Category: teaching
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Blogging and the Paperless Class.
I recently manned (womanned? personed?) a table at our school’s little tech fair; my subject was this post’s title. I am using blogs exclusively in my classes now–I’ve dropped Moodle, wikis or other platforms. For me the choice was not between blogs and paper– but that’s the choice for many of my colleagues, hence my…
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Why Teach ABout Social Media Using Social Media
Howard Rheingold speaks briefly and succinctly about his reason for doing this. I agree. Click To Play Another cool thing I found via Twitter!
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Teaching alternatives ways of searching
I was reading a draft of a paper for Bernard about democritizing web searches. I won’t go into the details of the paper–it’s not published yet. But, I do want to mention two search tools that I had never heard about before reading this paper, and I’ll give some short quotes from Bernhard on those:…
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Encouraging classroom participation
After trying a variety of different tools, I’ve come to some conclusions: IRC chatrooms work much better for discussion than web forums, even though they are synchronous and so are less convenient. Unless people know each other well and really care about talking to each other, exchanges on web forums always feels obligatory. Including a…
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New Media (or whatever we call it) at the MLA
From 27-30 December I made the traditional pilgrimage of English faculty everywhere to the annual conference of the Modern Language Association, since time immemorial held between Christmas and New year’s. This year, lucky for me, it was held in San Francisco. Bigger and … well, bigger than ever. Forty-eight concurrent sessions every day, from 8:30…
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Her Literacy Narrative
OK, I asked the students in my graduate seminar on teaching composition and literature to write a literacy narrative–the story of how they learned to read and write. Since they wanted an example, here is mine. I first wrote it as part of my dissertation back around 2001. This has been updated to reflect more…
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The effect of habitual contexts on tone
Sounds complicated, but all I actually mean is that for a long time I’ve used IRC, IM, and email to talk mainly with friends and colleagues rather than students, because my students generally have preferred to talk with me in class. But, this term I have to communicate with my first year students mostly through…
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And, we’re off!
The semester has started and students are starting to find their way to the Moodle site, where so far, they are managing to register and upload pictures of themselves, set up their profiles , etc. So that’s a relief. Now I just hope my grad students do as well. Meanwhile, we are scrambling through two…
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Where to Begin…
As I approach the first week of classes, the pace has picked up on campus quite noticeably in several ways. I’m getting about four emails a day from people trying to schedule meetings I am supposed to attend, my department mailbox has received a flurry of paper about various events, and students are already asking…
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"True North is in the Eyes of the Beholder"
Today I spent about 7 hours reading “writing proficiency (something) tests” –I always forget what the S stands for because everyone just says “WPST” all the time. Anyway, it’s exhausting to read and score (holistic scoring on a 6 point scale, 2 readers for each test) so many. I think I read about 60-70, about…