Category: 2008

Afternoon Solutions, Part Eight

Notes from Table VIII:

An opening thought about the new world since 1960: the average American has gained, as a result of technological innovations, an extra month of leisure.

Despite all this leisure, we are still harried, why? How do you define leisure?

Walking to work for me is an important time for me, a moment of pleasure. Our time is being redefined. I have different e-mail accounts, and I open some of them at different times in relation to my need and my desire for a personal moment.

Language is a vehicle to use to make solutions:

The problem of solution/paradigm still exists. What happens in the middle has to be adaptable, based on the challenge of living in a changing media, changing culture.

In written communication, we use a certain kinds of filters.  Oral communication another kind of filter. This alludes to Richard Lederer’s talk that there used to be a common body of knowledge, now there is a move away from that. There is now a new set of standards.

So is there a successful formula that writers use, a constant? Well, standards are evolving.

I see my students coming up with new interpretations of the great works. I’m wondering how to approach these new views.

Do you mean how to build possibilities of shared experience? Yes, even just the way a piece of literature is received.

To teach in CUNY is staggering.

The old curricular model of skills, values, and models seems out of place.

You never know what the students will bring to the table.  You couldn’t survive teaching at CUNY without knowing the literary heroes of students from different backgrounds.

In the writing center, we see students with great ideas, but there are issues that result from English as their second language.

I had some good luck to do research on the history of English in America. And teaching the English language was initially to make “us” Americans with certain values.  The English language is there for self-discovery.

Language:

It really comes down to using language as a frame; language to describe how we are thinking.

The word ‘language’ is a verb. How do we manage to live in this age? To survive; to manage; to thrive?

We need to come to conclusions about our first issue.  What do we want to say at the end? We enjoyed having the keynote at our table. (Laughing)

SOLUTIONS:

No matter what it the question is the solution will always be related to language.
As in looking at language as a common place to live. We need to get language into the conversation.

We are language. We live in language.

Afternoon Solutions, Part Seven

Notes from Table VII:

Solutions to address different frames of reference:

Humor can be lost through language, generational, and other cultural divides, which impact etiquette, protocol, and grammar.

Would most people in the general population understand some of the jokes we laughed at during the Richard Lederer talk?

Is listening to popular culture the window onto our civilization?  But there are parts of our culture, which are not of interest to other cultures.

There is commonality, especially in the young. For example; 7th-graders who love Shakespeare—universality? But one thing doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.

What do we want to pass to the next generation through narrative?

How do we implement listening and bridging the gap?

Modeling gap-bridging behavior for students:

•    emotional-intelligence awareness; soft-skill learning/training
•    ability to decode or understand different contexts
•    ask questions of students to encourage them to think for themselves
•    teaching students social skills for business and networking
•    classical rhetorical appeals:  ethos pathos logos  AUDIENCE!!!
•    Me-centered students—what kind of training will prepare them to see beyond themselves?

How do employees or students acquire the skills they need to have?  How do they know how to be adaptable within that?

Mentorship and orientation are similar and have important roles to play both in the workplace for new hires as well as for students in a university.

The use of simulations, role-play can help with the ability to read other people, an extremely important skill.
Also emotional intelligence, psychology or counseling; Let students or employees self-evaluate so they can see where the breakdown is, where differences can get in the way.

And as always read relevant newspapers (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, NYTImes) to get good writing examples, cultural knowledge, relevant vocabulary, one can even get it online; this for employees as well as the students.

And a new all timer favorite no-email Fridays: no e-mails to people in very close offices. This is in order to bring back inter-personal skills!

Afternoon Solutions, Part Six

Notes from Table VI

Communication is a communal act

Perspectives can change interaction, ask people to write down problems, move away from dyads but triangulate communication. Writing is different when it’s for one person or for a group.  Embracing multiple perspectives can work against miscommunication.

Conflict has to do with human perceptions. Conflict resolution requires shifting shared ground from one set of facts to another, to reframe the issue. Miscommunication comes in large part because of how much of communication is framed by these larger non-human structures.

What are some contexts for the problem we identified: How do we use listening to avoid miscommunication with the goal of understanding our differences and acting on our commonalities?

Sometimes the concrete suggestions may not do justice to the richness of the problems posed. An example of this is a grievance officer at a college, who listens to a lot of problems students are having with courses.  He or she has to understand that students are not always able to understand the solutions given by the counselor. The students need to really listen. How can this be taught?

