#the program i’m aiming for is where i’m at for undergrad and it’s fully funded

[theresa-of-liechtenstein]

jus rambling lmao ignore me but like just lingering on the graduate division website for my program and half of my brain is like i don’t know should i even bother going for a phd i’m not the brightest person i’m kind of slow and i feel like i’m always working twice as hard to get worse scores than other people and my grades aren’t best of the best i’m a straight 3.5/3.6 gpa and i’m not part of any clubs or anything i just play my little violin on tuesdays and thursdays and spend two hours a week being insane about physics in front of other undergrads and i’m not allowed to be a transmission electron microscope authorized user bc i’m baby i’m honestly just kind of a cringefail loser who likes materials science too much and gets butthurt when people inevitably drop me because i talk about school too much and everyone hates school or whatever. and then i remember i’m an honors student and literally working in a lab and due to write a paper and present at a symposium next year and half my tuition is paid by a state merit scholarship so even though i might be kind of stupid in the classroom sometimes, overall people did see something in me in 2020 and i haven’t been kicked out yet so people must still be seeing something in me. but idk.

[sadafs]

hi! i’ve seen you mention a few times that you're a linguist? i’m thinking about pursuing a career as a speech therapist or sociolinguist or such, and i was wondering if you'd be willing to share any quick advice or what-I-wish-I'd-known or anything along those lines? (of course, if it’s not too much of a bother!)

hey yeah! im currently studying for a ling BA. i’m likely going a computational route so stuff like natural language processing, machine learning, AI etc but there are a lot of other paths. 

for sociolinguists, the traditional path is undergrad > phd > postdoc position > try to get tenure-track. its really difficult, and phd programs vary in acceptance rates based on who is researching what at that particular moment in a research program. often, you can apply to many programs one year and get in nowhere, and apply to the same programs a year later and get into at least a few. i’m unsure how much you know about the grad student struggle, but for general advice, don’t do programs that aren’t fully funded (you are meant to be paid to be part of the program). research the faculty in the grad dept and base where you apply off of how overlapping your interests are with the existing people there. labs and program heads want people who are passionate not only about their own research but their research as well. 

there’s also something to be said for how hard it is to get an academic position these days, and how productive you need to be from a research publishing perspective to be taken seriously and be considered a desirable hire. 

but once you acquire a postdoc position, you get a lot of freedom wrt what you research in your free time which is always the largest draw of something like an academic position. with sociolinguistics, however, my main interest is how to apply research towards the public good; this is in part why i’m doing computation stuff now, and *intend* to do my socioling phd later once i have savings and a better idea of where sociolinguistics is going. it’s frustrating that i can read the same articles and books talking about linguistic discrimination but never hear about who else is reading that research besides linguists. 

in terms of setting yourself up well (and again, i dont know at which part of the process you’re at) i’d recommend trying to do sociolinguistic research with a professor at your own university during undergrad, and then applying to share your research at conferences and mini symposiums and all that. also, look at the kind of research that big socioling conferences like NWAV are including, as it can reveal trends in what people want to study right now, which is likely gonna help with applications. 

speech pathology is quite a different beast, although it has shared points of study with socioling like phonetics/phonology. most sociophonetic research is acoustically centered, whereas most speech pathology research/work concerns articulatory gestures. i know a lot less about speech pathology, other than that there is a really good program for that at emerson college. its a little more straighforward of a path (afaik) just because speech pathology programs aim for a technical training and there’s a traditional type of clientele- like, it’s a trade, whereas sociolinguistics is usually an open-ended research/professorial gig in an academic economy that has very few spots. i’d recommend talking to people you know who are speech pathologists about this. 

which overall is good advice- reach out to professors (not only at your university) with questions through email if you can, reach out to alumni from your school with your degree through linkedin to ask how they got to the position they’re at now, be it socioling or speech pathology. i’m still only graduating this semester and these are both fields i’m not pursuing at present so i know like, 2 things. hope this was helpful! and feel free to ask more qs if you want if you wanna message me directly 

[theatredirectors]

Raz Golden

Hometown?

Queens, New York.

Where are you now?

I currently live in Manhattan (but I spent a large chunk of my earlier career in Pittsburgh post-undergrad).

What's your current project?

