In early April, Luke Waltzer wrote a post introducing Performing Diasporas: Identities in Motion, an initiative that seeks to raise the profile of the Baruch Performing Arts Center and to infuse the performing arts into the curriculum. To this end, artists-in-residence Maya Lilly, Randy Weston, and Mahayana Landowne will lead a series of workshops for incoming students that interrogate issues of culture and identity in the context of globalization and late capitalism.
This is where Blogs@Baruch enters the picture. I joined Luke in a training session to introduce WordPress to the 2010 peer mentors, each of whom will lead a section of Freshman Seminar come September. Before our session with the peer mentors, we discussed some of the high and low points of the 2009 blogging season in Freshman Seminar. It should be said at the outset that Blogs@Baruch’s support of Freshman Seminar was amazingly successful in 2009 especially in light of the limited time for planning. Blogs@Baruch supported 60 section blogs with 20 students a week for a total of 1200 freshman bloggers, each of whom were tasked with writing six blog posts over the course of the semester, one after each of the required workshops.
But feedback from the peer mentors indicated that buy-in was low among freshmen. Last year’s peer mentors expressed frustration at having to chase after freshmen and repeatedly remind them to complete their blogging assignments. They also told us that the blogging assignments themselves left something to be desired, and that their procedural nature (to report back on the workshop just attended) tended to put a damper on students’ enthusiasm for the task. And finally, the peer mentors expressed a desire to customize the look of the section blogs.
We took each of these critiques seriously and decided to rethink the approach of Blogs@Baruch to Freshman Seminar in light of the concerns raised by peer mentors. Luke already had plays to open up the WordPress blogging environment, including giving more control to peer mentors over theme selection and plug-in activation, and incorporating social networking functionality through BuddyPress to create a more networked and collegial environment for peer mentors and first year students alike. Luke invited me to join the team that oversees Freshman Seminar to help him address the second critique, that is, to rethink the role of blogging in the Freshman Seminar curriculum. And so last Friday we collaboratively facilitated two sessions with peer mentors, part of which was a brainstorming session to develop more compelling blog post prompts.
The blog post prompts that follow invite students to reflect on the processes of identity construction through various lenses. In different ways, these blog post prompts encourage students to integrate online, social, and multimedia tools into their student identities, and to consider how aspects of their personal history can inform and ultimately enrich their academic work. If they seem repetitive, that’s because they are. Students are actually not required to complete any of them — which is a whole different issue — but in any case, we are hoping to entice them to do some. The idea is to make the blog post prompts so interesting that students feel compelled to do them!
This is what we’ve come up with so far:
1. If you were an iPhone app, which one would be you and why?
2. Use Grooveshark to make a playlist, a soundtrack for your life, and write a blog post explaining the significance of each song.
3. Cheap eats: Write a restaurant review of a inexpensive lunch spot in the Baruch area or around where you live. Include a photograph of the food.
4. Audit your Facebook account, and write about it; OR Google yourself, and share what’s true and what’s not.
5. Pick a stereotype that you think you embody and expand upon, shatter, or embrace it.
6. Consumer identities: What are the five most important brands that you use throughout the day? Why do you think you are drawn to these brands.
7. Choose a cartoon character that is in some way like you, post a picture or a video of this character, and write a blog post explaining your reasoning.
8. Using Paint or a similar program, paint how you see yourself, and post it with an explanation.
9. Record everything you eat in a day and share it. Reflect on what this reveals about your culture and identity.
10. Take photos or record a video of your commute to school. Describe the various spaces you pass through during this process. For instance you might compare the experience of being on the street in your neighborhood, versus being on the bus or the train, versus at Baruch. What stands out to you?
11. Find images related to your heritage on Flickr, and write a blog post explaining their significance.
12. Write a post about your favorite genre of art, and share an example.
13. Take and share a photo of something at Baruch that doesn’t work OR of some ironically defaced signage in the city at large.
14. If you had $1m and had to give it to a charity, which and why? OR Respond to an open ended, critical thinking philosophical/ethical question, like for example: Is it acceptable to lie under certain circumstances?
15. Search for your name or an idea about you on flickr, and post the first photo that comes up. Compare it to a photo that you think more resembles you.
I plan to revise this list of prompts based on the feedback of the ever-supportive edtech community at CUNY and beyond. Any suggestions? Help me make these prompts irresistible!