Blogging Pedagogy

Have you heard of hacking education? It's all the rage on Twitter. Fred Wilson suggests that teachers are going the way of newspaper reporters and that diplomas are becoming less important due to technological changes in education.

Hacking Education

I read a really interesting interview with Nicholas Carr this week. Carr argues internet use harms our ability to reflect deeply.

The interview is useful for a couple of reasons: first, instructors may want to think about how decisions to use technology or not affect the way their students are learning. We assume in the CWRL that using technology in the classroom is good, and this interview questions those assumptions. Second, if students read this article in class, they could critique their course (and their instructor's choices), which may help them think critically about what they are supposed to be learning and gaining by using technology in the classroom. I can see the article being a way to frame a learning record essay also.

Here's the link:
Computing the Cost: Nicholas Carr on How the Internet is Rewiring Our Brains

If you use your class website a lot, you might wan to take a look at the Topoi page that Mark Marino has put together for the USC writing program (www.pageflakes.com/markcmarino) This page is full of interactive tools for pre-writing. The widgets are meant to be copied and used on your own site to help your students. Here is Marino's post discussing the Topoi page: http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/2008/08/23/widget-based-education/

The Topoi - www.pageflakes.com/markcmarino
Writer Response Theory (Marino's blog)- http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/

Hi everyone. I wanted to announce the CFP for the upcoming issue of Praxis (Fall 2008), with the theme of Technology in Today's Writing Center. I know that many Blogging Pedagogy contributors are interested in the use of technology in writing instruction, so I invite you to consider writing something about your experience with pedagogical applications of technology, particularly if it might provide insights for people in the writing center community.

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I just stumbled across this four-year-old article from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

When Good Technology Means Bad Teaching

The article gives three pieces of supposedly helpful advice to professors who try to use technology in the classroom. It says to avoid

My students this semester, who as a group seem very bright, still have trouble sending attachments as .docs. This article probably reaffirms what many of us in the CWRL already suspected--that these kids are not necessarily more computer savvy than our generation.

Google Generation Not So Hot At Googling, After All

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing/

write poems!!

So, on a whim (sort of), I set up a forum for original poems. That is, poems written by students in my E314 Reading Poetry class. I sensed I had a number of writers, but was a little hesitant to ask them to actually lay it out.

So I was preparing to start off class today with a brief warning about using Wikipedia as a source when I checked out the site's entry for "globalization."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization

I was struck by the number of "dubious - discuss" tags throughout.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Globalization#Dubious

In most of this section, the discussion centers around suggested wordings and rewrites, use of evidence, etc.

I will definitely work this into my class at some point in the next week or two, but wanted to know if anyone has used this feature of Wikipedia as a teaching tool.

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.