sheehan Saldana: Designing with Computer Animation and Computer Based Image Making

Mikhail has christened Professor Zoe Sheehan Saldana our first “blogfessor of the month” for her “Designing with Computer Animation” course blog. On this site, she’s taken the rotating header function that comes with the Neoclassical WordPress theme and hacked it to accept Flash animations. She then had each of her students design an animated header for the site. If you go to the blog, and hit refresh, the header will change.

Our support for this project was limited to loading up the blog, giving Zoe administrative access, and tossing some ideas around. She did the rest. The result is, as Jim Groom has noted, “an awesome intersection of uses of this online space: sharing resources, publishing platform, collaborating on projects, and a class art gallery.”

Baruch Journalism: Writing New York and Online Newswatch

Few fields have been as deeply impacted by the explosion of Web 2.0 as journalism. Undergraduate journalism departments are scrambling to develop online and new media components to their curricula, and we’re happy to be assisting Baruch’s program as it adjusts. We’re currently supporting two journalism weblogs. One is the continuation of a blog first launched for Professor Roslyn Bernstein’s feature writing course last year, called “Writing New York.” The second is Professor Vera Haller’s resource to help all journalism students follow developments in online journalism, called “OnlineNewsWatch.”

Feel free to check out these sites, and follow them as they build over the course of the semester. There’ll be much more blogging at Baruch in the days to come.

From MTVU…

(unfortunately, and inexplicably, MTVU has removed this video as of 2/29. Links to media pickups of the video here and, from The Ticker, here).

Mikhail showed off this blog and some of the course blogs we’ve been running, and also demoed to oohs and ahhs VOCAT (which, hopefully, will get a more detailed presentation on this blog once it’s rolled out) while touching on the benefits of “soft money” when trying to break out of traditional teaching and learning molds. Matt talked about his experiences teaching through WordPress, MediaWiki, and SMF Discussion Boards in the CUNY Online BA program and in a traditional face-to-face class, and displayed how distributed class blogs (each student has his/her own) empower students to see their educations as tied into broader communities of knowledge. These approaches also helped his students develop technological “fluency” as they mastered the material of the course, a project that colleges should be grappling with when they discuss their general education curricula. Jim played the part of the prodigal son, sharing with us what he’s achieved using WordPress MultiUser at UMW. In a community of approximately 3200 teachers and learners, UMW has 800 individual and course blogs up and running on one installation of this software. “Running” is the key word. With Jim as their muse, users–students and faculty–are finding creative ways to connect within courses, across disciplines, and beyond the boundaries of the university. To explore this fantastic project, click here.

This was a truly inspiring panel, and raised some important issues. Though Jim put his finger most solidly on the question (and just built it out here), each presenter touched on the tension between administrative concerns that usually favor proprietary software solutions and innovative teaching and learning achieved through open source. For instance, Blackboard is successful primarily because of its strength as an administrative tool– students are auto-enrolled, grades can be calculated and submitted, it links with e-Reserve. Blackboard, however, rarely wows or gets students excited about participating, and applications like the blog and wiki feature in JournalLX simply fake the funk when it comes to the malleability and connectedness we saw displayed by the presenters. Applications like WordPress, MediaWiki, and SMF each empower users to shape information and experience however they need to.

Jim argues in his post that this tension is at the very core of what it means to be an instructional technologist. Joe Ugoretz, who is the Director of Instructional Technology at the Macaulay Honors College (Jim’s and my former stomping ground) echoes the question, and points out that information technology and instructional technology aren’t the same thing. Joe hopes that a more mutually beneficial balance of power between “administrating” and “teaching and learning” can be worked out. The MHC is a hotbed of experimentation in teaching and learning, like the BLSCI, and with Joe now running the show over there it would be great if we could explore connections and partnerships. There is great work being done on teaching, learning, and technology throughout CUNY but, in part because the ultimate target of such work is the classroom, few apparatuses exist for such knowledge to really resonate out and through the lives of CUNY folk. That the panel on open source at the CUNY IT Conference was much more highly attended than last year was promising. Perhaps next year these questions can be better represented in the design of the conference.

