Proud of Group Projects

Coming to terms with Service-Learning, Group projects, community service and public rhetoric.

The Project

I end every semester by asking students in my basic public speaking course to do a group project. There are more details to the project, but the first line of my assignment sheet pretty much sums it up: "Using what you have learned in this class, you must create a persuasive, public service communication artifact." With these words I ask my students to spend the last four weeks of class out in the community, using the skills I have taught them in persuasive communication, to do something in the public good. Every semester I am shocked at all the awesome things that they do and I wanted to share it with you:

My MWF class:

• Group One joined up with the football team and worked with them to help elderly members of the community clean up their yards for summer. Certainly, just joining with them would have been good, but they put their skills they learned in class to work getting a spot on a local television show (view it here) and persuading their friends and family to help the team do this work.
• Group Two did a car wash and barbecue to raise money for Big Brothers and Big Sisters. They were able to use the skills they learned in class to ask for donations and raised $487 for that charity. The money will be used to help the little brothers and little sisters get school supplies in the fall.
• Group Three only planned to go out and persuade people to pledge to eat at least 10% of their food locally. That was an ambitious enough goal. They garnered a number of pledges, but as they said in their presentation: "This has snowballed into so much more than a simple group project for school. We now have a website going up and regular weekly meetings beginning soon."
• Group Four decided to do a local concert to raise money for the arts and music programs at the local school. They used the skills they learned in class to set up the venue and do all the publicity for the concert. As if that wasn't enough, they were worried the school board would not endorse the concert (which, in the end, it did). So, they did a second project, "just in case." In their second project they did an accessibility study for disabled students on campus. The information they garnered will go to our disability services coordinator and be used to help disabled students in future semesters.

The First Tuesday/Thursday class:

• Group One worked with the Gospel Mission, a non-profit that helps the poverty stricken and homeless in the area. First of all, they did interviews with the local homeless population to ascertain the extent to which the homeless were aware of what services were being offerred. Then they engaged in a poster campaign in areas where homeless frequent to raise awareness for unknown services. This certainly would have been enough for the class, but they took it a step further and actually helped the Gospel Mission distribute commodities to those in need.
• Group Two worked with a local group called "Firewise" to set up a large public meeting. Fire is the major natural disaster in our area, and the students helped the group to create a meeting designed to minimize risk. In preparation for the meeting, they not only did promotion with flyers, but actually went door-to-door in at-risk areas talking to local residents and using the skills they learned in class to persuade them to come to the firewise meeting. Their work made the front page of the Silver City Daily Press, our local paper.
• Group Three worked with the local pet clinics in town to create awareness for health needs of pets. They contacted the pet clinics and asked them what they could do to help raise awareness. They ended up doing four separate poster campaigns all around town. One was for general pet-health awareness, the other three focused on parvovirus, rabies and the need to spay and neuter, respectively.
• Group Four worked with the High Desert Humane Society to help in that groups annual rummage sale. The group went around to yard sales and used the tools they learned in class to persuade the people at the yard sale to donate whatever was left over to the Humane Society's rummage sale. One of the persuasive techniques they used was to make it easier on the persuadee by coming and picking up all the leftover items themselves.

Second Tuesday/Thursday class:

• Group One worked to help one of the families who lost everything in the recent fires that have plagued our area. The family this group helped lost their house and all their possessions except for the clothes they were wearing. The victims had no insurance and have no means of recovering their losses. They sponsored an easter egg hunt which was coupled with a bake sale. Their advertisement worked, because the easter egg hunt brought in 200 kids and made the front page of the Silver City Daily Press. From this event they were able to raise $186.95. That would have been great, but they actually were able to do more by persuading New Mexico Bank to match their fundraising. That brought the total to $373.90. This won't, of course, be enough to let the family rebuild their house, but they will be helped and they will know that people care!
• Group Two did a campaign to promote recycling on campus. Those of you who work at other campuses might be surprised at how difficult it is to recycle at Wester New Mexico University, where my students work. My students worked tirelessly, not only doing a poster campaign letting students know that it is possible to recycle here, but actually persuading the recycling agency to give them recycling bins that they were able to put in the residence halls and high traffic areas of the campus.
• Group Three did publicity for Our Paws Cause, a new thrift store opening in town to support the Humane Society. This publicity included using their public speaking skills on the radio and their skills of persuasion in the form of flyers. They did not stop there. The students did a free barbecue for the thrift stores opening. According to one student "The main persuasive tools we used were free food and puppies. If that doesn't bring people in, nothing will."
• Group Four worked with a local day care to teach them about the environment, primarily focusing on spring and the new life involved. They helped the students color eggs and taught them about life emerging from eggs. They brought in some recently hatched chickens and let the students interact with them and helped the students decorate pots in which the children planted seeds that they can see grow. They also sang several songs about spring and new life. It was such a treat for me as a professor to watch the video of these little kids singing, being led by my students.

