Recently in the Literacy Category

The age of the notebook is rapidly passing us. I know it still has places in many circles, and that for some, the function of the notebook will never go away, replaced by weblogs and online diaries and bookmark lists; but the nature of these written-out sketches of crashing ideas overlaying each other and betraying time, emotion and reasoning as it bleeds through a wood pulp page is almost gone. We are going to lose something there, as we have already lost so much. --Jason Scott

A wonderful tribute to an enduring (and endearing) medium for capturing thoughts.

To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child's play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein's book asks is "How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?"

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn't know what to think. If you can't trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.--Clay Shirky

Although I explained how I track and archive my students' Twitter activity, I didn't describe what they actually do on Twitter.

That's because I wasn't sure myself what they do.

I mean, of course I've reading their tweets and sending my own, but I hadn't considered in a systematic way how my students use Twitter. That lack of reflection on my part echoes my initial guidelines to the students: my instructions were only that students should tweet several times a week at a minimum. I was deliberately vague about what they should tweet about. I didn't want overly specific guidelines to constrain what might be possible with Twitter. I wanted my students' Twitter use to evolve organically.

Now, six weeks into the semester, clear patterns are discernible and I can begin to analyze the value of Twitter as a pedagogical tool.

My most surprising find? Twitter is a snark valve. --Mark Sample

I'm not quite sure why anyone would be surprised to find snark on Twitter, but I think Sample's greater point is that snark requires some level of engagement. A student in my journalism class tweaked me for publishing an editorial a few years ago that didn't follow all the guidelines I provided to the class. The result was an opportunity for me to model an appropriate response to criticism, and I ended up revealing a bit more to the class about my reasons for writing that editorial.

BTW, I would not say the student was being snarky; his oppositional stance does, however, demonstrate the kind of energy that an opposing view brings to the discussion, which is part of the reason Sample recognizes and celebrates snark... not to encourage meanness and the knee-jerk rejection of nuance, but rather in the line Matt Barton's celebration of plagiarism as a means of forcing those of us who teach writing to confront our own limitations as authors and our need for power structures to wall of what counts as unacceptable stealing of ideas, so that we can continue the very different kind of stealing of ideas that we can masque with citations and present as acceptable academic discourse).

I just drafted a new handout on writing editorials. I couldn't find anything online pitched at the proper level, so I had to write it myself. (I'll probably be able to use a version of this in my freshman comp class too.)

Presume that your opponent has good reasons for disagreeing with you. Talk to people on the other side, and include some of their eloquent, well-argued points. Carefully and respectfully explain why your position is nevertheless more accurate (or ethical, or practical, or inspirational, or whatever).

• Avoid trying to make your opinion seem stronger by distorting the other side, either through exaggeration ("Animal rights groups would rather millions of people from cancer than have one animal die during a scientific experiment") or by using unflattering labels ("nicotine addicts who oppose my right to breathe fresh air..." "reactionary tea-baggers whose pathetic world-view is threatened by Obama's heroic economic vision..." ).
• Making "the other side" look evil or stupid may fool people who don't know what you are talking about, but people who do know something about the subject can (and will) write a letter to the editor correcting your misrepresentations.

When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices. --Fox News

It's a safe bet none of the world leaders meeting Thursday for the first day of the G-20 summit are aware that it's also National Punctuation Day. Rubin founded it in 2004 after he got fed up with seeing misplaced apostrophes and other transgressions by people who should know better -- newspaper reporters and editors, book publishers and billboard advertisers.

"No one cares," he says. "That's my pet peeve, that a lot of people who are doing this don't care. Where's their pride? Where's their self-esteem? Where's their drive to get it right?"

Falling on Sept. 24, National Punctuation Day promotes literacy by encouraging schools and businesses to conduct activities, programs, games or contests related to the almighty comma, period and apostrophe. It's listed in two directories published by McGraw Hill, "Chases Calendar of Events" and "The Teacher's Calendar."

Rubin also created a Web site, www.nationalpunctuationday.com, which lists the proper usage of punctuation marks and invites visitors to post photos of incorrect road or restaurant signs. --William Loeffler, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

This is a rather weak example of tying a local story to an international news event, but I do enjoy obsessing about the details of language.

Thanks for the link, Mike.

Silly headline, from a University of Washington press release.