I’m not sure that students are ever given much of an opportunity to learn to present or to PowerPoint in this way, to “PowerPoint what they know.” Would this be helpful as a freshman year assignment in some type of intro course? (I’m of the mind, by the way, that all freshmen should be taking a required media literacy course in their freshmen years… this would fit perfectly in that class).

I once worked with a freshmen class that used PowerPoint to create documentaries about their families, with embedded movies, audio interviews, and images. The goal of the assignment was to get students to break out of the PowerPoint box, and to get them to construct a narrative through the medium. The only rules were no clip art and no gratuitous animation. I gave them a workshop on PowerPoint, helped them storyboard their presentations, and then assisted them with the programming. Finally, they showed their work to the class. This assignment was a successful way for them to master the software and develop their voices at the same time, with the added bonus of creating community in the classroom through the sharing of personal information.

All of what I’ve written above is just prelude to the PowerPoint slides included below, which are examples of the more serious work that some Baruch students might produce if we give them the chance to PowerPoint what they know. Click on the image to read it.

(Slides taken from here, with a warning that readers not of the hip-hop nation may be offended).

Click here to view the embedded video.

How about using this as a model for an assignment on mash-ups, taking advantage of Web 2.0 to explore processes of translation/cultural exchange? Taking students inside the productive process, getting them to exercise knowledge in creative ways? It could work for anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, literature, language, or sketch-comedy classes.

In that spirit, I’ve been thinking that next Fall I’d like to build a blog that aggregates coverage of the 2008 Presidential Election and uses it as a jumping-off point for a current events course about politics and convergent media.

I think such a course would work well as a first-year seminar, and could expose students to rigorous engagement with contemporary issues while helping them critically examine the quickly changing processes by which we produce and consume information. Students would be asked to learn about the policy issues at play in the election, and the blog would provide a tool for the teacher to guide their inquiry through directed readings of more in-depth pieces of analysis as well as selected reportage. The presentness of the topic would infuse the course with energy. Students would write regularly to better understand the rhetoric of presidential politics, to debate issues, and also to examine role of the media in the electoral process. Once the election is complete, students would then be asked to place the events in a historical context and to produce a final paper on some element of the election or its coverage.

Anyone know a faculty member interested in teaching this class?

In a first-year writing course, students were required to attend a reading and then to post their reactions on the blog. The first blog post was from a student who railed at length and in detail about how boring the reading was and how uncomfortable he felt at the venue. The post wasn’t nasty at all, but it was quite negative in tone.

Rather than taking the post personally or defending the assignment, the Professor praised the student on the blog for his honesty and, importantly, for his willingness to reflect upon his disengagement. She also devoted much of the next class session to a discussion of “what it means to be liberally educated,” and how we can find value in things even if our reaction to them is negative. She had been disappointed by the behavior of some of the students at the event, but she didn’t let this filter onto the blog, preserving that space as an area for students to work out their ideas and write without her hovering judgment. It would have been easy for her to chasten the student (whose post actually begat more complaining), but that could have negatively impacted the virtual space the remainder of the term. Instead, the faculty member modeled for her students an approach to studying the world that found value in what on the surface–complaining and rejection–held little at all.

All writing is both process and product, though some types of writing assignments necessarily emphasize one element over the other. What was successful about the teaching described above was its loyalty to the goal of the assignment within the context of the class. That faculty member who was concerned about his students’ grasp of Plato was seeing their writing exclusively as a product, and missing the extent to which informal, public, process-oriented writing can open areas for responsive teachers to intervene.

At the CUNY Writing Fellows Orientation, I attended a breakout session where we looked at a compilation of the surveys given to all of the WAC-WID Coordinators at CUNY. We learned a few lessons. Each program is drastically different in structure, oversight, and activity. In some ways these differences reflect the particularities of the CUNY campuses; in other ways, they are just the products of local bureaucracies. Nearly every program has some element of faculty development, though with varying incentives for participation. Most programs have a web presence, and a few are experimenting with new media as an instructional tool. The writing-intensive requirements vary wildly across the campuses, and nearly every campus expressed concern about constant change and limited resources. Finally, a question on “How do you measure the work you are doing?” garnered responses that effectively said, “we assess,” without much exploration of what that meant.