The Night Class:

• Group One did a "walkathon" to raise awareness for fitness. The publicity for the walkathon included creation of a Facebook events page where the students could use their persuasive skills to convince people to come be a part of it. The students were able to tie their event to the "Tour De Gila," a nationally recognized bike race that takes place annually. The students were able to convince 20 people to take part in their walkathon.
• Group Two worked with the Cobre Consolidated school system in their backpacks program. This program allows students who need it to take home food in their backpacks. For students who depend on school lunches, this can literally be a lifesaver. My students actually stood outside our grocery stores and asked people to donate non-perishable food or money to the cause.
• Group Three worked to help some local girls attend "Bloom," a young woman and girls empowerment conference, which will be taking place in Orlando, FL. My students not only used their persuasive skills to create flyers to bring people in to a rummage sale for the program. They also were creative in convincing a local Mary Kay representative to donate some small make-up bags which my students raffled. On the whole, my students raised $610 to help these girls go. Some of my readers might be even more impressed that half of this group working for empowerment of girls and young women, are males.
• Group Four had two members on the football team. They decided that their work with the football team's fundraiser could dovetail nicely with this project. So, they did the part their coach assigned them, writing letters and cleaning up yards.

This is not to brag.

Well, it sort of is to brag, but not to brag about myself. Honestly, all I did, and all I really do every semester, is turn my students lose and give them permission to use their considerable skills to do some good. I am always awed by the work they do. I really don't do anything, but stand in awe and I just wanted to give my readers the chance to stand in awe too.

Goal meeting and Goal setting

Coming to terms with Goals, Goal-setting, Dreams, Objectives and Planning.

Where I learned Goal setting

I really learned goal setting in High School. One of the very best decisions I made in my life was to forgo the public school experience and attend a private Christian high-school which used an Accelerated Christian Education curriculum. A central facet of this curriculum is that students were allowed to "learn at their own pace," but never allowed to fail to push themselves. In order to accomplish these somewhat paradoxical goals, the school required us to engage in goal setting. This goal setting included long-term, academic quarter, weekly and daily goals.

Long term goals for a high-school student might be simply graduating in four years. For me it was graduating in four years with an adequate course background to be prepared for college. You have to start out with the long term goals and break that down into smaller goals. With this as my goal, I looked at college entrance requirements and figured out what would have to be accomplished to get into a school I wanted.

Following that, I could break up the requirements into the sixteen quarters of high-school and figure out how much work I would have to do in each quarter. I figured out right away what classes I would have to take in what order and how quickly I would have to move through them to accomplish my goals.

I broke those down into weekly goals and each day I set daily goals according to those weekly goals. Every day, when I would accomplish my goals, it would get me closer to my weekly, quarterly and long term goals. If I fell behind one day, that would mean I would need to dedicate extra time to that goal the next day.

Long term goals require dreams, AKA visions.

I have to admit that somewhere in college I lost track of having goals. My plans: to get through high-school and then college with certain GPA's in certain amounts of time were based in a dream I had, a vision for my life, an idea about who I was and what I wanted. My plan was to become a lawyer and stand up for Christian principles in the courts. While in college this dream suffered two major blows.

The first one was that the more I learned about law in my Political Science classes, which was my major, the less I liked it. Don't get me wrong, I loved that major. The political-philosophy classes were amazing and mind-transforming. The law classes, however, were awful. "Because the Legislature and Judiciary say so" was quite simply not an adequate answer for the questions that I had. So, I was working, suddenly, for something I realized I didn't want.

The second thing I learned was that "Christian principles" were more contested in the Christian community than I had thought. My Dad is a pastor and had been instrumental in my spiritual development. Suddenly I learned that not everybody, including those in our own movement, agreed with everyone else about what our principles are. I reached a point where I couldn't dismiss other opinions as being "non-Christian." This was coupled with my Dad being fired from a church into which he had invested vast amounts of time, treasure and talent. I was kind of disgusted with the "Christian" sub-culture at that time. So, how could I be a lawyer who stood up for Christian principles when I didn't agree with law and disagreed with other Christians about what Christian principles are?

