Year: 2007

Palms turned upwards

The meaning of the gesture is clear whether it’s with one upturned palm, the “Brother, can you spare a dime” stance of beggars around the world, or with the two-palm version favored by preachers who reach out to beseech divine assistance. Or by exasperated Hollywood directors who rise from their chairs with upturned palms to implore their actors, “Work with me, people!”

The upraised palm is the automatic accompaniment to an apology or an alibi. As you try blaming the computer for eating your homework, you shrug your shoulders and expose your palms as a show of helplessness. What could I do? How could I know?

Primatologists claim that gestures and speech evolved simultaneously into language. And that the upturned palm is

one of the oldest and most widely understood signals in the world. It’s
activated by neural circuits inherited from ancient reptiles that
abased themselves before larger animals. Chimps and other apes, notably
humans, adapted it to ask not just for food, but also for more abstract
forms of help, creating a new kind of signal that some researchers
believe was the origin of human language.

The whole story is at A World of Eloquence in an Upturned Palm – New York Times

I care about students. Really?

My college’s operational motto is “Challenge and Care”. While the measure of the former can be achieved by learning outcomes and their corresponding evaluations, the measure of the latter is a little trickier.

Here’s the answer of an experienced teacher:

When you care at a personal and individual level, you ask one question: How can I empower a student so that she or he isn’t paralyzed in fear, doesn’t feel defeated and isolated and lonely, isn’t weakened by powerlessness, isn’t dominated by pessimism and self-doubt, doesn’t feel passive and helpless, isn’t saddened by hopelessness, doesn’t feel unnoticed and devalued?

The most effective answer lies in the context of an on-going, warm, upbeat, respectful, responsive, empathetic, and trusting relationship with each student. Most a student’s ills can be cured with large doses of engaged, close, and non-punitive caring. We have to act within specific situations with specific persons; we have to learn the specifics of those people and those situations; and we have to respond to the details of that person and her or his situation.

Each student is a particular human being with different needs, different problems, and different stories. Because each story is different, caring may require something different for one from caring for another. So, part of caring is being attentive, for it is within the personal context that we must care and educate.

We must first see and listen to each student if we are to help her or him to help herself or himself. In caring education, there is no substitute for seeing, listening, recognizing the needs of each student. That means attention, attention, attention must be paid to each student.

Paying attention to each student, listening to each student’s story, letting have her or his voice, establishing her or his identity, maintaining her or his integrity, taking the human experience as seriously as we do transmitting information. In many instances, as in journaling, we have to practice a silent presence.

We have to learn how to see, learn how to listen, how to be empathetic, and how to be patient. Otherwise, all these generalizations, these “I believe,” these “in my opinion” are simply our own stories, our own perceptions, our own descriptions of a student whom we do not know, have not heard, have not seen, and certainly have not positively touched–and probably rarely exists.

For more, see the whole post on Louie Schmier’s blog

Bizarro on creativity

Most creativity is a combination of instinct and practice. I’m always suspicious of anybody who has some kind of succinct advice to give, because I think it’s different in all cases. Ernie Bushmiller, who did [the comic strip] Nancy, he’s famous inside the syndicated-cartoon world for having said, “Dumb it down.” He’d say, “You know, I like your work, but you’d need to dumb it down, dumb it down.” And that was his belief — that a cartoon needed to be excruciatingly dumb and obvious for people to enjoy it. And it worked for him. And people who love Nancy will say, “It’s just so dumb, I can’t resist it.” It obviously worked for him. But it would not have worked for Gahan Wilson. It would not have worked for me….

I think that all great art comes from inside, and it’s a combination of your own instincts and talents and the amount of practice and effort that you put into it. And eventually you get somewhere good and that becomes your secret. (cecil vortex)

 

Do your words make people see?

A blind man sitting on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet and a sign that read: “I am blind, please help.”

A creative publicist was walking by and stopped to observe. He saw that the blind man had only a few coins in his hat. He dropped in more coins and, without asking for permission, took the sign and rewrote it.

He returned the sign to the blind man and left. That afternoon the publicist returned to the blind man and noticed that his hat was full of bills and coins.

The blind man recognized his footsteps and asked if it was he who had rewritten his sign and wanted to know what he had written on it. The publicist responded: “Nothing that was not true. I just wrote the message a little differently.”