I reference this survey because I think that when doing assessment, it is necessary to first understand the role of your program within the whole institution. The BLSCI (of which the Writing Fellows are only a small part) has a unique challenge because while we are committed to improving communication-intensive instruction, this means very different things in each of the disciplines. Such a situation complicates assessment, not least of all because it depends wholly on the input of a group of individuals who are not necessarily the best-positioned to design and perform assessment: fellows. We’re mostly temporary employees who are completing our degrees and applying for full-time gigs. At the same time, we work for an Institute that is the closest thing to a Teaching and Learning Center that Baruch has, so we should have something to say about how assessment works.

This situation exists in tension with some of the “Nine Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning,” as outlined by the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment at Indiana University-Kokomo. I found the following points of particular interest: “Assessment works best when it’s ongoing, not episodic;” “Assessment fosters improvement when representatives from across the educational community are involved;” and “Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part of a larger set of conditions that promote change.” In addition to exploring our work within our narrow assignments, then, assessment is needed of the environments within which that work takes place: the curricula of the Weissman and Zicklin schools, the functioning of the Institute, and the mission of CUNY. Assessment should be done of administration as well as of courses and special programs, and our input, as fellows, should be integrated with a larger, systematic approach where the utility of assessment is clearly stated. Too often I fear that assessment is done merely for self-justification. An assessment that maintains the status quo is difficult to get on-board with, while an assessment that will yield improvements at the college could be exciting.

One idea dominated the breakout session I mentioned above: that Writing Fellows and WAC/WID programs at CUNY would benefit greatly from the centralization of information (though not of the administration of WAC/WID programs). The Office of Undergraduate Education is making strides in structuring support for the provincial programs that can be shaped to local concerns, particularly by promising a central digital archive that organizes and distributes the knowledge being generated on the campuses. What other campuses do for and with assessment would be a component of this, which is great.

What other questions might we ask and information might we seek as we begin to assess our path to assessment?

(copyright NPR)

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums.

This piece does not detail or directly ask what type of instructional support and training schools that have instituted laptop programs provide for their teachers, though it does hint that resources that might be devoted to those efforts are tied up repairing broken machines. It also seems to assume that proponents of laptops in schools make the argument because they think laptops will help students raise test scores. Mark Warschauer, an education professor at UC-Irvine and the author of Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom, who is quoted in the story, redirects the conversation when he says:

Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research. If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful.

While I’d argue that a school needn’t have such a lofty goal to find uses for laptops, I think Warschauer makes the right point. Of course laptops won’t improve learning if they’re dumped into an environment and grafted onto existing pedagogical goals and methods of assessment. This article seems to be about challenges to an assumption that was faulty in the first place. These school districts blame students for using laptops poorly, but the author didn’t ask administrators why it appears that they never considered the very simple question that should begin any educational engagement with technology, no matter the scale: why are we doing this? You have to be able to clearly answer that question and trace how it will change the playing field before you use technology effectively in education, and it’s socially irresponsible to throw millions of public dollars into a program that hasn’t made its rationale clear. That “laptops do not improve learning” seems to me to be the wrong conclusion to take from this story, especially if your measurement tools are grades and a standardized test. I think a better conclusion would be “bad programs do not improve learning.”

An important though somewhat-buried element of this story is the recurring cost of technology, which is an issue all institutions have to address, and which is particularly troublesome for those that depend upon public money. Technological devices slow down and become out of date as they age, or sometimes just plain malfunction. They regularly need to be fixed or replaced. We’ve all been in classrooms or libraries that have bad machines. It seems disingenuous or maybe just alarmingly naive for a school to lend laptops and then to groan about having to fix them, and is yet another example of how poorly considered some of the programs in this article seemed to have been. I’d be interested to see how schools are dealing with this issue, and which schools prioritize keeping their technology up-to-date and fully operational. I’d be willing to bet that those are the schools where students get the best guidance in how to use technology in their learning.