As Jewel famously wrote, "Dreams last for so long, even after they're gone." The old dream's death throws got me through an entire major. I ended up with a double major in Political Science with a pre-law emphasis and Speech Communication.

It was in the second of these that I started to find my new direction, and in fact where I found my calling. That dream, that vision can be summed up in the title of my blog and webpage, The Rhetorical Quest. It is all about "coming to terms." My new vision is to be a person who seeks out and finds language in which I can articulate truth and reality and to share that language with others. It is a quest on which very old friends, like Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas help me to seek and where new possibilities are being explored by both myself and other questers every day.

The point is that while I was between visions, I floundered. My GPA dropped. Searching for something, for some vision, for some hope, for some plan I went places and did things that were not edifying. I was dying. Without a vision, the Bible tells us, people die (Prov. 29.18). I had no vision and was dying. Part of the reason I was dying is I had no reason to do anything. No vision meant no long term goals, which meant no short term goals, which meant no weekly goals, which meant no daily goals and every day was just spent existing.

The secret to goal setting.

Since that time, there have been setbacks. I can think of a couple major ones. When the Human Subjects Review Board lost my application in graduate school, that probably set me back by a year. When my contract was not renewed at Culver-Stockton College, that set me back, I'd say by two years. Even still, my dream is clear and from that I have created a set of long term and short term goals to bring it about. I am reaching my goals.

There are three secrets to goal setting. The first is don't bite off more than you can chew. Four years to get through high-school was reasonable. Two people with whom I graduated did it in three years. One or two years was not reasonable. My goal for graduate school was to get my PhD before I was 30, a goal I missed by 10 days. My current goal of getting tenure had to be adjusted. That goal was 40, but since I was derailed for a bit, I am now looking at tenure by the age of 42. That is reasonable. Any earlier than that, and I am looking for trouble.

The second is make sure your goals are YOUR goals, things you can mostly control. There are always things that happen beyond our control. I could get a million dollars in the mail tomorrow, and that might change some of my goals. I could also suddenly be struck with an awful disease that really messes me up for a while. Still, goals should be things that for the most part are under one's control. I cannot have a goal that my wife will lose weight or that my friend will come to Jesus. I can cook healthy food and share Jesus with my friend, however. Tenure here is based on a decision of a tenure committee, so it is kind of beyond my control, but I can compile over the next six or seven years evidence of service, research and teaching that would make it so that if they said no, they'd just be being mean.

Third, goals should push you. Going to work today is not one of my daily goals. I would do that anyway. What I accomplish today at work is part of my daily goals. I have goals for the next seven years and in order to accomplish them I will have to do more than just do my job and care for my family. I will have to cut out luxuries. I will have to teach summer classes and overloads. This is within my power to do. I also hope that I can get some corporate speaking engagements, but that is harder to guarantee. I will have to write like crazy. Every day I will need to get up and make a decision that will move me toward my daily goals.

Riding the Narwhal into Heaven

Coming to terms with: open source, hackers, Linux and Ubuntu.

Riding the Narwhal

In his book, The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman listed "uploading" as his fourth world-flattening force. This included collaborative projects such as wikis and open source software. One of the major open source projects is Linux, the open source operating system. Because Linux is open source, it comes in a variety of distributions. One of the most popular is Ubuntu, produced by Canonical.

Ubuntu has released their newest version, 11.04, codenamed Natty Narwhal. I did not immediately upgrade when it came out on Thursday. I waited for the weekend. The upgrade went smoothly. Here is a video about my initial, silly, reactions to the new operating system can be seen here.

S0, you can see, I am pretty excited about the new Unity desktop on Ubuntu's operating system. Admittedly, I get excited about some pretty unimportant things. I am very excited for the upcoming Thor and Captain America movies, for instance. This is different. I get excited about open source operating systems for a number of reasons, some of them are actually legitimate.

Hackers make life better.

One of the things that I love about Linux in general is that it is written by hackers for hackers. Ubuntu is a nice Linux derivative because it is made by hackers for everyone, including hackers. This allows hackers to do what they do best which is make life better.

