The College of New Rochelle

As we return to a new academic year with the close of summer, we should note a significant anniversary in the use of technology to support learning. It was 20 years ago in August that Tim Berners-Lee and others created an information retrieval project at the Swiss European Laboratory for Particle Physics (or CERN) that would become the Web, an innovative way of managing information over the Internet. Accessing, transferring and interacting with academic resources could now be done through hypertext–a system of embedding links in Webpages to link to documents on other sites, a system you use every time you click on a link on the Web (including this one).

The scale of the project was astonishingly small at the beginning, serving only a small group of research scientists. By November 1992 there were still only 26 Web servers in the world, less than the number of servers The College of New Rochelle uses today. Now there are over 90 million Web servers, hundreds of millions of personal computers and an estimated 350 million websites. Over 2.1 billion people are online in 2011 and the number of users is projected to reach five billion by 2020.

As you might imagine, the very first Website quickly disappeared, but CERN maintains a slightly later (1992) version that you can view online. Since it was entirely text-based (images on the Web would have to wait a year until the invention of a better browser that would become Netscape) it’s not much to look at; but a quick glance will reveal topics and issues that are very much part of learning today:

• The Sciences and Humanities
• Literature, with the venerable Project Gutenberg (a precursor to our contemporary eBooks)
• Copyright issues with a link to Music, and a note that song lyrics are “apparently disabled for copyright reasons” (the debate over music on the Web would become a major controversy until Apple’s iTunes resolved many of the payment issues)
• Politics, including information on the 1992 Presidential campaign in the United States, the first campaign to be discussed on the Web (little did politicians know what the future would hold!)
• Reference material

From this, the Web quickly evolved, gaining in commercial importance, widely used by nonprofits and NGOs, and upending the traditional roles of news media and television. And in our own decade, the Web is the home of rapidly growing virtual communities like Facebook and instant messaging platforms like Twitter. For students and faculty, the Web is not just an add-on to their courses but a means of expanding the learning environment of the traditional classroom. Once inaccessible texts and resources are widely available and discussions that once required students to meet in class can now take place online, creating new opportunities for collaborative learning. While much of this happens through our ANGEL learning management system, faculty are also making innovative use of YouTube, WordPress (a highly popular content management system), and a growing number of image sharing sites such as Flickr and Picasa.

And what did Tim Berners-Lee’s boss, Mike Sendall, think of his initial idea for managing information back in 1992? “Vague but exciting” was the hand-written comment scrawled across the top of Berners-Lee’s proposal but it was enough to let him continue its development. Today it is far less vague, but equally exciting as we move into the future, guided by our mission as we provide new opportunities for our students to achieve their academic and career goals.

Emory Craig is the Director of e-Learning & Instructional Technologies at The College of New Rochelle.

Recently there have been high hopes and excitement of the new school built on the advent of the “National” Common Core as well as The Teacher and Leader Evaluations (APPR) emanating from the Race to the Top application and grant. Overly-optimistic assessment of these new initiatives, I believe, is unfortunately, not born from the realities of what is really happening in the majority of schools in this nation. Here are a few reflections:

1.The centralization of authority in the State Education Department and The Federal Department of Education through its Race to the Top largesse has clearly eroded the authority and local control both of School Boards and the local community in dramatic and untold ways. The unintended consequences of this political initiative will be detrimental to the achievement and success of many of our students.  Both the Federal Department of Education and The State Education Department were never meant to micromanage community schools as we have seen over the past few years, starting with the unsuccessful No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This law and the Race to the Top Law have provided little research data for such dramatic whole-scale initiatives, such as a value-added analysis relative to teacher and leader performance. In New York State, much of The Race to the Top application has been done with minimal input from educators. Many Superintendents have indicated that they had little idea of the implications of the law when they signed on to the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) necessary for the Race to the Top application. Essentially, the initiatives have turned out to be a major series of mandates, deus ex machina, without commensurate funding where struggling schools and exemplary schools are treated as a single entity. The “one size fits all” approach is alive and well!