I just finished directing a reading of a section of Lectures by Nazareth Hassan for the Play X Play monthly reading series here in NYC. It was one section of a choral piece the playwright plans on expanding into a full work examining the intersections of various themes like failure and joy with an ontology of Blackness. I’m always excited to get to interact with pieces in their infancy and this especially true for this work.

I am also working as an assistant director on Long Lost, a play by Donald Margulies at Manhattan Theatre Club directed by Daniel Sullivan.

Why and how did you get into theatre?

My first memory of live theatre was in the fifth grade. An educational production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream visited my school. They performed in what must have been the cafeteria of my school and the major gesture of the set was multiple green umbrellas that acted as modular set pieces. That transformed me into a lifelong audience member. I didn’t start participating in theatre until years later as a way to make friends in a new school. I observed the community that the theatre kids had and really wanted to be a part of that in some way. I got cast as Agwe in Once on This Island Jr. and have been involved in theatre in one way or another ever since.

The reason I became a director feels a little more opaque for me to articulate even though it’s a relatively more recent personal discovery. The short story though, is that I was in college and I fell in love with every part of the production process. I discovered new plays. And I wanted to see those plays on stage in the way I saw them in my head as I read them. That growing desire folded in naturally with beginning to understand the role of a director in a process and that;’s where I found that my talents and my passion lay.

What is your directing dream project?

My dream project changes constantly, but currently, I’m itching to tackle some ‘big’ classical pieces. I’d love to work on a piece that allows me to craft it with upwards of 50 physical presences on stage. In that vein, I think a Marlowe trilogy would be really awesome to tackle i.e.  Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine, and Edward II all in a conversation with each other.

What kind of theatre excites you?

Content wise I am all about theatre that aims to wrestle clashing narratives/topics/themes in one space. If a piece is set in more than one country, timeline, planet, or dimension then I’m interested. If it’s examining how people define themselves within a collective, whether they are a part of the majority or one of the ‘other,’ then I’m in. And I’m also in if a play explores difficult or complex topics in new and surprising ways, whether that be race, sexuality, mental illness, astrophysics or the Securities and Exchange Commission.

If we’re talking form, I always want to take advantage of what theatre does most successfully as a medium. I like theatre that brings art and audience together in one singular location and at one singular time, creating an event. I gravitate towards theatricality and playwrights that stretch the form through structure and language temporally and spatially. I also readily embrace pastiche and collage and love work that steals from a hundred different sources, with an understanding that a theatrical piece can be the synthesis of a multiplicity of ideas and forms.

What do you want to change about theatre today?

I think, or at least, I hope it’s understood that a) theatre today is often too expensive and b) the closer you get to Broadway the more white, cis, male and “safe” the work that gets made is and that needs to be changed. I’m hopeful, though, because I’ve been both beneficiary and witness of initiatives that are meant to change that fact. That being said, ideally, the fruits of those initiatives are evident all over the industry in 10 years, rather than 50.

What I’d love to see more of is emphasis, infrastructure, and resources put into theatre journalism and arts journalism as a whole. When publications are implementing austerity measures, it seems as if the arts sections are the first to get axed. I think journalism and criticism are vital in connecting our arts to our audiences and as chroniclers of the art form. Reading articles or watching videos about productions from the past was instrumental to my theatre education and it would be a shame for the industry if we let it fall by the wayside.

What is your opinion on getting a directing MFA?

Of course, it’s always a personal and highly specific decision to get an MFA because we’re lucky enough to have a career where a terminal degree is not required to be successful in the field. And in terms of artistic growth, we can expand our artistry in and outside of institutions.  But I do think, that in terms of the director as a business, an MFA has become increasingly more and more important.

The theatrical landscape has fundamentally changed in the past 50 or 60 years both in terms of how the arts are funded and the qualifications a director needs to be trusted professionally. Many of the directing luminaries of today don’t have MFAs because the programs didn’t exist back then but now I think they definitely play a role in lending legitimacy to one’s identity as an artist from a business perspective. Not to mention those same luminaries are running these programs. So many directors of the past made their names through starting their own companies and self-producing. And while I don’t claim that it was cheap back then, that process as an economic model is very different today and shuts out potential directors who don’t have access to the necessary resources.

As an aside, while the advent of online crowdfunding is incredible and we are lucky these days to have access to it, it doesn’t fully solve the problem of how artists who don’t already have an affluent resource network can raise money for their productions. Much of the money donated in these campaigns come from people who already had access to potential donors. The websites are better at facilitating the exchange between artists and their network rather than bringing in new potential donors into their existing network.

