Update: It's Been a Long Time!

I am on sabbatical this academic year (2015-16), and my primary project is leading my English Department in the adoption of the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) to shorten our "pipeline" of developmental-level writing courses. The ALP was created by Peter Adams and developed at the Community College of Baltimore County. It has been studied and researched intensively and has consistently found to be successful at the colleges where it is adopted.

As I am working on this project, I am continually reminded of the coursework I took at the University of Minnesota on my last sabbatical (academic year 2008-09) to complete a graduate-level certificate in Post-Secondary Developmental Education. (It was in one of those courses where I first started this blog.) In one of those courses I wrote a paper on "Mainstreaming Basic Writers," and one of the primary features of ALP is mainstreaming.

Irony? Fate? Coincidence?

Stay tuned; I may post more as the year goes on.

Blogs for Bibs? ... Or ...?

In my English 1121 class right now, we are beginning work on our annotated bibliographies for our major argument paper. One option I'm giving is to compose the annotated bibliography using Microsoft Office's PowerPoint rather than the "traditional" Word document.

To give credit where credit is due, or at least some credit, since my idea is a bit different:

A fellow classmate of mine, last year, when I was on sabbatical and taking courses at the U of MN, was Kate Peterson, a librarian at the U of MN, did her final project on "new" annotated bibliographies. If I remember correctly, she advocated using blogs for this, with one blog post for each source; the blog post would contain both the bibliographic citation and the annotation.

If you are interested, please read Kate's blog post about her final project.

I really liked this idea--for many reasons, including the use of a popular digital writing tool in place of a more "traditional" tool--but since I'm not assigning blogs (yet?) in my writing courses, I went searching for a way to modify Kate's idea. PowerPoint came to mind, not only because it is another digital writing tool that we studied and practiced last year, but also because one of its slide choices, "Title and Content," seemed to lend itself well to how an annotated bibliography is set up. In addition, another slide choice, "Two Content," might lend itself well to doing a summary annotation on the left side and an evaluative annotation on the right side.

I can also see students perhaps uploading their PowerPoint bibliographies into something like SlideShare or SlideBoom or SlideRocket and "publishing" it on the web.

I'll report back on how this works out.

Book Recommendations & Practicing APA Style

Some people have been asking me what I've been reading in my UMN classes on my sabbatical, so here's a reading list for everyone, in APA style (for some reason, the preferred style in most education courses). I've just included the many books; there have been many, many more articles. If you're interested in the articles, let me know and I'll show them to you; I also have digital copies of nearly all of the articles, if you want one or more.

EngL 4722 / "Alphabet to Internet: History of Writing Technologies" (Spring 2009)

• Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
  
• Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy. London: Routledge.
• Tribble, E. B., & Trubek, A. (2003). Writing material: Readings from Plato to the digital age. New York: Longman.
• Zaid, G. (2003). So many books: Reading and publishing in an age of abundance. N. Wimmer (Trans.). Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books.

EdPA 5704 & EPsy 5451 / "College Students Today" (Spring 2009)

• Baxter Magolda, M. B. (2001). Making their own way: Narratives for transforming higher education to promote self-development. Sterling, VA: Stylus.
• Colby, A., Beaumont, E., et al. (2007). Educating for democracy: Preparing undergraduates for responsible political engagement. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
  
• Harper, S. R., & Quaye, S. J. (2009). Student engagement in higher education: Theoretical perspectives and practical approaches for diverse populations. New York: Routledge.
• Kuh, G. D., Kinzie, J., et al. (2005). Student success in college: Creating conditions that matter. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Levin, J. S. (2007). Nontraditional students and community colleges: The conflict of justice and neoliberalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CI 5330 & CI 5475 / "Teaching Digital Writing: Blogs, Wikis, Online Talk, Podcasting, and E-portfolios to Teach Writing" (Fall 2008)

• Beach, R., Anson, C., et al. (2009). Teaching writing using blogs, wikis, and other digital tools. New York: Columbia Teachers College Press. (?)
• Gardner, S., & Birley, S. (2008). Blogging for dummies (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
• Hendron, J. G. (2008). RSS for educators: Blogs, newsfeeds, podcasts, and wikis in the classroom. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.
  
• Morris, T., Tomasi, C., & Terra, E. (2008). Podcasting for dummies (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

CI 5410 / "Struggling Adolescent Readers" (Fall 2008)

• Schoenbach, R., Greenleaf, C., Cziko, C., & Hurwitz, L. (1999). Reading for understanding: A guide to improving reading in middle and high school classrooms: The Reading Apprenticeship guidebook. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass and WestEd.