The idea of the FRO blogging project, a collaboration with our colleagues at Advisement and Orientation, is to provide first-year students with an online, public space for reflecting on a number of required projects and activities as well as their experiences of acclimating to college life — to give our incoming students yet more curricular opportunities to write and, in the process, to increase engagement and deepen their thinking about what they are learning and experiencing in their first year at Baruch.

Luke’s post details some of the nitty gritty of the project, which is one big experiment (a full-scale pilot, if you will) that we hope will teach us quite a bit more about the pedagogical potential of online personal publishing in introductory programs and courses. We hope, for example, to look closely at the tremendous variety of writing we have seen in the FRO blogs so far (from well articulated, impressively developed posts resembling mini-essays to brief, informal missives written in like SMS text messages) and explore ways in which to better teach students the conventions of college-level written discourse. For now, we’re focused fairly heavily on logistics and mechanics and look forward to building on and refining the programmatic and pedagogical aspects in coming semesters.

Student blogging seems to be a natural fit for typical Freshman Seminars, so I would expect that other schools have tried something like this though it does appear as though we at Baruch are blazing new trails. If you know of other schools doing something similar, please let us know.

It recently occurred to me that very little has been written about the Schwartz Communication Institute’s most ambitious and potentially most promising project, our Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool, or VOCAT. I have presented on VOCAT a number of times over the years (most recently at the 2009 Computers and Writing conference in June), but have not yet written about it in any kind of real detail. So it’s high time to remedy that.

VOCAT is a teaching and assessment web application. It is the fruit of a collaboration between the Schwartz Institute and mad genius code-poets at , Cast Iron Coding, Zach Davis and Lucas Thurston. It is still very much in development (perpetually so) but is already in use in introductory speech communication and theater courses as well as a number of assessment projects. Our career center used it effectively a few semesters ago as well. To date, approximately 3200 Baruch students have used the tool.

VOCAT was developed in recognition of the principle that careful, guided review of video recordings of their oral presentations (or of any performance, for that matter) can be remarkably effective for aiding students in becoming confident, purposeful and effective speakers. It serves as a means for instructors to easily provide feedback on student presentations.  It enables students to access videos of their performances as well as instructor feedback and to respond to both. It likewise aggregates recorded presentations and instructor feedback for each user and offers an informative snapshot of a student’s work and progress over the course of a given term or even an entire academic career. Presentations can be scored live, as students perform, or asynchronously once the videos have been uploaded. (Our turnaround time at this stage is between one and seven days depending on how many sections are using the tool at once — once some of the key steps happen server-side, turnaround time will not be as much of a concern.) Built on the open source TYPO3 content management system, it is a flexible, extensible and scalable web application that can be used at once as a teaching tool and as a means of data collection for research or other assessment purposes. (Screenshots are available here. I am also happy to share demo login info with anyone who would like to take a look — please email me at mikhail [dot] gershovich [at] baruch [dot] cuny [dot] edu.)

While VOCAT is quite feature-rich at this early stage, especially when it comes to reporting, data export, and rubric creation, we are always thinking about ways in which the tool can be made more robust and flexible. Currently, we are playing around with adding a group manager feature for group presentations, tagging for non-numeric assessment, moving from QT to Flash video, video annotation, as well as server-side video processing and in-line video and audio recording. We are also considering allowing users to choose to enable social functionality to take advantage of web 2.0 tools for sharing and commenting on one another’s work. And since, at its core, VOCAT is a tool for aggregating and responding to anything that can be uploaded, we’re thinking about other uses to which it could be put. It could easily, for example, be adapted for writing assessment. And someone once suggested that it could be useful for teaching bedside manner for medical students. Adapting VOCAT for these purposes is hardly a big deal.

The platform on which VOCAT is built is open source but the tool itself is not yet open. Right now, it is Baruch’s alone. Whether it should stay that way is a question much discussed around here. Here at the Institute we face several critical issues around open education, not the least of which is conflicting views on student access of Blogs@Baruch. In regards to VOCAT, however, the one thing constantly on my mind is the tension between an internal drive to share the tool as an open-source web application and build a community around it (there are no shortage of interested parties) and the pressures (or maybe a pernicious institutional common sense) that seem to compel us to keep VOCAT proprietary and use it to generate as much revenue as possible. I have heard arguments that VOCAT should be Baruch’s alone — that we should charge for its use and seek private funding for its deployment and development. This is a business school, after all, and I’m sure promoting and marketing VOCAT could be an interesting project for an upper division Marketing course.