2.The Common Core Initiative is a step beyond the existing Standards but it is not forward-looking as it attempts to provide college readiness for all students. New York State had brought together 130 of the top educators in order to create a 21st Century English Language Arts program based on the higher-order skills of Problem-Solving, Critical Thinking, Creativity and Collaboration fused with work for English Language Learners adjudicated by some of the top researchers in the nation. This initiative was aborted after two years of completed work due to the fact that the Common Core “had” to be adopted in order that sufficient points would be garnered in the search for the “questionable” Race to the Top pot of gold. Some of the work found its way into the “National” Common Core but not to any significant degree.

3.The newly-adopted Teacher and Leader Evaluations have been approved by The New York Board of Regents in spite of pleas from some of the top educational researchers in the United States. The use of standardized tests as a percentage of the evaluation of teachers and Principals is like building a house on quicksand. Over the years, the limitations of standardized testing as applied to students have been discussed, only to have it “rear its ugly head” again in the evaluations of staff. In addition to narrowing the curriculum, the 100 point scale used in NYS cannot be accurate from a psychometric perspective. It is unfair to students and to the staff whose careers hang in the balance, as a result of this inappropriate use of testing, untested by research. Daily accountability yes! Accountability similar to the NYS model will be troublesome and flawed to say the least.

I am uncharacteristically pessimistic as we begin the school year, given the many serious, unresolved questions relative to the grand “experiment” perpetrated on our schools and students, conceived by people with limited experience in public education or in fact, in education in general.

If you are reading this while driving a car or interacting with a little kid, please stop now.  Otherwise, proceed.

I started thinking about technology on my commute to campus.  As I glanced out the window of the bus, I saw a woman and a child walking hand-in-hand on the sidewalk, the little boy’s face tipped up to hers’, her face deep in a Blackberry as she intently texted someone.  She didn’t seem to see the child at all.

The phenomenon that explains the inattentiveness of the Blackberrying woman — as well as the increasing numbers of automobile accidents attributed to cell phone usage — is called “inattentional blindness.”  Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice a fully visible object because one’s attention is otherwise engaged.  What causes inattentional blindness?  Simply put, there’s a serious mismatch between the amount of information that can be taken in by our senses and the capacity of our brains to process all that stuff.  We cannot pay attention to all the information our senses collect at one time.  In the timespan of a single second, your brain scans roughly 30-40 pieces of information−sights, sounds, smells, tactile information−until something captures its attention.  All the rest of the stuff never reaches your consciousness and you remain “inattentionally blind” to what has been filtered out.

A classic experiment by researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Harvard University found that about half of the viewers of a videotaped basketball demonstration who were asked to count the number of passes failed to see a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene.  Researchers at Western Washington University demonstrated how talking on a cell phone produces inattentional blindness.  In their experiment, a clown rode a unicycle through an open square on campus. Of the test subjects who were walking by while talking on their cell phones, roughly three out of four failed to see the clown; of those who were merely walking, and not talking, the number was much lower.

Inattentional blindness is why texting while driving a car can be lethal. So can merely talking on a cellphone, hands-free or no, especially if instead of a clown on a unicycle the driver fails to see a line of stopped cars or a bend in the road.

My colleague, Roxanne Zimmer, in her Introduction to Communication Arts class, gives students the assignment to go media free for a day.  You might try it.  If you do, send me an email and let me know how you get on.  I promise not to read it while driving or walking hand-in-hand with any of the little kids in my life.  I might read it at lunch, though.

Dr. Roblyn Rawlins is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Arts & Sciences at The College of New Rochelle.

Today I put in my book order for my favorite course, Growing Up Female. In Growing Up Female, cross-listed in sociology and women’s studies, we study the process and experiences of growing up female, both in the United States and around the world. We consider how girls’ experiences growing up are influenced by parents and peers, the media, experts, and consumer goods. We look at how girls’ different social locations — including diversities of culture, religion, social class, race, ethnicity, region, generation, and nation — shape their experiences of growing up female. We study the ways in which different cultures construct female embodiment: what bodies are valued and how girls’ bodies are viewed by themselves and others. We think about how culture creates girls and how girls create culture.  It is a delight to teach this class at a women’s college like The College of New Rochelle, because in class we learn from one another about the commonalities in our experiences as women and also about the differences that derive from our diversity. First-years often take this class, so they are also getting to know me and the other students. It is always a lot of fun to be in class.