Second, fourth and sixth grade children with and without handwriting disabilities were able to write more and faster when using a pen than a keyboard to compose essays, according to new research.

The study, headed by Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington professor of educational psychology who studies normal writing development and writing disabilities, looked at children's ability to write the alphabet, sentences and essays using a pen and a keyboard.

"Children consistently did better writing with a pen when they wrote essays. They wrote more and they wrote faster." said Berninger.

With this Wired article, Clive Thompson put me into a happy place, and I wanted to share it. He's quoting Andrea Lunsford:

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it--and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom--life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos--assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

Wonderful stuff from Steven Krause.

Representing the world champion, the "going to hell in a hand-basket," the eternal the youth are getting worse and worse, and carrying on the tradition of complaining about students that dates back in western culture to at least Isocrates, I give you Stanley Fish's "What Should Colleges Teach?" on his New York Times "blog." Judging by the many comments here that repeat "oh yes, the students are so much worse today than they used to be," he's clearly the champ and the crowd favorite.  And why wouldn't he be?  Isn't it much more satisfying for grown-ups to note the weaknesses of youth?  After all, to do so simultaneously suggests that the grown-ups of today are both "better" than the current youth, and it suggests that the previous youth (e.g., today's grown-ups) were also better than the current youth ("When I was their age, we learned this stuff.  But now...").

In the challenger's corner, we have Clive Thompson and his WIRED article "The New Literacy," in which he argues that "it's not that today's students can't write.  It's that they're doing it in different places and in different ways."  Boos from the crowd; looks like Thompson has an uphill battle.  Let's see how this works out.

(Ding-ding-ding!)

I love the scare quotes for Fish's "blog".

Colbert's tag line brought tears to my eyes. (Thanks for the suggestion, Kerry!)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Nailed 'Em - Library Crime
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Tasers

David Stanley pointed me to this thoughtful essay.

Modern librarians who prioritize information over knowledge perpetuate a distraction from the real purpose of a library. A library facilitates the patient gathering of knowledge - whose acquisition is superior to almost every other endeavor. Religions have adapted to technology for the most part without being destroyed by it, so why can't libraries? It might not be too late.

Information on the Internet may come across as authoritative, but much of it is one giant Ponzi scheme, especially in the hands of the young, where it can become a counterfeit for the reading and memorization that true learning requires. Scholars are made through the quiet study of one chapter at a time. For that we need silence. We need to restore an appreciation for the close study of words.--William H. Wisner, Christian Science Monitor

I missed this when it came out a few weeks ago.

At Hopkins, Knudson uses Twitter as an extension of the classroom, asking students to raise questions, hold discussions online, keep up with breaking news and share links to interesting stories. She believes the limited number of characters allowed is a useful way to remember to choose words carefully, cut clutter and realize how much can be said in a small space, like a haiku.

There are people known for their writing on Twitter. As one example, she pointed to Arjun Basu, who has thousands of followers for his short-story tweets: "The marriage ended somewhere on a two lane road south of Cleveland. The kids in the backseat sensed it too. The kid in the trunk had no idea."-- Susan Kinzie, Washington Post

My wife was horrified when she turned on the computer to look something up online, and noticed that my blog now includes a Twitter feed. "I learned to deal with the idea of you being on Facebook," she said, "but Twitter?"

Roundtable
Chair. Charlie Lowe, Grand Valley State University

Scott Banville, University of Nevada, Reno
David Blakesley, Purdue University

How can open source software, open access publishing, and commons-based peer production (CBPP) principles help us to create a sustainable university?

How can they positively impact the social and economic development of the university and expand the resources available that sustain university culture?

What is the role of the university in the larger community in fostering such sustainable practices?

The rise of online media has helped raise a new generation of college students who write far more, and in more-diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both for the future of students' writing and for the college curriculum.

Some scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands. -- Josh Keller, Chronicle of HIgher Education

Chair. Gian Pagnucci, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Process-Blogging: A Sustainable Foray into Collaborative Writing
Sabatino Mangini, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Jessica Schreyer, University of Dubuque

Endings: The Problem of Sustained Blogging
Steve Krause, Eastern Michigan University

Keeping a Blog as Chair: Sustaining Public Discourse in a Private Job
Gian Pagnucci, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

What follows are my notes, lightly edited.  My own comments are in square brackets.

