Writing Across the Curriculum

highly visual introduction to rhizomatics & networking with strong implications for connectivism.

Strategies for using student curation in the classroom.

Slide show of data about Internet growth and developments.

In what could be a major step toward bridging the gap between massive open online courses and the credentialing system that they are supposed to "disrupt," the American Council on Education on Thursday endorsed five MOOCs for credit.

An online journal about flipping the classroom, mostly grade school.

Another cool platform to consider as an online resource for your classes.

A new alternative to class wikis??  I see many possibilities.  

At exactly this moment, online education is poised (and threatening) to replicate the conditions, courses, structures, and hierarchical relations of brick-and-mortar industrial-era education. Cathy N. Davidson argued exactly this at her presentation, "Access Demands a Paradigm Shift," at the 2013 Modern Language Association conference. The mistake being made, I think, is a simple and even understandable one, but damning and destructive nonetheless. Those of us responsible for education (both its formation and care) are hugging too tightly to what we've helped build, its pillars, policies, economies, and institutions. None of these, though, map promisingly into digital space. If we continue to tread our current path, we'll be left with a Frankenstein's monster of what we now know of education. This is the imminent destruction of our educational system of which so many speak: taking an institution inspired by the efficiency of post-industrial machines and redrawing it inside the machines of the digital age. Education rendered into a dull 2-dimensional carbon copy, scanned, faxed, encoded and then made human-readable, an utter lack of intellectual bravery.

I'm a bit wary/skeptical about this whole "Flipped Classroom" idea and how it works in practice.

This helpful infographic does a solid job of breaking down the basics of learning theories in a visual and understandable format.

There are a variety of tech tools and methods out there for teaching writing that can make the process easier and more fun for both teachers and students. While not every high-tech way of teaching writing will work for every class or every student, there's enough variety that there's bound to be something for everyone.

I'm delighted to report that our efforts to grow Writing Commons like an academic journal have worked out really well.  We've reviewed over 75 new webtexts, and we are in the process of publishing some excellent free resources for college students.  Perhaps the most exciting result is that traffic is really blowing up!  Since February of this year, 105,532 unique visitors have accessed Writing Commons.

Open Educational Resources abbreviated as OER, are openly formatted and licensed documents and media accessed on the Web that are useful for teaching, learning, education, assessment and research that anyone can openly use and reuse, without charge.

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.

How one professor uses a MOOC and its resources to flip his own classes.