All that being said, getting an MFA is one of the few stable ways to grow one’s artistry, network, and resume over a continuous period of time. And if you get accepted into a program that is dedicated to making sure it’s graduates aren’t burdened with massive amounts of debt, that’s a plus. So I don’t believe getting an MFA is a necessary step, but I think it’s more necessary and reasonable in this day and age. It’s a likely step for me sometime soon, at least.  I don’t have any scientific evidence to back that up but it’s just a hunch.  

Who are your theatrical heroes?

In the words of Issa Rae, “I’m rooting for everybody black.” I have really been shaped by the Black directors and playwrights that I have either met, seen, worked with, or read about that paved the way for me to be where I am and are continually expanding the definition of what it means to be black on or off the stage. I’m thinking, Suzan Lori Parks, Saheem Ali, Ruben Santiago Hudson, Regina Taylor, Diane MacIntyre, Robert O’Hara, Whitney White, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, August Wilson to name just a very few.

Any advice for directors just starting out?

If you live in or near an area with a strong theatre community cultivate yourself there before you decide to move to NYC. It’s the center of the industry but not the be all, end all. I know I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t developed myself as a director in Pittsburgh.

Network. Network. Network. Not just with actors, but playwrights and other directors who are around the same stages of their career as you. I have 5 or 6 director friends like that and their advice and companionship are indispensable.

Assistant direct a couple of times. But make sure that you’re creating your own work during that time. Partly because it’s so valuable taking the lessons you get from someone with more experience and directly applying it to your rehearsal process and partly because you can invite those directors to see your stuff. Also, if you have a choice, assist younger directors. It can be very cool to assist men and women who are the legends you’ve read about since you started studying theater, but the directors who are only 10 or 15 years removed from you often have super practical advice for building a theatre career in the twenty-first century.

Plugs!

Nothing that I can talk about specifically right now, but be sure to visit my website, razgolden.com to see what I’m up to in the coming months.

[digitalcontext1]

Research for Essay

In this part of my blog I will be looking into VLE systems: 

Any Web site is a built information space. In many cases though, this information space is just spaghetti of HTML files. We refer to the ‘architecture’ of information instead of ‘structure’ or ‘organisation’ of information in order to emphasise the fact that the structure results from analysing the functional requirements of the environment. 

For learning environments, the functional requirements are numerous and have not been yet systematically studied. Here are a few examples: 

• Using information in educational interactions. For answering simple questions such as “Give me an example of...” or “Give me an argument against...”, information must be stored in tables (databases producing dynamically Web pages) or in HTML files enriched with meta-information1 . 

• Multi-authoring. The information stored in a virtual learning environment is produced by many authors: several teachers, students, domain experts, ... 

Who is authoring what must be explicitly stored in the system for developing mechanisms for sharing objects (e.g. «locking» an object when somebody is editing it) and workflow techniques (e.g. the document produced by X must be sent for approval to Y and Z before to be displayed). 

• Indicating information source. Web information without explicit information regarding to (the authority of) its author will soon have no more value 

• Maintaining information. When Web sites grow, if information has not been carefully structured, maintenance becomes very heavy: maintaining links, removing obsolete information, ... The cost of maintaining a Web site may become higher that the costs of creating the site! And despite this, it is rarely included in the budget. 

• Following technical evolution. The effort devoted to developing Web sites has to survive the current technology. Structuring information and adding meta information increases the potential of reusability of information. 

• Sharing information with the world. Education would benefit from richer possibilities to share information outside the environment. There are currently efforts to establish worldwide accepted ‘resource description formats’2 and to specialise them for educational purposes3

Key words: Innovation Education, Design and Technology, Information and computer technology, research, InnoEd, National Curriculum, Virtual learning environment, Creativity, practical use of knowledge, Internet, inventions, design.

Definition 1:

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) may not be the most innovative educational technology to be found in use today, but they are one of the most pervasive, with 86% of respondents from United Kingdom Higher Education (HE) institutions reporting the presence of a VLE in their institution (2003). 

This lack of innovation is perhaps why many researchers and educational technologists hold them in something resembling disdain. 

