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.

Rodney sent me this article in the Washington Post, The Eye Generation Prefers Not to Read All About It:

Because visual literacy is not required in schools, she says, "this generation's ability to assign meaning to the visual texts of others is passive and still needs a great deal more work. They are easily manipulated as students, consumers and citizens."

In other words, students today need to be taught, through images, how to think critically.

This is a familiar refrain, right? Well, last week I was reminded of how really OLD this type of argument is. I was watching Blackboard Jungle - a film that did a lot to create the category of "Juvenile Delinquent" in the 1950s. The story has been redone a great deal in recent years. Higher Learning comes to mind. But, more to the point, Blackboard Jungle was trotting out this "visual learners" argument in 1955. One of the ways that the teacher in the film reaches his students is by showing them a cartoon and then having them analyze the stories. After having such success with these leather jacket wearing hooligans, other teachers ask him what he's doing differently. I wish I could find the exact quote, but he explains that "kids these days" are visual learners...that you have to meet them on their own terms if you really want to reach them.

Matt just pointed me to this interesting article from Innovate. The piece is about how perceptions of the "Net Generation" can be reductive and how such perceptions have affected pedagogy. Here's the abstract:

In this article, Sarah Lohnes and Charles Kinzer argue for a more nuanced understanding of Net Generation students and their technology practices than received wisdom currently offers. The realization by college and university administrators that Net Generation students, having grown up digital, will learn differently and make new demands of their learning environment has led to changes in many sectors of academic life, with a particular focus on campus infrastructure, faculty development, and curriculum. However, these well-intentioned efforts to adjust to the perceived needs of Net Gen students are frequently made based on a vision of the Net Generation as a homogenous group of technology users. Lohnes and Kinzer argue that a much deeper understanding of student technology practices, and the intersection of these practices with student learning, is critical. To this end, they offer a small ethnographic study of liberal arts college students' technology practices, the results of which indicate that, contrary to common assumptions, we may not be at the point of changing the classroom practices of either professors or students. Addressing on-the-ground student technology practices, they conclude, may provide a better way of considering the complex picture of technology integration on campus.

Clay writes of TeacherTube - it's YouTube for teachers. I'm not sure what the audience is for most of these videos, but it might be a nice place to distribute video teaching materials to a wider audience.

Then again, it might also just be more teacher-ish version of YouTube: