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Stephanie Cooper

ACU Connected Blog » Class Blogs as a Mobile Hub - 2 views

  • Ideas to Get You Started Here are a few basic strategies for integrating student voices into your class blog this semester. Comments – Obviously the most familiar way to add student voices to a class blog is adding comments to a post. At the beginning of the week, the instructor or TA would create a post that includes a discussion question or prompt. Then during or between classes students would stop by to add comments to the main question or reply to the comments of others. Question Queue: create a standing post where students can raise questions they would like to discuss in class. Rapid Response: ask students, individually or in pairs, to contribute a 3-4 sentence position statement they will then defend or debate. Student Posts – One way students can master new concepts is by having to teach them to others. Most blog software provides user roles for secondary contributors, so with a little preparation, students can have their own dashboard and post content as a full author to the blog. If you imagine student work more like a short essay than a single observation, then allowing students to make full posts may communicate higher expectations and value of their work. Reading Journal: ask students to post a summary of preliminary research or more formal abstract to the blog for peer comments and critique. Media Mashup: have students analyze appearances of course concepts in popular media by embedding a YouTube clip and then evaluating its relevance. Post by Email – A final feature we found in many mobile blogging tools was post by email. For students and faculty with mobile devices, this provided us a simple way to share content quickly back to the class hub. Since most native apps on the iPhone offered email sharing of photos, links, and media, post by email become the common avenue connecting mobiles to the blog. (At ACU, this feature is built on a Gmail account associated with each blog and the Postie WordPress plug-in described below.) Webliography: early in a survey course, ask students to construct a bibliography of useful study materials and web sites by emailing links with annotations to the blog. Photo Shoot: send students into the community (or out onto the web) to capture images that reflect social attitudes toward a common topic then email them to the blog for discussion. (New iPhone or iPod touch users may not know they can tap and hold on a web image to copy it before pasting it into an email. Remind them to cite the original source of the image, or better yet copy and paste the URL as well.)
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      This is great info to make class blogging successful.
  • WPtouch – An essential plugin for mobile blogging via WordPress is WPtouch (now standard on all WordPress.com blogs). Once installed, the plugin makes reading and commenting on mobile posts and pages easy. Simple to install and MU compatible.
  • CONS: essential links from sidebar widgets in a desktop theme must be added to the WPtouch menu manually.
Stephanie Cooper

JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching - 1 views

  • The use of web logs (“blogs”) has become a popular addition to many college courses as faculty try to find new ways to integrate this popular technology into the classroom. (Beeson, 2005; Quible, 2005; Ducate, 2005, Glogoff, 2005).   By the end of 2004, 32 million Americans said they had read a blog, eight million Americans had created blogs, and almost half were created by people under age 30 (Reine, 2005).   In fact, Huffaker (2005) cites several studies that reveal that a significant number of blog authors are younger than 20.  Lenhart (2006) notes that by 2006, these numbers had increased to 12 million American adults who keep a blog, and 57 million American adults who say they read them. Thus, students come to the classroom with a facility for maintaining and communicating through blogs.  Beeson (2005) argues that it is an approach that is more in keeping with their way of thinking (29).  With the increased popularity of blogs, faculty members have been integrating them into their courses to enhance class discussion.  Past research has summarized findings from case studies involving the use of blogs in a single course (Glogoff, 2003; Quible, 2005; Ducate, 2005).  The authors of this study, conducted at a business university, assigned a similar blogging exercise in three different courses—expository writing, e-commerce, and government--in order to introduce students to the use of blogs in their respective disciplines and to help students prepare for meaningful classroom discussion. This study finds that by completing the required readings and then posting discussion questions and reflections on topics of interest to which their classmates can respond--essentially beginning the conversation prior to the class session--students become more engaged in the course material. This exercise requires students not only to read the required course materials but to engage with them critically in order to move beyond a superficial understanding of the materials.  By using the same assignment and assessment tool, the authors found that blogs can be effective in enhancing class discussion in a range of disciplines and in integrating liberal learning into professional programs.            Blogging in the Classroom
  • Like online threaded discussion groups, blogs are an easy way to engage in dialogue on the web outside the classroom. The availability of several blog providers such as Google’s blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, and WordPress.com make it free and easy to set up, manage, and update blogs frequently and without additional support.   By using blogs “students become familiar with blogging, a tool now used by an ever-increasing number of employers to support routine operating functions” (Quible, 2005, p. 76).
  • Since blogs are a fairly recent pedagogical tool, new scholarship has emerged that points to its benefits in the classroom.  The ability of students and faculty to easily update an online journal promotes blogging as a new form of communication to enhance class discussion and to create a community outside the classroom.  Flatley (2005) argues that the technological medium provides a space where students can interact with one another, and it can open up the classroom space "where discussions are continued and where every student gets an equal voice" (p. 77).  In addition, blogs can promote collaboration (Flatley, 2005; Williams & Jacobs, 2004; Oravec, 2002).
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  • In contrast to more traditional forums for online discussion, blogs are open to the world to see. This provides visibility for students to share their ideas with the larger world. Quible (2005) says that blogs are “a natural in business communications courses” (p. 73) because they enable students to share their writing with a larger audience.  Glogoff (2003) notes that students “used the [class] blog for a purpose other than from what it was initially intended,” (p. 2162) causing them to create a new blog for a more general audience.  Huffaker (2005) argues that bloggers can get feedback on their writing from a wide range of other bloggers, and "they can link to fellow bloggers, creating an interwoven, dynamic organization" (p. 94).  In addition, "students can have a personal space to lty member not want student writing made public, blogs can be maintained so that only the students in the are allowed to access it and post to it.
Stephanie Cooper

Six Trends That Will Change Workplace Learning Forever - 2010 - ASTD - 1 views

  • “Historically, the learning community has stayed away from informal learning and social learning, and that is where most of the learning is taking place,” ASTD CEO Tony Bingham said during an interview promoting his new book, The New Social Learning, with co-author Marcia Conner. “We now have the tools, and the catalysts, to engage [employees] with that kind of learning. I think that is going to help the learning community take it to the next level.”  
  • An ASTD and Institute for Corporate Productivity study made a strong business case for using social media to enhance productivity. Millennials found social media tools more helpful in terms of learning and getting work done than Generation X workers or Baby Boomers. More organizations dabbled in social media during 2010, using shared workspaces, social networks, and wikis to deliver learning and development.   “The next generation of workers coming into organizations will demand the ability to work in ways they’ve already found to enable success,” wrote Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd in a July 2010 T+D article. “If the learning function does not step up to the task, some other department in the organization will, and the learning function will become irrelevant.”
  • As Daniel Pink wrote in The New Social Learning foreword, social learning will not replace training and employee development, “but it can accomplish what traditional approaches often cannot … [It] can supplement instruction with collaboration and co-creation, and in doing so, blur the boundary between the instructor and the instructed. … It can bring far-flung employees together into new communities in which they can not only learn from one another, but also fashion new offerings for customers. In short, social media can change the way your company works.”  
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  • The greatest technology growth of 2010 came with mobile devices, and thus, one of the biggest changes in workplace learning came via smartphones. Mobile phones have become an extension of the workplace and have made the world of work a 24/7 reality, but how have they changed learning?  
  • An IBM study, published in the January 2010 issue of T+D, highlighted two main purposes for mobile phone use: in-field performance support and access to current, just-in-time information that is relevant to a specific project or task. But an even more important reason to venture into the world of mobile learning is that newer workers in the workforce, the Millennials, are demanding it.  
  • The need to make social media and mobile learning a part of the workplace to attract, engage, and retain the younger generations is forcing learning professionals to explore new and innovative ways to deliver learning on these inexpensive devices, anytime and anywhere.  
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      This also applies to professors.  Since mobile learning is becoming a reality in the workplace, students need to be prepared for it.  
  • Morgan Stanley estimates that by 2015, more users will connect to the Internet via mobile devices than by desktop PC. “Our world,” Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd wrote in a July T+D article, “will turn into three-minute learning vignettes.” GPS sensitivity, according to Meister and Willyerd, will help new hires find checkpoints so they can learn the company and its history, and could alert us when we are near an expert in a topic of our choice. “Perhaps the future role of learning is to find, organize, and enable the experts,” Meister and Willyerd wrote.   Learning is trending toward the user and the moment of need. Workplace learning and performance professionals need to redefine the role that mobile learning will play in their learning initiatives because if they don’t, they risk being left behind in this new workplace paradigm.  
Keith Hamon

Brown - 0 views

  • As new technologies take us through major transformations in the way we use documents, it becomes increasingly important to look beyond the conduit image. We need to see the way documents have served not simply to write, but also to underwrite social interactions; not simply to communicate, but also to coordinate social practices.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This touches directly on Deleuze & Guattari's admonition to ask not what a document means but what it does.
  • Printed documents, Anderson maintains, were essential to replacing the ideology of sovereigns and subjects by creating the idea of a self-constructed society built around shared ideals and shared practices.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Creating documents of our own empowers us in all ways.
  • Anderson calls the resulting community an "imagined" one. This is no slight. An imagined community is quite distinct from an imaginary community. It is one, Anderson notes, whose members "will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion." Where an imaginary community does not exist, an imagined one exists on too large a scale to be known in any other way. And the central way they can be imagined is through the documents they share.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I really like this imagined community. Actually, I think all communities are imagined, but this makes a useful distinction.
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  • In this way, document forms both old (like the newspaper) and relatively new (like the television program) have underwritten a sense of community among a disparate and dispersed group of people.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Connectivity enables community, and it's the documents created in that community that provide the tell-tale markers and sign-posts about the function of that community.
  • In offering an alternative to the notion that documents deliver meaning, both arguments instead suggest connection between the creation of communities and the creation of meaning, for communities seem to create meaning for themselves.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a very challenging notion in education, where we usually assume that it's the job of experts to provide or channel meaning to the students and verify that they got it. This says that a group of students create meaning in a community and that teachers assist in that construction.
  • Providing a shared context for constructing meaning, documents are the beginning rather than the end of the process of negotiation.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      To my mind, this inverts the usual role of documents in most classrooms.
  • Indeed, writing on writing is both literally and metaphorically an important part of the way meaning is negotiated. Annotation is a rich cultural practice which helps, if only by the density of comment attached, to signify the different cultural importance of texts and parts of texts. The thin trickle of original text overflowing a vast dam of commentary, the long introduction, and the separate subject entry in a library catalog offer clear indications that a particular text is socially and culturally valued.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      How often do we ask students to write on writing, and then tell that their constructed meaning is wrong?
  • Hypertext software, however, has revived the immediacy of intertextual links.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Software such as Diigo allows for easy annotation and for sharing such annotations within a community.
  • The interpretation of a document always depends on community standards. Nonetheless, documents can and do play important roles in negotiating differences and coordinating practices between communities.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Nice: documents at once define a community and act as a point of negotiating between that community and other communities. What does that say about our classes as communities of discourse?
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    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.
Keith Hamon

gen y statistics | whY genY: the whY generation, Generation Y, Millenials, Gen Y, Echo ... - 0 views

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    Separating Gen Y into two groups are some drastic differences. It's Nintendo vs. Guitar Hero, Discmans vs. iPods, Chat rooms vs. Skype and B.T. (Before Texting) vs. A.T. (Always Texting). The word coined to describe this schism between older and younger Gen Yers is "gaplet."
Keith Hamon

The Ubiquitous Librarian - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    Are we seeing a shift from text to video as a primary form of expression? Perhaps in pop culture this has already happened with television, movies, youtube, and the web-but what if it stretches into academia? In fact, we're already seeing this with math.
Keith Hamon

Reacting to the Past: An Open Game Based Pedagogy Workshop at Duke, January 19-20 - Pro... - 1 views

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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.
Keith Hamon

Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: 5 Steps to Digitizing the Writing Workshop #edchat #writing - 3 views

  • Expecting students to write in our classrooms for hit-or-miss praise is criminal. Their nimble fingers can text an entire piece of writing via their mobile device to a relevant audience online at the same time they publish to a worldwide network. For them, the pay is in the joy of publication, in the act of making their work known, and of partaking of the work of others.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a big part of the intrinsic, and fun, motivation for writing online.
  • Take advantage of over 20 digital tools for students (Sidebar #2 - Digital Tools for Students).
  • You can easily transition from notes and highlights kept in Diigo.com social bookmarking tool to a written piece that appropriately cites content. Check Sidebar #3 for Electronic Citation Resources.
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  • reflect on the teacher's role in the writing workshop, and the technology available to organize the writing workshop.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      One of our tasks in QEP is to devise tools and strategies to make the instructor's job easier, not more difficult. Technology can help, and we want to explore how.
  • Create a Self-Editing checklist that is actually a GoogleForm or the Questionnaire Module in Moodle so you can quickly see class progress in graphs. Students complete this information via a web-based form that allows you to quantitatively track progress in class. Create a bank of online mini-lessons that students can watch and listen to again and again in an archive. Build that in your GoogleSites Wiki or Moodle. Facilitate sharing using recording tools in a discussion forum or Sites wiki. When doing the Group Share during a Writing Workshop, you can either play the students' presentation of the audio (which they recorded when they were ready) or record the feedback students get so that it can be added to the written piece/recording shared. That way, students can come back and reflect on the advice provided by their peers.
  • Using a Moodle or wiki, you can create a reference point that can house your mini-lesson content, including audio and/or video recordings.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Perhaps we could build a mini-lesson space on the Writing Labs wiki?
  • VoiceThread.com - Enables teachers to create an enhanced podcast about the MiniLesson content, but also allow students to contribute audio, text, or video content as comments. This enables many to many interactions.
  • GoogleDocs Presentation Tool - Enables teachers to create a slideshow that students can participate in chat, as well as contribute slides to.
  • As wonderful as a writing workshop teacher may be, s/he cannot offer the feedback that ALL students may need. However, online discussion forums through Moodle, attached to wikis, or with blog postings and comments CAN facilitate student to student interaction independent of the teacher. While many fear these kinds of interactions, in online learning, these interactions make or break an online course...or a face to face one.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Fostering this kind of online conversation is key to QEP. It's what we are about, but we recognize that most of our students are unaccustomed to conversing about academic issues among themselves. We want to teach them to talk college.
  • Collaborative word processors can also serve as a way for students in groups to interact with ONE text online.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is an excellent entry point into many different kinds of exercises: group editing, group writing, group brainstorming, group illumination (adding images and video). I like this.
  • Shelly Blake-Pollock, the teacher and author of the TeachPaperless blog (http://teachpaperless.blogspot.com), encourages his students to publish online. Beyond that step, though, he offers feedback on their writing online as well via screencasts, or video recording of his computer screen. Screencasts, or "JingCrits," that he creates are short, less than 5-minute video clips where he highlights student work on screen and offers feedback (View an example - http://bit.ly/bsgVQQ).
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This could be a wonderful strategy for moving our QEP Writing Labs into the online world, enabling writing specialists to engage student writing, and offer useful feedback, online.
  •  
    This article is about 5 steps you can take, as a writing teacher, to digitize your writing workshop. There are many more, though, so "stay tuned" for future articles!
Stephanie Cooper

Professor to students: Text away | The Committed Sardine - 1 views

  • Georgia State University students who don’t want to yell their questions from the back of a cavernous lecture hall now have another option: They can send text messages to their professor, who reads the queries from an overhead screen.
  • Text-messaged questions, McDonald said, are compiled on a class web page—known as a wiki—where other students can answer the questions. “It creates a knowledge base, and a knowledge base has real power,” he said. “And students love to show how smart they are.”
Keith Hamon