Yet, I am inclined to believe that VOCAT should be shared freely and widely with other institutions and that other developers should be encouraged to develop for it.  A great many more students would benefit and development would certainly be accelerated as more and more schools add features they need that could then be adopted for use here. Were VOCAT open, in other words, it would evolve quickly and probably in ways we haven’t even imagined. And that is very exiting.

In the coming months, I hope to continue to present on VOCAT and to gain insights into the roles it can play in communication intensive courses or in a communication-focused curriculum of any sort. More importantly, I would like to move towards opening it up and will work with our developers on the features and functionality that facilitate sharing. I hope also to draw upon the tremendous expertise of my friends and colleagues involved in the open education movement and learn from those who have worked with and developed various open source tools for teaching and learning. Listening to others’ ideas for VOCAT has been invaluable to thinking through what this web app could ostensibly do with the right sort of development.  could be and how to best realize its full potential as a teaching tool — both in terms of deployment, training, and development.

I’m curious to hear what sort of advice instructors give to students about citing sources for slide presentations. While it easy to envision a final slide that is a reference list, it seems to be trickier to develop best practices for identifying sources in slides that make up the main part of a presentation. Should you use numbered notes? An author-date notation set in parentheses? A source note at the bottom of the slide? To what extent can the rules that are delineated in the major style guides (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) be applied to slide presentations? Do these rules, which were created to support the needs of scholars writing books, articles, and reports, work well in a medium like slide presentations, where there is a great deal of flexibility in the way text can be presented?

Question: A student gives a presentation. He has a heavy foreign accent and is at times incomprehensible. Overall, the speech seems well researched and on target. What do you do?

a. Give him an A.

b. Subtract points for incomprehensibility and give him a B.

c. Tell him that the presentation was unacceptable and that he should improve his oral communication proficiency.

Instructors cite a variety of reasons (often with a kernel of truth) why they let incomprehensibility slide:

1. “Asking a student to reduce his/her accent is embarrassing and discouraging.” — It is true that accents are windows to our identity, and that a student changing his/her accent may experience a tangible sense of loss or feel repercussions from home culture friends and family.

2. “It’s not possible to reduce accents in adults. Native accents can be achieved only when we learn the language before puberty.” — It is true that, after the brain hemispheres separate at puberty, a native-sounding accent tends to be more difficult to achieve.

3. “People who don’t understand foreign accents are prejudiced. They should try harder to understand.” — It is true that sometimes the problem lies with the listener. Don Rubin (University of Georgia) conducted a study some years back, in which a recording of a native English speaker was played to undergraduate students. They were told that the speaker was a college instructor and asked to rate his comprehensibility. Some groups were shown a photo of a Caucasian, others a photo of an Asian-looking individual while the recording was played. Although the recording was the same, the Asian-looking individual was ranked less comprehensible than the Caucasian.

Despite these valid objections, I believe it is paramount that we encourage students to improve their oral language skills to a level where a benevolent native speaker can understand without straining. We are doing our students a disservice if we don’t.

Our nonnative students are sometimes being ostracized by native-speaking teammates, who don’t want them to participate in presentations for fear that their grade will be jeopardized. And our nonnative Baruch graduates are sometimes dismissed at the early stages of the job interviewing process, due to heavy accents. The first practice often happens under the radar; the second when it’s too late, and students have left the college. In my view, both practices are unethical. We have a responsibility to provide students with an education that promises workplace success.

How to approach the issue? One way would be to adopt a threshhold model by which we evaluate presentations (as well as papers) only if a basic standard has been met? Any student falling below this standard is asked to revise. A threshold model would require a common standards on what constitutes acceptable form (e.g., more than five errors per page or five incomprehensibilities per minutes of speech, and additional work is indicated).

In my experience, most students welcome the opportunity to improve. When I told a Russian student in a public speaking class some years back that he was not going to pass the course unless he worked on his comprehensibility, he committed himself to weekly tutorials and almost daily language lab work. The change in this student in only one semester was extraordinary. He changed from a low-proficiency speaker to one that was 100% comprehensible.