If you're a fan of lifehacking, you'll already be familiar with some of these issues. I'm blogging this because it's a good example of doing justice to an opposing view, giving a good presentation of the strongest objections to multitasking. 

If the pundits clogging my RSS reader can be trusted (the ones I check up on occasionally when I don't have any new e-mail), our attention crisis is already chewing its hyperactive way through the very foundations of Western civilization. Google is making us stupid, multitasking is draining our souls, and the "dumbest generation" is leading us into a "dark age" of bookless "power browsing." Adopting the Internet as the hub of our work, play, and commerce has been the intellectual equivalent of adopting corn syrup as the center of our national diet, and we've all become mentally obese. Formerly well-rounded adults are forced to MacGyver worldviews out of telegraphic blog posts, bits of YouTube videos, and the first nine words of Times editorials. Schoolkids spread their attention across 30 different programs at once and interact with each other mainly as sweatless avatars. (One recent study found that American teenagers spend an average of 6.5 hours a day focused on the electronic world, which strikes me as a little low; in South Korea, the most wired nation on earth, young adults have actually died from exhaustion after multiday online-gaming marathons.) We are, in short, terminally distracted. And distracted, the alarmists will remind you, was once a synonym for insane. (Shakespeare: "poverty hath distracted her.")

This doomsaying strikes me as silly for two reasons. First, conservative social critics have been blowing the apocalyptic bugle at every large-scale tech-driven social change since Socrates' famous complaint about the memory-destroying properties of that newfangled technology called "writing." (A complaint we remember, not incidentally, because it was written down.) And, more practically, the virtual horse has already left the digital barn. It's too late to just retreat to a quieter time. Our jobs depend on connectivity. Our pleasure-cycles--no trivial matter--are increasingly tied to it. Information rains down faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so. The question, now, is how successfully we can adapt. -- Sam Anderson

This essay clearly identifies a thesis, in the paragraphs I've quoted above. But then it spends a long section arguing precisely the opposite of the thesis.

My freshmen are often so used to getting their academic information through bulleted lists and bold keywords, so that they skim for the main ideas and only read the connecting text if they can't instantly get the gist of the page.  But the traditional essay requires readers to pay attention to a chain of ideas, leading from an opening question, through all the potential objections, to a conclsuion. Students who aren't familiar with this structure will often quote from the "con" part of an essay, mistakenly attributing to author A an idea that author A has cited only in order to tear it town.

I remember, as a high school sophomore, that some of my classmates were horrified by "A Modest Proposal," because they read it at the surface level, and didn't grasp the irony. (They also apparently didn't read the introductory summary or the discussion questions, but that's another issue.)

A budding artist learns his real skill is not artistry, but the ability to critique. I'm blogging this for the next time I introduce iteration as an important cognitive skill -- something that requires dedication, time, and a willingness to take risks in order to learn from failures (something that doesn't often fit will with millennials who fear losing points for not "getting the right answer" on the first try).

Drawing what you actually see--that is, drawing the plastic bull that's in front of you rather than the simplified, idealized image of a bull that's in your head--is something that does not come naturally to most people, let alone children. At its root, my gift was not the ability to draw what I saw. Rather, it was the ability to look at what I had drawn thus far and understand what was wrong with it.

While other children were satisfied with their loosely connected conglomerations of orbs and sticks, I saw something that bore little resemblance to its subject. And so, in my own work, I attempted to make the necessary corrections. When that failed, as it inevitably did, I started over. Again and again and again, each time making minor improvements, but all the while still seeing all the many ways that I had failed to persuade my body to produce the correct line or apply the appropriate coloring. -- John Siracusa, Ars Technica

This reminds me of what Robert Heinlein says about being a writer. Paraphrasing: anyone can become a writer, but what's really hard is staying a writer.

The first time I taught a lit crit class at Seton Hill, students felt overwhelmed by the almost-weekly paper assignments. It wasn't fair, some of them said, that I graded them on the essays they wrote before the class discussions, since it was often only after the class discussions that they understood the topic they wrote the essays about.  This time around, I made an extra effort to front-load the idea that the essays are designed to improve the quality of the discussions. If everybody showed up at the discussions without having first tried to write a paper about reader-response theory or semiotics or formalism, then the discussions would not be very useful. 