MediaShift . Class, Turn on Your Cell Phones: It's Time to Text | PBS - 0 views

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    Cell phones are in the hands of the vast majority of adults, and whether schools like it or not, they're in the hands of most students. While many schools still see cell phones as a distraction rather than as an educational tool, it's hard to deny that these devices are quickly becoming the primary means by which we communicate, in or out of schools.
Keith Hamon

Creating MultiMedia eBooks - wesfryer - 0 views

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    Learn how to create enhanced/multimedia eBooks including digital text, hyperlinks, images, and embedded videos.
Keith Hamon

Technology-Driven Community Building Activities - Home - 0 views

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    This website has been designed to describe mobile learning and technology-based activities that facilitate a sense of community in a variety of educational and training settings. The links in the menu lead to descriptions of the individual activities.  They rely mostly on texting, emailing, and photo-taking activities.  Free, group sharing internet sites are also used which require access to the Internet via a smartphone or computer.  Sites such as Flickr Photo Sharing, Google Docs, and Web 2.0 tools supplement some of the activities.
Thomas Clancy

The 21st-Century Digital Learner: How Tech-Obsessed iKids Would Improve Our Schools| Th... - 2 views

  • I've heard some teachers claim that this is nothing new. Kids have always been bored in school. But I think now it's different. Some of the boredom, of course, comes from the contrast with the more engaging learning opportunities kids have outside of school. Others blame it on today's "continuous partial attention" (CPA), a term coined by Linda Stone, who researches trends and their consumer implications. Stone describes CPA as the need "to be a live node on the network," continually text messaging, checking the cell phone, and jumping on email. "It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis," she writes. "We pay continuous partial attention in an effort not to miss anything."
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      Stone's definition of "continuous partial attention" hits the whole philosophy behind connectivism and rhyzomes on the head!
    • Thomas Clancy
       
      The sub-text here, forgive the pun, is that the primacy of the textbook in class (and a lecture derived from the textbook) is deadly. As an out-of-class reference, ok, but as the focus of a class period, NO.
Keith Hamon

Lines on Plagiarism Blur for Students in the Digital Age - NYTimes.com - 1 views

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    Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students - who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking - understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.
Keith Hamon

Lines on Plagiarism Blur for Students in the Digital Age - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism. Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students - who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking - understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.
Keith Hamon

http://www.jcu.edu/education/dshutkin/readings/Felten,P.%282008%29.Visual%20Literacy.pdf - 1 views

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    The centuries-long domination of texts and words in culture, particularly Western culture, has come to an end. The new "pictorial turn" means that  images no longer exist primarily to entertain and illustrate. Rather they are becoming central to communication and meaning-making.
Keith Hamon

Visual Literacy: An Institutional Imperative (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 1 views

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    Academics have a long history of claiming and defending the superiority of verbal over visual for representing knowledge. By dismissing imagery as mere decoration, they have upheld the sanctity of print for academic discourse. However, in the last decade, digital technologies have broken down the barriers between words and pictures, and many of these same academics are now willing to acknowledge that melding text with image constructs new meaning, and some may even go so far as to admit that images, as communication devices, can stand on their own.
Keith Hamon

Extreme Makeover, Syllabus Edition « Tona Hangen - 1 views

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    I've been tweaking the content of the syllabus for a couple of years now, but was looking for a way to arrange or present it that was less linear, less text-y, more visually engaging, more like a magazine or a website.
Keith Hamon

Teaching with Technology in the Middle: Diigo for Digital Writing Reflection - 1 views

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    I've been having my students use the social bookmarking site Diigo since the start of the school year. They've used it to keep track of information they find on the web, to share information with our class group, and also to respond to digital texts they read.
Keith Hamon

Brainstorm in Progress: Why MOOCs Work - 2 views

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    For Connectivism, the medium is the message - teaching Connectivism any other way than a MOOC is as ridiculous as buying a book about free, open text books from Amazon.Com. I hope that the critics of MOOCs take the time to actually take a course, even as a lurker - they will gain immensely from the experience, and who knows? They might even learn something.
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