Tagged: CUNY

Media Technologies, Spring 2014, Syllabus

With Martin Luther King Day behind us, it is the beginning of the spring semester at CUNY. This semester I am teaching only one class there.

Media Technologies

An overview of media technologies, including early writing and the printing press, the rise of mass culture, and the digital revolution.

This is a class that all Media Studies majors have to take, and it really covers a lot of ground. We start with communication before there was writing and survey how print and electronic media emerged after the Enlightenment and Industrialization. Finally, we cover a lot of the innovations of the twentieth century, such as motion pictures, radio, and television. We end with computers and the Internet as the basis for digital communication we know so well.

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p>The course meets on Monday nights, from 6:30 – 9:20 PM, in Kiely Hall.

I Took an Online Course, and All I Got Was…

CUNY makes us all take an online course for Preventing Workplace Violence.

If there’s a person who looks forward to this kind of training, I’ve never met such a person because a lot of these trainings traffic in common sense. For example, did you know that if a co-worker begins yelling at you and raises a stapler in a threatening manner, you are not to grab for the scissors to defend yourself? No, instead we learn that we’re suppose to step back and let your agitated worker blow off steam. Chances are that your co-worker isn’t going to injure you but does indicate that there are some issues that need addressing.

The fruits of thirty-five minute online "class"

The university requires us to take this course each year by December 31. Deductive reasoning indicates that I last took this course back in 2012, although I don’t remember exactly when. I also can’t remember when I was first reminded to take this course, but this taking this class has sat as an action item in OmniFocus since May 29.

It’s also appropriate that as finals week now approaches, I can confidently say that I finished my exam well ahead of that year-end deadline.

Alphabet Soup for the Soul

In class today, I covered three topics that could be summed up by a set of acronyms initialisms. You may know some of these:

  • RTFD
  • GIGO
  • GTD

The context of the discussion was student papers for an introductory class. The papers were due back in early October, but as I graded the first batch, I found that they were almost universally terrible. It was pretty demoralizing for me, as I’m sure it would be for them.

The papers were so bad that I held off on returning them until after they took the midterm last week. My thinking was to let them focus on the midterm exam and worry about their poor performance on the paper afterward. I also wanted to devote some time in class to discussing the paper, and it seemed too cruel to berate everyone on the same day they take an exam.

Today, we had a heart-to-heart about undergraduate writing, and I used a little alphabet soup to make the point.

Read the Directions

One of my paper-saving initiatives is to have students get the assignment guidelines from my 1998-style course website. They can access them on their tablets or computers. And if they can carry killing trees on their conscious, they can even print the guidelines.

Relying on students to get the guidelines on their own might have been a mistake. It seemed like some students simply wrote this assignment without reading the guidelines.

For example, the assignment had a very strict word count of 743 words. Students submit a hard copy so I can’t count each word to see if they hit the word count. But I can tell when a paper is much longer or much shorter due to the agony factor. And reading some were quite agonizing

But that wasn’t the biggest sin of not Reading the Foremost Directions. I gave a really concise example of how to cite courses in text. It wasn’t some crazy “proprietary” system, just a simplified version of MLA-style parenthetical citations. But very few followed that. Instead,  an abundance of papers listed three or four websites as their research sources, rather than trying to craft a proper reference list.

Garbage-In, Garbage Out

As for the students who didn’t follow directions, it was a clear case of garbage in–garbage out. The assignment called to read at least one chapter from our textbook, Communication in History, to distill the historical impact of print. Students were assigned to read a more contemporary account of print, The Late Age of Print, and to determine whether the recent evolutions change the historical function of print. 

It was pretty clear that many students simply didn’t read one or both of the readings. The most common type of paper was an opinion piece on how ebooks are convenient but not as great as print because, you know, “what if someone steals your iPad?” Many also alluded to the smell of the paper that is lacking with ebooks.

Without reading the directions and going through the steps of the assignment, they produced nothing of value because they ingested nothing. Garbage In. Garbage Out.

