Writing Across the Curriculum

An examination of college students' dispositions toward critical thinking.

Tips for assessing critical thinking.

You need a plan. Just because you build doesn't mean in online communities they will come. Rather you need to understand who your audience is and why you are together. You also need to have a common language about what a community is and what it isn't.

New testing rationale -- in line with QEP.

The online world is vast, often making such research a time consuming drain on valuable study time. So what do you do? The following top 10 tips for successful online research below will help make time dedicated for research more efficient.

Education is the second largest industry in America behind health care, and it too is experiencing a similar shift as it struggles to adapt traditional design and delivery models to the demands of modern audiences who are accustomed to digital interactivity. The challenge to transition successfully is especially pressing for online higher education. The Sloan Consortium reports that two-thirds of post-secondary educational institutions are seeing an increase in online courses and programs, so it's a market that education providers simply cannot afford to ignore.

How do you take a group of individual, unrelated people and connect them in a supportive community quickly? … Here are some answers.

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.

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

Shows the trend that Keith mentioned in our workshops this week. Over 2,000 "free" M.I.T. courses on the Web.

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

May use as a guideline in the web2.0 classroom

Each CramCast is a three- to four-minute overview of a classic work of literature and gives you background on the author, a brief summary of the book or play, and ends with the top three things you should know about the work.

Recent studies show that literacy practices "are changing so rapidly that educators, students, and parents are unsure about how school literacy learning experiences and out-of-school literacy practices connect." However, "a majority of more than 900 educator-respondents to the NCTE poll indicate that … out-of-school literacy practices are as critical to students' development as what occurs in the classroom."

In that spirit of collaboration, the Teaching Carnival is back. … Each month, a new writer will collect and sort teaching-related links and will post them here. (If you are interested in writing one of these posts or contributing links to the roundup, see the info at the bottom of this page.) This is a great source for connecting to college profs who are writing about teaching in college.

students are apt to just click that top link when searching for information online, with minimal assessment of the quality of information they're going to find there.

I recently put together a workshop on using visual thinking techniques in the classroom for a group of graduate students at my teaching center.

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.

Members want 3 things from any online community. These three things shape your actions in the following ways:

Overview of definitions of student engagement & methods of assessing engagement: self-report measures, checklists & rating scales, direct observations, work sample analyses, & focused case studies.