ENGL431fosen

This is a long talk, but you can skip to the comments about education by selecting the chapter. I started watching from Chapter 14 "Media Literacy". Chomsky discusses training of learners by preparation limited to passing the next test. His anecdote of a student who asked a question that a teacher did not have time to answer speaks to the overly structured framework that education exists in. Instructors are required to cover a specific amount of material which means that creative restructure of the class process is marginalized. Yet situated learning is a self creating process in which members should be able to contribute equally to the form and content of the class, especially in a democracy. A country that values equality and tolerance should have institutions that incorporate those morals into the practice of education. To return to evaluating the source, Chomsky has written Miseductation which criticizes the methods of the school systems in America and how they contradict patriotic values by generating conformity and non questioning submission to authority. Chomsky touches on the treatment of students as vessels to be filled with the most important thinkers thoughts until the test day, which obviously is not valuable learning. IN his discussion of the Nobel prize winner he points out that the information age and the role of technology can yield a benefit if used in a 'cooperative effort' (e.g. education) to come to terms with the knowledge that is available.

As an avid Video game enthusiast, I've always been curious about what exactly makes them so rewarding to play. Some would say story but that can't possibly account for the success of games like Call of Duty and games like Bioshock are not critically acclaimed solely for their gameplay. This video from a web series called Extra Credits (think TED talks meets gaming) touches on the theory of Gamification. The concept is best summarized in the video where they state "Gamification is simply the idea of taking the principles of play, the things we've learned in three decades of making videogames and using them to make real world activities more engaging." If this theory could be refined and applied to learning, both in and outside the classroom, I feel we would see an almost revolutionary shift in student engagement and enthusiasm.

Noting that most existing studies on bi-literacy have focused on learners whose L1 and L2 share the same script (the roman alphabet), the authors of this study examine the acquisition of Hebrew literacy by children who are already literate in Russian. This longitudinal study compared the reading success of 1st grade students of three groups: bilingual (Russian and Hebrew) who were literate in Russian, bilingual (not literate in either language), and monolingual (illiterate). The study found that that the students from the first group, those who were literate in Russian when they started school in Israel, performed better on a number of reading tasks in Hebrew than the students who started school without literacy in any language (including those who were bilingual but illiterate). From this, the authors conclude that bilingualism does not significantly enhance literacy acquisition but that being already literate in another language, even one with serious structural differences and that uses a different writing system, does aid the acquisition of literacy in the second language.

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 is an RSA animation of a lecture given by Sir Ken Robinson, a proponent of creativity and innovation in education (see http://sirkenrobinson.com/skr/who for more information about him). This is an interesting and often humorous look at some general trends in modern public education. Though there is nothing that directly relates to teaching writing, there is much here that may contribute to the topic of failure, and to the importance of learning in social contexts. Robinson concludes that collaboration is the stuff of growth, it is our natural learning environment.

This webpage is presented on the Texas A&M University website. It is all about low-stakes writing, and how it helps the students develop their ideas and write more freely. It beings with a description of low-stakes writing, and the ways in which a teacher would have this type of writing in their class (including how to grade, types of assignments, etc). The web page stresses the importance of feedback on the students' writing, and also says that the feedback can come from a number of sources, not just the teacher. It suggests responses from peers, the writing center, or the student themselves.

I found this video actually looking for an informative video about students liking writing ---- goes to show that most students "hate" writing for multiple reasons. Many of the reasons in the control of educators. Teachers have the power to change the negative connotation students interpret writing to be - just an assignment, no further significance to, no interest to write ---- students should enjoy writing <<< school stems from learning through writing and reading ---- students want to write on things that interest them not pedagogical theories and research assignments. Students like to learn through their own eyes - students enjoy different genres of writing. Teachers have the power to enable their students in finding their interest in the writing realm. However, students should know the general rules and process of writing whether it be a narrative or research assignment, etc. Also, (as a teacher comments within the movie) - students don't always take blogs or social-media oriented writing forums with interest since self-representation is then transmitted into a educational institution. The video also covers the public's views on possible preventing of "writing hatred." This video also reflects the concept in the Casanava article in our class packet - teachers need to work on getting students immersed in writing through allowing their personal knowledge be combined with the values and lessons deemed by the institution they are writing for.

