From a resource called “All Headline News” comes this story, “Scottish School Forces Students To Use Fountain Pens.” There’s not much really there beyond the headline of the story (other than the students claim to like using fountain pens), but I thought it was worth linking to in my ongoing collection of links about handwriting and penmanship. I am beginning to sense a different sabbatical project….
Links/Readings on Web 2.0 Stuff
A couple miscellaneous readings I’ll probably need to think about for English 516 for the winter:
- There’s this article from the Sunday NYT, “2006, Brought to You by You,” which is about a whole bunch of different Web 2.0 phenomenon and a pretty good introduction to one of the latests twists in the ‘net typified by things like YouTube, MySpace, and other sites with “user generated content.”
- I came across a web site this morning called Open Culture, which appears to be a blog with lots of cool links to, well, “open culture” sorts of things. I came across it after following a link about free sites for learning foreign languages with your iPod.
Again, just something to start making me for next year– really, next term, but I’m going to say “next year” to make me feel like I’ve actually got more time to work with.
Online writing assessment tools might not be evil
Another one of those things to think about for my teaching: “Students, teachers give high scores to online writing assessments,” which comes from some sort of southern Connecticut newspaper group– the Hartford Advocate? The Hartford Courant? I’m not sure…
Anyway, here’s a passage from the opening:
In Connecticut, schools in Bristol, Glastonbury, Windsor, New Fairfield, Killingly and Stonington received state grants last year to try the technology. East Haven also has a pilot program.
The online assessment tools, which are accessed by subscription, analyze a student’s writing sample to point out potential problems in organization, grammar, sentence complexity and other issues.
The technology doesn’t replace teachers, however, because computers cannot provide subjective feedback on skills such as analysis, creativity and interpretation.
However, many educators say the programs are a helpful tool that offer the kind of individual attention often not available in crowded classrooms.
Now, every time some sort of electronic grading tool is brought up among a bunch of composition teachers, especially in places like the WPA-L electronic mailing list, people go freakin’ nuts. And certainly I understand that it isn’t really possible to separate “content” and “mechanics” easily, that these tools can be easily misused, and they generally don’t work as well as the makers of the software often claim.
But if these tools are being used like this, if they are being used to help students deal with “mechanics,” and if they can help ease the workload of grading papers (and let’s face it, the worst part of teaching is grading), well, why not?
"Inanimate Alice"
Who says that hypertext stories are all like “difficult listening music” and made only for adults? From my wife (who found it in a mailing list that discusses children’s literature) comes “Inanimate Alice.” I’ve only seen/experienced the first one on China, but I am looking forward to playing with the other installments soon. Definitely a good thing to include for English 516 and/or English 444.
Never mind the handwriting; what about typing?
I’ve posted many things here about handwriting and computers over the years; here’s what I think is the first article on typing: “Exercise still key to computing,” a poorly written headline for an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Here are the first few paragraphs:
Long gone are the days of high school typing classes, where the clack of manual Underwoods and electric IBM Selectrics echoed down the hallway.
Students as young as first grade are introduced to a keyboard in computer technology classes. The state’s technology standards recommend that all students be able to type proficiently on a keyboard by eighth grade.
But as with handwriting, there doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day to teach keyboarding. Schools are preparing students for state tests, or there’s so much more technology to teach than just keyboarding.
There’s also a cool picture here of kids typing at computer keyboards with boxes over their hands so they can’t “cheat” from their practices of touch typing.
"Paperless" school article
From the Orlando Sentinel comes this article, “Who needs pens? School goes paperless,” an article about (guess what!) an elementary school with lots of computers and laptops and such.
First off, I don’t think it’s so much about paperless as it is about just having computers. The idea that this is a “paperless” seems to be the work of a headline writer. Second, I think this falls into the wildly optimistic view of technology. For example:
“Technology is one of the best and worst things introduced in schools in the last 20 years,” [Eugene F. Provenzo Jr., a University of Miami education professor] said. “It can be an extraordinary tool. . . . But it can also be the difference between watching a movie about Venice and actually going to Venice and smelling the salt air.”
