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The rise of online media has helped raise a new generation of college students who write far more, and in more-diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both for the future of students' writing and for the college curriculum.\n\nSome scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands.\n\nA new generation of longitudinal studies, which track large numbers of students over several years, is attempting to settle this argument. The "Stanford Study of Writing," a five-year study of the writing lives of Stanford students - including Mr. Otuteye - is probably the most extensive to date.

What This Blog is About In one phrase: Building Engaging Learning Experiences through Instructional Design and E-Learning I'm an instructional designer developing online learning, so that's primarily what I write about. * Instructional Design: This is what I do all day, and I'm always trying to learn how to do it better. * Higher Ed: The courses I create are graduate courses, so I'm interested in higher education. * K-12 Education: The participants in those courses are mostly K-12 educators, so I'm interested in what's important to my audience too. * Corporate E-Learning: Even though I'm in education, I know I can learn a lot from corporate e-learning. Besides, I'm employed by a for-profit company. * Lifelong Learning: It didn't start out to be a goal for my blog, but I've discovered that these tools help my own lifelong learning. I write about my discoveries: what works, what doesn't, what I'm thinking. * Technology: I write about technology, especially as it overlaps with any of the above areas. * Bookmarks: The Daily Bookmarks Posts are resources I find interesting or useful. You can view and search the complete list of bookmarks on Diigo or del.icio.us. On my Post Series and Recurring Themes page, I've collected some popular topics. This includes my liveblogged posts from the TCC 2008 conference and my series on instructional design careers. The top posts in the sidebar to the right are another great place to start reading.

What This Blog is About In one phrase: Building Engaging Learning Experiences through Instructional Design and E-Learning I'm an instructional designer developing online learning, so that's primarily what I write about. * Instructional Design: This is what I do all day, and I'm always trying to learn how to do it better. * Higher Ed: The courses I create are graduate courses, so I'm interested in higher education. * K-12 Education: The participants in those courses are mostly K-12 educators, so I'm interested in what's important to my audience too. * Corporate E-Learning: Even though I'm in education, I know I can learn a lot from corporate e-learning. Besides, I'm employed by a for-profit company. * Lifelong Learning: It didn't start out to be a goal for my blog, but I've discovered that these tools help my own lifelong learning. I write about my discoveries: what works, what doesn't, what I'm thinking. * Technology: I write about technology, especially as it overlaps with any of the above areas. * Bookmarks: The Daily Bookmarks Posts are resources I find interesting or useful. You can view and search the complete list of bookmarks on Diigo or del.icio.us. On my Post Series and Recurring Themes page, I've collected some popular topics. This includes my liveblogged posts from the TCC 2008 conference and my series on instructional design careers. The top posts in the sidebar to the right are another great place to start reading.

Indiana University's Center for Evaluation & Education Policy released a new survey (PDF) last week on virtual education in Indiana. The center surveyed principals and teachers throughout the state on their thoughts about delivering part or all of a student's education online. The report has severe limitations: It was commissioned by an advocacy group (although CEEP itself and the report are non-partisan) and it had a very low response rate (just 3 percent for principals). Those weaknesses were strong enough that we took a pass on writing a story, but the findings do raise interesting questions.

I located a couple of interesting examples of people using networks as a grassroots tool to help stakeholders develop analysis of the power networks they are embedded in as a strategy tool. Also great to see such a low-tech solution.\n\nThe NetMap toolkit developed for IFPRI by Eva Schiffer makes use of boardgame-like tokens which can be used to represent the various actors, their relative power, positioning, and modes of power. Relationships (drawn as lines on paper) and positioning are determined by participants as part of the discussion. The resulting maps are recorded by the researcher. (Why do I waste my time writing software? ;-)