Blogging Pedagogy

Thanks to a tip from someone over at the Blogora, I've started testing out a new tool called Annotate (check out their website for a 30 day trial). Annotate is an add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 (a version for Word 2003 is forthcoming) that gives you many more options for commenting on student work. There are a lot of stock comments for things like comma splices or transitions.

Via Earth Wide Moth, here's a neat, open-source animation tool called Pencil. For those teaching new media, this tool might provide an interesting way to provide students with another mode in which to write.

Every once in a while, I'll read a newspaper article that says "According to Wikipedia..." I'm always struck by the ridiculousness of this. No one should be citing Wikipedia. People (students, journalists, anyone) should be citing the sources that Wikipedia provides as footnotes. Well, the American Journalism Review has a piece asking editors' their feelings about citing Wikipedia, and I think it could be a great starting point for teachers and students talking about research and citation. Here's an excerpt from the article:

Voicethread (thanks to Earth Wide Moth for the link) is an unbelievable way to annotate images with text and sound. This would be a very cool assignment. Check out this example to see how it works (click the play button to hear audio, click the images in the toolbar to navigate to other images):

Matt Barton points us to another instance of teachers getting "YouTube'd." This is something every teacher should probably be aware of.

43 Folders has an interesting post about concentration strategies for students. They link to this post from the University of Kent. This resource might be something to pass along to students, especially those in their first year.

On Thursday, August 23rd, the CWRL is hosting a workshop called "Technologies for the Unwired Classroom." While we in the Lab often match pedagogy with technologies in interesting ways, we are lucky enough to teach in rooms that have about 25 computers in them. This workshop will be for instructors who teach in rooms that either have no computers or have only one computer as part of an instructor media console.

Woo, John, and I will be putting on the workshop, but we wanted to post some thoughts here to see if anyone had any suggestions or additions. Our plan is to show off some web-based technologies that could be used in "un-wired" writing classes and then to brainstorm with the instructors. What we'd really like to drive home is that the pedagogy should push the technology - not the other way around. In other words, we'd like to ask instructors what their goals are for their course and then help them brainstorm some possible technologies that might help them meet those goals more effectively. Below are a few of the things we'll be presenting, but the list could obviously go on forever. The workshop is only 90 minutes long, so we've whittled down our list quite a bit. We'd like to ask folks to please post comments with some other ideas you might have. We'll be showing this blog post to Workshop participants.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is sponsoring a Digital Media and Learning Competition, and I'm thinking that Blogging Pedagogy should apply for some monies. There is $2 million available, and there are two types of Awards: Innovation and Knowledge-Networking. I'm thinking that BP could apply for a Knowledge-Networking award. Here is a description of what they're looking for:

The field of digital media and learning has already produced a number of brilliant ideas that deserve wider dissemination, circulation, discussion, translation, application, articulation, and customization. Not every inventor/developer is a good knowledge-networker. Knowledge-networking takes good ideas and circulates them widely, taking full advantage of the Web's potential for collaborative thinking. It enables communication in which many can contribute, shape, and share.

The NY Times has this story about students being forced to pick a major as a freshman in high school. I find this disturbing:

Here in Englewood, every eighth-grader already works with a guidance counselor to formulate a six-year academic career plan that stretches through the first year of college. Elementary-school classrooms are named Harvard, Yale and Rutgers. The district’s 1,063 high school students attend classes in Gothic-style buildings on a 40-acre campus named for Dwight Morrow, a former senator and diplomat whose daughter, Anne, married Charles Lindbergh.

ddd sent me this story from the New York Times about the proliferation of mapping tools. I've been working on some assignments using Google's new My Maps function and Flickr's geotagging.

There are probably infinite ways these tools can be used in writing classrooms, but the assignment I worked up involves having students map a border that shapes their own life. This assignment was inspired by the book that first-year writing students at UT will be reading this year, The Devil's Highway - a book that explores U.S./Mexico immigration policies. I've worked up an example map that explores a border in my own life (that border is I-35, the highway that divides "East Austin" from Austin) - I plan to use this as an example for students. You can see that map here.

Google's "My Maps" is really easy to use. All you need is a Google Account, and you can point and click your way to a pretty detailed map. You can embed video, images, and audio in maps, and you can draw shapes, insert markers, and draw lines. Very, very easy. I'm currently developing a workshop on mapping assignments for our CWRL orientation, so I'd love to hear about any ideas people have.