One of the topics we study is gender equality in education. The College of New Rochelle was the first Catholic college for women in New York State and our founder, Mother Irene Gill, was a pioneer in education for women, so this is a topic that has special relevance for us. We find that in many parts of the world girls do not have equal access to education, and women make up two-thirds of the world’s population that lack basic literacy. However, we know that educating women improves the economies, health, and overall well-being of not only women and their families, but of their whole societies. So we examine some of the initiatives to improve girls’ access to education and educational attainment that are proposed by UNICEF, USAID, and other international agencies. Each year, some students express a newfound appreciation for the opportunities for education they’ve enjoyed growing up in the U.S., while others share their experiences with schooling while growing up on other continents.

When we study gender equality in education in the United States, we find that just over the past 30 years, things have changed tremendously from the days when most girls were shut out of pre-college curriculum and the saying that women went to college only to get their Mrs. degree was true for many. Today, girls in high school succeed in pre-college and advanced placement classes. The U.S. Census Bureau’s data from 2010 shows that for the first time in U.S. history, more American women finish college and hold advanced degrees than men.

I really enjoyed it when several students in the class last year started chanting in unison a school-yard rhyme that was new to me.

Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider
Girls go to college to get more knowledge!

We all laughed at this, despite its violation of the rules of grammar in the service of rhyme.  And we acknowledged the men who attend CNR’s School of Nursing and School of New Resources in pursuit of knowledge. But in the School of Arts & Sciences, I am proud to say that we are living out the modern-day nursery rhyme that

GIRLS [women?] GO TO COLLEGE TO GET MORE KNOWLEDGE!

Dr. Roblyn Rawlins is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Arts & Sciences at The College of New Rochelle.

Recently the New York Times printed an article: “Talk Therapy Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy.” The article did not make a clear distinction between the various professions providing psychotherapy, and the differences in the training processes in these respective fields, and therefore left  readers with the misconception that now, due to the changing policies of mental health insurance reimbursement which set lower fees for psychiatrists who actually do clinical treatment, people seeking psychotherapy are forced by default, to work with less qualified clinicians. This is far from the truth.

Freud noted in his famous paper “On the Question of Lay Analysis“  that psychoanalysts, the most intensively trained psychotherapists, first trained in the medical field, were not as well prepared to do the clinical work of psychoanalysis as others from a wider range of less rigidly structured disciplines such as the liberal arts or creative arts. This principal, that creative people may be the best clinicians if properly trained, may also be applied to other forms of psychotherapy.

In recent years, the changes in policies set by the insurance industry and further influenced by the pharmaceutical industry have misled the public into  believing that quality mental health may only be achieved by seeing a psychiatrist and receiving medication. Current research has since disproven this attitude and shown that ongoing clinical work can be more effective than medication. Other forms of psychotherapy may in fact require clinical training that actually surpasses the quality and intensity of clinical training of psychiatrists. For example, the art therapy master’s degree that we offer at CNR has always required intensive training in didactic coursework and extensive highly supervised clinical work with a strong psychoanalytic orientation.

It is clearly a misunderstanding to assume that psychiatrists are the most well trained psychotherapists.

So, if they now, as a group, feel it is beneath them to work for less than $200 for a 15 minute consultation, then there are many more highly trained clinicians, who are more dedicated to helping people than their personal bank accounts, ready and willing to fill the gap. In fact we have always been available, and now with NY State licensing in place, we can establish private practices beyond institutional settings to remain readily available, to serve societies need for psychotherapy, often at reasonable fees, with or without insurance reimbursement. Here at CNR, in keeping with the mission of the College, we will continue to offer high quality clinical training to qualified creative people, who in turn, will become well prepared to bring their clinical skill to those in need of help, in fiscally responsible, realistic formats.

Robert Wolf is a Professor of Art Studio at The College of New Rochelle.

Thousands are dead, missing, or injured without medical treatment, so I am thankful my wife is unhurt.  Shops in Sendai are barren of food and beverages (and batteries, candles, anything useful).  So she is surviving on crackers, water, and cold canned foods, hoping that lifelines will open up in a few days before her food runs out.  Ironically, we outside the danger zone have fairly good information from government helicopter reports, but those on ground zero have no TV or Internet for information.   She has no power, light, nor heat, only freezing-cold water.  She has called me twice on her cell-phone, but fears that her cell battery will die long before other power sources are revived.

