Skip to main content

Home/ PWR at CU Boulder/ Group items tagged readings

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
anonymous

Welcome to College Writing - 0 views

collegewriting.org/home

college writing free textbook

shared by anonymous on 17 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 17 Oct 10
     
    CollegeWriting.Org is a free writing textbook for college writers. * Process: Understand the working habits and and attitudes of effective writers. Improve your prewrting, revising, and editing abilities. * Research: Understand library research methods and conventions for evaluating, citing, and summarizing sources. Explore primary research strategies--surveys, ethnography, case study. * Projects: Guidance on academic genres, popular writing assignments, and links to sample readings.
anonymous

Writing as Design, Design as Writing ( jnd.org ) - 0 views

www.jnd.org/...TS-WritingAsDesign.html

writing as design design principles

shared by anonymous on 23 Jul 11 - Cached
  • I think you have to be a writer yourself to know how hard it is to make something easy to read -- or else you just have to be a little smart.
  • One of the things that stands out when talking to designers and long-term users of poorly designed systems is that these people take great pride in their skills. They had to go through great difficulties to master the system, and they are rightfully proud of having done so. That, by itself, is alright. The problem is that the difficulties become a test of the person or group. Then, rather than ease the situation for the next people, it is used as a sort of initiation rite. The hardy survivors of the experience claim to share a common bond and look with disdain upon those who have not been through the same rites. They share horror stories with one another.
  • To be successful, both writing and design have to follow basic psychological principles. And then they must be tested, tried out with readers or users who are similar to the intended audience, and then revised in whatever manner the test results indicate. All this takes a lot of effort and time. Time to learn the principles and appropriate techniques, time to practice them, time to test one's writing or design, time to revise, retest, and re-revise. Few are willing to expend that much time or effort.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • It sounds to me suspiciously like those folks who told me that if I made errors using the Unix computer system, why then I had no business using it. Clearly those who are incompetent to use something or to understand a text have no business trying to do so. Isn't this a great defense? You can cover up any kind of inelegant design or writing this way. Wonderful.
  • but the real test of the power of the idea ? and of the thinker ? is the ability to translate it into terms that the rest of us can understand
  • Consider the effect of age on intellectual ability. Young scientists find that human intellectual abilities decline with age, starting in the late twenties or thirties. However, older scientists doing the same kind of research show that intellectual ability does not decline with age, at least not after you exclude the effects of illness, "cohort" effects, and other technical complexities. Sure, physical and sensory abilities decline ? physical strength, vision, hearing, speed of response ? but certainly not intellectual ability. In fact, older scientists point out, knowledge, or what is called "crystal intelligence," is not only unimpaired, it improves with age.
  • The same points hold today, even though the technology of writing has advanced to the point where the hard work is the mental creation and refinement of one's thoughts into a form the reader can understand instead of the physical act of writing. It is easier for writers to let all their thoughts spill out on the page as they occur to them than to do the hard, time-consuming work to make those thoughts clear and easy for readers.
  • Conscientious authors find they must spend considerable time writing and rewriting.
  • The flaw in the argument, of course, is that why should anyone bother? How will they even know that something worthwhile is in there if it cannot be understood? Sure the work got published, and sure, my friend got promoted, but did anyone read the papers? Did his work have any impact? That is where readability matters.
  • The harder the author works, the easier for the reader. Hasty, inconsiderate authors create hours of effort for the reader. Careful, conscientious writers simplify the task for readers, but at the cost of great time and effort for themselves. Whose time is to be worth more: one writer or many readers?
  • t, opposing ideas are considered very important, because each scientific paper must carefully listen to the opposing voices and try to explain why they are either mistaken or why they perhaps do not apply in this particular case
  • It is through studies of the citation index that we know that interesting statistic: an amazingly large number of scientific papers never receive even a single citation.
  • these activities are presumably done for the benefit of others, so shouldn't the needs and abilities of those others be considered? A good writer and a good designer share many things in common. They need to understand the needs and abilities of their audience, and they must consider just how the product will be used.
  • Obviously the notion of trying out the material on the intended audience is not popular among designers and writers of instruction manuals,
  • Writers need editors and test readers to serve this role. Designers need the equivalent.
anonymous