This was my first symposium, and I had a fine time. It’s nice to break up the monotony of our academic day-to-day, to mix with folks from the outside world, and also to get to know some of my fellow fellows better. I thought both Keynotes were good. William Taylor’s talk resonated through our small-group discussion, and I thought it was an effective mixture of presentational models: part book talk, part corporate motivational speech, and part exhibit on public presentation. Chris Anson’s talk was interesting due to his knowledge and polish, but felt a little disconnected to me… I’m not sure that the format of a fireside chat meshes well with a Keynote in this context. Perhaps other folks felt differently.

My discussion group was enjoyable, though we could have used a few more business folks and a finer focus. Everyone was amiable and contributed something to the discussion, but our group didn’t get much further with the questions than the fellows had when we wrote them. That’s ok, since the purpose was to generate dialogue between businessfolk and academics. Much of our group’s talk revolved around the relationship between authenticity and effectiveness in communication. I argued that there was no determined relationship between the two, and that most businesses care less about being “authentic” with their customers than they do about effectively communicating their way into pockets. Authenticity can be a tactic, but communication can be just as effective if the communicator is being inauthentic. In many cases, “effective” communication requires inauthenticity (see: buildup to War in Iraq). The afternoon discussion did not address the question we came up with in the morning, which was: “Given a world with too many forms of communication, how do we create an architecture that ensures that we communicate effectively within our organization?” Perhaps that question was unanswerable, or maybe the answers were obvious.

My final point, which obviously says more about me than anything else: I should have been more prepared for this, given that we’re at Baruch and given the nature of this gathering… but in my many years of graduate school, I’ve rarely been in a room where the big C seemed so far off the table.

By the way… those mini-cheesburgers? Man alive… and grilled to a perfect medium, too. We should have applauded the Chef at the Players Club right after we cheered for Mikhail and Mr. Schwartz.

This video, beyond showing off the amazing ability of practitioners of parkour, also reflects the multiple literacies of its producers and their familiarity with a variety of cultural forms. It was produced with practically no budget. We all are concerned about the writing and speaking ability of our students, and we should be. But we also, I think, should realize that students have other languages through which they can express themselves and generate knowledge, and most of them don’t think that they’re allowed to draw upon these forms at college. I think they should be, as long as it’s in the right pedagogical setting. We can help make this happen. I’d love to see Baruch students use the aural and the visual to explore themselves and each other, and to present their explorations to a broader audience. I have no doubt we’d all be impressed with the product. That, to me, is what teaching through Web 2.0 is all about, and it’s the perfect use of these new technologies at the most culturally diverse college in the country.

I like this. Discursive chaos is great and all, but ultimately blogs are more useful, in my opinion, when directed by a purpose and an administrator to articulate and enforce the rules. This goes triple for class sites. Then again, that’s just good teaching.

Anyway, I’m not sure much will evolve from this effort, which seems intended to empower milquetoast administrators to administer rather than to allow their sites to devolve into nastiness. Just thought that it was something to note in advance of our Symposium.

Talking Points Memo, a weblog operated by three men out of a small office in Chelsea, has pushed the story since early January. They’ve produced original reporting, but have also depended a great deal upon the participation of their readership in tracing the contours of the scandal. Here’s a piece from the LA Times that details TPM’s process.

TPM’s work has employed collectivized information gathering and sifting. After noticing that several US Attorneys were being replaced late last year, TPM’s editors deputized their readership and asked them to send relevant clips from local newspapers. TPM aggregated the clips, revealing a pattern of politically-motivated firings. Two weeks ago the Department of Justice released more than 3000 documents related to the purge. TPM asked its readership–most of whom had been following the story for two months–to sift through the documents and discuss their findings online. The staff followed the threads to identify which documents to highlight, and built a timeline of significant events and players in the scandal. TPM has owned this story, out of a combination of editorial leadership and reader participation.

