Students Present Blog-Projects in Class (Part I)

8:30-10:00. Four groups of students presented final versions of their blog-projects in class today. Then the students voted for the best blog project. So here I am announcing the winner:

Congratulations, bloggers Caroline and Marie!
Your blog
German and American Election Coverage/How the Foreign Media Reports on Elections got most of the votes!

Here is what the authors of the blog write about themselves and their blog-project:

We are two students in the "Did Angie Learn From Obama" Seminar at TU Dortmund and this, our blog project, features the media coverage of both the American 2008 Presidential Election and the German 2009 Bundestag elections. Marie will discuss and analyize the American Media coverage of the German elections and Caroline will do the same for the German media coverage of the American Presidential race.

Marie digged the web for the American news articles covering the German Bundestag elections (2009), while Caroline consulted the mainstream German news outlets covering the U.S. Presidential elections (2008). The blog is successful in it’s content and presentation. Free of hype-filled or flashy stuff, the blog is informative and interesting due to a careful selection of pictures and videos enhancing the chunks of texts.

The blog has a community-building potential. The audience which might benefit from reading this particular blog is, most apparently, the American and German student body; and anyone else searching for information about the most recent American and German elections in English.

Even if it is doomed to get frozen out there, in the large blogosphere---it will not lose its worth. But I sincerely hope this blog will not be abandoned. I hope Marie and Caroline will keep in touch and enrich the blog!

Once again, congratulations on successful completion of the course!

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Now let me introduce German and American 3rd Party Policies. This blog-project was voted the second best today. In terms of design and visualisations, it is notoriously ascetic. No pictures, no videos---focus on the issues, instead.

Briefly about the ThirdPartyBlogger:

Two students. One male. One female. One American. One German. Both interested in politics. There you go.

The American and German ThirdPartyBloggers selected three American and three German minor parties for their analysis. Why would anyone care about the minor parties in the U.S. and Germany?

American ThirdPartyBlogger writes:

In this blog I will be discussing three Political Parties of the United States of America. However they will be the Constitution Party, the Communist Party and the Pacifist Party. Such third parties are often ignored by the mainstream media and rely on the internet to get their views out to the public.

In the light of the recent events, Americans and the American news media became more interested in the third parties ("Time for a Third Party" by Douglas E. Schoen of Politico). In Germany, the voters dissatisfied with the dominant parties, started paying more attention to the minor parties. For example, in 2009, the Left and the Greens made larger gains than ever and got safely into the Bundestag. More and more third parties have sprung up in the U.S. and Germany recently. The third American and German parties selected for this particular blog-project have a rather long history, though.

The German ThirdPartyBlogger writes:

In this blog I would like to focus on three of the so called German ''3rd parties''. Throughout the next weeks I will present their policies regarding immigration, education, taxation etc. Today I would like to start with a brief introduction of the parties, which belong to very different political camps:
1. Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany), NPD (...)
2. Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (German Communist Party), DKP (...)
3. Partei Bibeltreuer Christen (Party of Bible-Abiding Christians), PBC

The German and American 3rd Party Policies blog will definately meet the needs of a content-oriented reader. This blog is unique due to the research work done. So far, it is the only one of its kind in terms of the content, and, I hope, the blog will not be abandoned.

My congratulations, ThirdPartyBloggers, with a successful completion of the blog-project!

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Big thanks to the BP eco-blog and Religion during the elections 2008 and 2009 blog, which I would describe as a socio-political.

I am looking forward to the next class, which will take place next Saturday at 9 a.m. (room 0.406, Amerikanistik, Kulturwissenschaften, TU Dortmund).

My Response to the 2010 Uprising in Kyrgyzstan: Drawing Our Trauma

(click on the picture to enlarge)
One declined, another accepted.

DECLINED. May 28th, 2010, I received the letter, which notified me:

dear sveta,

i just needed to let you know that we could not put up your pictures in the exhibit. i am really really sorry - it was a matter of framing them (our frames did not fit the measures and we certainly did not want to cut anything apart to make it fit). also, the other stuff we put up was from faculties or departments (not from indidivuals who work in faculties), so the concept was a little different than we originally expected. now there is a poster from the american studies department in the u, and the
ruhrgebiet poem by allen ginsberg.

