Tag: Education

My job is to kill creativity

University professors… are curious forms of life. …They think of their bodies as transport for their heads.

We educate children only from the waist up, focusing on their brain, and that too, only one side of it.

Jillian isn’t sick: She’s a dancer.

If all insects were to disappear from the planet, life on Earth would vanish in 50 years. If all humans were to disappear from the planet, all forms of life would flourish.

These are a few quotes that stood out to me in this brilliant TED talk about education, given by Sir Ken Robinson. If you’re an educator, you owe it to yourself and your students to spend 15 minutes to watch it:

Hello, my name is Mihaela. My job IS to kill creativity.

Here’s how I try to try not to:

I’m very, very cautious, I try to treat it like a fragile and precious rare flower.:

  • I try, as much as I can, knowing I will always fail, to remove fear out of the classroom. But I still have to give grades, so it’s impossible to do away with fear. If you read my blog before, you know fear in education is one important theme on PR Connections.
  • I try to encourage students. I ask them to give themselves a break, not be harsh on themselves. I compliment them a lot. Yesterday I taught strategy. I asked students to create strategies for some case studies. They were hesitant to share, afraid they were wrong. I kept telling them it’s the first ever time they’re doing it, and they only had 20 seconds to think about it. It’s OK if your strategies suck. Guess what, they didn’t. But how many times do we grade students on their first attempt at something? 90%, I’m guessing.
  • I remove students, as much as possible, from modes of writing (research papers) that have conditioned their minds to be numb. I ask them to email or blog assignments instead of writing APA style papers. I ask them to create videos, dance, or perform, their final project. I will be (and I am) a persona non grata in my department for stating this publicly (we live for APA papers, and we do exactly what Sir Ken Robinson says: try to make them all university professors).

But here’s what I think: If you change the medium, you change the way they think. Ask them to write in a new medium, one that they haven’t been conditioned to fear and be constipated about and write like a mindless robot (see Richard Landham on the need to un-teach students how to write) – and guess what: Students’ writing comes to life, you all of a sudden see ideas, thoughtfulness, soul!But many times they choose to write APA style papers. Because it’s too late, because they’re scared to do otherwise, because they can’t think of anything else. So sad.

So, if you’re a teacher or a professor, what do you do to (not) kill creativity?

If you’re a subject of education (and we all were students at some point), teach me: What can I do to protect your creativity, or maybe even encourage it to grow?

[Found video via PROpenMic, thanks to Paul Loop. This post is inspired by the comments I posted on Paul’s post.]

WHY do we have to learn this…?!

…is the question many students ask themselves and few professors answer (well).

Via Kaye Sweetser’s blog, this NYU student asks the same, and more.

I’m posting below my comment on Kaye’s blog, which turned out to be long enough for a post:

I’m a bit late to this conversation, but can’t help but jump in.

The critical theorist in me is happy this is happening. Alana’s post is an example of tearing down the Golden Wall I wrote about some time back. It’s good that students have a voice. Education is by definition a power imbalance, where students pay to subject themselves to our authority and power. In theory, I say, bring it on!

The professor in me smiles a sad smile: I was once (not very long ago) young and arrogant and thought I knew it all. I hated classes that didn’t teach me real skills for the real world.

It took me years to get over myself and understand that the best classes are not the ones that teach me skills that will be dated in 2-3 years (though you need those, too, to get a job next year) but those that teach me how to think.

Here’s critical theory again: Students expect us to train them to be good employees, servants to the Corporation. They’re lost and disappointed when we teach them how to be free thinkers, free people. That’s called hegemony, I think.

A recent opinion article at Clemson ranked liberal arts courses as the worst, most useless ones. How sadly misguided. [Really, WHY should we have to learn about hegemony?! What a “useless” concept, right?]

Where we profs fail is that we don’t help students understand WHY we do what we do and how it WILL be more useful than teaching button-pushing.