The big media outlets who originally paid little mind to this story are now on top of it, thanks in part to TPM’s muckraking. In this process, the editor/reporters there have modeled some ideas that I think are central to the integration of technology into teaching at the college level:

1. By empowering their readers to contribute, they’ve magnified the impact and worth of their enterprise.
2. By funneling the flow of information through their own expertise, they’ve shaped the potential chaos of many voices into purposeful and concrete journalism
3. By identifying themselves as journalists who work through a blog rather than bloggers who do journalism, they’ve influenced their field without letting the power and newness of the medium overwhelm their mission

Each of these points has a corollary in technological pedagogy. Technology at its best can augment what happens in the classroom, sharpening lessons, expanding fields of discussion, and magnifying student engagement with the materials under consideration. The teacher’s role in this process is central, and the employment of technology should be in support of a firmly defined pedagogical goal. Finally, just as good journalism is good journalism whether in print or on screen, effective teaching is effective teaching whatever the medium. The core rules of the disciplines still should dictate how technology is and is not used. This last point is important to revisit time and again because the power of the medium threatens at times to overwhelm the content that’s explored through it. TPM shows us that with a firm goal and high standards, it needn’t.

I’m not embarrassed to say that I am a college basketball fanatic, though many in the academy (and my family) probably think I should be more than ashamed. For hoops nuts like me, the past week of conference tournaments has been mere prologue to the main event. This is a week in which I must work conscientiously Monday to Wednesday to make up for the distractions brought by the first days of the tourney, Thursday and Friday. No matter how hard I try to be responsible, buzzer-beaters and Cinderellas will inevitably wind their way into my consciousness and push to the side any sense of duty. I’m not alone. American productivity won’t be aided by the emergence of March Madness on Demand, an online viewing tool that rescues diasporic fan-bases from the frustrations of CBS’s regional programming while threatening to undermine bottom lines everywhere. Every one of the games in the first three rounds is available for online viewing, for free. CBS advertises the service as for those “stuck in a cubicle” during daytime games, and the video player even features a “Boss Button” which you can click to immediately transform your desktop into an Excel spreadsheet. No kidding.

As irrelevant as all of this may seem to the regular goings on here at Cacophony, there is a link… there are many, many links, actually, and you can follow them to learn everything you want to know about college hoops and the tourney, and to research selections for your bracket challenges (the FBI has estimated that more than $2.5 billion changes hands in NCAA office pool betting).Fans of college basketball, like many people who invest ridiculous amounts of time in their passions, have firmly ensconced themselves in the blogosphere. College hoops bloggers range from the sabermetricians who focus on statistical analysis to the homers who obsess publicly about their teams. Many blogs offer predictions for the tourney, others aggregate the day’s hoops news and etceterata. One offers a petition that argues CBS should fire their obnoxious and analytically-underwhelming color analyst, Billy Packer. A site I read every day combines many of these approaches: Big Ten Wonk is run by an Illinois fan/American History PhD/stats-maven who offers 7-day a week blogging during tournament time under the heading “A Wonkalypse Now.” He regularly works Hegel and the Frankfurt School into his analysis. If I remember correctly, the Frankfurt School last appeared in the tournament as a 16-seed in 1989, and almost knocked off UCLA.

Beyond justifying how I’ve spent a lot of my time over the past few days (and months), this post is meant to show one example of how the blogosphere and Web 2.0 have welcomed and nurtured a cacophony of voices around a topic. In the process, they have changed how people relate to to the world of college hoops. The blogs above and the gazillion online college hoops forums have allowed passionate fans to express themselves, engage and connect with others, and learn more about the game they love. The pulse, flavor, and core issues of college basketball are accessible in a trip through these blogs. March Madness was around well-before these developments; they’ve just made it madder.

