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Fascinating must read on how "attention blindness" prevents us from seeing the bigger world and how unstructured charges to students on finding academic uses of iPods they had been given as Duke first year students led to interconnected learning, innovation, etc. Excerpt: But it got me thinking: What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in college-the term paper-and not necessarily intrinsic to a student's natural writing style or thought process? I hadn't thought of that until I read my students' lengthy, weekly blogs and saw the difference in quality. If students are trying to figure out what kind of writing we want in order to get a good grade, communication is secondary. What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook? Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University's Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent-not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.

by Ron Tanner, November 6, 2011 This article echoes some of what Geoff ? said several years ago. When I began teaching a course called "Writing for the Web," three years ago, I pictured myself scrambling to keep up with my plugged-in, tech-savvy students. I was sure I was in over my head. So I was stunned to discover that most of the 20-year-olds I meet know very little about the Internet, and even less about how to communicate effectively online. The media present young people as the audacious pilots of a technological juggernaut. Think Napster, Twitter, Facebook. Given that the average 18-year-old spends hours each day immersed in electronic media, we oldsters tend to assume that every other teenager is the next Mark Zuckerberg. Aren't kids crazy about downloading music, swapping files, sharing links, texting, and playing video games? But video games do not create savvy users of the Internet. Video games predate the Internet and have little to do with online culture. When games are played online, the computer is no longer an open portal to the world. It is an insular system, related only to other gaming machines, like Nintendo and Xbox. The only communication that games afford is within the closed world of the game itself-who is on my team? At their worst, games divert children from other, more enriching experiences. The Internet's chief similarity to video games is that both siphon off audiences from television, which will soon reside exclusively on the Internet. As a delivery system for television, film, and games, the Internet has proved itself a premier source of entertainment. And that's all that most young people know about it. Why wouldn't we educate students in sophisticated uses of the Internet, which is commanding an increasing amount of the world's time and attention? I'm not talking about a course on "How to Understand the Internet" or an introduction to searching for legitimate research-paper sources online (although that is useful, obviously

Book review by Corinne E. Hyde of Writing Assessment and the Revolution in Digital Texts and Technologies. How to assess writing with technology. Having firmly established that the technology is omnipresent, that it can be reductive and inaccurate, and that it shifts the purpose and nature of writing itself, he goes on to describe what he terms "hypertechs," which can have a much more positive effect on the field of teaching writing. He describes hypertechs as consisting of hypertext (in which readers can progress through the text in multiple ways, and in which there are multiple linked connections), hypermedia (which is very similar to "new media" or "multimedia composition"), and hyperattention (which is actually a characteristic of the writer and reader, and could be equated with the short attention span produced by bombardment and integration of digital media in daily life). Neal then provides concrete suggestions for selecting and evaluating the various technologies that are available for assessing writing, advocating the use of both construct validity and writing outcomes in the process of determining which technologies will provide the greatest benefit to writing educators.

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) was created in 1980 by combining offices from several federal agencies. As a whole it is dedicated to: - Establishing policies on federal financial aid for education, and distributing as well as monitoring those funds. - Collecting data on America's schools and disseminating research. - Focusing national attention on key educational issues. - Prohibiting discrimination and ensuring equal access to education.

Civic engagement resource from EnCorps, an organization concerned with CE, website

Hey, guys, this is a resource that Jason, Wes, and Jacque found in their Task Force development. Pay special attention unit 6.