As a prof, I try to teach students not only twitter, but also skills that will be relevant 10-20 years later. They can’t appreciate that now. They need help. They’re too young to think in that time frame. So I take time to explain.

See also my comment on Alana’s post.

[Update, 9/19/2008] Interesting development of NYU story: Professor attempts to ban students from blogging & twittering about class (from MediaShift, via Simon Owens. Excellent blogger relations, Mr. Owens!)

I’m afraid neither party is approaching this problem productively. Both Alana and prof. Quigley have a lot to learn from each other. If they could get over their fears (of each other, of old stuff, of new stuff, of having their egos threatened) and cooperate, the story would have a much happier ending.

This is the comment I posted on the follow-up story [cross-posted]:

This is what I see the big picture of this story to be:

Blogging (and much of social media) bring more transparency, empower the “masses” and threaten authority by bringing down the Golden Wall.

This is happening a lot in business. It’s scary for corporations, and empowering for consumers.

Why shouldn’t it also happen in education?

I am a college prof., I require students to blog and am planning to teach them to live-twitter the class next week.

Yes, I know it’s scary – for me. For the old idea of the “powerful, know-it-all” professor who taught critical thinking and thought it was OK as long as s/he wasn’t the subject of criticism.

I sometimes teach my students critical theory by exposing my own power & authority practices in the classroom.

The world has changed. The education model we use is the same as hundreds of years ago: The professor is the “master.”

Enough is enough. We don’t have to be masters and servants. We can help each other and learn together.

Alana and prof. Quigley have a lot to learn from each other. Why don’t they?

The Golden Wall

I’m reading The Discovery of Heaven, a novel of ideas by Dutch author Harry Mulisch. One of the main characters, Onno, after a stint in politics, meditates on the nature of power.

He claims that power exists because of the Golden Wall that separates the masses (the public) from decision makers. Government, in his example, is a mystery hidden behind this Golden Wall, regarded by the masses (the subject of power) in awe.

Once the Golden Wall falls (or becomes transparent), people see that behind it lies the same mess as outside it. There are people in there, too. Messy people, engaged in messy, imperfect decision making processes. The awe disappears. With it, the power.

What happens actually, with the fall of the Golden Wall, is higher accountability and a more equitable distribution of power. Oh, and the risk of anarchy.

But the Golden Wall must fall.

In the communication professions, social media is tearing huge holes in the Golden Wall. Just like in 1989 Europe, some are celebrating, others are paralyzed with fear.

In education, the Golden Wall stands. Secret meetings behind closed-door decide the curriculum, the professors’ yearly evaluations, tenure, lives, my life.

I talk to my students about squabbles in faculty meetings that result in curriculum changes. I want them to see behind the Golden Wall. To understand how decisions about their education are made. That we’re human, imperfect, and hopefully, possibly, subject to change. I haven’t seen undergraduate students involved in changing the curriculum. Nobody asks them. They don’t push. At Purdue, the Graduate Student Association had a representative sit in on faculty meetings. We did impact the curriculum. We were in, behind the Golden Wall.

In U.S. government, C-SPAN gets us glimpses behind the Golden Wall. But we don’t watch. We’re too busy. It’s too boring. (OK, there are exceptions.)

Look around you. Do you see Golden Walls? Tear them down.

Then come back here and tell the story in the comments section.

Fear

“Yet I believe that school should be a safe place, the way home is supposed to be. A place where you belong, where you can grow and express yourself freely, where you know and care for the other people and are known and cared for by them, a place where people come before information and ideas. School needs to comprehend the relationship between the subject matter and the lives of students, between teaching and the lives of teachers, between school and home.” (J. Tompkins, A Life in School, p. 127)

“Fear is what prevents the flowering of the mind.” (Krishnamurthi)

(Thank you, Cheryl, for pointing out these quotations to me 🙂

How much of what you do, or what the people who work for you do, is motivated by fear?