I hear the term "hacker" associated with criminals all the time. Some hackers are criminals. So are many Caucasians, but it is correct to use neither of these terms synonymously with the term "criminals." There are many people who commit crimes using computers who are neither hackers nor Caucasians. There are also a majority of hackers and Caucasians whose acts are not criminal. However, there is something of a mindset of hackers that, I'll have to admit, lends itself to criminal action.

Bruce Scheier explained that a hacker is

"someone who thinks outside the box. It's someone who discards conventional wisdom, and does something else instead. It's someone who looks at the edge and wonders what's beyond. It's someone who sees a set of rules and wonders what happens if you don't follow them. A hacker is someone who experiments with the limitations of systems for intellectual curiosity" (citation)

I'd say that this is not always for intellectual curiosity. Sometimes necessity is the mother of hacking. Sometimes economics create a need that can't be filled without thinking outside the box. Sometimes there isn't time for conventional methods. Sometimes, once you've learned to do it, thinking outside someone else's box is just easier than trying to think inside one.

My dad is no computer expert, but from Scheier's point of view, he is a hacker. We drove a mini-van around for years with the engine block held in place using a block of wood he found. The legitimate fixes from mechanics never held. The block of wood did. I remember a number of winters where we ate a lot of fudge because he was trying to get a create a recipe that got the consistency of fudge he wanted on cheaper ingredients. My dad is a pastor and my wife is an amateur photographer. She has given him blanket permission to use her photographs for church. She has also put settings on her photosite that prevents direct downloading of her work. So, my Dad has told me that rather than call and ask each photo be sent, he takes a screen capture and edits. It's faster and more convenient. It's also not illegal because he has her permission.

Dad passed these values on to me. I believe in making what we have work and making things work cheap. My car's bumper is held on with bungee cords. I have a coolant leak sealed off with duck tape. And I've taken it a step further. My computers, not the ones for work, but my own computers, all run free open source software. Whenever I've gone the consumer route instead of the hacking route, I've regretted it. Dad taught me well.

So, when something doesn't work, a hacker makes it work. Really, this makes life better for everyone involved.

Hackers like to take things and figure out how to make them better for their own purposes which is a stumbling block for closed-source software producers. If they don't inhibit innovation, they cannot control distribution. See, if a person decides to make their code available, there is nothing stopping someone from just copying that code into their own computer and compiling it themselves, or putting it up on the internet where anyone can compile it. The only way for the public to make stuff better is to for distributors to make it free. So, for hackers to do what they do legally, there have to be open source options. These are options that a person can alter so they work better for themselves. They are also free to the public. Free does not intuitively seem like a good business model, but it does work sometimes.

How free works.

How does free software make money for its producers? The simple answer is that it doesn't. Most open source software is either a branch of a company that makes profits elsewhere, a private individual's offering that only gets that person a good reputation, a non-profit company or, in most cases, a combination of the three. Really, the idea that open source never produces profit is sort of not true.

Probably the most successful Open Source phenomena, the one that people always point to for open source success, is Firefox. Now, before I get comments arguing here, I am not advocating Firefox or even really endorsing Firefox. I am only using it as a case study because it seems to be an open source product everyone knows about.

Firefox is released under the Mozilla Public License, which is actually a somewhat restrictive license as far as open source licenses go. Still, it makes it so that one can view the code freely and alter it, at least for one's own use, freely. It is offered free to the public both compiled for installation in various operating systems and uncompiled, meaning just as code. Since it is free, it isn't something sold.

Mozilla is a non-profit organization, so if it made no profit that would be fine. However, the latest financial records, from 2009, show $104 million in revenue in 2009, according to their annual report. That is not Microsoft type of money, but it is a lot more than most of the non-profits I've worked with handle. Especially when one considers that this includes a loss of "$104,000 in investments from the Foundation's long-term portfolio as a result of economic conditions and investment values at the end of 2009."

The money came from all over the place. You can donate, it is a non-profit and the monies are tax deductible. A great deal of it came from grants. Most of it came from that little thing up in the right hand corner of your screen, if you are using Firefox. Google, Yahoo! and other companies payed Firefox to be included as automatic search choices. That is one means by which Open Source makes money.

Of course, Ubuntu also receives money from donations to its foundations, and in good years growth from its that foundation's investments. It also gets revenue from another source, customer support.

I've never used it. There is awesome support available from the Ubuntu community through their forums. Often, I've had to wait for a few days to get an answer, however.

