Blogging Pedagogy

This post (Technology Source) offers a ton of interesting ideas about what would constitute a better grammar checker and what sort of technology would help composition teachers better manage the huge amounts of student writing that they deal with. There are links to all the software mentioned - from NativeMinds to turnitin.com (although some of the links appear to be not functioning).

Check out Elaine Childs’s article in the Kairos Praxis Wiki about using Facebook to teach rhetoric: Elaine Childs

Here (Lectures on tape) is a piece about the scary possible repercussions of having lectures recorded. Is it now necessary to teach as if your every word might be broadcast?

Here are some more musings about the complex relationships between professors, students, and the internet in college classrooms.

I had a conversation with my brother yesterday, who is 22. He was telling me about World of Warcraft, a video game that he spend many hours playing every day.

He told me that he hasn't come across any other situations in which his unique abilities and interests are so obviously helpful to other people. In the game, he works as part of a team. He gets constant validation and praise for his actions. He depends on other people, but he also needs to excel at his roles.

Michael Wesch has an essay on Academic Commons examining the effects of what he calls the social revolution of Web 2.0 on teaching and how to restructure the college classroom to respond effectively. He criticizes the model of the professor as the source of knowledge and education as the pursuit of knowledge. Instead, he champions a greater focus on analysis and discussion. I am skeptical regarding the novelty of his ideas - has the changing internet really led to revolutionary calls to end "regurgitative" education?

Most of us at UT know to send kids to the writing center if their papers are terrible. But so many times, it's not just their writing that is terrible. They often aren't reading very well either.

The UT Learning Center offers academic counseling. Students can drop and speak with a counselor for 20 minutes on aspects of learning that are giving them trouble, for example:

Time Management
Reading and Concentration
Note Taking
Memory Improvement
Goal Setting
Motivation
Test Preparation
Test Taking Strategies

For those of you currently negotiating the transition from teaching in Rhetoric to English, and for those of us just beginning to think about this transition, I wanted to offer a Weighty Question (and two CWRL books to help address it):

What kinds of writing should we ask of our students in English courses, and what is the purpose of this writing?

Normally, I shy away from talking about reproductive rights in the rhetoric classroom, even though I study reproductive rights discourse in my research. The reasons are several: first and foremost, I want to guard students’ privacy; second, it’s a topic I have fairly strong feelings about myself and I don’t want to get myself in an uncomfortable situation with students who feel differently; and third, I just don’t see many opportunities for stasis in the values-based, divisive discourse surrounding abortion.

A couple of years ago, my CWRL project group set out to determine how Second Life could be used in the rhetoric classroom. Starting with the tool, we tried to imagine an assignment that would fit--somehow--into our curriculum. Only one person in the group tried the assignment we developed. It was irrelevant to the rest of our courses.