Jerz's Literacy Weblog

Anytime you post online, you publish. Anything you say or do that might be posted by someone else reflects upon that brand that you'll be working so hard to build. Don't undercut your hard work with moments of Facebook foolishness. Nor should you stop reporting when you surf for fun online. Stories can emerge from anywhere. Soak in all the information you touch, and when you read, watch or listen think always "Would others find this interesting?" That's how you find the material you'll need to fill your blog, Twitter feed or whatever else you publish online. --Robert Niles, Online Journalism Review

In the end, the blog honed a lot of my online skills and was an excellent precursor to the professional world. Additionally, because I was covering the very school I was attending, the blog served as a bridge from my academic life to the outside world. I found that as a student, I had access to a lot of information a regular beat reporter/blogger never would -- campus events, internal e-mails, and good old word of mouth. UMass Journalism Professor's Blog

Grinnell College here, like others, has found it necessary to be explicit about when parents really, truly must say goodbye. Move-in day for the 415 freshmen was Saturday. After computer printers and duffle bags had been carried to dorm rooms, everyone gathered in the gymnasium, students on one side of the bleachers, parents on the other.

The president welcoming the class of 2014 had his back to the parents -- a symbolic staging meant to inspire "an aha! moment," said Houston Dougharty, vice president of student affairs, "an epiphany where parents realize, 'My student is feeling more comfortable sitting with 400 people they just met.' "

Shortly after, mothers and fathers were urged to leave campus.--NYTimes

I remember being very crabby when my parents dropped me off at college. My dad wanted to stop to eat just a mile or so from campus. I was grouchy and impatient, and eventually paced the sidewalk waiting for them to finish. Then, after I got moved in and felt ready to relax, I was ready for a final meal with my parents, but they waved and left -- just like that.

Freshman arriving on campus in 2010 bring with them a huge online social network, so they don't have to say good-bye the way we did in the days of analog relationships.

One exhibit will be a BBC pronunciation guide from 1928, in which broadcasters are told to pronounce combat as cumbat and housewifery as huzzifry.

There will be examples of the linguistic games people played, and a poem from Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, published in 1867. In it, 130 years before the arrival of mobile phone texting, Charles C Bombaugh uses phrases such as "I wrote 2 U B 4". Another verse reads: "He says he loves U 2 X S,/ U R virtuous and Y's,/ In X L N C U X L/ All others in his i's." --Guardian

This year, for the first time, a video game will appear on the syllabus of a course required for all students at Wabash College, where I teach. For me - and for a traditional liberal arts college founded in 1832 - this is a big deal. 

Alongside Gilgamesh, Aristotle's Politics, John Donne's poetry, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the Tao Te Ching, freshmen at Wabash will also encounter a video game called Portal. If you're curious to know how it happened, read on.  --The Brainy Gamer

While discussion has always been a big part of my pedagogy, I very much enjoyed this item from an engineering professor about what happened when he pushed the lecture out of class time, and spent what used to be a lecture period as a lab. In my American Lit class, I'm not planning to record full lectures for students to watch passively for homework, but I will record short introductions to readings, and direct students to existing videos or other web resources that supply background information that will help them understand the primary texts we'll spend most of our time discussing. During the class time freed up, I will spend more time on in-class writing activites -- something I have in the past thought of as a solitary, contemplative activity. I hope to make it more communal, exploratory, and reactive. Students will still write two traditional papers, and they will do most of that on their own time, outside of class.

Gregory A. Moses, a professor of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has tried to reverse the "lecture-homework paradigm" in a computational science course. Instead of watching a lecture and doing homework later, outside the classroom, students study the lectures on their own time online. Class is a lab, with students solving problems under the supervision of faculty. Mr. Moses went from "not knowing the names of the students in his huge lectures to knowing which ones smoked and which ones didn't," writes Glenda Morgan, an e-learning strategist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who sent me an e-mail pointing to projects by Mr. Moses and other professors at Big 10 universities. Click on the link above Mr. Moses' picture here to learn more about his work. --Chronicle

Lou Gehrig might not have had Lou Gehrig's disease. --NY Times

Clever writing in this story about a priest who rides around in a "God Squad" car.

Father Strand, who is currently ministering at the Holy Family Catholic Community in Fond Du Lac, Wis., was perhaps slightly surprised when Best Buy sent him a cease-and-desist letter, which told him that the company believes he is infringing on its trademark.

True, the God Squad logo does mimic its Geek Squad counterpart rather closely. But there might have been those who would be flattered that God's earthly representative would make reference to a mere retailer of electronic gadgets and the occasional racy DVD. However, Paula Baldwin, who ministers at Best Buy's public relations department, insisted that the company must pursue all trademark infringements, lest it allow its logo to fall into trademark purgatory. --CNet

So, you're an office worker who sends tons of email? Take one hour, read this article on writing effective emails, and then rewrite your last ten emails according to those guidelines. Forever after you'll be a better emailer.--Stubbleblog

For 136 years, then, typing in English has meant making certain neurological associations. Words exist in our minds and on our tongues, but they also live in our hands and fingers. Anyone who types envisions and feels words in space, and for English speakers who use technology, this space is defined by the qwerty keyboard. Who knows what qwerty has done to the language -- even to modes of thought -- by attaching meaning to certain constellations? Deep in our typist-minds, G and H are centrally located and somehow siblings; X and Z are southwestern outliers; and Q is always followed by . . . W.

But maybe qwerty is finally on its way out. Virginia Heffernian, New York Times

Our technology story rests on three strong pillars. First, like many personal services, including much of health care, the law and banking, higher education remains essentially an artisanal industry. These are industries in which technological progress has not reduced the number of labor hours needed to "produce" the service. By contrast, labor productivity in basic manufacturing has soared, and this is why the cost of a year of college has gone up compared with the purchase price of a basic car or a basket of groceries.

Students interacting directly with professors and other students in small groups remain a benchmark of quality in education. Ask any family if they want their son or daughter to learn in small group seminars taught by tenured professors, or if they prefer giant impersonal lectures or online chat rooms monitored by adjunct teachers who answer lots of e-mail questions. --Archibald and Feldman, Forbes