We are lucky that Baruch offers free services to assist the students: SACC has a number of professional speech tutors (not students, but trained professionals) who work with students one-on-one. We also have a new and well-equipped ESL speech lab that is open 10 hours most days, and even on Saturdays. The lab features tons of excellent materials not only on pronunciation, but also grammar, vocabulary development, conversation management, and more. For more information, please see http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab

Considering that communication skills are consistently ranked at the top of skills desired by employers of college graduates (and oral skills usually outranking written skills at that), we need to make our students aware of these services and make adequate communication skills an integral part of our evaluation procedures.

Students’ speaking in class is highly valued and rightly so. Those of us who practice student-centered instruction don’t want to be the only one speaking during the class session. We also don’t want only a handful of our students participating in discussions. Therefore, I appreciated when Mel Silberman, author of several books on active training, conducted a session at the Baruch College Faculty Orientation in August in which he offered some tips on how to increase participation – tips included “pre-discussion” and students’ calling on the next speaker. And I have to say his methods worked; he increased participation in the session. My concern is the narrow focus on speaking without giving students an alternative to expressing themselves. An alternative that may embolden students to speak in class later in the course or down the road in other courses.

When I first started teaching, I was particularly sensitive to students who are not comfortable speaking in class regardless of the reason. I wanted to give students an alternative way of participating. While I was looking at sample syllabi, I came across a syllabus that incorporated another method of participation, a response sheet. I am sorry to say I do not have a record of the source of this way of using response sheets and have only one copy of a syllabus with my directions to students- with a few years away from work as a full-time mom, crashed hard drives and flooded basements – more than a few things have been lost. As I have stated, participation in class discussion is highly valued and often represents a portion of each student’s final grade. So why do we appear to only value oral participation? Could we not have written participation? The response sheet is an alternative avenue of participation for students that has worked well in my classes.

Here is my sample from the syllabus for a course that had weekly class sessions:

Class Participation

To receive 100% on class participation, you will need to speak in class on average about once per week. There will be opportunities to speak every session during lectures and classroom exercises. For students uncomfortable with speaking in class, you can participate by completing a one-page reaction sheet (2 paragraphs at a minimum) for each class session. State what you learned or how the session impacted you as an individual. It could be a reaction, an insight, an opinion, but NOT a summary of the material covered. Reaction sheets are not required but strongly recommended. All students are encouraged to do them, even if you participate regularly in class. The additional credit may help compensate for other areas of weakness such as test taking. Reaction sheets are due the next class session and will not be accepted beyond that. E-mail submissions are accepted and encouraged.

Some guidelines for the response sheet are as follows:

• For the first 2 response sheets received in a semester from a student, I give written feedback and a chance to resubmit for participation credit if the response sheet does not adhere to guidelines or is lacking in substance. I also read one or two samples out loud to the class as models of good response sheets (when I feel strongly that the anonymity of the student can be maintained). On all subsequent response sheets, I indicate whether the participation point has been earned or not and include other comments as I am inspired to.
• You can also keep the practice of reading a few response sheets out loud at the next class session and spend a few minutes discussing them with the class.
• I recall requiring response sheets or in-class participation in discussions for 10 weeks in the semester (for however many class sessions that works out to) in order for students to earn the maximum participation points.

In my experience, less than 25% of students submit response sheets. Some students started with response sheets then abandoned them because they were participating in class discussions. Perhaps they just needed time to feel more comfortable participating.

I really see this as one small way we can provide a more welcoming learning environment. Response sheets enable us to engage quiet students in a way that can lead to their speaking in class later in the course. If not, we still communicate that we value their input, and we too can benefit from the insights students express in writing. Imagine from the quiet student’s perspective of feeling encouraged as opposed to pressured to speak in class. I believe this creates a learning environment in which class participation will actually increase.

http://cac.ophony.org/2008/10/15/the-deadly-grip-of-tradition/

Below is a link to information on Student Writing at Baruch College from the Faculty Handbook:

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/facultyhandbook/writing.htm

What is your view of the traditional introduction-body-conclusion approach in teaching composition?