This note – written by a Japanese colleague – offers an all too human account of life after the earthquake.  As awful as the earthquake was, it was followed by two equally horrendous events – a tsunami and the threat of a nuclear catastrophe.  The latter poses a special psychological horror as Japan is the only nation to have ever experienced a nuclear attack.

In earlier writings, I once addressed factors that influence public tragedy.  These factors include issues such as the scope of tragedy, whether it is perceived a preventable, and whether or not it is considered to be human-made or a natural event.  The latter two factors each have their own problematic elements.

In Japan, the scope is massive.  What is especially complicating is that it is both natural and human-made, both unpreventable and preventable.

Yet, in the massive nature of this disaster, we cannot forget the very individual stories of people coping with the loss of their loved ones, the destruction of their homes, and the disruption of their livelihoods.

Nor can we forget the other tragedies that unfold despite the disaster.  One email was from a colleague safe in Tokyo.  Though trained to offer aid in disaster, she stood on the sidelines.   The reason was that her first grandchild was prematurely born – hanging on to life by a slender thread.  Often it is these tragedies that become lost in a disaster.  I once counseled someone whose child died after a long bout with cancer on September 11, 2011.  As she said, “I almost have to apologize when I explain he did not die in the twin towers.”

As Japan struggles with these triple tragedies and the small every day tragedies that still continue, they can take some comfort in the fact that they are not alone.  As a homogeneous and insular nation, the Japanese often feel alone and isolated.  Yet, these crises reminded Japan that they are part of a world community – a community that demonstrates daily – it cares.

Dr. Kenneth J. Doka is a Professor Gerontology in the Graduate School at The College of New Rochelle.

Portland, Maine.

It’s hard not to hover.  It’s a rare demonstration of my own insecurity regarding myself as an educator:  did they know what I wanted them to know?

Yes, they did.  After hanging on the sidelines of the roundtable sessions of the Northeast Regional Honors Council’s annual conference, held this year in Portland, Maine, during which Darianna Parra SAS’11 (communication arts/Spanish) and Kristen Diaz SAS’11 (psychology/women’s studies) were presenting “Honors Goes Broadway,” I finally got a report.  Kristen bounded over to me and, in typical fashion, replaced a more normal greeting of “Hello” or “Good Morning” with the information-filled “All I can say is, our Honors Program is sooooooo impressive.”

She filled me in on the details of the morning.  While some Honors Directors sit with their students leading the roundtables, I try not to – it is their program, after all, and they should be able to best represent it.  There were many things I wanted them to talk about in terms of how the Honors Program at CNR works a Broadway show into its curriculum each year.  But I hoped that the goals of the Broadway program were defined clearly enough that the students would be able to convey them without my prompts.

“What points did you hit on?” I asked Kristen casually, going through the list in my head of what I hoped she would say.

She told me that the conversation focused on the need for arts within Honors programming, and how many attendees from other schools expressed regret that with so many budget cuts, arts were nearly extinct in their Honors.  She said that they emphasized how theater could be incorporated into so many classroom themes, such as how the “Race and Ethnicity” seminar used Avenue Q, why we created  an entire symposium on West Side Story, or what the first-year cohort got out of seeing The Color Purple.  But most importantly, she said, they talked about how important the theater excursions had become in terms of the Honors cohort understanding itself as a community:  teaching the first-year students how to get into and then navigate Manhattan, getting to know students from different majors, and ensuring that the Program operated as a whole, rather than by class year.

Bingo, I thought, as my fears and insecurities completely subsided.  They knew what I wanted them to know.

Watching CNR students operate outside of the campus context is, in a word, thrilling, because it is off campus that we learn whether or not the machinations of the classroom travel with them.  While we might try to de-center classroom power relationships as much as possible in the Honors seminar room, sitting around a table, emphasizing discussion over lecture, there is an inherent authority vested in the mere title of professor that cannot be shaken, nor should.  Here in Portland, however, in which three CNR Honors students are wandering amongst hundreds of honors faculty and students from institutions of every sort, I see how well we have done.  Because when they run with what they know, adding their own contexts, their own pieces, they represent not just CNR as an institution, but the faculty that teach there, and the things that we teach.   And, soon enough, it is clear that they know far more than we wanted them to know.

Dr. Amy Bass is an Associate Professor of History in the School of Arts & Sciences and the Director of the Honors Program at The College of New Rochelle.