I did give the students a chance to re-do one of their ten critical theory exercises, and in general the exercises were going so well that I relaxed a little and let the students write a creative hypertext or a letter to the editor if they wanted to. But the rigor of doing a short paper every week, and committing their initial ideas to paper, before showing up in class, really helped develop their critical thinking skills.  By the last week of classes, after I returned their rough drafts of their term papers, I got confident, satisfied smiles from the class.  They knew what they had to do, and they knew they could do it.  It was very rewarding.

That kind of confidence comes only with practice.

• Nate Krueter, "High Stakes Style"
• Star Medzerian, "Rereading the Past: Style's Place in Our Disciplinary Memory"
• Mike Duncan, "Destroying the Topic Sentence"
• William Fitzgerald, "Dressing Up in Style: The Return of the Figurative in Composition Pedagogy"

This was one of the most enjoyable 4Cs panels I've attended, mostly because it reminded me that I got into this major because I love words.

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments in square brackets.

• Katie Retzinger, "Immediacy, Desire, and the Other: MMORPGS and Constructions of Identity"
• Mathew S.S. Johnson "The World is Subject: Gamers as Potential for Change"
• Phill Alexander: "Running with the Bulls: The Race Rhetoric of the Tauren in World of Warcraft"

The study of games and composition have long overlapped in the areas of popular culture and identity studies have long been areas of overlap.  I didn't detect a shred of defensiveness in the approach these scholars took, which has not always been the case at games-related CCCC events.  The idea of presenting games as an avenue for social change sounds like another potential growth area, in which the study of composition can turn games into a tool of inquiry and challenge, in much the same way that composition teachers often posit their role as preparing future citizens of a literate society.  I wanted just a bit more of the "How my thesis applies to college composition and communication" bullet point, simply because one expects that in a talk at this venue, but all three held up as explorations of issues relevant to both games studies and identity politics.

What follows are my own rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments inserted in square brackets.

• Pamela Gay, "The Blogitorial: An Alternative ? Genre for Writing"
• Derek Boczkowski, "When Writing (and Teaching) Goes Public: Blogging and the Wall-less Classroom"
• Michael J. Faris, "What's in a 'Zine? A Public Ancestry of Blogs"

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited.  I've inserted my own thoughts in square brackets.

• Michael Williamson, "Validity and Bias in Writing Assessment"
• Les Perelman, "The Five Paragraph Essay Makes People Stupid and Machines Smart"
• Brian Huot: "How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the 5-Paragraph Essay"
• Nancy Glaser, "One of Many Myths: Does the Five-Paragraph Essay Sink or Swim in Large-Scale Writing Assessments."
• Edward White, Respondent. (White recently published an amusing "satire" of a five-paragraph essay, which appeared in College Composition and Communication 59:3 (Feb 2008): 524-526

Another chapter in the love-hate relationship comp teachers have with formulaic assessments. (Mostly hate, with some codependency issues.)

• Dawn M. Armfield, "On the Go: Mobile Technologies and Literacy"
• Daisy Pignetti-Cochran, "What are you doing? Teaching with Twitter?"
• Kimberly A. Schulz, "Social Presence in the Online Writing Classroom: Community-building through Social Networking Technology" (with comments from Laura Gurak)
  

I do the "suck air in through my teeth" thing whenever I hear statements about how kids today "naturally" take to digital media.  If they hear that, they may get the idea that those of us who have acquired textual literacy just came to it naturally -- as if we didn't work hard to acquire that literacy. And students who are told that they are naturally good at digital literacy might get the idea that they're doing something wrong if it doesn't come to them effortlessly... people who are good at digital literacy have spent countless hours immersing themselves in the digital world -- doing things that mainstream society considers wasting time on Facebook, pouring inane thoughts into a Twitter stream, blogging endlessly about minutiae.  In a similar way, we developed our own textual literacy by spending countless hours staring at black marks on dead trees, looking at boring books without any pictures. Kids today are digitally literate because they see the immediate value of investing time in their product (whether they measure that value in terms of the number of Facebook friends they acquire, number of people following their Twitter streams, ratings and views in YouTube). 