One particular student is an unfriendly marketing major who is inadvertently plagiarizing his work. His argument was that the same sentence was on ten websites, so it’s not plagiarism. How hard it becomes to communicate the real life answer.

Sometimes students really hear something different than what is being said.

Sometimes it isn’t an issue of listening but of perception.

This student maybe doesn’t want to understand, so it is not a failure of listening.

Here is an interesting question: what are the roles of power and authority in listening?  From the student’s point of view what can be done?

In communication classes students are offered scenarios and asked for interpretation, the class jumps on one, and in the end the challenge is to come up with a bunch of different explanations and alternatives.

Recommendations/Best Practices
– Rephrase questions
– Offer multiple perceptions
– Understand emotional noise
– Build in delay time between responses
– Write down complaints
– Triangulate or bring in fourth person to reduce miscommunication, diverse listening backgrounds in terms of ethnicity, gender, SES, etc.
– Multiple perspectives

Afternoon Solutions, Part Five

Notes from Table V

Solutions – Filtering/Editing in Electronic Communication

Determining rules of thumb or hard and fast rules: “Emails should be as simple as possible but no simpler”

Rules (of thumb) for email communication:
– Pay attention to cc and bcc lines; be careful of “reply all”
– Write like Hemingway (as simple and straight forward as possible)
– Email may not be the best medium; consider the context (maybe a call would be better)
– Be conscious of tone
– Never write anything you would not want to be forwarded to your boss

When to be short and when to be more expansive?

The higher up the food chain you are, the longer the emails you receive and the shorter the emails you send… If communication is very nuanced, email may not be the best medium.

Sometimes we ascribe characteristics to email that email is not (inherently) deserving of:
e.g., The ability to be persuasive, or to convey tone

Critical questions:

What is it that we want our rules to achieve?
How do we restrict some (unnecessary) communication yet permit others (necessary and relevant)?

The formal way of establishing expected norms are rules for communication (e.g., etiquette; like having tea with the Queen of England). Can this be sustained within and across institutions, generations, and cultures?

Theory/principles of the rules:
– Rules are good
– They should be consciously discussed and implicated
– We must understand that not everyone will know the rules
– We can’t let the rules trump the substance of the communication
– Rules need to be generalizeable, but we must realize that some are specific to particular types of communication
– The rules need to be allowed to evolve and change over time (along with technology)
– The rules need to be designed to make our jobs easier
– Everyone is responsible for both adhering to the rules and enforcing them by calling attention to the rules when they’re broken (self-responsibility and responsibility to the collective)

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Afternoon Solutions, Part Three

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Notes from Table III’s Afternoon Discussion

The question we will try to answer: Can we teach people to be good listeners?

How can we bring a greater awareness of listening? How do we listen intelligently? When you listen, you open yourself up to connection.

An important point is to give the opportunity of finding pleasure in listening.There is no right way to make students listen better; there are just too many variables.

•    The role of Emotion in communication
•    The sense of community and or identity in communication
•    The simple ability to understand
•    Bootstrap Learning Left Brain and Right Brain

As we become good listeners, we immerse ourselves in potentially difficult situations. We are immersing ourselves in the flood of information such as the Internet; the issues of filtering information.

You need a network of trusted people (community)

You need a number of communities and people depending on the needs to filter or to understand.

Can we educate the gut?

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Afternoon Solutions, Part Two

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Notes from Table II

Which of the world’s communication ills will we cure?

Writing by committee?

What can we do to facilitate the process of writing in groups or writing by committee?
Empathize with the target audiences?

There is a “Tyranny of the writer” in collaborative writing: use of ‘master’ doc that then is passed around to be edited→ the result is tinkering at the edges. The final outcome then falls on arbitrary responsibilities and the thinking process is short-changed.

Two Rules: Getting to the starting point and the core: what are we trying to accomplish in our communication?

There are similar examples working such as writing with a public safety committee and collaboratively writing service manuals for technicians, or a collaborative report from an online course.

There is the importance of facilitating people through the landscape:
• Seeing landscape, topics, audience
• Thinking in human terms of relating material to audience
• Brainstorming details for each topic
• Final stage = sequencing, this is often where logical problems arise

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Morning Session – Table X

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TABLE X

Facilitators:

Phyllis Zadra, Associate Dean, Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College
Frank Gatti, CFO and Sr. Vice President, Educational Testing Service

Questions:
2) How does listening factor into effective communication? What does it mean to listen effectively? How might effective listening be fostered or taught in both academic and business settings?
3) Are correctness and adherence to formal conventions always required for communication to be successful? Do incorrect grammar, punctuation, non-standard pronunciation (as in accents of various sorts), or deviation from formal conventions necessarily lead to miscommunication

On Credibility:

Credibility builds trust.