Education Week: Classroom-Tested Tech Tools Used to Boost Literacy - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...02literacy.h04.html

digital literacy digital pedagogy digital writing teaching

shared by anonymous on 03 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Teaching students to read in an authentic context is a key part of being literate, says Jeffrey Wilhelm, a former middle and high school teacher who is now at Boise State University, where he does research on struggling readers. “Being literate has always meant the capacity to use a culture’s most powerful tools to create and communicate meanings,” he says. “If you’re not teaching with [technology], you’re not only not preparing the kids for the future, you’re not preparing them for the present moment.”
anonymous

Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Hi... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...63746

readings multitasking

shared by anonymous on 09 Aug 11 - Cached
  • That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 09 Aug 11
       
      I really like...
anonymous

Digital Discourse: Composing with Media in the Writing Classroom - 1 views

www.dartmouth.edu/...digital-discourse

digital literacy digital writing new media digital composition multimodal composition

shared by anonymous on 01 Aug 11 - Cached
  • None of these students had created a video composition before. And yet, using archival footage from Rauner and on-campus interviews, these first-time filmmakers produced a moving short film about student activism and apathy. As you watch the film, note that the filmmakers’ choices (of image, interviews, music, and transitions) are very clearly rooted in an awareness of the effect that they hoped to have on their audience.
  •   One might argue—and argue correctly—that teaching students an awareness of audience does not require that we study or assign multimedia compositions. But students are deeply engaged with these media, often relying on them to make very important life decisions, like whom to vote for in the next presidential election and why. This engagement leads students to feel that multimedia compositions matter, and that these compositions have a power that other compositions don’t have—perhaps because they believe multimedia compositions have a broad and genuinely interested audience are therefore more likely to be seen.
  • Indeed, a group of students working on a short film reported to me that they had spent an hour heatedly arguing about a single transition in their film. These were students who often overlooked transitions in their written work.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • properly designed, can enhance students’ understanding of how to compose the traditional academic essay.
  • Because web readers have more freedom in their reading practices, writing for the web requires writers to think especially carefully about their readers: web writers must both anticipate readers’ choices and try to find ways to manage these choices. A good website is thus constructed so that the reader’s experience is self-determined but also managed, coherent across pages but not redundant. Finally, writing for the Web 2.0 invites web writers to think about opportunities for interaction: writers can poll readers, invite them to comment, and even engage in a sustained discourse with them.
anonymous

Featured Articles - 0 views

www.usdla.org/...article01.html

digital learning digital pedagogy transformative learning teaching learning technology

shared by anonymous on 25 Oct 11 - Cached
  • The typewriter prized one particular kind of intelligence, but with the Web, we suddenly have a medium that honors multiple forms of intelligence-abstract, textual, visual, musical, social, and kinesthetic. As educators, we now have a chance to construct a medium that enables all young people to become engaged in their ideal way of learning. The Web affords the match we need between a medium and how a particular person learns.
  • The first dimensional shift has to do with literacy and how it is evolving. Literacy today involves not only text, but also image and screen literacy. The ability to "read" multimedia texts and to feel comfortable with new, multiple-media genres is decidedly nontrivial.
  • The real literacy of tomorrow entails the ability to be your own personal reference librarian-to know how to navigate through confusing, complex information spaces and feel comfortable doing so
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • But discovery-based learning, even when combined with our notion of navigation, is not so great a change, until we add a third, more subtle shift, one that pertains to forms of reasoning
  • Judgment is inherently critical to becoming an effective digital bricoleur.
  • As such, the Web becomes not only an informational and social resource but a learning medium where understandings are socially constructed and shared. In that medium, learning becomes a part of action and knowledge creation.
  • requires immersion in a community of practice, enculturation in its ways of seeing, interpreting, and acting.
  • f we could use the Web to support the dynamics across these quadrants, we could create a new fabric for learning, for learning to learn in situ, for that is the essence of lifelong learning.
1 - 18 of 18
Showing 20▼ items per page