Since I am not a heavy user of my phone (I use a Tracfone, the cheapest and simplest model I could find, I am conscious of conserving my calling time so that I don't have to buy extra minutes, and I wouldn't think it's worth it to get an unlimited calling plan, I found this panel very useful.  There's plenty of room for an analysis of the data -- I'd like to see some over-arching patterns that emerge, not from a single narrative about a single classroom experiment, or even a panel that combines several such narratives, but a survey that examines many such studies and categorizes them.  Such a study would take a lot of time, which is why I want to read someone else's study rather than write my own.

The following notes are a rough transcript, lightly edited. [Bracketed text reflects my own thoughts, responding to the speaker's presentation.]

Here are my rough notes, taken while the speaker was talking. (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2009.)

After thanking the audience for the "opportunity to serve in the cause of writing," Bazerman began with Mesopotamian farmer's clay pebbles used to keep track of flocks. What will the world be like 5000 yrs from now, or a century, or a decade? Our life projects develop with literacy; few in the developed world are farmers, but we participate in complex knowledge-based activities.

Farmer GPS Software slide: "Even farmers now grow crops by the book."

Writing has been considered sacred; it creates a space where we can be more thoughtful.

Writing facilitates building a parallel world of knowledge that allows us to monitor and influence the world we live in. As teachers of writing, we are bearers of this transformative technology, leading future generations in to more refined skills, deeper understanding, more complex cooperation, new adventures, greater communion.

The take-away message for me...

"The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the pen, like the sword, takes a deft hand, won through long years of training."

An emotional call for respect for the differences of composition, not by hoping for a world in which all English professors will be judged by their fruits, but rather a separatist rallying cry for the discipline of composition. It was well-received by the audience, though I find I rather like my own identity as an English generalist. (Bazerman invoked journalism several times in his talk. But that's one of the hats I wear, under the broad umbrella of English, that would not fit with the mission of the CCCC.)

More notes...

Editing, like sending thank-you cards, is one of those things that everyone acknowledges is a good idea but few people do. It takes time and you don't reap much reward, certainly not equivalent to the time. There is probably not enough attention to teaching writing in graduate school, but at least you have plenty of models and plenty of chances to practice.

Models of editing are scarce -- that is, unless you work with commercial presses or magazines. There, editors really edit. We think of those venues as shallow slaves to the market, but they often pay more attention to the words and ideas than we do. They never lose sight of their audience, holding the quaint assumption that writing is actually written for people -- not for tenure or a CV, both of whom are tone-deaf. -- Jeffrey J. Williams, Chronicle

In the past, I have pointed out copy-editing weaknesses at Story Book Forest at Idlewild Park, in southwestern PA.  When I was last there, shortly before Halloween, my son stopped in his tracks and said, "They repainted the Little Miss Muffet Sign!"

And he was right... they repainted some of the signs. Just now, when I was clearing out my camera's SD card, I noticed I had a set of before and after photos. Here's one sign in September 2005:


Here's the same sign in October, 2008.


I must say I rather miss the webbing, and the lettering for "Little Miss Muffet" is almost illegible. (What's the deal with the vines?) The new sign omits the period after "whey," so that the revision is now a run-on sentence. But at least the egregious "besider" error has been fixed.

"It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online," said Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and the report's lead author. "There are myths about kids spending time online - that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age."  -- MacArthur Foundation

Some details:

The researchers identified two distinctive categories of teen engagement with digital media: friendship-driven and interest-driven. While friendship-driven participation centered on "hanging out" with existing friends, interest-driven participation involved accessing online information and communities that may not be present in the local peer group.

Significant findings include -

• There is a generation gap in how youth and adults view the value of online activity.
  • Adults tend to be in the dark about what youth are doing online, and often view online activity as risky or an unproductive distraction.
  • Youth understand the social value of online activity and are generally highly motivated to participate.
• Youth are navigating complex social and technical worlds by participating online.
  • Young people are learning basic social and technical skills that they need to fully participate in contemporary society.
  • The social worlds that youth are negotiating have new kinds of dynamics, as online socializing is permanent, public, involves managing elaborate networks of friends and acquaintances, and is always on.
• Young people are motivated to learn from their peers online.
  • The Internet provides new kinds of public spaces for youth to interact and receive feedback from one another.
  • Young people respect each other's authority online and are more motivated to learn from each other than from adults.
• Most youth are not taking full advantage of the learning opportunities of the Internet.
  • Most youth use the Internet socially, but other learning opportunities exist.
  • Youth can connect with people in different locations and of different ages who share their interests, making it possible to pursue interests that might not be popular or valued with their local peer groups.
  • "Geeked-out" learning opportunities are abundant - subjects like astronomy, creative writing, and foreign languages.

