Animated Speakers

January 12, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

When I teach, I rarely use the board. My handwriting is terrible, and for just about everything I say in class, I have a write-up that I post on Blackbloard with the ideas and evidence laid out systematically and all the key concepts and names in bold type. When I do write on the board, I often see student struggling to decipher the letters. I tell students not to worry about copying it all down. They can find everything written clearly and spelled correctly on Blackboard.

Underlying my casual attitude to the board is the assumption that I-write-you-copy ritual breaks the flow of thought. That’s also one of my objections to PowerPoint, especially if students focus on writing down what’s on a slide rather than thinking about what’s being said.

Who am I kidding? The only one whose thought gets broken is me. For students, a pause while I write on the board would give them a minute to think about the idea. Besides, I realize now that having a written version, even with no pause for reflection, reinforces and somehow adds to a lecture. I realize this thanks to RSA Animate. Watch even a minute or two of one of their animations. Here for example is Zizek on cultural capitalism.



The drawings don’t really add anything intellectually, and the words are just a shortened transcript of what Ehrenreich is saying. But the message coming simultaneously via two senses seems much more memorable. (The RSA site also has the video of Zizek on camera for the full half-hour lecture, for connoisseurs interested in side-by-side comparisons.).

I guess I’ll be spending the rest of winter break working on my marker skills.

Beach Blogging Bingo

January 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The SocioBlog is heading for a week in the sun (I hope). Internet access may be dicey. If I do post, it will be from . . . well, I’ll let the Saxophone Colossus tell you. (Jazzers will know what I mean. Or click on the link for the classic track.)

Brands - Image and Reality

January 7, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In yesterday’s post, I wondered what “brand equity” meant in higher education. I think I have a vague idea.

A school doesn’t just educate. A school is also a brand, and its graduates carry that brand regardless of the education they may (or may not) have gotten there. Juilliard, for example, was GLM’s top-ranked music school for brand equity (it was also twelfth in the list of colleges, just behind Wellesley, just ahead of Vassar).

I knew a Juilliard graduate, Brad, many years ago, back when I was a playground dad. Not many other men were there on weekdays. Often, it was just me and Brad (plus the moms and nannies), and we got to know each other. He had come from Boston with his saxophone, but at Juilliard he studied conducting. After graduating, he stayed on the West Side and eventually actually managed to land a job as conductor with a regional orchestra somewhere in New Jersey that did five concerts year. It didn’t pay all that much, but it allowed him a lot of free time, which was why he was one of the few other dads regularly at the playground in the afternoon.

One day as we were sitting on the bench, Brad asked me where I’d gotten my Ph.D. I guess we’d never talked much about higher education. Harvard, I told him. “I didn’t know that,” he said, surprised, “and I’ve known you all this time.”

“Don’t be impressed,” I said.

“But I am,” he said. From his voice and the look on his face, I could see that he meant it.I wanted to convince him not to be.

“Oh Brad,” I said, my voice rising in mock awe, “You went to Juilliard?! You must be this really great and talented musician. Juilliard – wow!” Or something like that. He laughed. “See what I mean?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. Then a pause. “But I’m still impressed.”

Brand Equity in Higher Ed

January 6, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Global Language Monitor has just released its rankings of colleges and universities (here). GLM ranks “brand equity.” No measures of faculty or student quality, no measures of cost, no graduation rates. Just “buzz.”

TrendTopper MediaBuzz utilizes a mathematical model that ‘normalizes’ the data collected from the Internet, social media, and blogosphere as well as the top 75,000 print and electronic media.

Those other rankings – the ones that look at the schools themselves – are biased.

GLM’s TrendTopper MediaBuzz Rankings actually removes all bias inherent in each of the other published rankings, since they actually reflect what is being said and stated on the billions of web pages that we measure.

Here are the top ten universities

1. Univ. of Wisconsin—Madison
2. University of Chicago
3. Harvard University
4. Mass. Institute of Technology
5. Columbia University
6. Univ. of Michigan—Ann Arbor
7. Cornell University
8. University of California–Berkeley
9. Yale University
10. University of Texas—Austin

And the top ten colleges

1. Davidson College
2. Occidental College
3. Williams College
4. Wesleyan University
5. Carleton College
6. Amherst College
7. Bucknell University
8. Oberlin College
9. United States Air Force Academy
10. Pomona College

The aren’t any surprises in the first list, except perhaps that four of the top ten are state schools (the “public option” when there’s a “government takeover” of education.) But with the colleges, I wonder what the nature of the buzz was. Is Occidental at #2 because Obama went there as a freshman? Why is Bucknell more buzzworthy than, say, Kenyon or Vassar?

I also wonder what brand equity means. In commerce, it adds value. It increases the price of a product or share of stock. What does it do for education?