Introducing Bubbl.us

Here's my BUBBL.US version of the clustering/mapping that I did on the classroom whiteboard on Monday. I'm brainstorming here about the reading and writing classes I remember taking from my 9th grade year in high school through my first 2 college writing classes. Here's the link. And here's the embedded version.

eFolioMinnesota: An Emerging Assignment

For my Fall 2010 ENGL 0950 classes, we will be exploring the potential uses of eFolioMinnesota, along with initial advantages and disadvantages.

We will consider the use of eFolioMinnesota in our particular class, along with use after this class has ended.

We will also consider comparisons to other digital "tools" or "products" that might be used for portfolios, such as blogs (e.g., Blogger), MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

For now, however, here are some of the most important links:

eFolioMinnesota

Minnesota Satellite and Technology (MnSAT)

Dr. Helen Barrett's Home Page

The REFLECT Initiative

An Initial Tutorial at YouTube



More later!

More Education Videos

Here are two more videos that I might use for my writing classes--for discussion and/or for research.

The first is about a professor supposedly smashing a student's laptop!



The second is about "Your First College Year." I found out about it in a book the ARCC faculty are reading in preparation for the 2010-11 academic year:

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future: Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30, by Mark Bauerlein (New York: Tarcher-Penguin, 2009, p. ___).

When I followed the link, however, there wasn't a video there. Here's another related link that actually appears to be the same page.
More later!

Online Glossary of Usage

Hello all!

I'm looking for recommendations for an online "Glossary of Usage."

Such a glossary is usually found near the end of a typical, printed writing handbook, and these books are usually used in a Freshman Writing (or First-Year Writing or Composition) course.

I, however, have abandoned these handbooks--for reasons I can write about later--and am using the MLA Handbook in my courses. The MLA Handbook, however, does NOT have a glossary of usage.

Any suggestions? Would the Purdue OWL have something like this? The St. Cloud State U. WritePlace?

Thanks!

In Cold Blood - Minnesota Monthly - January 2010 - Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota

Since I'm too busy and too cheap to actually subscribe to this magazine -- OK, all right, I did subscribe at one time, but . . . hmm -- I'm providing the link to a good article for my Minnesota Writers class at Anoka Ramsey Community College:

In Cold Blood - Minnesota Monthly - January 2010 - Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota

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.

A Possible Argument and Research Project

Here are three related videos:

A Vision of Students Today (12 Oct. 2007): A short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today -- how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.( This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. So you are welcome to download it, share it, even change it, just as long as you give me some credit and you don't sell it or use it to sell anything.)

Embedded:



A Vision of K-12 Students Today (28 Nov. 2007): This project was created to inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.

Embedded:



A Vision of Community College Students Today (29 June 2009): Inspired by mwesch's YouTube video, "A Vision of Students Today" . . . For more information on Sussex County Community College and its anthropology department please visit http://sussex.edu/

Embedded:



Here might be one more video to consider:

Shift Happens

Embedded:



Possible Assignments:

1.) Write a response to one of the videos:

• A personal response--how do your own experiences connect to the video? do your experiences further support, demonstrate, or illustrate ideas in the video? or, do your own experiences refute or contradict the video? etc.
• An analytical response--what is the purpose or intent of the video? who is the intended audience for the video? what rhetorical strategies are used in the video (ethos, pathos, logos)? etc.
• An argumentative or a persuasive response--do you agree with the ideas in one or more of the videos? do you disagree with the ideas in one or more of the videos? can you offer further support? can you offer counter-arguments? etc.
  

2.) Compare and contrast two of the videos

3.) Synthesize the main ideas in the videos

4.) Research

5.) Other