I'm already aware of much of this. Knowing that students would rather learn from peers, I've added more group work, and I've added a requirement that students in my advance media classes publish a screencast about their final project to YouTube.  In future classes, I'll have students review those videos as part of their research process. 

My younger students (in the entry-level class) are generally much more excited about new media than the upper-level students (some of whom either barely tolerate or openly loathe the "new media" component of the "new media journlaism" program).  I've got to watch my lower-level students closely, so that I can adapt the upper-level classes to their strengths, and keep that process going throughout the major. That means I'm probably going to have to introduce more experimentaton in the lower-level classes, since I've got to cast a wider net to find out which techniques are the most productive.

As a professor, I collaborate with other authors all the time.  But I rarely assign collaborative writing assignments. I often ask students to critique each other's papers or beta-releases, but that's not the same thing as having them collaborate to create a single, coherent document.

I'm teaching a literary criticism class next term. The last time I taught it, students expressed a lot of frustration at how long it took them to get the hang of what criticism is. You're not writing summary, or personal opinion, or factual investigations about the author's life.  So what do you write about?  I can't really think of a way to get students to learn how to do lit crit, other than having them read models, talk about it, and try it.

Even though I always hated group work when I was an undergrad (and I never did any as a grad student -- not once), after a conversation with my colleague Lee McClain, I think I'm going to have my literature students write their first few papers in teams. I'll probably have some mechanism so that a student who is part of a successful team paper can request to write the next paper individually. That way, the students who are sure that they can do better on their own can opt out of the group work quickly. 

Young people around the world are learning, in their pre-teen years, to use tools like Game Maker, Click & Play, Stagecast Creator and others to build simple games. As they move into their teens and twenties kids learn to master and use Flash, modding tools, and even sophisticated tools like C++, game engines and graphics tools to create the complex, sophisticated games they imagine and design. Many of these students go on to enroll in college and graduate school game design and construction courses and majors, creating, while in school, games at, or very close to, professional levels.

But can students design and build successful educational games? The answer appears to be yes, as well, especially under the right conditions. And that is very good news for our schools and our learners. Because the next generation of educational games - the games that will truly engage and teach students - is likely to come from the minds of other students, rather than from their teachers. -- Marc Prensky (PDF)

I'm surprised not to see a reference to MIT's Scratch. Otherwise, a very good article.

Many professors will spend countless hours putting together elaborate and voluminous course packets of photocopies for classroom use (I used to be one of them). And now, it is more frequent for technologically minded teachers to file-share large numbers of PDFs through password protected sites on campus. This is so wrong it hurts. We are killing our own chances to have readers in the future or be remunerated for the scholarship we do. It's not only about the modest royalties that faculty authors may or may not receive, it's about the principle of valuing each other's scholarship and editorial work. I order good, attractive and useful paper-and-binding books or textbooks for my classes because I want there to be a system in place to support my work as an author and editor in the future.

If the paper and binding book vanishes as a dominant commodity, as it seems to be, maybe the new virtual system of book distribution, reproduction and delivery will allay some of the problems I describe in relation to photocopies and PDFs. It is becoming increasingly easier to put together affordable 'readers' or anthologies culled from existing print material without bypassing rights and fees and without overloading students with unnecessary expense. If this wave of the future takes hold and becomes the new standard in textbook publishing, I think it will be good for all parties involved. But what about the paper-and-binding book? -- Christopher Conway, Inside Higher Ed

When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google's search results for any given topic, fueled by generous links from fellow bloggers. In 2002, a search for "Mark" ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No more. (Wired)

Just a few days ago, I submitted a conference proposal that asked whether academic blogs are the new five-paragraph-essay, so this article comes at a good time.  Here's the concluson:

Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter's character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase.

As a writing teacher, I'm perfectly happy to hear that bloggers are expected to write good prose.

I don't plan on giving up my own blog anytime soon, but the fact that so much energy has moved to feeds and commercial social networking sites -- the Wal-Marts of the blogosophere -- means that I have changed what and how I write on this blog.