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Most of the students were quite awkward in their initial blogging. Good students all, the class was a seminar on "Designing for Effective Change" for the Honors Program, but lacking experience in this sort of approach to instruction, the students wrote to their conception of what I wanted to hear from them. I can’t imagine a more constipated mindset for producing interesting prose. For this class there was a need for them to unlearn much of their approach which had been finely tuned and was quite successful in their other classes. They needed to take more responsibility for their choices. While I gave them a prompt each week on which to write, I also gave them the freedom to choose their own topic so long as they could create a tie to the course themes. Upon reading much of the early writing, I admonished many of them to "please themselves" in the writing. I informed them that they could not possibly please other readers if they didn’t first please themselves. It was a message they were not used to hearing.

The commenting, more than any other activity the instructor engages in, demonstrates the instructor’s commitment to the course and to the students. In turn the students, learning to appreciate the value of the comments, start to push themselves in the writing

Is open blogging this way consistent with FERPA? As best as I’ve been able to determine, it is as long as students “opt in

A video library for K–12 foreign language teachers; 28 half-hour and 2 one-hour video programs, library guide, and Web site

Smokeball provides lawyers with practical and affordable legal practice guides and precedents, together with free legal forms

Plagiarism is taking another person’s work, whether literary, musical, or artistic images, and claiming it as your own unique work. It is not simply copying another’s work word for word, bar by bar, or canvas stroke by canvas stroke. Derivative works are also considered plagiarized works if the new work is not significantly different from the original. For example, paraphrasing or rewording a literary idea is another form of plagiarism if it lacks attribution. Likewise, someone else can plagiarize a song without being an exact duplicate, if the new song derives the bulk of its composition from an original work.

Scriven and Paul begin to define critical thinking as ‘‘the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action’’ (quoted in Foundation for Critical Thinking, 2009, para. 2).

Bloom (1956) offered one of the first comprehensive elaborations of these important skills. Since the conception of Bloom’s Taxonomy, his colleagues (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) have carried on his work and developed a two-dimensional taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing student learning outcomes. The Knowledge Dimension identifies four types of knowledge: factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive. The second aspect of Bloom’s Taxonomy, the Cognitive Process Dimension, outlines six ways of thinking (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create) and their many subprocesses.

For the purposes of this article, critical thinking is defined as the practice and development of an active, conscious, purposeful awareness of what one encounters both in the classroom and in the outside world. It is a kind of thinking and learning that demands an investment in personal and communal learning on the part of the student and teacher. Critical thinking does not discount the emotional or gut responses that everyone has. Rather, it complements and enters into dialogue with them so that reasoned judgments are possible.