It is more worthwhile thinking of credibility not as credential, but in the context of communicating a message. On the one hand, an intro can create an environment where your audience can trust you. Over time you build that credibility to keep their trust.

Mother Theresa would have been able to call forth anyone to be her audience. Who we are as a person is what we bring to the table. Her love for humanity and her willingness to suffer gave her a trust with any audience. She was disarming and did not appear as a threat – which is why she was able to draw people to her. There was a quality of trust established.

What tactics do we need to get through filters?

Vulnerability and authenticity creates trust in the audience. There is a whole other side to this and that is verbal miscommunication vs written miscommunication.

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Morning Session – Table IX

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Table 9, picture 1

TABLE IX

Facilitators:

James Drogan, Senior Lecturer in Global Business and Transportation, Director of Online Programs, SUNY Maritime College
Joseph Ugoretz, Director of Technology and Learning, Macaulay Honors College, CUNY

Participants:

Natasha Yespimenko
Ryan Swihart
Stephen Smith
Erin Martineau
Cenk Parkin
James Hoff

Questions:

2) How does listening factor into effective communication? What does it mean to listen effectively? How might effective listening be fostered or taught in both academic and business settings?
3) Are correctness and adherence to formal conventions always required for communication to be successful? Do incorrect grammar, punctuation, non-standard pronunciation (as in accents of various sorts), or deviation from formal conventions necessarily lead to miscommunication?


The Discussion:

The discussion of table 9 was captured in the following three photographs.

Poster 1

Figure 1: Chart 1

The roundtable discussion started at 10:15 am and about 11:20, after substantial, free flowing conversation the thinking of the table began to coalesce. This is intended to be depicted by Figure 1 Chart 1.

We reached a conclusion that the two questions were closely related, but that different weights (in the sense of guiding critical thinking) were assigned to the questions (the notation on “perceived value”) depending upon the channel (F(channel)) of interest.

The experience of the investigator in the recognition of communications issues plays a major role in the assignment of the weight. A tyro and a pro will see the channel differently, perhaps very differently.

The experience has two sources. First is a base level of knowledge and skill that comes from training. The second is that experience that evolves out of (mostly) mistake. The mistakes should also provide a basis for adjusting the training.

Mistakes arise from the incorrect or inappropriate application of existing levels of knowledge, skills, and experienced. This represents a learning activity which needs to be dealt with in a formal manner. For example, the armed services conduct formal after action reviews comprising three questions:

1. What worked?
2. Where did we get stuck?
3. What would we do differently next time?

The area of Figure 1 Chart 1 enclosed in a dashed line represents what table 9 decided to focus on in the afternoon roundtable meeting. That is, presuming that the experienced investigator (e.g., Writing Fellow) is indeed of value, how is one trained?*

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Morning Session – Table VIII

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TABLE VIII

Facilitators:
Paul Cahill, Principal, Cahill Associates
Judith Summerfield, University Dean of Undergraduate Education, CUNY

Questions:
1) Think back to an instance of miscommunication that involved you in some way. How did you recognize the problem? Why did it arise? How might it have been avoided? What common themes arise in your discussion of this question?

4) What challenges do we face in communicating within increasingly diverse classroom and business environments? How do we best navigate cultural or even generational differences in working to nurture effective speaking and writing across academic and business contexts?

Generational and interpersonal issue:

By avoiding talking about certain issues due to gender, culture and generation, we increase instances of  miscommunication; on the other hand, is there a common core that cuts through difference that we can access when communicating?

It is often with negotiations that should be done in person but are done on email; email discourages working together in the workplace.  It comes back to “More Anguished English” vs more “Anguished English.”  Even the climate of inhibition around talking about politics is a form of miscommunication and an interpersonal issue. Yes, for example a spousal debate over election and the husband feels unsupported. Yes it is interesting to see what kinds of words are used in politics; sound bites in politics are nouns: change, rigor.

We have unfiltered conversation in blogs and email—because we use so many fast tools; one has to be careful because one can be testy and sarcastic when in ‘fast’ mode. The receiver does not always understand this.

Do short responses come off as flippant because we don’t have time for niceties? Does that create more miscommunication?

Socio-cultural contexts in which miscommunication flourishes: Central dilemma: We are increasingly pushed into problems of solutions paradigms…

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