The new sign read: “Today is Spring and I cannot see it.” (source unknown)

Choosing the right medium for the task: Information richness

The advent and widespread use of e-mail, instant messaging and video conferencing has broadened the menu of available media beyond the letter and the phone call. Communicating effectively therefore requires a choice of the medium that is appropriate to one’s communication objective.Information richness theory provides a guide in choosing the medium that “fits” the task:

Daft and Lengel (1984; Daft et al., 1987), introduced an approach considering information-richness as a major factor in information processing and media selection by managers. They defined information-richness as “the potential information-carrying capacity of data” (p. 196), and stated that the medium used in communication determines the potential richness of the information processed, and thereby the effect of a communication act.It is suggested that media differ in their potential capacity of transmitting the meaning of information in four information-richness factors, so that they can be ranked from ‘rich’ to ‘lean’. The factors are:

  • Interactivity (speed of feedback): Rich media provide the opportunity for immediate feedback so that participants may adjust their messages “in response to signals of understanding or misunderstanding, questions, or interruptions” (Kraut, et al., 1992, p. 378). Synchronous media are richer than asynchronous media in this respect.
  • Multiple cues: Rich media allow a full range of verbal, paralinguistic, intonation, proxemic, and kinetic cues (Lim & Benbasat, 1991) to convey not only the literal content of ideas, but also intensity and subtleties of meaning (Kraut et al., 1992). These ’surplus’ cues are sometimes somewhat confusingly called ’social cues’ (Daft et al., 1987; Farmer & Hyatt, 1994). Lean media put constraints on the range of cues that may be used in communication. Face-to-face meetings are rich media in this respect, while text is lean.
  • Language variety addresses the range of meaning that language symbols may convey (Farmer & Hyatt, 1994). Numbers convey greater precision of meaning than natural language (Daft et al., 1987); and visual or graphic symbols carry a greater range of interpretations (Daft & Lengel, 1984). Higher-variety languages are not only more ambiguous, but may also be used to organize a large amount of information (Farmer & Hyatt, 1994) given that a shared understanding of the language has been established. Rich media such as video conferencing allow the use of a high-variety language; lean media such as shared numeric databases restrict language use to low-variety language.
  • Social-emotional cues, which is related to ’social presence’, is the factor that has gained least interest in research. Daft and colleagues (1987) describe rich media in this respect as media which permit communicators to have “personal feelings and emotions infuse the communication. Some messages may be tailored to the frame of reference, needs, and current situation of the receiver.” (p. 358) For example, face-to-face meetings are richer than e-mail in this respect.

A medium’s potential richness can be thought of as the sum of scores on each of these information-richness factors. In other words: ‘medium richness’ is defined by the information-richness that a medium potentially transmits. ‘Potentially’ is added because the actual richness of a medium is determined by how users use it. (source)

Related posts:

Communication tools map

Current communication ecosystem

From criticizing to providing feedback

At one point, people used to “criticize” each other. But then it was too harsh and hurtful to criticize, so instead, people started “giving criticism” to each other. (Notice the shift from a direct to a more indirect voice.) This was still too hard for many, so then we start to “give constructive criticism.” (Note the addition of a positive adjective — lessening the impact of a negative phrase.)But this was too long to say so then we stopped giving constructive criticism and started “to critique” — which has come to mean “high end criticism.” This then gave way to “giving critiques” (note the same pattern of lessening the impact by turning it from a verb into a noun). This one, however, didn’t last, and was quickly replaced by “giving feedback,” which then became “providing feedback” (note give — provide adds an additional syllable: longer words conceal more than smaller words do) — which is where we remain today.

Although we’re still “giving/providing feedback” today, that’s just starting to be replaced by its successor: “providing developmental feedback.” (Note, again, another example of adding a positive adjective to a negative phrase.)

This pattern is more invidious than it seems to be at face value: big words often hide big deeds, and big deeds are more often than not bad deeds. One of the key weapons in fighting the laziness of thought (and all the problems that derive from this) is through clarity in language. (Random thoughts)

Did I miss anything?

The end of summer… the beginning of classes… and questions from students that keep coming back every year…

Q.: I could not be here last class, did I miss anything?

A.: from a poem by Tom Wayman:

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human existence
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren’t here