"How Do We Form Communities (and why does it matter in English class)?"

Really interesting example!

I wonder if the YV Photography teachers have seen this.

One of my favorite inquiries is how the brain works with language. This book looks fascinating! "Learning to read seems to be one of the more important changes that we impose to our children's brain. The impact that it has on us is tantalizing. It raises very fundamental issues of how the brain and culture interact. "

These new readers are starting to get to what we need in the classroom. "The e-reader screen is used with a stylus that can underline or highlight text, take notes in the margin, pull up a blank piece of e-paper for solving math problems, or touch a link for a video of a chemical interaction that is then displayed on the LCD screen." I've heard predictions that even more flexible devices will be developed this coming year.

I'm trying to learn more about Zotero, and this professor, Sean Takats, suggests that he used it with a "research-intensive" class this semester: "With their unprecedented collaborative functionality, Zotero groups promise to transform the way that instructors and students interact with sources, particularly in research-intensive classes. " I wonder how it went.

I like all of the definitions in this blog post. They sound connected to past research, yet new. I know I was feeling odd at the "Digital Is..." Conference, because I don't want to let the technology disappear into uses. It's better, I think to look for what we can get out of particular technologies. That's what we are doing now with Google's Wave. "Alongside these discussions Frances Bell suggested the term Co-Digital as a better term to describe the process of "…seizing the opportunities presented by the newness of technologies to spot changes and then shape the development of the technology."" As this paragraph suggests, we still need to look at "digital technologies" to see how we can exploit them for what we need.

I love how this article is framed. "Still, is this shift in pedagogy and policy worth the effort? Will sound, traditional writing instruction still suffice, or do we need to reframe the way we teach students to write due to the global, online spaces they will frequent more in their lives? In an August 2009 Wired article, Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, offered her own research to suggest that students are writing in environments far removed from those from even a generation ago. "I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. According to her five-year study of student writing, technology is pushing writing literacy in new directions that educators must begin to make sense of. "