Author Archives: Michael Mandiberg

One history of the White Supremacist version of the Free Speech Movement

Posted on by
Reply

Noam Cohen published a piece in the New Yorker looking at one origin story for the techno-utopian, neoliberal Free Speech Movement, and its radical right, White Supremacist inflection. Worth the read: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/origin-silicon-valley-dysfunctional-attitude-toward-hate-speech

A novel use of Twitter Bots to study prejudice

Posted on by
1

Check out this Political Science study that uses Twitter Bots to assess responses to sanctions for racists tweets. This is really relevant to the topics we will cover in the last few weeks of the course. The author writes:

I employ an intervention designed to reduce the use of anti-black racist slurs by white men on Twitter. I collect a sample of Twitter users who have harassed other users and use accounts I control (“bots”) to sanction the harassers. By varying the identity of the bots between in-group (white man) and out-group (black man) and by varying the number of Twitter followers each bot has, I find that subjects who were sanctioned by a high-follower white male significantly reduced their use of a racist slur.

If you are interested in this topic and/or methodology, the paper is worth a read. I put it in our Group Files. You can skip over the lit review, which is very PoliSci, and read the methodology section, which is really translatable across disciplines. The results are much more nuanced than the abstract, including the fact that a significant percentage of the users had a reaction to out-group comments, causing them to increase their harassment.

Teaching and Learning Center Grants, 2017-2018

Posted on by
Reply
RFP: TLC Grants, 2017-2018
The Teaching and Learning Center is pleased to open the application process for 2017-2018 Teaching and Learning Center Grants. This program supports doctoral and masters students at the CUNY Graduate Center as they develop, plan, implement, and reflect upon creative approaches to teaching and learning. The goal of this program is to foster experimentation in the classroom, and to contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning at the City University of New York and beyond.

TLC Grants of up to $2,500 will support the planning, execution, and public reflection upon a teaching and learning project, and which will make a broader contribution to conversations about teaching and learning. Examples of the kinds of proposals that might be funded include class assignments involving archives (digital or physical) or cultural institutions, cross-course collaborations, assignments that integrate writing into quantitative disciplines, the construction of a new series of teaching guides for the TLC website, creative mapping or data visualization projects, research on teaching and learning, a workshop series or seminar on a specific pedagogical strategy, the purchase of software or hardware to facilitate a specific course or set of projects, and the beginning phases of research and development of educational technology tools, platforms, and projects. Descriptions of previously funded projects are available on our web site.

Funding from TLC Grants can fund both the labor that goes into teaching and learning activities and offset the costs of goods, services, or experiences that are central to a project. TLC Grant winners will be expected to design their project in regular consultation with TLC staff, launch or implement the project in Spring 2018, reflect on the project on our blog, Visible Pedagogy, and make a public presentation about the project at Teach@CUNY Day in Spring, 2018 or at the GC Digital Showcase. Applications for collaborative projects are strongly encouraged, and may be funded at up to $3750. The TLC also encourages collaborative projects designed in partnership with applicants to the Provost’s Digital Innovations Grant program. If you are submitting a collaborative grant proposal, please note in your project description the nature of the collaboration and your partners.

To Apply:
Applicants must be a doctoral or masters student currently enrolled and in good academic standing at the Graduate Center.

Proposals must include the following, submitted in a single PDF by email to tlc@gc.cuny.edu by midnight on October 9, 2017. Please put “TLC Grant Application” in the subject line, and save your PDF as lastnamefirstnameTLCGrant.pdf:

• Applicant Information:
• name
• program at the GC
• contact information (email, mailing address, and phone number).
2. Abstract: 100-200 word statement summarizing the project and how it represents a creative, experimental approach to a pedagogical opportunity or problem

3. Narrative: up to 1000 words. Description of the project, including a timeline for development and deployment, key benchmarks, and a statement about the project’s significance and potential impact.

4. Budget: an itemized description of how the funding will be used, not to exceed a page. Instructor labor should be priced at the Adjunct Lecturer hourly rate of $89.12 per hour.

5. Short CV for all grantees: no longer than two pages.

Proposals will be evaluated by a review committee according to the following criteria:

• feasibility
• creativity
• clarity of purpose
• detail and appropriateness of budget
• contributions of the project to the scholarship of teaching and learning
• replicability and sustainability

Applicants will be notified about the status of their proposals by the end of October. Please direct any questions about the application process or the TLC grants initiative to tlc@gc.cuny.edu. Applicants are welcome to request meetings with TLC staff to talk through ideas for their proposals.

ITP Lab: Planning and Completing a Project

Posted on by
Reply

Planning and Completing a Project
Kimon Keramidas & Michael Mandiberg

Start with an overview (5m)
Project Management begins with conceiving of realizable and relevant projects
Project Management requires time management, and team communication
Your goal for this sessions is for you to recognize the importance of planning and forethought in executing a complex project

KK & MM share some anecdotes (20m and 10m for Q&A)
Projects: Smithsonian & Chaplin/A+F
Themes:
You need to find your own path, but you need to be actively looking for that path.
Scope creep – how do you measure what is scope creep?
How to you build in time to make mistakes?
How do you enable experimentation?
When and how to you reach out to others for help/knowledge/resources?
How to understand the scope of tools you are unfamiliar with?
You need to understand your field so you know how to act in that field, and what constitutes new knowledge.
How does traditional research transition into project based work?

Breakout (20m)
Pair and describe their goal – project/general interest/direction – write it down
Describe a potential project – write it down
Make a list of what they need to accomplish the project – people, skills, knowledge resources, stuff, access
Identify which ITP labs meet these needs
Draft a rough sequential timeline (what comes first, second, third). Focus on order, not necessarily duration.

KK & MM workshop a few of them. (20-30m)

KK & MM Talk about how we deal with time management & team communication (20m)
How we allocate time and resources.
Share 7×24 grid as *one* way of managing time.
You have to know yourself. There are many ways of dealing with time. You need to be honest with yourself and find the one that is going to work for you.
K – stays ahead of inbox, likes meetings with people
MM – all creative work on Tuesday, Trello, talking things through, the shower/bicycle/massage
Dealing with other people: You need to understand their personalities. Often you will be leveraging access to resources through someone else, so get into their good graces. How do you negotiate all the people.
Remember, a dissertation is a project you are managing, with a team, and a workflow.

Consider your data, and its afterlives. This is a Data checklist from the Library.

Review the list of workshops this fall and Sign up for Labs!

Pair and then report back (15m)

Q&A for remaining time.

 

Here is a cleaner public version of this document on Kimon’s site