(...)

again, i am really really sorry. and i hope you will come and see the exhibition sometime.

have a good weekend

ACCEPTED. June 14th, 2010, I received the letter, which notified me:

Hallo allerseits,

Anbei der Masterplan für die Konferenz, sowie eine pdf des Konferenztickets, falls ihr kein Studententicket habt.

In diesem Sinne, teu teu teu, und bis Mittwoch!

(...)

P.S.: Stefan, haben wir für Svetlana Makeyeva und Anne Kellermann ein Namenschildchen (Helfer)?
P.P.S.: Falls noch jemand morgen um 10 Zeit hat: wir packen die Konferenztaschen in
der Transferstelle...

Yes, I was invited to the Culture Entrepreneurship Forum to help with the stuff like distributing drinks and taking care of other small things. But then Angela Märtin, project coordinator of kultur.unternehmen.dortmund, asked me whether I wanted to take part in the Dortmund Creative Entrepreneurs Fair and exhibit my drawings in one of the five fascinating conference locations: DEPOT at Immermannstraße 29. DEPOT has always been one of my most favourite locations in Dortmund. Just take a look at this fascinating space, where contemporary local artists exhibit their intellectual and artistic works.

I exhibited eight graphic works from my family archive: these pictures were drawn for my pleasure, and two of the pictures were dedicated to my beloved. Hence, they were not for sale, but preserved for our home and occasional exhibitions like the one that took place in Katholische Hochschulgemeinde in the Ostenbergstr. 10 (Scroll down to see the poster of Russischer Abend am 27. April 2010 ab 19 Uhr in der KHG)

One of my favourite pictures - "Bad News from Kyrgyzstan" - might appear as the most disturbing and darkest in this collection. It is my personal response to what has become known as the 2010 Kyrgyzstani uprising (April 3 - 15, 2010).

During the uprising, I was in Dortmund. The call from parents. The bad news from Kyrgyzstan. I never felt that insecure. In the drawing, you can see me in a Kyrgyz dress, which is stylized... almost unrecognizable as Kyrgyz, but still appearing as oriental. With this, I wanted to signify that my stay in Europe changed me, but not completely. I hold a cell phone (in Germany, they call it 'handy'). The cell phone turns into a tool of torture. The solar disk -the Kyrgyz 'tunduk', an upper part of a Kyrgyz home called 'yurta'- functions as a kind of a razor throwing star. It destroys my ear. My vision gets blurred. On my shoulder, there is a naked human, swirled into a tumour. I got my worst dermatitis rash I ever had in my life the next day. I scrabbed the white matter coming out of the multiple abscesses with a spoon... It was that bad. This picture is pain. It is a drawing of trauma I try to overcome. In light of the recent pogroms and killings in Osh and Jalal Abad (please, watch the video below), I have very little hope things will get better for me and my family in Kyrgyzstan.



I am very grateful to those who support me and my country. Some people do it unintentionally, like Angela Märtin, who invited me to exhibit my graphic drawings. I had a chance to exhibit this particular one last week. People were coming to me and talking about it, and what they heard from the local news stations about the recent tragic events in Kyrgyzstan. Talking about trauma is the best way to cope with it.

------
P.S.: June 23rd, 2010. I received a letter, which notified me:

Sehr geehrte Frau Makeyeva,
Vielen Dank für Ihre Spende.
Ihre Hilfe kommt an!

Reprinted from UNHCR Emergency website: URGENT HELP NEEDED TO SAVE LIVES IN KYRGYZSTAN & UZBEKISTAN

People forced to leave their homes by the latest violence in Kyrgyzstan are in dire need of assistance. Please donate now and help UNHCR provide them with protection, shelter and aid.
You can make a difference.

My name is Svetlana Makeyeva. I am the author of this blog. I know that even 5 Euros can make a difference to my fellow Kyrgyzstani and Uzbekistani people. Please, visit the UN Refugee Agency website You can donate with the EC Karte, if you are located in Germany. The website is very easy to handle.

The SuperDozent/in: What Does S/He Look Like? S/he Looks Like This: S-D

For a beginning course instructor like me, there are a good many things to learn and improve. No, it is not enough to observe professors (especially at Fach parties :)) in order to educate your "instructorous" Self! Though, it is a quite useful practice in addition to reading books about teaching. There is a number of course instructors who inspire me to persuit my dream: I dream of becoming a Professor working with and for students. Such professors as Doctor Aron Brudny, Doctor John Couper, Prof. Robert Jewett, Prof. Martina Pfeiler, Mr. Valeri Hardin and a future professor Eriko Ogihara.

