teachers seem to be happy when students publish their work for purposes of grading, but don’t do anything with it afterwards. I think we’re seeing symptoms of what I call “The Keillor Effect” coined by Garrison Keillor in this quote:  “I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numbers…. The future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $175.”

As a warm up in the beginning of class, I took standards and turned them into the following questions: Could you use the work that this group to solve a similar problem? Give an example. What problem strategies did this group use when solving this problem. Can you suggest another? Did the makers of this video “leave out a step” or go into “too much” detail? Explain. Can you suggest a different approach to solving this problem? Did this help you learn? Why or why not was this effective or ineffective?

Instead, students should be learning note-taking as a way of organizing data and curating information they need for a defined purpose.  Students should sift and cull, summarize and synthesize. Students should learn how to take notes in ways that correlate with real-life situations. Finally, students should master the skill of making meaning from their notes and finding the best ways to share that meaning with others.

When does our note-taking have a real purpose? When we are collecting field notes, listening to a webinar or YouTube training video, scanning a book for nuggets of wisdom. When we attend workshops or conferences, or even when we meet someone for a networking lunch.

What are the actual skills students need in order to organize the vast amounts of information they must cull through to make meaning and solve problems? Is note-taking from the Internet, from Twitter, or from texts really a different kind of animal? Won’t students buy into the note-taking process if they understand that it matters for something more than spitting back a professor’s lecture notes that haven’t changed in the last twenty years?

rning goal before they publish anything in digital spaces.

Have students set aside specific times to consider digital feedback.

It commits the learner to 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes to consider social media feedback and e-mail. This can balance production and conversation.