I spent a significant amount of time outlining the difference between opinion and analysis. A common question from undergraduate students is “oh, so do you want us to write our opinion?” The answer is a resounding NO! Opinions, as we all know are like …, and no one wants any part of it. I certainly don’t. But I am interested in a student’s analysis. That requires reviewing sources and coming to a conclusion that they will base on those sources. 

For example, I think ebooks are for the most part pretty great. I can customize my reading experience (i.e., selecting my typeface), get a book delivered instantly, and carry around a lot of books without it burdening me as I ride my bike. But in at least one of the readings, we read that the development of print was responsible for challenging the authority of the Catholic Church and even leading to a scientific revolution. That’s a pretty big impact, and it’s one that I have yet to see ebooks, for example, match. Therefore, I am going to argue that ebooks lack the revolutionary impact of print, based on the much longer history of the latter. Although my opinion is that ebooks are awesome, my analysis reveals that they don’t yet seem to qualify as revolutionary.

Get This Done

Finally, I gave students a poor-man’s version of the GTD philosophy. GTD means, as we all know, “Getting things done.” It’s the subject of a cult favorite book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, and is the basis behind one of my favorite apps. My version the GTD speech was to have students collect, process, and focus on their tasks. As I assigned them a paper to write, it was up to them to write it. Perhaps it might be more useful to determine what steps they needed to take to start their assignment, including setting aside some time to actually do it. 

It’s unlikely that my students understood the entire idea behind GTD, based on my brief description of it. Moreover, as I finished explaining GTD, I saw some students grazing on their phones, which they all have, or notebook computers, which only very few students use. That was a good time to remind them that the whole GTD process, much like doing well on assignments or exams, falls apart unless they have an unrelenting focus.

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LMS No More

This semester I swore off all learning management systems (LMS) for my classes. The biggest reason was out of self-interest because I am teaching four classes at three colleges and mastering a different LMS for each is a huge pain. Don’t believe me. Let’s take a look:

College Learning Management System Version
CUNY Queens College Blackboard 9.1.70081.25
Fordham Blackboard 9.1.110082.0
Pratt Institute Moodle 2.5.2, I think

Each also has a very idiosyncratic way of logging in. With Fordham, I just use my single sign-on, and I’m usually in. However, with CUNY, I have to login twice using the same credentials and then select Blackboard, after I tried to login to Blackboard.

It’s also hard to brush up with each individual platform because you often don’t even know if you’re going even to teach the class as colleges cancel classes at the last minute. This is one of the cruel realities of part-time teaching: it really discourages advance preparation, and many of us don’t bother with it until just before the start of the semester.

Another reason for abandoning the learning management systems is that each one was recently updated. Let’s face it, none of these learning management systems were going to be easier to use than the previous version. In fact, you can bet that each iteration adds a number of new complex features for the IT department purchasing the upgrade, at the expense of usability for the teacher and students. No, thank you.

Can you tell me where to stick my syllabus?

Can you tell me where to stick my syllabus?

How is an overworked teacher supposed to function without an LMS? Am I helpless like those teachers at Springfield Elementary when the students stole the Teachers’ Editions? No, I just roll things back to the days of web 1.0.

Static HTML syllabus

After a year of testing, I’m bringing back the static HTML syllabus. For example, my Media Technologies class has one with a pretty easy-to-remember web address: http://juanmonroy.com/mediatechnologies. I wrote the whole thing in Markdown and then exported it to HTML using Byword or Marked, depending on my mood at the time, which I then uploaded with the help of BBEdit. On the syllabus, there’s links to resources, such as:

  • textbooks
  • reserve readings, available as PDF.[1]
  • screenings
  • lecture outlines
  • slides

If you want to print the syllabus, there’s a print.css stylesheet that will render a printer-friendly version. (I told you this was really old stuff.)