There are a number of charges often levelled at the more popular VLEs, and particularly commercial ones, which can be summarised as: 

• They are content focused; 

• They have no strong pedagogy; 

• They are based around a teacher-classroom model; 

• They combine a number of average tools, but not the best ones; 

• They do not feature a particular tool; 

• They operate on a lowest common denominator approach; 

• They do not meet the needs of different subject areas; 

• It is difficult to exchange content between them, despite claims to interoperability.

http://lams2006.lamsfoundation.org/pdfs/Weller_Lams06.pdf

Facts and data about VLE

A virtual reality learning environment (VRLE) is defined as one in which the participant (e.g. student) actively engages with what is going on rather than being a passive recipient.

It also encourages communication between students and their teacher in order to find solutions to a range of problems.

This can take the form of a desktop set up but equally, can involve the student wearing virtual reality glasses or some other form of head mounted display (HMD) and an input device. This enables them to interact with events in that environment.

Another option is the use of avatars: an avatar is a 3D representation of a human being. This virtual being is created by a student who then uses he/she/it to explore a virtual environment. Their avatar can be customised to their requirements and have its own personality and modus operandi.

Definition 2: 

Following the emergence of the Internet in the early 1990s, many new tools and products have been developed to fully exploit its benefits. Since the mid- 1990s the education community has witnessed the appearance of software products labelled Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) that aim to support learning and teaching activities across the Internet. 

Many educators want to take advantage of the benefits offered by the Internet to support their teaching activities. However, creating Internet resources that are stimulating, appealing, easy to use and educationally sound is time consuming and requires considerable expertise.

 VLEs allow educators to create resources quickly and without the need to develop technical skills. 

Typically web-based, VLEs provide an integrated set of Internet tools, which enable easy upload of materials and offer a consistent look and feel that can be customised by the user. Popular commercial VLEs currently being used in UK HE include Blackboard and WebCT. 

Managed Learning Environments (MLEs) incorporate the elements of VLEs but also include and interact with the whole range of information systems e.g. student record systems, finance etc that contribute directly or indirectly to learning and teaching management. 

A virtual learning environment (VLE) is “a set of teaching and learning tools designed to enhance a student’s learning experience by including computers and the Internet in the learning process (Whatis.teactarget.com, 2013). 

Hence, a VLE package usually includes sections of curriculum (a usual curriculum broken down into smaller sections that could be easily assigned and assessed), student tracking, on-line support for both teachers and learners,and Internet links among its many functions.

Virtual learning environment users are assigned either a teacher or student ID. 

The teacher gets to see what actions the student takes, and the teacher has additional rights to create or modify content and track student performance.

There are a number of commercial virtual learning environment software packages available including: Blackboard, WebCT, Lotus Learning Space and COSE. Unlike the above mentioned, the VLEs which are the focus of this research study (Edmodo and Moodle) are available at no cost.

VLE: 

Forecasts

More students in the traditional age bracket of college (18-22) will be taking online courses/programs than their non-traditional age counterparts (25 and above) by 2020 – as a whole

More undergrad students at community colleges and small colleges will be taking online courses than their traditional classroom counterparts by 2017 if not sooner

Online degree programs will see an enrollment increase in the range of 20-25% by 2013, I’m talking about yearly average, again as a whole

7.5-7.8 million students taking at least one online class by early 2013

Government funding for online learning in education to increase by 15-20% by 2014 – if not sooner, the global economy plays heavily into this

Increase in costs for some online programs – equal rather then lower to their traditional B&M classroom counterparts – at private universities

More states offering a universal “online school” or as some states refer to “virtual schools” 

Pros and Cons of VLEs

Pros:

✔ Can offer a range of solutions and options depending on product ✔ Can be used for blended learning and staff development or courses where anytime anywhere access is an advantage ✔ A safe secure place that is specially for educational activity ✔ Pupils may not like interacting in front of the whole class ✔ Can be a quick and easy source of reference, for example, for a class to use for a specific assignment ✔ Staff and pupils can keep academic and personal lives separate ✔ Technical support is available ✔ Moodle is free and open source in Kenya, Chile and the UK

Cons:

✖ Encouraging use can be tough.  Usability, interaction and design may not feel as attractive to users so they may not use it; students and staff may feel it’s forced upon them rather than part of their world ✖ There may be other opportunities to teach and learn using the web that might be lost ✖ Pupils may filter their interaction on the VLE because they feel it will be assessed ✖ Some VLE platforms develop slowly compared to the social web ✖ A proprietary solution may require long-term investment and commitment ✖ It will take time to train staff and develop a culture of use