Life in school

In a recent column in the National Communication Association’s newsletter, NCA president Dr. Arthur Bochner writes about institutional depression – a systemic sadness, loneliness and hopelessness that affects many academics. He blames institutional depression on the lack of communication and community among academics in the humanities, whose work and rewards systems encourage individual performance. Academics don’t feel a sense of belonging to a group or community, and left to their own devices, like many other mammals, flirt with depression.

You’d think that the ivory tower is alive with sparkling, stimulating conversation. You’d hope. Well it is, but mostly in the classroom.

I then read Jane Tompkins’ riveting memoir, A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned. A personal account of her experiences as a student, scholar, and academic. A courageous, naked disclosure of her psychological journey from insecurity, depression, craving for acceptance to what seems like peace. A peace she couldn’t find in academia, so she retired early from a tenured professorship in English at Duke University.

I read the book in one sitting, and I think it should be mandatory reading for all academics and university administrators.

That’s because although we live a privileged life in academia (hey, we’re paid to sit, talk, read, and write), it can also be a miserable life. No one takes care of our souls. Tompkins claims no one takes care of our students’ souls, either. Within the university, we’re not people. We’re minds.

So what can be done to improve quality of life in academia? Tompkins’ solution was to create opportunities for building community. She tried. She failed.

She realized the main reason why community isn’t happening is because we’re too busy. We run all the time. We work all the time. We need to be accomplishing something all the time. There’s no time for leisurely conversation and relationship building. (Want to know more about how that can kill you? Read my favorite non-fiction book, American Mania.)

As some of you know, for personal family reasons but or maybe for no reason at all, I’ve been doing my own flirting with depression lately. The recent SNCR conference has given my spirits a huge boost, because it was alive and a-twittering with sparkling, stimulating conversation.

So I’ve decided to try for myself and others Tompkins’ idea of building community and have proposed starting a summer book club at Clemson. First reading on the list: Jane Tompkins’ A Life in School.

After a 3-day approval process, my call was forwarded to people in Clemson’s College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities. A few people have responded. If you are in the area, are reading this, and would like to be part of the book club, please contact me.

I hope it will be a safe place for friendly and stimulating conversations, not a battle of egos. The next books on my reading list are:

Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
The Septembers of Shiraz, Dalia Sofer

… but I’m open to suggestions.

If you’re not in the Clemson area, tell me:

How is/was your life in school?

Did school take care of both of your mind and soul? Did you feel treated like a whole person? Should school even do that?

Twitter in education: Practical solutions

We talked at EDB about using twitter with students: the benefits, the drawbacks, the logistics – including the 48 hours of twitter assignment that Karen Russell and Kaye Sweetser use. One logistical issue was to help the students find and follow each other among the professor’s long list of followers. Karen Russell solved this problem by getting a new account to use with her class. However, one thing I like about twitter is the help I sometimes get from other people who jump in the class discussion. Creating a new account would make it impossible for my students to meet my twitter community.

Here are the 2 solutions I found, and I document them here so other instructors can use them (and so I don’t forget them!).

1) – ask students to use a specific number (or other set of characters) as part of their twitter user names. For example, the course number, or any other random number. Then, they can scroll through the list of followers and follow all the other people whose user names contain that number. This works well, but sometimes students dislike interfering with their freedom to create a user name they like. The second solution solves this problem, too:

2) – e-mail students a distinct, clearly different image that your other followers are unlikely to use and ask all students to upload that image as their twitter icon. Instruct students to scroll through your list of followers and follow all the people identified by that particular image. After the students have identified and followed all the other class members, they can upload their own photo to their twitter profile.

Another challenge is to keep track of a conversation students carry on a particular topic. Their tweets might get lost among the tweets of others you’re following. Ask your student to use hashtags (#) followed by a specific code so that Twemes will collect all (in theory, at least) the posts on that topic. For example, we discussed symbolic interactionism in my Communication Theory class and marked all tweets about it with #si. You can see the resulting conversation indexed on twemes. I noticed Twemes didn’t pick up ALL students’ posts, so I wouldn’t rely on it to assign participation points, at least not yet.

