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This article is stresses the importance of the cultural component as a part of language learning rather than subordinate to it. It separates "cultural awareness" from "intercultural capability" in which the later is understood as "engaging learners in developing the capability to exchange meaning in communication with people across languages and cultures". Then the article goes on to give an ambiguous solution to revising L2 learning assessment. The article is short but it offers good insight to that fact that schools assess language as merely a descriptive code.

Profess Groff, at MIT, took on the topic of classroom technology and the classroom environment. It is an older article, but she looked at the integration into the learning processes of student and the ways to judge a successful device in the learning process. One point, is that instructors need to assess the effects of a device early-on, so that an effective integration plan could be implemented before the likelihood of it hindering the learning process. I would agree that in the past this was a simple solution even though there seemed to be a lag in the educational system to integrate these devices. Now, however, the rate of development of new devices seems to be making the lag even more of an issue. The end of the article details the main obstacles to learning, the classroom and new technology in the classroom; and they mostly relate to the teacher. Students have no problem keeping up with the newest device available. This then brings me back to the idea that an effect plan in the school and teacher training needs to be employed.

The article written by ERIC (The Educational Resources Information Center) which I must assume is a part of George Washington Univ. Washington DC. Graduate School of Education and Human Development is a broken down "checklist" of sorts. It addresses six different concerns with grading student's writing. One such concern is one I think we all might have asked ourselves at one point in time, "Why do professors need to construct effective writing assignments?"(3). The answer given to the question was interesting in that it pushed hard for effective peer reviews. While some peer review is helpful the article did address the fact that most students are unaware of how to give effective peer review. The basics of the article concerning peer review are that professors need to help students learn by example and explanation. I thought it interesting as well that the article addressed how professors can avoid giving a grade that they will have to defend after the fact, a problem for professors who grade writing without a series of rewriting stages. The solution offered is, that's right, stages of rewrites with the professor holding off giving a grade for as long as possible. One important idea brought up in the article is that "…the writing assignment should include necessary information about audience and purpose, the two pillars of writing."(3) I often wonder how we focus on the first and not the second. As the article states one of the pillars of writing is purpose, yet we seem to habitually focus on the audience and not give student's a purpose for their writing.

This video is a very entertaining whiteboard animation of a talk given at RSA (described on their website, http://www.thersa.org, as "an enlightenment organisation committed to finding innovative practical solutions to today's social challenges") by author Dan Pink (for more, see http://www.danpink.com/about). The question he poses, is "what motivates us?" The common belief that people will work harder for a bigger reward is found to be true only when the work involves simple, mechanical skills. When the work requires even rudimentary cognitive skills, a surprising reversal occurs: the larger the reward, the poorer the performance. Pink states that engagement requires three factors: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Though his presentation is addressed to the business world, I think that he's really addressing fundamental aspects of human nature that can be applied in education as well. For example, his claim that crappy products are the result when profit is separated from purpose, can be applied to education as well, when grades are separated from meaningful learning.

Great video and surpassingly simple. We do better work, when we are doing work towards something that interests us and that we are voluntarily invested in. That's not to say that we are invested in it voluntarily from the beginning, but that as we invest ourselves the reward is more personally gratifying. We are made happy by getting better at a task and mastering that task, we are made happy by engaging in abstract cognitive ideas that interest us. Money can not buy happiness, it can only buy a lack of cognitive effort.

This article was written by Lawrence Musgrove, an associate professor of English and foreign language at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, Illinois. In the article he talks about a lot of the same problems that we have been touching on in class with concerns to first year English composition classes. After a quick discussion of the issues with English composition, he goes into his proposal for a solution. He first conjured up a metaphor between writing and driving. Bad driving has very concrete consequences, and Musgrove thinks that writing should, too. His proposal is centered on professors issuing students "writing tickets" that can be cleared up by attending workshops, seminars, revising their paper, or any other writing task their professor deems sufficient. While reading the responses posted after his article, I noticed that his ideas drew attention from all sorts of different people. People from all different professions and backgrounds (high school students, business men, elementary teachers, etc) had a variety of things to say. Some people loved his idea, and others heavily disputed it. I found that the responses generated were as resourceful as the article itself.

This article is written by Cheryl Hogue Smith, a professor of English at CSU Bakersfield, about teaching writing to students considered "basic writers." Smith discusses the difficulty of getting basic writing students who are "woefully underprepared for college-level reading and writing tasks" to learn to be better writers. The solution, she claims, is to teach writers to be critical thinkers and "less fearful performers of academic tasks." She talks about how students come to her class from all different backgrounds with all sorts of different perspectives and ideas. A lot of her students have no confidence to write in the college level and so have no interest in it as well. The article attempts to solve this problem. Smith's idea is to teach the students to better value their thinking so that they have more of an interest in their writing and eventually, more confidence.