This online-community-sourced interview with Sir Ken Robinson (British education adviser, author, and speaker) followed his TED talk about creativity in education. He makes some good points about the need to cultivate creativity in students in all areas of education (not just those traditionally associated with creativity, like music or painting). This is closely tied to the struggle to create motivation in the classroom and addresses an attitude more than a specific set of strategies.  He tends to talk more about math and science than language, but most of what he says can be applied to our field as well. He connects the idea of "teaching creativity" to "teaching literacy", but I would argue to achieve true literacy, you need those creative elements that are so often lost in the language classroom.

"I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else. I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way."

I found this article to be interesting, and overall useful when thinking about the writing process as a whole. Junot Diaz is the pulitzer prize winning author of "The Brief, Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao," and, "Drown." He is one of my favorite writers, and I believe that reading about his routine, how he became a writer, and his thoughts on the craft can only be helpful.

sound interesting...i think i'll check it out.

The article I found articulates the beneficial attributes of tutoring, mentoring, and faculty assistance in the "alleviation of writing anxiety." There is also discussion on embellishing the self-efficiency university students when writing essays.There authors also use gender as a precursor in determining the differences between the efficacy of writing among males and females. In addition to analytical gender studies, the authors also integrate other academic variables such as GPA's and literary composition as a "recreational activity." There is even breathing exercises, methods for relaxation, and interventional aid to students who completely reprehend writing all together. This is article is definitely pertinent to the academically overstressed life of university students; especially, students enrolled in an English course. At a certain point, we all experience unpalatable junctures of unwanted anxiety, that by any means, impedes our ability to academically perform. It is very similar to the dynamics of examination anxiety. A student may have acknowledgments that exceed the finite boundaries of an exam, but cannot access their superior level of comprehension because of their cognitively, suppressive test anxiety. The word "test," "examination," or "dissertation" have become connotatively dreadful; however, replacing these words with academic euphemisms such as "long quiz" or "filling paper words project" could potentially reduce oppressive, academic anxiety-in a sense. Judging by all of the diagrams of everyone's writing process, I'd say the extraneous variety of distractions can all result from, or even cause, anxiety.

This website is a tool for people wanting to incorporate blogging into their classroom. The site offers that writing should be a collaborative process, which is exactly what blogging offers. In response to critics, "Blogging is about reading and writing. Literacy is about reading and writing. Blogging is about literacy"

I ran across this article last year while browsing through journals in the library and thought it was humorous. I thought of it again when we read Bartholomae. In this article by Philip Eubanks and John D. Schaeffer, the authors first set out to define what bullshit is, then discuss the ways in which bullshit is an aspect of academic rhetoric. The humorous (and most likely intended) irony is that all the while they are writing in a very traditional academic style which is, in and of itself, often associated with the very claims of bullshit they are examining. The main idea is that it matters not whether the content of the bullshit itself is true or false, but that bullshitters misrepresent themselves and their intentions (375). Eubanks and Schaeffer examine various types and purposes of bullshit, as well as various reasons one might engage in bullshitting, including representing a 'constructed self', gamesmanship, pleasure, reputation and superiority. "To sum up, prototypical bullshit has to do with a purposeful misrepresentation of self, has the quality of gamesmanship, and . . . is at least potentially a lie"(380). In the second half of the article, the authors examine academic writing, determining what features make it prototypical and how those features might be construed to be bullshit. One important aspect is the use of jargon, which seems to many non-academic readers to merely confuse for the purpose of elevating the author's status. "Often academic writers could be clearer but prefer to serve up something that sounds like bullshit" (382). They point out that students imitate this style in their own writing, and are rewarded for it. In addressing the issue of audience, the authors make a statement that is very reminiscent of Lave and Wenger's communities of practice in Situated Learning: "much academic publication, especially by young scholars, aims to qualify the author for membership in a group of specialists" (382). As we discu