I mean, I am of course all for computers in the schools and technology and stuff like that, but this view seems a little rosy. Unless they’ve got smell-o-vision on those computers in Florida….
T-Day/Multimodal Literacies
I’m getting ready to get out the door for the holidaze, but before I go, I have to make a link to the NCTE Multi-Modal Literacies site, something I stumbled across via John Walter’s blog. This is a potentially interesting site to me for at least two reasons. First, it’s right up the alley of something I ought to mention in a version of English 516, and one of my (oh too many) goals for the Thanksgiving “break” will be to start getting a version of that class ready for online consumption.
Second, it speaks to the sort of weird way that NCTE speaks about these things. “Multi-Modal” strikes me as an odd phrase, as does the language that is NCATE/NCTE-related, the phrase “non-print texts.” This is the term used again and again in one of the documents about accrediting secondary teachers in English, a document my department has been paying a lot of attention to lately because we have several hundred majors in this area. I understand what NCATE and NCTE are trying to achieve with these phrases, but both muli-modal and non-print strike me as, well, odd phrases.
But maybe that’s just me.
"Video Game Programs Look for New Ways to Use Games"
I heard this story, “Video Game Programs Look for New Ways to Use Games,” on NPR yesterday afternoon, a piece I will probably include in a unit for 516, a new one I need to develop on gaming, technology, and writing. Quite frankly, computer/video games are not my cup of tea (with the possible exception of a once or twice a year dip into games like “The Sims” or Civilization or something like that), but there’s a lot of interesting things out there right now about games and literacy, obviously.
The funny thing I remember about this NPR radio story: the reporter is talking to a student who is in the new major/program at U of Southern California (I think) on video game development about this game the student is developing. It’s impossible to figure out what one “does” in this game, but the student keep referencing philosophers like Foucault and he describes himself as “obviously a poststructualist.” The reporter asks “um, do you imagine this being a popular game?” “Absolutely not,” the student responded.
The role of technology in Law education
This is a little bit off the “beaten path” for this blog, but I thought it was an interesting piece: from “HLS News: An op-ed by Clinical Professor John Palfrey: What is technology’s role?” For the most part, you can substitute the words “law” or “law schools” with “composition and rhetoric” or “literature” or whatever and pretty much get sensible questions and concerns about technology and teaching.
Another good link, another thing to think about for English 516…
Jeff had a good point/link on his blog yesterday about YouTube. I’m not completely sure I agree with him entirely (mostly though), but I haven’t read the IHE article about YouTube he mentions yet.
Oddly, the think that most immediately comes to my mind is not YouTube, the article in Inside Higher Ed, or Jeff’s take on it. Rather, the first thing I thought was “jeez, that’s something else I need to figure out for English 516!”
I’m teaching that course online in the winter term and I have an embarrassing amount of stuff to do to get ready to do that. Don’t get me wrong; I have a pretty good sense about what I’ll be doing this coming term, mainly because I’m in the third year of this particular cycle of the course. (What I mean by that is I have found that I have to pretty much throw out everything but the most foundational texts– things like Ong on writing as a technology, Selfe’s “Paying Attention” essay, a few other things– about every three years because they simply become too dated).
But as I have learned before, the tricky thing is figuring out how to make this stuff translate to the online experience. For example, one of the things I’ve done in this class in recent years that I think has been reasonably successful is student presentations on books from a selected reading list on “cutting edge” issues in computers in writing. A lot of it is stuff that I’d like to read but I haven’t gotten around to it.
Anyway, in a face-to-face setting, this is pretty easy to facilitate: students talk about their book project for about 10 minutes or so and they hand in a brief essay. I could of course just ask student presenters to write something that the rest of the class can simply read. But that doesn’t really capture the “presentation” experience. On the other hand, I could ask students to make a presentation and post it– an audio file, a video, etc. But that makes technical demands at a level that I’m not sure I can expect from online students.
So we’ll see. It makes me nervous to say this, but there is going to be a “making it up as we go along” element to this class in the winter….