Spreadsheet Gradebook

On my own computer I keep a gradebook in Numbers. You can do the same with Excel, Google Docs, and Open Office. Blackboard never had a good way of taking attendance so I’ve had to do this anyway. Moodle offers its own attendance module, but sheesh, it’s way easier to use an old paper attendance sheet than to decipher one of ten “attendance codes.”

In any case, calculating scores by spreadsheet is not the easiest thing in the world. I know most people use spreadsheets like a database to store lists and such, or to add and subtract simple values. However, a long time ago, a former boss of mine taught me Excel functions with weird names like VLOOKUP, LEFT, LEN, MIN, and SUMIF. Things really get fun when you nest functions inside others, and with those lessons from 1996, I calculate student’s grades in 2013.

Weening yourself off an LMS might not be the easiest thing. I am really pushing the limits of what I know about HTML, CSS, and spreadsheet functions. But I know that fighting bloatware is a cause I’m prepared to support.

  1. To avoid the ire of publishers, I use HTTPD Auth with a single username and password for everyone in the course.  ↩

Media Technologies, Fall 2013, Syllabus

The fourth and last syllabus I’ve posted is for Media Technologies at CUNY Queens College.

This is the very brief course description:

An overview of media technologies, including early writing and the printing press, the rise of mass culture, and the digital revolution.

Perhaps the reason the course description is so short is because, when I wrote it last spring, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to include in this course. It turns out that I had to cover a number of media technologies, even some that aren’t very technological, such as writing and language. Moreover, some of the media I covered include magazines, newspapers, and books. Those three overlap a great deal: all three are print forms, all three thrived in the industrial era, and all three contributed to the rise of mass culture in the nineteenth century. I wondered whether it was even possible to teach three separate classes on these three similar subjects.

The course covers other media and communications technologies such as the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, motion pictures, and finally digital media such as the Internet.

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p>The course meets Mondays, from 6:30 – 9:20 PM.

American Film Industry, Fall 2013, Syllabus

Here’s yet another syllabus. This one is for American Film Industry at Queens College.

From the course description:

This course examines the economic history of the American film industry since 1912. We will also focus on the technological and cultural changes of the industry, and pay special attention to how film has responded to successes and challenges of the US film industry and the changes to its business practices.

This is the fourth iteration of this class I’ve done at Queens College, most recently in Fall 2011.

This is the class that almost didn’t happen. As late as last Wednesday, the class was "under-enrolled" at six students. I was told that it would probably have to be cancelled unless enrollments ticked up. Over the three-day weekend, as many as eleven students had enrolled. However, it wasn’t until Labor Day that I received a final confirmation that the class was a "go." That’s when I got to work on updating the 2011 syllabus, and in less than a day, I had this syllabus ready to go.

Writing Syllabi in the Summer

Although Labor Day isn’t for another seven days, for all intents and purposes, summer is over. I usually try to get my syllabi done in early August, but I haven’t been especially motivated lately, especially since I’ve taught these classes before. I didn’t start reviewing the syllabi until last week, and I even posted one for this semester’s Introduction to Electronic Media and that class that was ultimately cancelled on Friday.

After getting that bit of bad news, I lost whatever slim motivation I had developed last week. I took the weekend off and started reviewing my unfinished syllabi today. Since it’s a bit late in the game here, I did a little triage to figure out which classes to prioritize, and, in doing so, I figured out that I have a “soft landing” at the beginning of the semester.

Course College Start Date Enrollment
Introduction to Electronic Media Fordham University August 28[1] 3
Experimental Film Pratt Institute August 29 14
American Film Industry CUNY Queens College September 3[2] 9
Introduction to New Media Fordham University September 3 19
Media Technologies CUNY Queens College September 9 27

As you can see, my classes start over the course of three weeks. And with one already cancelled and one in danger of being cancelled, I start one class each of the next three weeks, giving me a bit of time in finishing each of these syllabi. It could get complicated if Queens College runs American Film Industry. The course had six students enrolled on Thursday, when I learned it was in danger of being cancelled, but it now has nine students. I’m not sure if that’s enough to spare the course. I haven’t heard anything yet, but I am not updating another syllabus only to have the class cancelled.