Today, I have read several anonymous course evaluation sheets I discovered in my mail-box. The general impression is: overall, the students who completed the course were satisfied! Of course, there were things I should have done better. For example, many students thought this course will be predominantly about the 2008 presidential elections in the U.S., but it was not the case. I have spent more sessions on the history of American politicosphere, than initially planned. I do have an explanation for that, yet I give credits to those students who shared these impressions. This only means one thing to me: if I do not want to be enslaved by my ascetic and non-explanatory course description published in the student course book, and if I want to avoid any confusions --- the course description should be as clear and explanatory as possible.

I have received very positive responses about the learning atmosphere in class, my abilities to trigger interest about the topics I teach, use of new media and EWS, the diversity of the tasks performed in class, the accessibility for a conversation and questions and the selection and quality of the reading materials. I am very happy that the students appreciated my efforts. Yet the very same reasons (in addition to something else... either my personality traits or the marsh-coloured jeans) made four of my students leave. Over-exposure to The Web can be exhausting and very intimidating to some students. In addition, I am a kind of a person who persuades other people, including students, to produce something on The Web, not just consume the digitalized knowledge. This is my philosophy of teaching: use, produce and share on The Web... This is not what every person might appreciate. It is enourmous stress to produce something special (like this or this). Consequently, here is my grading policy: every student who constructively manages the stress during a deep cogitative pause, then survives convulsions of creativity and produces something intellectual and special, deserves a good grade. (In addition, the student should pass the test.) This student, afterwards, is the most grateful one.

After reading the evaluation sheets, specially developed for Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, I spent this morning on re-evaluating my strategies and approaches to teaching and learning.

I have spent more than an hour on translating the evaluation sheet, the copies of which are supposed to be distributed by the American and British Studies instructors. I do not imply I have waisted my time on translating the "Evaluationsbogen zum Seminar"; this was a great practice of my German! But I wonder how come there is no English version of the evaluation sheet for the course instructors, who speak no or poor German? We also have Erasmus students taking courses from Anglistik und Amerikanistik, who hardly speak any German! That's right, they speak English. And in addition to the course evaluation sheet in German, there should be a course evaluation sheet in English. Students should be able to understand the questions of the evaluation sheet in order to tick the answers they find appropriate. English speaking instructors should be able to read and understand what the student ticked about his/her course in the evaluation sheet. I think, I am talking about obvious things here.

Well, back to the content of the evaluation sheet and MY BIG Moment of Zen. Based on the questions and answers of the evaluation sheet composed for and about instructors dwelling in the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik in Technische Universität, Dortmund, I have compiled a list of the characteristics of the local Super-Course Instructor, or SuperDozent:

1. The Super-course instructor explains everything clear and comprehensible.
2. SuperDozent/in (because the German version is shorter) summarises main historical events appropriately.
3. S-D (this is short for SuperDozent/in, who looks happy because he or she is... einfach super!) encourages independent research by providing guidance, if necessary.
4. S-D effectively allocates time.
5. S-D encourages students to approach ideas critically.
6. S-D encourages students to share their own ideas, knowledge and experiences.
7. S-D ???how can one translate that???
8. S-D is open for questions.
9. S-D is also available off-hour.
10. S-D's course plan has clear structure and comprehensible goals and objectives.
11. S-D's course requirements are easy to understand.
12. S-D delivers course material in such a way that by the end of the course the students are fit for tests and exams.
13. Despite the fact that the language of instruction is foreign (English!), the students taking this course are able to easily follow the S-D in class.
14. S-D's course should be engaging.
15. S-D uses different teaching methods in order to reach all students effectively.
16. S-D should be able to raise and satisfy the student's expectations.
17. S-D's course content corresponds to the course description available in the TU, DO course overview.
18. S-D implements audio visual teaching methods in his/her course.
19. S-D's audio visual materials are of a high quality.
20. S-D creates a healthy positive learning atmosphere in class.

So there you are 20 tips on becoming a Superdozent/in within the walls of the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik in Technische Universität, Dortmund. I suppose, that's how S-D looks like after students' evaluations: S-DDDDD!!!