Presenting at #NEMLA session 8.1 Friday. “Hacking English: Examining a multimedia sandbox ‘creative critical project’ as an approach to literature.”

Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Trials and Tribble-ations #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 6) Trivial Time Travel…The daughter missed her graduation ceremony…

Rereading “Writing to Learn”

Rereading “Writing to Learn,” William Zinsser’s 1988 book about helping students overcome the fear of writing. That’s how I remember the book, but it’s also about hacking the act of teaching so that we don’t inadvertently convey the notion that students who make mistakes during the writing are doing something wrong. I spend a lot…

Chapbooks — the latest assignment in my “History and Future of the Book” class.

Students have already done a 400-word speech, a 400-word manuscript, and a 400-word typescript. I asked them to make multiple copies of their books. They wrote, cut, pasted, photocopied, folded, and bound. Our classroom today smelled cheerfully of glue. Up next: A “Futuretext” (whatever that means). Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9)…

Keeping things in the proper perspective at 4Cs: Praise for my delivery of a line from Star Trek.

Already met a lot of good people and found opportunities for following up. I’m here through Saturday morning. For now, though, I’m eating a sandwich. Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5,…

My buddy JTK helps me make a key point in my slideshow. #4c18 #b29

Putting speaker notes on an iPad is always more fun when using a typeface that invokes TNG Okudagrams. Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Visiting the #scienceofpixar exhibit @kaminsciencecenterQuick visit to see my mother and siblings.Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo…

Midterm Grades Submitted.

Similar:Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.The daughter missed her graduation ceremony because she was performing in Kinetic Theatre’…This was a rough term. Still have a winter term course to publish before midnight but time…My brother drove my mother in to see Carolyn in tonight’s opening night Kinetic Theatre pr…‘People are rooting for the…

Multimodal Composing, Sketchnotes, and Idea Generation

Using the mixed media of sketch notes, animation, and voiceover, this video explores the field of composition’s relationship between multimodality and composing. The piece illustrates how multimodal strategies such as sketchnotes can enhance idea generation and learning and provide classroom strategies for multimodal composition. […] We must remember that, yes, digital composition is multimodal but…

Why Textbooks And Education Are To Blame For Fake News

The way we teach it at Seton Hill, as a process that leads to a researched term paper, I think it’s safe to add freshman comp to the good list. We continue to operate on the basis that knowledge is stored in repositories, usually a book or an teacher. This dependence on textbooks has distorted…

The science of fake news: Addressing fake news requires a multidisciplinary effort

The rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against misinformation in the internet age. Concern over the problem is global. […] Our call is to promote interdisciplinary research to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed. Failures of the U.S. news media in…

Among today’s major professional accomplishments: installing this hook. #springbreak

My office door feels more complete now. Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Trials and Tribble-ations #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 6) Trivial…

Thesis Critique Activity: Another Use of a Class-edited Google Doc

A few weeks ago, I had students in my upper-level media class collaborate on a Google Docs study guide for The Name of the Rose. In my freshman writing class yesterday, I did something else with Google Docs… I created a page with three columns, and asked students to type their preliminary thesis statements on…

Affect (v. “to change”) vs. Effect (n. “the result”)

I ran into this problem several times in the last set of student papers, so it’s time for another illustration. When you’re talking about making a change, you mean the verb “affect,” and when you’re talking about something that results from a cause, you mean the noun “effect.” It’s rare to encounter “effect” as a…

Weak: Personal Intro. Strong: Blueprint, introducing supporting points. Weak: string of stand-alone paragraphs. Strong: Transitions develop complex conclusions. Weak: Last sentence introduces synthesis for the first time; no room to develop it. Strong: Conclusion synthesizes original ideas that have been part of the paper all along.

New handout: “The Shape of an Academic Paper”

I’ve given an in-class presentation on “The Shape of an Academic Paper” enough times that I’m ready to turn it into a stand-alone web page, which I’ll ask my students to read for homework, in order to save more class time for writing workshops. Musical friends, I’d welcome your feedback on point #5, “Think of…

An Hour of Monastic Silence in Media Studies Class (plus an awesome drum solo)

I announced that my 300-level Media and Culture class would spend an hour in monastic silence, collaborating on a Google Doc. I expected the students would understand I was helping them get into the mood to appreciate the 14th century setting of The Name of the Rose. What I didn’t expect was an awesome drum…

Clicking, collaborating, and talking in the library

Our local paper did a story on how libraries are changing to meet the needs of students. I’m teaching a course on the history and future of the book, so we’ll be talking quite a bit about the physical medium; however, printed material is no longer central to a college education, so the print collection is not central to our library.

Research Before Google Books (from 2006)

Me: It took a few days for the spool of microfilm to arrive via interlibrary loan. I’d use this steampunk contraption to manually seek the right page in the book. But I found it. Crying stock photo child: (Sniff) Checking sources was scary ‘n’ hard in 2006! Me: Yes it was, crying stock photo child. Yes…

On the Importance of Nonverbal Feedback in the Classroom [an Anecdote]

I don’t generally like teaching with slide decks, but students are used to them. I use a typeface that makes it easy for me to pretend I’m creating Okudagrams for Star Trek: TNG computer displays.

Research Poetry (communicating research results and expressing their significance through poetry)

For an article on communicating research findings in poetic verse rather than academic prose, an article in Qualitative Inquiry cites my Top 10 Poetry Tips handout.

What Grammar and Style Checkers Miss

Teaching students to write does not mean correcting their errors, or even preventing them from making errors. While I’m grateful that autocorrect catches most of my typographical errors, I have so far been unimpressed by software tools that aim to check grammar and style. Most of my students are pretty good readers and writers; if…