Canonical, however, offers the services of paid hackers to help a person make things work perfectly for them. They do this without you having to wait. You pay for this service, Canonical makes money. Once again, not Microsoft level of money, but still, lots and lots of money.

The result is that the world is flattened and everyone benefits, except Apple and Microsoft.

I hope my readers know that saying I am "riding the Narwhal into Heaven" is hyperbole. Writing about open source computers brings out the techno-utopian in me. Yet, I know that Jesus said the poor will always be with us (Mat. 26:11). Yet I really think that through open source a number of people can move up.

See, hackers make things work and they make them work cheap. A block of wood in the engine, the fact that my bumper is held on by bungie cords, these are cheap. Open source can make it possible for the poorest people to have access to computer tools just like the rich. That means the poor can bring their blogs (like this one), their ideas and their products to market. It doesn't make everyone rich, but now everyone can compete.

The big software producers like Microsoft and Apple have fought pure open source. They have done so in courts, by giving cheap licenses to schools and universities so that students get addicted to consumer products and by simply failing to acknowledge their existence. I have noticed, however, that the companies realized that there are advantages to innovation of having open source products. The conundrum has resulted in even these companies releasing a few products open source.

Excitement is not so silly.

So, you see, my excitement over the newest innovation in Ubuntu is not so silly. Every open source innovation is a move in the right direction. It is a move to something better. It is a move that makes me excited.

The Rhetorical Quest: A new blog.

Why a new blog?

After years of keeping my blog on Myspace, I am excited to be bringing my readers to this new, hopefully more accessible, location. Myspace just wasn't adequate for my needs anymore and continual changes in the format and limitations put in place increasingly made it meet my needs less and less. I posted the reasons I was considering that move on that blog if you want to read it.

For those of you who faithfully read my blogs on Myspace, I want to give you a hearty thank-you. I believe that there are one or two of you who actually kept your Myspace accounts primarily to make my blog more accessible to you. I have the deepest respect for Myspace and hope that you can find other reasons to continue to interact with them. Their constraints and my blog, however, have finally had to part ways. I will continue to have an account there primarily because it is still the best social network for music and entertainment.

Many of the reasons for choosing to move my blog here were technical and probably do interest some of my more technical savvy readers. Those reader will notice in my format below the appearance of a number of options that are at best difficult and increasingly impossible in
Myspace. Even less technophilic among you will be excited to see a number of new options:

Open comments: You do not have to be a member of anything to comment on my blog. The comment section below creates the possibility of commenting leaving as much information as you want. You can even comment anonymously. Easy syndication: This blog comes with an atom or rss feed that can easily be entered into your reader or aggregator. If you don't have a reader, it is high time you got one. Still, if you really don't want one, you can even subscribe to the blog by email. Open licensing of material: You can quote from my blog, email it to a friend, copy it, link to it, put it together in a bound book and put it on your shelf. Furthermore you can do it all legally. The specific license to use my content can be found by clicking here. There are restrictions, but not many.

Connections to more relevant content: From this page you will always be able to connect to my personal website, full of information designed to further you on your rhetorical quest. There are also going to be links to other sites. Few ads: Right now, there are very few. In fact, there are none. I will continue to have none for a long time. Maybe I will always have none. If I ever do have ads, tools will be in place to make sure that the advertisements are relevant to the page. Easy readability: I am not referring to language choice here. My history of rhetoric teacher once told me that if a person is not writing above his or her level, he or she is writing below it. There won't be a bunch of weird background pictures messing up the text. It should be clear and readable.

What can I expect from this blog?

For those of you who were familiar with my blog on Myspace, it should be more of the same, just in a better format. The subtitle of the blog; "a blog about coming to terms" might be the best way to express what is going on here. It is, to a large extent, a blog about living in the world and trying to make sense of it. My expertise in rhetorical theory and criticism, my faith, my experience as a professional educator and my philosophical mindset all will play a role in my writing, but the blog will not be about any of these things.

I hope that this blog will be a true weblog: a description of my journey that will help me map my progress. The blog will be about a journey, a quest, a search not only to find and know truth more, but to put it into words that we can share with others. It is a quest which has consumed me for a long time. It is a quest that I know many of you have been following as well. Whether you intend to join or guide me on this quest with your comments and emails, or if you merely interested in how the quest is going for me, I want to thank you in advance for
reading.

Now I will continue my journey . . .