It’s not easy to write syllabi in the summer…especially when there might not even be a class.

  1. This class was cancelled on August 23, due to low enrollment.  ↩
  2. This class is in danger of being cancelled due to low enrollment.  ↩

Six Stills from Six Silent Films

A few weeks ago I posted images of six films I screened in my History of Cinema class at Queens College. As part of the final exam, students were to name five of the six films and provide the country of production and, if appropriate, the avant-garde movement.

Here are the answers:

Anemic Cinema

Anemic Cinema

Celebrated artist Marcel Duchamp produced this film using a spirograph and other graphics that rotated on screen. Like much of Duchamp’s work, the film was a Dadaist work that utilized word play. In this still, the text translates to “If I give you a penny, will you give me a pair of scissors?” According to Katrina Martin, however, Duchamp is playing with colloquial French expressions and this actually translates to “If I give you a penny, I will give you a fuck.”[1]

The Man with a Movie Camera

Man with a Movie Camera

What can I say about this film? There are two items in the picture, a man and a movie camera, so I figured that would be easy. I was also looking for an image from this film that would show off two influential art movements in the Soviet Union: montage and Constructivism.

The challenge was to find a still that had montage within a single shot. Montage generally edits two shots together to create a specific and deliberate meaning, but I can’t show that in a single still. This one demonstrate the ability of montage to show “editing” within a single shot. Moreover, Constructivist integrated machinery into everyday objects, including the human form.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Cabinet of Dr Caligari

Not to spoil too much here, but in this still, Alan reacts to seeing Cesare in his room. He is terrified. In this shot, Cesare’s figure casts a shadow against the wall on the right side of the frame. The set of the room is highly stylized. It is not shown in classical Renaissance perspective, but instead has very sharp angles. This approach to composition was common in German Expressionism.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

Nosferatu

This is another German Expressionist film but from 1922 and directed by F.W. Murnau. The shadowy composition is again present here and is there to cast a sense of terror. Moreover, no one who has seen this film will forget Count Orlock’s appearance. It has to be one of the most chilling figures in cinema.

Un Chien Andalou

Un Chien Andalou

This is the seminal surrealist film, produced in France, by future film icon Luis Buñuel and celebrated painter/sculptor Salvador Dali. Early in the film is perhaps one of the most unforgettable images in cinema history: the cutting of a woman’s eye. The film rejects any narrative causality and instead follows the logic of dreams, as surrealists were wont to do.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

Sunrise

Yes, it’s another film by a German filmmaker, F. W. Murnau. But this film, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, was produced in the United States, not Germany, and was stylistically similar to Expressionism, although it was made well after the movement had its hey-day in Germany. This still is from the first third of the film. The man, played by George O’Brien, is about to kill his wife, played by Academy Award–winning Actress Janet Gaynor, and make it look like she accidentally drowned. You can see the compositional similarities between this image and that of the still from Caligari. Also, O’Brien’s posture is not unlike that of Orlock in Nosferatu.

Students in my class would have undoubtedly noticed that I absolutely love this film—it’s easily one of my all-time favorites—and some would remember it because I heard a few people crying at the end of the film.

As *Sunrise* is perhaps the last silent film made in Hollywood, it also might be the best.

  1. Martin, Katrina. “Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema.” Studio International 189, no. 973 (February 1975): 56.  ↩

Media Criticism this Summer at Queens College

Much like last year, I am scheduled to teach Media Studies 300W, Media Criticism, at Queens College. The class will meet on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings, from 5:30 – 7:45 PM, between June 3 and July 15.

This class satisfies the all-important writing requirement, but instead of stretching it out over fourteen grueling weeks, we will be condensing the class into six weeks. And because it’s summer, it will be more relaxed than it is during the fall or spring semesters. There will not be any overwhelming amount of material to memorize. Instead, we will read and respond to some very engaging issues in media studies.

To enroll, visit the Summer Session website and enroll in section 7627.