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Sara Thompson

Should We Really ABOLISH the Term Paper? A Response to the NY Times | HASTAC - 1 views

hastac.org/...h-term-paper-response-ny-times

learning teaching education innovation bcushare blogs

shared by Sara Thompson on 25 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • And for my own account of the decision not to use term papers when I taught at Michigan State, you can check out a piece I published in Academe in Sept-Oct 2011.   In some ways, it is more assertive on this issue than Richtel's piece, and is highly critical of the establishment English Department that too-often forgets its own importance as society’s “keeper” of two of the three R’s of traditional literacy, namely “reading” and “‘writing.’”   I won’t rehearse my critique; here's the link:  http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2011/SO/Feat/davi.htm).
  • She is also working with composition teachers around the country who are documenting similar findings that, in fact, this generation comes in reading and writing more and better–and, yes, differently–than earlier ones, not worse.  Lunsford uses the same metrics to assess these students as were used to evaluate past ones.  Her website is:  http://www.stanford.edu/~lunsfor1/
  • We have a Word Press class website.  Students blog every week about the reading and project-based assignments they create.   The two students charged with leading the class that week have to respond to every blog.  The students respond to one another.  
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • When I put their semester's work into a data hopper, even I was shocked to find out that they were averaging around 1000 words per week,
  • I argue that the open architecture of the Web is built on the principle of diversity and maximum participation--feedback and editing
  • Students learn to evaluate one another's thinking and challenge one another--and, far more important, they learn from one another and correct themselves.  I cannot think of a better skill to take out into the world.
  • I respond more too.  Like my students, I feel like I'm not spending as many hours reading and grading term papers, but, I know, from the end-of-term data crunching again, that, in fact, I have spent more time responding to their writing than I used to. 
  • the tipping point in these classes is when someone the student doesn't know, an anonymous stranger, responds to their work.  When it is substantive, the student is elated and surprised that their words were taken seriously.   When it is rude or trollish, the student is offended.  Both responses are good.  The Internet needs more people committed to its improvement, to serious discourse.
  • As I often do with classes, I did a diagnostic, found that many of my students were woefully lacking in basic writing skills.  I asked them what they most wanted from a writing class, and quickly transformed the class into a "writing as if your life depended upon it" workshop.
  • The "final" in the class was for each student--with lots of readings by me and the rest of the class--to apply for three or four summer jobs and internships.  That year, every student landed a position. 
  • More recently, I asked graduate students why they often left their term papers until the end and, with sadness, they confessed it was often because the whole exercise of writing a research paper is so debilitating and terrifying they often developed writer's block or writer's anxiety and needed the deadline to motivate them to write.
Sara Thompson

Blogs vs. Term Papers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-term-paper-tradition.html

wrtg315 blogs writing teaching learning education bcuedtech

shared by Sara Thompson on 03 Feb 12 - No Cached
    • Sara Thompson
      Sara Thompson on 03 Feb 12
       
      It almost sounds like he's saying that term papers, by their very nature, must be NOT interesting.
  • Her conclusion is that students feel much more impassioned by the new literacy. They love writing for an audience, engaging with it. They feel as if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable, whereas when they write a term paper, they feel as if they do so only to produce a grade.
  • “The sad thing is, he’s now convinced there is brilliance in the art world, brilliance in the multimedia world, brilliance in the music world and that writing is boring,” Professor Davidson says. “I hated teaching him bad writing.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • He proposes what he calls the “page a year” solution: in first grade, a one-page paper using one source; by fifth grade, five pages and five sources.
  • The National Survey of Student Engagement found that in 2011, 82 percent of first-year college students and more than half of seniors weren’t asked to do a single paper of 20 pages or more, while the bulk of writing assignments were for papers of one to five pages.
  • “Writing term papers is a dying art, but those who do write them have a dramatic leg up in terms of critical thinking, argumentation and the sort of expression required not only in college, but in the job market,” says Douglas B. Reeves, a columnist for the American School Board Journal and founder of the Leadership and Learning Center, the school-consulting division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “It doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting blogs. But nobody would conflate interesting writing with premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.”
  • The debate about academic writing has given rise to new terminology: “old literacy” refers to more traditional forms of discourse and training; “new literacy” stretches from the blog and tweet to multimedia presentation with PowerPoint and audio essay.
Sara Thompson

