Class 39: Discussions of Ivory Tower event + Diversity Taskforce + mission rewrite

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For our thirty-ninth class on November 13, 2017 we met at 2pm in 901 NAB.

Photos

📸 More photos (Dropbox 🔒)

Emails

Hi Projects class, 

We’ll meet today  at 2pm in room 901 NAB. 

Please bring a printed copy of the 3 pages based on your conversation.During the break we’ll make copies for everybody to read and annotate over the coming week. 

Please also submit a PDF or DOC file of your 3 pages here: 

https://www.dropbox.com/request/M5gzzxQg7Wg3a2Pt16NZ

We’ll start off today with presentations from Sobel, Dempzil, Jake, and Casey.

And we’ll leave the last hour for a class discussion and a possible prompt.

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Recap of Class 39: Class discussions of Ivory Tower event + Diversity Taskforce + mission rewrite (11/13/2017)

We met at 2pm in 901 NAB. We discussed the Ivory Tower event that Kiersten, Jake, Vic, and others have been working on across groups including ASC and Archive Club — now scheduled for Friday, December 8. It will combine a screening, discussion with director Andrew Rossi, community reception, archive fundraiser, and collaborative publication. The discussion touched on the shape of the event, how it has come together and what it takes to pull off, the way school resources are allocated, and what the content of the publication might be.

We then heard about developments related to the Diversity Taskforce, co-chaired by Toni Torres and Sam Keene. We discussed the origin of this initiative and previous ones, the composition and structure of the taskforce, the role students play in and outside of committees, and some of the terms and approaches introduced by Toni in our previous class.

In closing we returned to a discussion of the ongoing rewriting of Cooper’s mission, which we have previously spoken about in class with Peter Buckley, and spent severalclasses workshopping together last semester.

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Recap of Class 38: Discussion with Toni Torres, Director of Strategic Initiatives and Institutional Effectiveness + Interview project (10/30/2016)

We met at 2pm in 901 NAB. We were joined by Toni Torres, Director of Strategic Initiatives and Institutional Effectiveness. She presented some background on her studies at UC Berkeley and career including serving as Vice Provost at Drexel University and as an independent consultant. She spoke of the broader charge of her role at Cooper as creating a student-centric culture and climate, and her day-to-day of work like reporting data to federal agencies.

We discussed kinds of data Cooper generates and tracks including: information on entering freshmen; exit surveys and alumni surveys; and data from departments across Cooper such as rankings, retention, grades, giving, and employment rates. Toni spoke about better articulating how data is defined and working on more complete data collection, towards an integrated framework of institutional research and evaluation.

She introduced many terms such as a “student lifecycle approach” and “Theory of Change” model, as well as research methods like focus groups. She also shared some of the people whose writings and concepts have influenced her approach, including: Alexander Astin and Vincent Tinto on student success and belonging, Claude Steele on Stereotype threat, Carol Dweck on mindset, and Albert Bandura on agency. 

Toni was kind enough to send along a 3 page bibliography of research and publications she thinks may be useful to the class — see attached.

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If you’re interested in questions around “dataification”, I’d recommend listening to this panel discussion from ”New Topics in Social Computing: Data and Education”, which took place in 2015 at Eyebeam in Brooklyn, and was moderated by Joanne McNeil.


Hi all-

A few quick updates!

**Jake, Kiersten &I have moved the reservation of the Rose auditorium for the screening of Ivory Tower from the evening of Thurs Nov 30th to Friday DECEMBER 8th- partially this will allow a bit more time for outreach, work better with the schedules of engineers & still accommodate the director Andrew Rossi for a Q&A before the community reception/archive fundraiser in the lobby.**

Kiersten and I (and whoever else is interested/available, we've heard from a few!) are going to bunker down starting today 11/15/17 @6pm in room 604 of foundation to look at some older/recent documents and think through some ideas presented by the class and at the smaller discussion re: publication after class and we'd be happy to work alongside anyone! we'll particularly be trying to pin down what's worth synthesizing in these times, thinking about what might or might not be self-evident and working on a timeline and looking at what's publicly available. 

~9pm Archive club is gathering in the same room, so if you'v been interested but not made it out yet pop by 604!


Hey all,

Just a quick reminder that we have no class today, but the three pages of interview material are due next week. Please print a copy and bring it to class.

If you haven't been in touch with your interviewee yet, you should schedule some time to talk with them ASAP. More info, interviewee assignments, & contact info are in the attached PDFs.

The class wiki is also now up to date with some of our recent class meetings (35, 36, 37, 38), emails, and visitors (mitchell, richard, and toni). (And you're welcome to also contribute your own notes & documentation there.)

Have a good week!