My wife's experience in re-taking first-year writing after 28 years and a double major from the University of Oregon would indicate that we are not teaching habits that persist indefinitely. That is to say that academic writing is a rarefied collection of habits that can be lost over time despite fluency in other areas.

This is not news, but interesting to see in practice.

When the Bat Signal calls :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It

When the Bat Signal calls :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It: "My view is that Wikipedia and projects like it belong at the heart of a high school and college education. Instead of turning to a handful of approved sources and paraphrasing them to write a ten-page U.S. History paper that will be viewed and graded only by the teacher – who looks at a stack of papers and anticipates the same bad movie, twenty times – you can be asked to demonstrate a sustained and original contribution to a Wikipedia article on an important topic, having to contend with conflicting sources and others’ arguments, learning to discern and then defend truth amidst chaos – and to refine your own view in light of what you discover. There are few things as devastatingly disarming to others as admitting when you’re wrong."

Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange Hunting, Gathering, and Growing Open Educational Resources: "A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources. By “open” it is generally meant that the resource is available at no cost to others for adaptation and reuse in different contexts. These resources could include books, lesson plans, syllabi, slide shows, etc. There are several examples of individuals and institutions providing open educational resources. The open education movement is introduced, and we discuss how to find and organize open educational resources, specifically within the context of the Open High School of Utah."

Hunting/Gathering/Collecting

John Hilton is emphasizing the reusability component of open coursware, something I brought up during the roundtable discussion with instructure. I hadn't made the important reusability/open content connection before now.

Reusable content needs to be modified for particular contexts, rather than phoning it in. Someone, maybe Gladwell, wrote about art that is created through gradual refinement rather than in a burst of genius (see Chris Lott post) and open courseware's reusability would tend to promote this sort of growth.

David Wiley's 4rs of Openness:

Reuse

Redistribute

Revise

Remix--take two or more existing resources and combine them to create a new resource (e.g. take audio lectures from a course and combine them with a slideshow from another course to create a new course).

** Creative Commons is a key enabler of open educational resources

-attribution
-share alike
-noncommercial
-no derivative works

Commercial schools, teaching for profit, can't use many Open resources.

Q: what's the relationship between fair use and open content?
A: (me) Fair use is being eaten alive by corporations

Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange Build your Audience like a Virus: "Learn how one small professional development program has taken advantage of free and low-cost Web 2.0 and text messaging technologies to keep in touch with our core participants, reach out to previously untapped audiences and expand our “viral marketing” efforts"

I'm attending this session at #ttix. Victoria Williams is moving through a list of technologies that she's used to promote UEN's offerings.

Blogs: kind of stagnant, and no dialogue ensued
Youtube: 250,000 hits, but few of them from the core audience
Text alert systems: 200 subscribers. Using http://www.txtwire.com Sent out text alerts to promote under-enrolled courses.
Facebook: haven't really exploited that much. 49 "fans."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW0nWJaB4g

Chick-Fil-A asked the user who created their facebook page to administer the site, because the corporate approach doesn't always work. "They just come in with the MBA approach" Of course, education isn't chicken sandwiches.

A lot of corporate involvement in social media consists of barging in on other people's conversations. [yes].

**** Use facebook to LISTEN to what your audience is saying. Not as sold on FB as a dissemination tool.

Twitter: 26 followers. Ugh. "We haven't really got a huge strategy for using this."

"tech tips tuesday" and "websites wednesday"

Most hardcore twitter users are posting ten times a day. The weekly strategy seems anemic.

using http://twitterfeed.com

Is hoping to combine twitter and blogs. It strikes me that, after three years, there need to be cultural changes to encourage participation. Everyone wants to have fun.

"I can usually see a spike in registration within 24 hours of a newsletter going out" (magnet mail, a paid service)

AvantGame by Jane McGonigal

AvantGame by Jane McGonigal

Dual Perspectives Article

Dual Perspectives Article: "Everyone complains about 'e-mail overload' — getting so much stupid corporate e-mail that you miss out on important messages. But Byron Reeves has figured out a way to solve the problem.

How? By turning corporate e-mail into a game.

Reeves, a communications professor at Stanford, had studied the spectacularly popular online game World of Warcraft, and he knew that people inside the game place enormous value on the game's artificial currency of gold pieces. They'll go on quests and spend hours doing boring tasks just to earn it. That gave him an idea: Why not create a system where users earn virtual currency by intelligently using e-mail?"

Games Without Frontiers: The Game of Politics Is Ready for Its Upgrade

Games Without Frontiers: The Game of Politics Is Ready for Its Upgrade: "But let me suggest another way to look at it. Maybe American democracy really is a game -- and maybe that's the best thing about it.

What, after all, is a game? A game is a set of rules that gives players a set of goals but also constrains their behavior in striving for those goals; it architects their behavior in an interesting and hopefully enjoyable way. A really well-designed game is 'balanced' and self-correcting. In a game of pool, for example, if you take an early lead by sinking a ton of balls, you quickly discover that -- whoops -- the game gets harder because your opponents' balls block all your shots. In MMOs like World of Warcraft, different classes of players do different things; as a result, no one class can run roughshod over all others."

The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online:

"Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods."

two items I stumbled across are both interesting and troubling. First, the University of Virginia, citing 99% laptop ownership among its students, is closing down their computer labs over three years to cut costs:

http://www.metafilter.com/80409/Rethinking-the-higher-education-computer-lab-at-U-of-VA

And in other news, the venerable Networked Writing Environment closed down last summer. I never used it, but over the years I've kept stumbling across it and reading references to it. It seems like a lot of good scholars worked in that lab and now it is gone as well:

http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/writing/closing/

I feel really fortunate that our two labs are student-funded, but I also have noted that increasingly more laptops are showing up in class. These issues have cropped up on Techrhet repeatedly over the years, of course. Perhaps the economic climate is accelerating certain changes to the technological context of writing instruction.

snippet on time travel from Lost

Blog - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blog - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia