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the best way to teach students how to write more effectively is to have them write more often.

In the traditional F2F classroom, the instructor asks a question, and the same four or five extroverted students inevitably raise their hands. They offer spontaneous, often unresearched responses in the limited time allotted for discussion. In the online environment, discussions enter a new dimension.

explain, share, comment upon, critique

unresearched responses

However, I have heard from very few faculty members who are not energized by the creative process of achieving the same instructional goals in an entirely new format.

On average, online courses are far more writing-intensive than traditional classes have ever been.

he first response that comes to mind rather than the best possible response

Many online students have indicated that this is the first time they have ever "spoken up" in class and that they enjoy the opportunity

Geared to lifelong learning

as a result of the relative anonymity

online education can be done well,

In their everyday lives, individuals do not have a teacher at their side to direct them in their acquisition of new information. One of the roles that we need to perform as educators, then, is to teach students to find and learn information on their own or in concert with their colleagues. The online environment fosters self-motivated education. Students direct their own use of Internet links, search engines, discussion boards, chat, e-mail, and other media. While such resources cannot guarantee student initiative, they establish a framework that gives precedence to the autonomy of the learner.

develop course materials among themselves in a manner rarely seen in the F2F classroom.

We shall workshop stories by both professional writers

I don’t accept laziness or haphazard work, but I usually reject it with a smile and a joke

At this point, I need stick notes to track down sticky notes

I resisted activities where the students “taught” each other for fear that they would leave something out

I will be extremely busy

I am eliminating much of the homework requirements so students can work on the online course

It will be an enormous challenge for me to let students take the lead and not dominate the airspace. If I want my students to make it to that “performance” or “resolution” stage I see this stepping back as being essential. I want them to “Perform” in the sense that they build their learning into webpages. If I dominate their peer critiques, for example, they might as well become my webpages. The intent is for them to run wild with their creativity, and to step away from me as the direct instructor. He also discusses the steps groups take to make decisions, “forming, norming, storming, and performing.” Garrison emphasizes that groups not only need time, but also clearly stated goals to function productively. I am very familiar with his claim that, “groups do not naturally coalesce and move to integration and resolution phases.” I loathe group work for this very reason! I have avoided it much of my teaching career, afraid of losing control of the classroom and the content, and often seeing little progression in student learning when I do venture to use it. He goes on to argue that, “direction and facilitation is required to establish cohesion and ensure messages are developed.” I guess I assumed this, that you need to give clear directions, state your goals for the activity, and facilitate its progression. I’m concerned with how this will go online.

This reminds  me of Kelly as a “thread killer.”

time consuming

whether I’d catch the next episode of the “Backyardigans.”

The main reason they do not work is because of a misguided, outdated, and pseudoscientific stigma against the teaching of knowledge. The evidence for the importance of knowledge is clear. We have a strong theoretical model that explains why knowledge is at the heart of cognition. We have strong empirical evidence about the success of curricula that teach knowledge. And we have strong empirical evidence about the success of pedagogy that promotes the effective transmission of knowledge. If we fail to teach knowledge, pupils fail to learn.

By neglecting to focus on knowledge accumulation, therefore, and assuming that you can just focus on developing conceptual understanding, today's common yet misguided educational practice ensures not only that pupils' knowledge will remain limited, but also that their conceptual understanding, notwithstanding all the apparent focus on it, will not develop either. By assuming that pupils can develop chronological awareness, write creatively, or think like a scientist without learning any facts, we are guaranteeing that they will not develop any of those skills. As Willingham and others have pointed out, knowledge builds to allow sophisticated higher-order responses. When the knowledge base is not in place, pupils struggle to develop understanding of a topic.

In a lot of the training material I read, these knowledge gaps were given very little attention. Generally, the word "knowledge" was used in a very pejorative way. The idea was that you were supposed to focus on skills like analysis, evaluation, synthesis, and so forth. Knowledge was the poor relation of these skills. Of course, I wanted my pupils to be able to analyze and evaluate, but it seemed to me that a pupil needed to know something to be able to analyze it. If a pupil doesn't know that the House of Lords isn't elected, how can you get him to have a debate or write an essay analyzing proposals for its reform? Likewise, if a pupil doesn't know what the three branches of government are in the United States, how can she understand debates in the papers about the Supreme Court striking down one of Congress's laws?

You can’t check e-mail using a spiral-bound notebook

Paper facilitates creative thinking

requires deep creative thinking.

My present ideas never look like version 1! The result is that the ideas I handed up in the proposed learning activities resemble very little of what I actually have now

Confucius

One of the insights has to do with letting go as a teacher.

Reading Sue’s

I agree with Sue.

paper writing in novel environments

be more creative

form stronger comprehension

Just because it’s “tradition” to spend the week before exams holed up in the library in some macho display of academic self-flagellation, this doesn’t mean that you have to follow this path.

If you take up the adventure studying challenge — and I hope you do