Writing Across the Curriculum

Some excellent questions for building an assignment. Look beyond the writing assignment pedagogy to the general aspects of any assignment.

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."

If you can break down what you're looking for in a good paper into a set of categories and assign a numerical value to each category, then you should definitely consider using Google Forms to help you grade. I just developed a quick and easy way to do this. Here's what I do.

We're seeing more and more recruiters use the web as a place to search for talent and conduct employment background searches. This trend is set to increase year over year and I've been predicting that an "online presence search" will become as common as a drug test since 2007.

There are as many reasons to teach as there are reasons to learn.  One reason item-response testing (the twentieth-century's dominant method of testing) is so deficient is that it tends to reduce what we teach to content (especially in the human, social, and natural sciences) or calculation (in the computational sciences).  Think of the myriad ways of knowing, making, playing, imagining, and thinking that are not encompassed by content or calculation.  This semester, I've moved over to highly experimental, collaborative, peer-led methods in my two undergraduate classes

An obvious tool to use for writing projects is a blog. Blogging software is free, web-based, and very easy to use. You can insert all kinds of stuff into a blog-images, multimedia, podcasts-and customize it according to your purposes. My two most popular blogging software tools are WordPress and blogger.

a critical question: what is the unique idea in connectivism?

At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks.

Tagging allows you to find content in other blogs that matches yours and possibly can provide you with additional insights and information about a subject area you are passionate about. But tagging can also serve a very valuable service for faculty using blogs as a class assignment. If your students are writing individual blogs for a class assignment/project, you can ask them to identify their blog posts with a specific tag, such as your name course name and section number.

Flipping the classroom has transformed our teaching practice.  We no longer stand in front of our students and talk at them for thirty to sixty minutes at a time.  This radical change has allowed us to take on a different role with our students.

The days of the teacher as "sage on the stage" are numbered.  Instead, the teacher becomes the "guide on the side" where students are using the class/school experience as a fully interactive experience WITH the teacher  - - instead of the teacher being the one-way traditional talking head.

Although wikis, with their collaborative approach and vast reach online, have been around for at least 15 years, their use as a general teaching tool in higher education is still relatively recent. But an increasing number of universities are now adopting them as a teaching tool. As part of that trend, a handful of Singapore universities are using the wiki platform as a way to engage students.

It's not enough to simply write about data any longer; the world wants visuals. While there are many professional information designers making a name for themselves, such as Nicholas Felton of Feltron.com, the majority of these digital artists are up to their eyeballs in high-paying work. Where does this leave you? Well, if you want to spruce up your documents, blog posts, and presentations, there are some free tools online that can help.

An ongoing debate has ensued around the status of George Siemens' (2004) connectivism theory and Stephen Downes' (2006) connected knowledge theory as learning theories for the network age (Kop & Hill, 2008).

How to set up a Blogging Block in Moodle

How can wikis be used in writing projects? Remember, a wiki is a collaborative tool, so writing projects using a wiki should include a collaborative aspect. Following are some ideas:

The purpose of this paper is to outline some of the thinking behind new e-learning technology, including e-portfolios and personal learning environments. Part of this thinking is centered around the theory of connectivism, which asserts that knowledge - and therefore the learning of knowledge - is distributive, that is, not located in any given place (and therefore not 'transferred' or 'transacted' per se) but rather consists of the network of connections formed from experience and interactions with a knowing community. And another part of this thinking is centered around the new, and the newly empowered, learner, the member of the net generation, who is thinking and interacting in new ways. These trends combine to form what is sometimes called 'e-learning 2.0'-an approach to learning that is based on conversation and interaction, on sharing, creation and participation, on learning not as a separate activity, but rather, as embedded in meaningful activities such as games or workflows.