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.

A great tool recently made the rounds on the techrhet listserv. If you paste text into it, it gives you the word frequency of the essay. You can view the results as a tag cloud (like the tag cloud that we have on our page) so that words used most frequently are the largest in the cloud. You can also view a "graph" that provides a list with the number of times each word occurs.

Karen Schwalm, the person who posted this to the listserv, used this tool to talk about coherence in an essay, and she points out the following:

Then in some investigation of tag clouds (those visual representations of word frequency), I read a comment that indicated that the more frequently a word is used, the less meaning it had. Bing! That makes sense.