A Post-LMS World (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 1 views

www.educause.edu/...244412

future education LMS moodle technology software edtech

shared by Sara Thompson on 02 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • According to Babson Survey Research Group, 65 percent of all reporting higher education institutions said that online learning was a critical part of their long-term strategy, and over 6.1 million students took at least one online course during the fall 2010 term—an increase of 560,000 students over the previous year.
  • A post-LMS world does not suggest that the LMS is obsolete but, rather, that the practice of evaluating learning outcomes through a traditional LMS as the sole means for knowledge acquisition is obsolete. The original design of the LMS was transactional and largely administrative in nature, hence the “M” in “LMS.” The function of the traditional LMS is to simplify how learning is scheduled, deployed, and tracked as a means to organize curricula and manage learning materials.
  • LMS 3.0 design focuses on four essential applications: learning grids; e-learning intelligence; content clouds; and open architecture.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Effective LMS 3.0 learning grids create and inspire greater user independence and self-governance to facilitate effective content-creation capacities and new crowd-sourced intellectual property through the personalization of a vast array of information sources. LMS 3.0, properly designed, creates reliable content that facilitates learning through organized interaction and communications processes that include the widest-possible spectrum of points of view.
  • LMS 3.0 information architecture plays an increasingly important role as the gravitational pull for core strategies in assessment, engagement, retention, and outcomes.
  • Tracking learning events is crucial, but ultimately faculty are interested in the kind of learning that yields positive behavioral changes reflected in outcomes and a mastery level leading to a seamless transition to the workforce.
  • LMS 3.0 design expands functionality to include open, flexible digital repositories with components that add context through outcomes measurement, social curation, reporting, analytics, and extensive sharing capabilities.
  • Higher education is increasingly embracing a more open future, and next-generation LMS design needs to commit to an open ideology.
  • Moving from LMS 1.0 environments that do not offer long-standing, established community contributor models—from the perspective of both source code and open content—to a truly open environment will be a critical success benchmark for the post-LMS era.
  • Effective e-learning design, as a lowest common denominator, will embrace nimble, interoperable, modular infrastructure in ways that make learning contemporary, relevant, and engaging.
  • Sara Thompson on 02 Feb 12
     
    An interesting opinion piece on the future of the LMS.  Try reading this and replacing "LMS" with "library database" ... what would that look like? 
Deb Robertson

Free Webinars with U of Wisconsin-Madison SLIS Faculty - 0 views

mhtml:file://C:\Users\robertsond\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\TAYQTQCF\email.mht

UW-Madison SLIS e-journal licensing professional development Webinar

shared by Deb Robertson on 02 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Deb Robertson on 02 Feb 12
     
    To register: email Anna Palmer (ahpalmer@wisc.edu) Thursday, February 23, Board Books in Libraries: Helping Librarians and Caregivers Develop Emergent Readers with Allison Kaplan, Ed.D. Friday, March 9, Contemporary Trends and Debates in E-Journal Licensing with Kristin Eschenfelder Wednesday, April 4, Learning from H1N1: Public libraries and public health with Catherine Arnott-Smith
Sara Thompson

How to Get the News You Want Without Being Overwhelmed - Alan Jacobs - Technology - The... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...252221

workflows productivity organization reading ideasfile

shared by Sara Thompson on 01 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • (1) Our story begins with RSS feeds (in my case via Google Reader) and Twitter. Lots of reading material turns up every day through these initial filters. Some of it I can tell immediately I don't need to follow up on, but if I see something that's even potentially interesting I send it to ...
  • (2) Instapaper. What a great gift Instapaper is. The bookmarklet makes it trivially easy to send articles to Instapaper from your browser, and the better Twitter and RSS clients for the iPad and iPhone
  • (3) What I read in Instapaper I pass along to one of three destinations. If I have no further use for an article or post after reading it, I simply trash it. If I decide I'd like to share something in the article with others, I post it to my tumblelog.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • And if I think the article is something I might want to use later, I select a representative quotation from it and then bookmark it, with an appropriate tag, in Pinboard -- which is just as wonderful as Instapaper. Incidentally, I also pay $25 a year to have Pinboard generate a (searchable!) archive of all the pages I have bookmarked, which insures me against link rot.
  • And one more thing: I think filtering strategies need to be taught -- starting in high school, at the latest, and in a very thorough way in colleges. But this is rarely and haphazardly done. Drinking from the firehose is too hard, too disorienting; and yet that's what we allow young people to do. This is a serious mistake. The filtering tools are out there, and they're either free or ridiculously cheap. Let's use them, and teach others to use them.
Deb Robertson

Association of Research Libraries (ARL) :: Code of Best Practices - 0 views

www.arl.org/...index.shtml

fair use best practices copyright arl

shared by Deb Robertson on 31 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Deb Robertson on 31 Jan 12
     
    This is a code of best practices in fair use devised specifically by and for the academic and research library community. It enhances the ability of librarians to rely on fair use by documenting the considered views of the library community about best practices in fair use, drawn from the actual practices and experience of the library community itself. It identifies eight situations that represent the library community's current consensus about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials and describes a carefully derived consensus within the library community about how those rights should apply in certain recurrent situations.
Sara Thompson

Resources - Apps for Academics: mobile web sites & apps - Research Guides at MIT Libraries - 0 views

libguides.mit.edu/content.php

bcuedtech apps iPad gadgets research education

shared by Sara Thompson on 30 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 30 Jan 12
     
    Apps by topics: productivity, reading, research, notes, presenting, and music, plus a resources page
fleschnerj

Life after Google: You Have Options - 0 views

senseandreference.wordpress.com/...-after-google-you-have-options

google blog webtools

shared by fleschnerj on 30 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 30 Jan 12
     