Do you have other practical solutions or ideas for using twitter in higher education? Please share them in the comments!

Need more on twitter? Here are some of my favorite links:

Edelman Digital Bootcamp

I’m live-blogging EDB, look for several updates throughout the day.

Other EDB updates: twitter, EDB website & blog

Session 1 – Social Media 101

Erin Caldwell kicks off the day with her personal story. As an Auburn student, she became familiar with the PR blogosphere (see this blog’s blog roll for a start), she started the Forward Blog and built her reputation online. Edelman contacted her and by the time she interviewed, they pretty much knew they wanted to hire her. Being able to use social media & building your professional reputation online can help you get a job in public relations, whether you want to practice online or offline PR.

Team Edelman introductions and personal stories about social media a-ha moments. Different stories, different people, with technology backgrounds varying from tech guru to “barely able to turn on a computer” – but all share passion, curiosity, and love for their work [9:05 am].

Who’s here from Edelman: Chris Broomall, Erin Caldwell, Steven Field, Phil Gomes, Jena Kozel, Monte Lutz, Stephanie Wasilik. Bios here.

Educators’ track

Session 2: How PR practice uses social media

PR educators introduce themselves and talk about: helping students establish connections between social and professional uses of social media; motivating students to learn social media; disparity between expectations (students know all about social media) and reality (students are not familiar and even intimidated by new communication technologies – RSS what?!) [9:50].

Phil Gomes provides the big picture of current social media use in PR.

Phil saw blogging as the ultimate media relations tool – you can demonstrate journalists that you’ve read them, and have reacted to their work.

Don’t think of it as a technology problem; the technology in social media is easy to learn.

Phil describes his approach to teaching social media in the Chicago T4 lab. They spend one day immersed in online conversation analysis. Phil doesn’t believe in teaching products, so he teaches his students to use free tools to analyze existing conversations about a client. Tools you can use: bloglines, technorati, alexa, blogpulse, etc.

Job description for an entry PR job (assistant account executive):

  • administration
  • coverage + conversation tracking
  • list building + community & member-list generation
  • editorial/speaking calendar building + identifying client conversation-entry opportunities
  • list & opportunity qualifications + deep-dive analysis
  • team knowledge mgmt
  • AP + web style
  • etc. [10:20]

Phil loves the advanced search in technorati that identifies all links to a specific URL. For example see who links to this blog.

What Phil looks for in a job candidate:

  • intellectual curiosity
  • up-managing skills (free of CLM -career limiting moves-)
  • an examined, omnivorous media consumption life (facebook or myspace? why? WSJ or NYT? why?)
  • basic knowledge of social media tools

== Tired : Pitching :: Wired : Engagement ==

Don’t write self-referential posts (what I did/wore today) – be useful.

 

The ideal job candidate would have:

 

  • perspective; understanding of online communities – Phil loves this Wired article
  • good online writing skills: concise; interlinked
  • online law & public policy (DMCA)
  • communication, technology & society
  • critical consumption of media
  • an understanding of rules/culture of online engagement [10:40]

Session 3: Social Media Tools in the Classroom

Session 4: Social Media Assignments

Educators shared assignment ideas that make use of social media in various PR and communication courses. [4:15 pm]

Session 5: Wrap-Up – Best Practices

Students sum-up some of the lessons that stood out:

  • transparency
  • there are many free social media tools out there!
  • update your site/blog often
  • blogger relations require a different mindset

Edelman practitioners were impressed to see students taking time out of their weekend to learn these skills – there’s hope they’ll have new colleagues with the right skills set.

Phil Gomes wrapped-up the day.

Congratulations UGA students for organizing a great event! You’ve worked very hard and it definitely paid off, it was a very successful day!

[5:30 pm, signing off]