I haven’t read the study, nor, really, do I plan to. As I learned in one of my first graduate school courses, it’s much easier to criticize a book you haven’t read than one you have. I have though read a lot of the reporting on the study this week, and while I think there may be something to the notion that Americans have become more self-involved, I wouldn’t put it on the younger generation (narcissistic link: they need help to consume critically), I wouldn’t date it to the 1980s (thank you, Dr. Freud), and I certainly wouldn’t accept on its face Twenge’s simplistic notion that “current technology fuels the increase in narcissism. By its very name, MySpace encourages attention-seeking, as does YouTube.” That is only one of the things these sites do, and to disaggregate that from the other processes at work is to miss the forest for a tree.

Here’s a link to an interview with Twenge, and a response by a certified Generation Me’er (I thought they were Generation Y?). I think the second interview complicates the first a bit. These things are certainly worth talking about, but I don’t think they’re worth getting overwrought about. Kinda like these developments:

One note that may, in fact, contradict what I’ve just written: the AP story on this quoted a young woman from University of Vermont saying most of her contemporaries are politically active and not very self-centered. If a reporter has to go to UVM to get that perspective, maybe we are in trouble.

The second–”Epic 2014″–was produced by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson while they were fellows at the Poynter Institute in 2004, and is described as a “future history of the media.” This piece gives a brief history of the corporatization of the web, and projects forward to a time when new media has brushed traditional media, such as the New York Times, into the dustbin of history.

These videos have a lot in common, most of all that they place us in the middle of a revolution that has changed the rules of communication. The first video revels in the promise of this evolution towards connectedness, while the second provacatively envisions a Philip K. Dickian (or Dickensian) future where every human is his/her own editor and where machines write news stories; it argues we may be overconnected in the future. Still, a central truth runs through these pieces; that is, Web 2.0 challenges and threatens to upend traditional notions of authority.

Has what it means to “read critically” changed, or is it just the texts that have changed? We’ve devoted much energy here to discussing how these new rules have affected the academy. If the future as envisioned in the second video is plausible, should colleges be responsible for explicitly integrating some form of media studies into their core curricula?

I think that we need fundamental changes in primary education (and I’m hardly the only one!). New generations of students approach this world organically, and not often in a critical or discerning matter. By the time they get to college, their stance towards media is already developed. How should society educate them into this environment? And what implications for nation, community, and citizenship does this new connectedness have? A crucial starting point, I believe, is to find ways to level the digital divide in K-12 education. Any new education policy that emphasizes equality of opportunity must begin with that. I’m not particularly hopeful on that front, for historical reasons.

These videos taken together remind us that technological progress, especially as it relates to connectedness, is distinct from social progress. We should welcome Web 2.0, but we should also realize and respond to the implications of its ascendency. We should use the tools to teach, but we should also teach about what it means to use the tools.

The conference is an interesting convergence of the separate areas of IT at CUNY, with attendees ranging from registrars to systems administrators to instructional designers to, yikes, historians. I attended three panel discussions, in addition to the keynote address, and each event raised important questions about the state of information technology in higher education, generally, and at CUNY specifically. In anticipation of questions and discussion that I hope will come, I’m dividing reviews of each panel into their own posts below. My apologies for taking over the top of the blog, but there was a lot that I found interesting and thus a lot to share.

The short presentations combined with the Blackboard wall between the public and the program make it difficult for me to assess exactly how effective the online instruction is. The faculty do seem to feel as though they are teaching and reaching many of their students… this, it seems to me, is the most you can really hope for from a program that’s taught entirely online. Clearly, there are a lot of talented faculty involved in the program and a lot of resources invested, so it seems likely to me that a lot of good work is happening. Hopefully, we’ll hear more about the CUNY Online BA in the future.

No faculty member really wants to teach a course entirely online, but I do feel that this program allows students to complete a degree who, due to work and family commitments, might otherwise find it impossible. The program fits well within the CUNY mission of providing affordable, quality higher education for the diverse population of the city and, judging from what I saw, the instruction is rigorous and demanding. In this case, technology is entirely responsible for making it possible.

The most astounding factoid to come out of this session was the claim made, privately to me, that there hasn’t been a single instance where a student has needed technical aid, because the program orientation covered every possible potential problem. I have a hard time believing this, but if it’s true, that must have been the Best Orientation Ever.