    Back in October, the geeks were crapping their collective shorts in anger at some ill-advised changes coming out of Mountain View. If you'll recall, Google tweaked Reader and rolled out some crappy apps in what was called the week Google messed up. "We're leaving Google!" the geeks proclaimed.
Deb Robertson

ACRLog » Convenience and its Discontents: Teaching Web-Scale Discovery in the... - 1 views

acrlog.org/...overy-in-the-context-of-google

information literacy instruction ACRLog Grand Vallet State University

shared by Deb Robertson on 30 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Deb Robertson on 30 Jan 12
     
    Providing a unified interface through which patrons can access nearly all of your library's collection has an obvious appeal on all sides. Users get the googley familiarity and convenience of a singular, wide-ranging search box and, according to a recent case study done at Grand Valley State University, the reduced friction patrons face when using library resources correlates to an increase - potentially dramatic - in the frequency with which they access them. If the new tool is like Google, then why does it require instruction?
Mark Lindner

The Gypsy Librarian: Article Note: On Progressive LGBTQ Reference - 0 views

gypsylibrarian.blogspot.com/...note-on-progressive-lgbtq.html

article review LGBTQ gender

shared by Mark Lindner on 29 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 29 Jan 12
     
    Perhaps of interest as we ramp up our LibGuides, with the caveat we must be very careful.
Deb Robertson

Critical Assets: Academic Libraries, a View from the Administration Building - 0 views

www.libraryjournal.com/...CA6726948.html

IPAL academic library administration Barbara Fister

shared by Deb Robertson on 27 Jan 12 - Cached
  • Deb Robertson on 27 Jan 12
     
    Survey results shared from interviews with chief academic officers and an online survey taken by over 130 leaders in academic affairs yield surprising results. Perhaps the final lesson we can take from hearing from administrators is that they look to us not just to make the case for libraries but to ride the wave of change. We must ensure that libraries and librarians step into new roles and take up different challenges, reimagining the ways we and our libraries can be essential consultants in all the ways that students and faculty learn, discover, and share their work.
Deb Robertson

EBSCOhost: Exploring the Future of Academic Libraries: A Definitional Approach - 0 views

web.ebscohost.com/...pdfviewer

academic library IPAL future of libraries

shared by Deb Robertson on 27 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Deb Robertson on 27 Jan 12
     
    "Academic libraries that choose to emphasize services that are relevant in a digital world strike the authors as the most likely to find fertile ground." Academic libraries that choose to emphasize services that are relevant in a digital world strike the authors as the most likely to find fertile ground. They would be entering a realm of many opportunities; a realm characterized by rapid and discontinuous shifts. These institutions would be well advised to begin the process now. The trend-line is clear and the shift to a digital environment has tremendous momentum. Libraries cannot afford to wait until the smoke has cleared and the digital revolution is complete to take action. First the risk of being subordinated to more nimble entities within (and perhaps outside of) the academy is significant. Libraries will be hard pressed to reclaim lost territory once others fulfill these roles successfully. Second, the shift to a predominantly digital environment began more than a decade ago, shows no sign of slowing, and is creating a cascade of associated changes.
Mark Lindner

Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online | The Public Domain Review - 1 views

publicdomainreview.org/ing-public-domain-works-online

PublicDomain

shared by Mark Lindner on 26 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 26 Jan 12
     
    This guide is intended to assist people who are interested in exploring interesting works which have entered the public domain. It covers: Collecting leads Online Collections Legal Stuff Licensing When Does a Work Pass Into The Public Domain?
fleschnerj

Fair-Use Guide Hopes to Solve Librarians' VHS-Cassette Problem - Wired Campus - The Chr... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...35151

Fair Use Copyright Guidelines

shared by fleschnerj on 25 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 25 Jan 12
     
    The Association of Research Libraries might have a solution to what some librarians call "the VHS-cassette problem." Here's the scenario: An academic library has a collection of video tapes that is slowly deteriorating, thanks to the fragile nature of analog media.
fleschnerj

U.S. House Introduces SKILLS Act - 0 views

networkedblogs.com/sUNyS

school libraries law SKILLS Act

shared by fleschnerj on 19 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • fleschnerj on 19 Jan 12
     
    Defines an "effective school library program" to be staffed by a state-certified school librarian, have up-to-date materials including technology, teaches digital literacy skills, and finally, has regular collaboration between other education professionals over curriculum. Replaces Improving Literacy Through School Libraries with Improving Literacy and College and Career Readiness Through Effective School Library Programs which would award competitive grants to underserved local schools and school districts to develop an effective school library program. Allows school librarians access to professional development funds under Title II of ESEA.
Sara Thompson

Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration - 0 views

dschool.stanford.edu/makespace

collaboration commons buildings design furniture home libraries

shared by Sara Thompson on 19 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 19 Jan 12
     
    book from d.school at Stanford University "Appropriate for designers charged with creating new spaces or anyone interested in revamping an existing space, this guide offers novel and non-obvious strategies for changing surroundings specifically to enhance the ways in which teams and individuals communicate, work, play-and innovate. This work is based on years of classes and programs at the d.school including countless prototypes and iterations with d.school students and spaces."
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