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Reacting to the Past (RTTP) is a series of elaborate games, set in the past, where students take on the roles of historical characters, and through arguments and gameplay, have the potential to reshape history. In order for students to "win" the game, they have to thoroughly master literary and historical texts for their games' time period, and to be able to fight against their in-game opponents through a series of oral presentations and written work. In other words, students in Reacting to the Past have to basically do everything their professors want them to do in a college class-read and analyze texts, learn about historical contexts, learn how to construct forceful and convincing arguments-but in the guise of a game.

Great advice and tips for using the "Flipped" model

This guy has some very interesting thoughts, but can teachers really afford to follow some of his advice??  

His sense of audience is ridiculous. I'm all about creativity, even in academic writing. My students have a variety of creative opportunities, but the fact remains that they need to learn how to put thoughts together effectively. I just looked at two essays that had absolutely no coherent point, even though they featured personal experiences. He made a comparison between essays and novels. Dude! They are two completely different forms of writing. They have different goals and different parameters. Yes, the 5-paragraph essay is a stilted, inauthentic form of writing and it is largely on its way out, but at the secondary level, it is the training wheels some students need to learn how to organize their thoughts coherently. No matter how they write, they still have to say SOMETHING.

He does exaggerate for effect, e.g. his claim that students are told to write in a style similar to classic literature--ridiculous! No one is told to copy any writing style previous to 1950, unless it is graduate students being told to mimic the horrible jargon of academic journals, but I think that's a different "bad" than what he means here. He avoids what should be his real topic--truly bad writing; I mean incompetent, to the point of being an effort to follow, poorly structured writing. We see this writing from the strongest cases of ESL students and from students who seem to have skipped several grades in school or who have never read a great deal in their school years. He leaves off the most important tool for teaching writing, and that is frequency. Anyone who only writes by email, Facebook, and twitter, and only writes something for a class once or twice a semester, will never break into a "conversational" form of writing (with complete sentences and paragraphs) that will be recognized as literate, normal, and natural. We recommend starting with short, non-graded writing and, by writing 2-3 times a week, working up to something more substantial. If teachers can do that, then college student writing will improve, but the plan requires patience and consistency from the teacher.

I thought this was a great article on the differences between collegiate level writing and high school writing. Moreover, it lays a groundwork for writing a paper. If only there was some way to convey these differences to our students in a way that they will understand without feeling discouraged. I think the weakness of the article is that it is very long, if I wanted to pass this on to a student I fear that the sheer length would deter them away from both reading it and/or finishing it. On the other hand, if we could manage to make this simpler or convert it into a series of short workshops for students then I think the content would be extraordinarily beneficial.

E-learning has been around for ten years or so. During that time, it has emerged from being a radical idea-the effectiveness of which was yet to be proven-to something that is widely regarded as mainstream. And now, e-learning is evolving with the World Wide Web as a whole and it's changing to a degree significant enough to warrant a new name: E-learning 2.0.

critical thinking demands objective examination of a topic and then a conscious response to that examination.

critical thinking demands objective examination of a topic and then a conscious response to that examination.

These are a few things to keep in mind when trying to relate to new freshmen.

Siemens' thoughts about the impact of open courses on learning and the Academy.

Diigo can be a very useful tool for helping you to write a college essay or research paper.

Online or off, getting students to talk to each other is a tricky task. … The FeverBee Primer About Successful Online Communities can help. While meant more for corporate and public community building, the lessons apply to the classroom just as well.

Students are all too often on a quest for the Correct Answers, which has little to do with critical-thinking development. Our schools are about competition, merits, awards, and how to earn the Golden Ticket -- giving the right answers. And this focus often starts as early as kindergarten.  … Studies show that getting answers wrong actually helps students learn.

This would be a great class assignment! It uses critical thinking skills, imagination, technology, and a touch of writing (posting comments, etc.)

But how is creative or critical thought defined and taught? And by what assessment can we measure it, if at all?

Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.  Given that students may lose interest in what they're learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they're also apt to think less deeply.  One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades.  The more the task required creative thinking, in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded.  Providing students with comments in addition to a grade didn't help:  the highest achievement occurred only when comments were given instead of numerical scores (Butler, 1987; Butler, 1988; Butler and Nisan, 1986).

The spurious nature of grading seems particularly true in the case of writing. Most any piece of writing can, and often does, receive any grade.

To fully assess the document's evolving role requires a broad understanding of both old and new documents. For documents are much more than just a powerful means for structuring and navigating information space -- important though that is. They are also a powerful resource for constructing and negotiating social space. It is the latter quite as much as the former that has made the documents of the World Wide Web so popular.

I liked this article because it talks about how it is easier for resistant writers to write by blogging.

See how they use peer interaction to stop cheating in online classes. This sort of beats them at their own game! lol