The historians involved in the project are top-notch, and both the scholarship directing the modules and the design of the site are strong. I was struck, however, by how methodologically similar the pedagogic process of these modules was to the ways in which primary sources have been mobilized in the teaching of history for years. The Web has drastically improved access to primary sources, and the success of these modules lies in how faculty have framed the sources for students and directed their exploration. The site harnesses the Web’s speed and ease of information exchange for high-level history teaching. In this case, new technologies have expanded what can be done in the classroom without significantly altering the processes of teaching and learning.

It seems to me that the next generation of technological teaching tools—the products of Web 2.0, which enable increased interactivity– may pose a challenge to traditional pedagogies. While I haven’t seen inside the Blackboard sites to the fruits of the “Investigating History” modules, they seem to work on the same tracks that the teaching of history has for some time. That is, a scholar/teacher provides materials and background for students to work through with guidance; as students do, they learn about the past and about participating in the historical project. These are sound pedagogical goals for any history course.

In other disciplines, blogs and wikis have upended traditional teaching methods and goals by empowering students with more accessible means to produce and disseminate knowledge. In the teaching of history, such empowering elements of the Web have been employed in this project to reinforce and strengthen one traditional model (while also enabling more robust discussions of visual culture due to the increased accessibility of images). Historians like those who presented at the conference sense that the future of teaching history lie in using technology to more vividly open up the worlds of the past to their students. It will be interesting to see if new technologies continue to reinforce traditional methods of teaching history, or if they challenge those methods. One example of how they might is here.

(note: A few audience members were flabbergasted when the gentleman who followed James Groom, Florian Lengyel, Assistant Director for Research Computing at the CUNY Graduate Center, showed us that open source has recently become a more significant presence at the Graduate Center. See here.)

Minutes from Seminar on Instructional Technology

I’ve seen some good Blackboard sites in the past, and have used it myself effectively in the teaching of the American history survey. I’ve never, however, heard any faculty member or any student say “what a great Blackboard site! Wow!” Instructional blogs that I’ve seen in circulation, however, have “wowed” frequently. This is likely not a newsflash to anyone with experience using these technologies.

The “wow” factor, on the surface, seems to have little pedagogical value, and it’s vulnerable to accusations of the elevation of style over substance. But I don’t think it should be completely discounted as an element of our efforts to bring students to our material through online teaching tools. Creating an inviting virtual space, with a logic and an aesthetic that flow from the purpose and materials of the course, can help students see that space as an extension of the learning that is happening concurrently in the classroom. It can help them feel a sense of belonging and a sense of ownership, and can help them feel that they are participating in something unique. I can’t help but believe that this feeling translates to the way that students approach the material and the assignments on the site. I’ve seen it work well and not so well, and I look forward to exploring it more in my teaching. Blackboard’s aesthetic, with its heinous buttons and familiar logic, tends to generalize online learning. It’s much more likely to produce a “duh” than a “wow.”

I don’t want to open a war on Blackboard here, because I do think it can be effective as a teaching tool, and it’s certainly easier to master than a blog. I just want to drive home the point that we are dealing with spaces here, and virtual though they may be, how they look and act impacts the way we teach in them and the ways that students learn in them. When we’re in the classroom, there are different methods we can use to engage students: mastery of the material, ability to spin a tale, and asking probing and demanding questions are a few that come to mind. Those methods are still available to us in the virtual space, to be sure, but face-to-face contact is not. Just as the personality of the teacher is an important element of his or her ability to engage a class, so too is the personality of an online teaching space. This personality is developed through an attention to aesthetics.

http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org

The Seminar on Instructional Technology: Blogging Across the Curriculum

Wednesday, November 1, 2006
12:30 pm-2pm, VC 14-285

This roundtable discussion will explore the implications of new instructional media including weblogs and wikis for teaching and learning. Participants will consider ways in which these new media have been incorporated in undergraduate courses at Baruch and elsewhere as a means of encouraging active learning and facilitating write-to-learn activities.

Lunch will be served.