This is an interesting article of a professor describing how he strayed away from the typical freshman comp syllabus to teach a class that would be relevant to the students. He used a current event (the Immigration Debate) that was especially relevant to his students; the majority were Latino/Chicano and lived in Southern California. He starts the article by giving a history of the immigration debate which isn't important to what we're studying. But then he starts talking about his class at the bottom of page 20 (that's where the article starts to get interesting) and describes how he planned his lessons and writing assignments to be centered around this debate. He tried to make the class interesting for the students and wanted them to feel like they were really learning something. The students had to write a series of essays describing what side of the issue they were on and they had to back up their reasoning with sound evidence and support. Hale describes the work as "challenging assignments that focused on critical thinking and argumentation: (26). All of this led up to a final research paper they had to do which the students would have an easier time doing because they already have a wide range of knowledge on the subject which Hale says "helped to prepare the students to write their research paper" (26). After all the articles the students had read they also had "a good databank of sources to back them up" (27). Hale also describes how this take on teaching was helpful to him as an educator. This was a subject he was very interested in and he notes that he "was tired of placing such a huge firewall between my classroom and my outside activism" (27) so by making his assignment something he was interested in, his enthusiasm would get the students interested too. He states that "the immigration debate engaged my interest as a teacher in a way that standardized assignments did not" (27) and I think this is an important thing for educators to consider when ma

Tong's post! This article is about the complication of academic writing. It identifies some of the difficulties in understanding an academic paper. Through anthropologist view they point out that academic writing are becoming more and more complex due to many reasons like the contents of the paper, the vocabularies including syntax and discourse. It mentions something that has to do with "technical and/or scientific writing" and the relation to countries that are working to "catch up". And how it would be a hard task in helping them to understand what's really being done. People were being hired to make the text more comprehensible to other readers. Academic writing is like making/ stating an idea in a complex ways by the uses of complex vocabularies. One important thing I found interesting and true for myself is the way student approach academic writing. Students only skim over articles to get a sense of what's being said rather than reading to "make use of the information." Then I thought could it be that students have to write on multiple articles and while in school we takes several classes that are not related to the same thing/topic and therefore our reading and writing are does not focus on the same genres or format.

This is a technical discussion on dopamine, rewards, and time by neurologist Robert Sapolsky. His research has shown that the anticipation of reward is more pleasurable than the reward itself and this pleasure increases when the reward is not a guarantee, but a possibility. This kind of discussion may seem overly abstract and distant from the classroom, but understanding how motivation works, even on a neuro-chemical level, can help us to not only design our courses, but develop new approaches to generating enthusiasm and performance in the classroom. It is a good place to start when crafting (or re-designing) a teaching (and/or writing) philosophy. What are the rewards students associate with writing? What is our role in creating, maintaining, and providing access to those rewards? Do the rewards always have to be attainable? How do we frame these ideas for use in academic planning?

This is a scholarly article written by Howard Rheingold explaining the various uses of Participatory Media and social media to engage students in the writing process and to promote civic engagement. The article gives numerous examples of particapitory media being utilized to empower students and give them an investment into their work. The entire article comes from a pedagogical perspective that I found beneficial.

This is a handbook for understanding and developing authentic materials suitable for adults published by the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL), which ran out of money and funding sources about four years ago. I've already been sold on the value of authentic materials and tasks, but with this handbook, NCSALL takes that extra step I've been looking for, it gives me some guidelines to create tasks for my own potential classroom. The underlying theme of this text seems to be facilitating students' connections with their own literacy.

I've decided to go in a different direction than the posts I have been submitting on diigo; however, where our research starts is certainly not where it finishes. I decided to approach the dynamics of voice and style and its relationship with "good writing." Moving along- This article directly engages in explaining "what makes good writing?" and how teachers view this complex question. Teachers alike analyze students' writing in very, very different ways and all hold their own literary interpretations in accordance to their curriculum. There is also much emphasis on "questioning a standardized writing style," "procedures and participants," and a variety of methodological approaches. There is also a list comprised of 31 perceptions on what establishes writing as "good." There is also much emphasis on the dynamics of structure, clarity, purpose, voice, and correctness. Near the end, there is an evaluation of controversy of a many statements revolving around "good writing", as well as "implications for the classroom." This is definitely a resourceful article for anyone endeavoring literary mentoring, and/or teaching of any kind. The diagrams are very concise and comprehensive, and above all, they are applicable to our instructive environments.