Group items tagged

"It's not that my memory improved but, instead, that I started archiving these events and ideas with my phone, as photographs. Now, if I want to research the painter whose portraits I admired at the museum, I don't have to read through page after page of my chicken scratch trying to find her name. When I need the title of a novel someone recommended, I just scroll back to the day we were at the bookstore together. Looking through my photo stream, there is a caption about Thomas Jefferson smuggling seeds from Italy, which I want to research; a picture of a tree I want to identify, which I need to send to my father; the nutritional label from a seasoning that I want to re-create; and a man with a jungle of electrical cords in the coffee shop, whose picture I took because I wanted to write something about how our wireless lives are actually full of wires. Photography has changed not only the way that I make notes but also the way that I write. Like an endless series of prompts, the photographs are a record of half-formed ideas to which I hope to return."

"What's neat about this is that I didn't have to use any special software while I was writing to make this "video" possible. I was working in plain old vanilla Google Docs. And to show you this one paragraph I liked, I didn't have to present you with the whole document (all 39,154 revisions of it) - I could extract bits and pieces that I thought were interesting, and interleave them in a blog post. Imagine what a high school English teacher could do with that. Imagine what you could do with that if instead of a minor effort by ol' Somers here you had, say, a piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (I've always wanted to watch how TNC writes. If he's ever used Google Docs, it's now possible.)"

I love this: "I worry that most people aren't as good writers as they should be. One thing is that they just don't write enough. Another is that they don't realize it's supposed to be hard; they think that good writers are talented, when the truth is that good writers get good the way good programmers get good, the way good anythings get good: by running into the spike. Maybe folks would understand that better if they had vivid evidence that a good writer actually spends most of his time fighting himself."

The assignment: Choose a word. Write it in capital letters. Find 4 synonyms. Write those in a second line. (Pick the easiest word to rhyme for your last word.) Then write a phrase that ends with a rhyming word. As a class, we wrote this poem.

MAGICAL
Imaginary, mythical, enchanting, spellbinding
Potions of my mind unwinding.
-Mrs. Simon's Caneview class

"But first it is about this question: What is web writing in 2015? * * * You know, web writing - that chatty, affable, ephemeral old thing. The thing that prized personality over pomp, the thing with feathers (and links). What does it look like?"

"People are caught up in a focus on STEM"-science, technology, engineering and math-"but the piece they don't understand is that all of those fields rely on clear, good writing, and we're not getting that," says Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, executive director of the National Writing Project, a nonprofit think tank at the University of California, Berkeley.

So here's an idea for a fresh meme: #GoodWritingIsSexy.

"All you social dystopians can unclutch your pearls; no linguist thinks this bodes the end of writing. Text is our most powerful, go-to communication tool. For most people, these ideograms are an upgrade. And what an unusual one! Language always changes, of course; slang is born, prances, and dies. But it's exceedingly rare-maybe unprecedented-for a phonetic alphabet to suddenly acquire a big expansion pack of ideograms. In an age where we write more than ever, emoji is the new language of the heart. Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article. "

Bet you never thought of the adjective "cool" when writing your syllabus. In case you want to start, this syllabus is very cool. I will be following this class as they publish their writing openly. I am optimistic that the teaching & learning will be pretty cool.

" This course is not one in which an instructor feeds you information and you regurgitate it for a good grade. You (the student) and I (the instructor) are almost certainly going to disagree on some things, and that's just fine (see the Grading section below). It's probably easiest to think of this course as a small, independent publication/think tank focused on the concept of 'cool'. Your job is to look carefully and thoughtfully at the world around you, and produce a series of essays that would help a potential reader understand your stance on what 'cool' means to you. You'll be using the process of writing and editing to help you define, and refine, that stance for yourself. You're also responsible for helping your fellow writers do the same. " h/t Stan

Maxine Greene (1995) writes:

"The role of the imagination is not to resolve, not to point the way, not to improve.  It is to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily unseen, unheard, and unexpected" (p. 28)

In this age of constant information and busy lives, it's difficult to get teachers and parents to read large amounts of research, or to understand the importance of boycotts, resolutions or petitions. The information we wish to share regarding the ill purpose and effects of corporate ownership of education must be expressed using all of the senses, in our bodied actions-instantaneously and with the emotion it warrants. As Nick Sousanis considers, we have to remember that conception (i.e as what we believe, what we think of as "real") largely comes through our perception (i.e what we see with our eyes and how we construct meaning).

Greene writes that through the "art of knowing"-"The experience and knowledge gained  by this way of knowing opens new modalities for us in the lived world; it brings us in touch with our primordial landscapes, our original acts of perceiving" (p. 149).

We need to redesign the social landscape with new images, new stories, new ways of understanding what corporate reform "is" and how it works.  What we need is action-creative action collectively inspired in local communities and through national organizing-to UNFLATTEN our worlds.

Not that I think there's much actual merit in the "find your voice" theory, but you've just conflated being a good (that is, literary) writer with being an employed writer, and also your "voice" with grammatical minutiae. Read any essay by Benjamin and you'll find it unmistakable, no matter what the format of publication. Perhaps it's time to stop longing for the day you find your own voice. The second-worst kind of writing is committed by those struggling to find their voice (the worst kind being by those who think they have found it).

2 Frameworks in my UNIV 291 - SYT course to teach students how to write blog comments. They seem to have helped them a bit. I could tell if they have read this through.

I really liked this post.

I'm tempted to make one of those. Also seems like you could skip the mirror and flip w software pretty easily.

Pretty interesting example of public undergrad research writing about the impact of depleted uranium in Iraq and Kuwait.

"Lighten up your email with the Emotional Labor extension. Works on any email sent through Gmail. First write an email. Then click the smiley face to brighten up the tone of the email before sending. "

"In case you can't tell, I'm incredibly proud of all of my students.  They were permitted to choose their own subjects and conduct their own research, and they really enjoyed writing for a wider public beyond their professor. "

""The real concern of this book is how existing scholarly activities (things like writing, publishing, networking and engaging) can be enhanced through social media and perhaps transformed in the process.""