Please RSVP to Corinne_Giladi@baruch.cuny.edu

ABOUT THE SEMINAR: The Seminar on Instructional Technology is envisioned as the first in a series co-sponsored by the Schwartz Institute and BCTC. The goals of this first meeting are to cultivate interest in blogs, to build a community of faculty and staff interested in instructional technology, and to begin to construct a support structure that will maximize the pedagogical benefits of the college’s use of blogs. The seminar is organized by Mikhail Gershovich, Director, Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute; Luke Waltzer, CUNY Writing Fellow; Jim Russell, Director of Instructional Technology; and Patrick Ackerman-Hovis, College Website Administrator.

Michael Sandy’s Friendster page as it appeared on page B6 of the New York Times on October 10, 2006.
(Sinister technology-related update to this case here, Times subscription required).

While I know from conversations with real live journalists that they often use resources like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook in their research and reporting, this was the first instance in which I’ve seen an actual reproduction of a page from such a site in a newspaper (though I admittedly haven’t been looking too hard for it). If users didn’t realize how “public” these public sites really are, the Old Gray Lady’s screen grab should make it perfectly clear. (for a related post, see Kate Moss’s “Excuse me sir, but your online persona is showing.”

The relationship between technology and the question of what’s public and private has come up recently in our conversations about how to stimulate blog usage within the Baruch community. When BCTC rolls out its Movable Type blogging package, all Baruch blogs will come equipped with a disclaimer that indemnifies the college against the worst efforts of community users. What’s not clear yet is whether these blogs will be open to the public, restricted to the Baruch community, or restricted to a group determined by the blog’s administrator.

I feel strongly that course blogs should be seen initially only as an extension of the classroom for the use of participants in the class, and that they should be closed off from the public unless the community they immediately serve wants them to be open. A learning community–faculty and students–should be able to take advantage of the ease of information transfer afforded by new technologies without worrying about who’s watching (tenure committees, parents, and intellectually property attorneys come to mind!). At the same time, we are trying to study how course blogs are being used across academia, and we are finding that our access to them is frustrated by the very philosophy we embrace.

The solution, it would seem, is some combination of public/private sections in a course blog, where only collectively approved content goes out over the airwaves. Ultimately at Baruch we hope to build a community of faculty who can share their blogging experiences with and learn from one another. Whatever happens, though, users—faculty and students—should be educated about the implications of their choices and should know who, potentially, has access to any work they put up on a server.

What’s yet to be determined, though, is the range of directions blogging will go (Vlogging is one definite; integration with social networking sites is another). As is normally the case, colleges and universities will lead– it’s up to them to really think about and experiment around this question, and we may be reaching a “tipping point” in that process. More and more universities are making blogging services available to their communities of faculty, staff, and students. These blogs are being used in a variety of ways, from the instructional to the communal to the entreprenuerial to the personal. This process has not yet been studied or reported upon in any great detail, as far as I know (well, there’s this). Universities will be doing that, too.

Locally, Baruch College will be rolling out its own blogging service using Movable Type this Fall, and the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute is currently supporting faculty who are interested in learning a little or a lot about the medium.

The promise of blogging for teaching is, of course, in the ease and variety of communication the medium allows. Given the scalability of weblogs and their speed of information exchange, their implications for teaching are profound. In an era where students seem to be doing less and less writing in their classes, course weblogs are a potential curative. They offer faculty a way to extend their classrooms and diversify their interactions with students. If used well, blogs can aid the transfer of textual, visual, and technological literacy, and also provide students with regular outlets for expression. Such tools, if used with discipline, can only bolster liberal education.

Weblogging in higher education has already been discussed on CAC.OPHONY in great detail, thanks to efforts of Kate, Deborah, Jill, and Mikhail. Let’s bring it back up to the top, and see what type of conversation we can generate. What, then, are productive weblog projects for courses, beyond what have already been discussed? What can universities do to get the most out of the weblogs they support? The Institute will be thinking about and reporting on these questions over the coming academic year. We’d be interested in hearing from any visitors who have strong thoughts, examples to share, or probing questions on the matter.