it makes class time bearable. "The findings showed that multitasking often gave the students an emotional boost, even when it hurt their cognitive functions, such as studying."

From the originator of #fuckyouwashington, which created a minor hashblurp. Some thoughts on how the tag functions socially.

one for first-year comp in design of the argument.

Short post that will be good to critique in A&E. Lovely little half-truths, gross generalizations, even some bullet-proofing of arguments - all make it attractive to buy into, but weak and in the end, nothing new. Can also come at this from a distortion of ethos: apparent practical wisdom that is built of unquestioned aphorisms and placebos. Can see it by asking if the ethos is open to an alternative. Mis-leading title: this is back focused, not future. Nothing new here. Summed up in: Yes, it's apparent in your writing that you learned very little in college.

less on critical thinking as a practice and more like 3 examples of skepticism. a starting point, but not an ending point. solid critical thinking would address her opening statement that the education system doesn't teach critical thinking. read it.

light-handed synopisis and essay on cognition a d action. Too glib? might be. "Fiction is stuff you know you’re making up, and memoir is stuff you don’t know you’re making up." that is.

Racism. sexism, misogyny: marketing. Spurious arguments even in context.

A quick commentary on decorum. Those krazy Palins.

The opening claim - "Children who spend much of their time online find it harder to concentrate in class, are permanently distracted and have shorter attention spans, researchers found." - turns out to be perceptions and beliefs by teachers. The article tells us more about misconceptions than what student are doing. Shame on Telegraph.

Freelancers. Make xtra $$ at home on your spare time. Paper pirates are pricey. Let's keep it that way.

Seems I've seen these 12 points before - can't recall where, but they are familiar. Anyway, brief, light-weight toss-off article homogenizes The Kids by working backwards from characteristics of some web interactions to characterizing the Coming Workers.

Businesses stay clear of ipad. Why? "All they care about is selling volume to pimply-faced teenagers looking for the next big thing. It is not in their business model and so it can't be in ours." Talk about a specious argument. I say, Fine. Keep ipads out of business. we spotty-faced pros do just fine without your tribe.

via techrhet Flash

via techrhet: Dead on intro to development of the western alphabet and writing.

Local boy plays Lynn Truss, gets on NPR. The problem with signage fascists is that you can never tell if they are being good-natured, or just dim and nasty. All that talk about writing wrongs and whiting-out sin and evil might be posing and bluster. This typo-boy is polite, at any rate.

The backstory

New media, used dangerously.

Gotta be a rhetorical move here.

Little bib on changing punctuation conventions, some of the speculation resting too much on ... um ... speculation. Leaves out Crystal and Baron. "All signs suggest punctuation is in flux. In particular, our signs that mark grammatical (and sometimes semantic) distinctions are waning, while those denoting tone and voice are waxing."

A brief look at how text that can circulate through the web creates more value than text locked in boxes- the problem starts when we're limited in what we can circulate, whether by lack of copy and paste or rights restrictions. Starts with commonplaces books as web snippets and rests the argument on that practice. "A single piece of information designed to flow through the entire ecosystem of news will create more value than a piece of information sealed up in a glass box." "When text is free to flow and combine, new forms of value are created, and the overall productivity of the system increases. " The

radical transparency.” In short, Kirkpatrick argues that Zuckerberg believes that people will be better off if they make themselves transparent. Not only that, society will be better off. (We’ll ignore the fact that Facebook’s purse strings may be better off too.) My encounters with Zuckerberg lead me to believe that he genuinely believes this, he genuinely believes that society will be better off if people make themselves transparent

TechCrunch meets Fortune and sparcs fly off the paper. The whole snafu is caused by an intern, that's clear. But it does dramatize the clash of currencies.

A list of tools and toys - sites and applications - for the very traditional way of teaching first-year comp. I wouldn't call this best practice so much local practice, and I don't see these so much as tools for learning as tools for teaching. Perhaps a counter-list is in order.

Readers using scrolling material had lower recall of information. More study necessary.

"We create tools and then we mold ourselves in their image." and other comments

Color and design don't persuade but make the mind receptive to an aspect of a message.

Light reading for FYC. Assignment: List five ways you could revise the menu to make even more profit - without alienating diners. Extra points for emerging with your ethos intact.

Map of visual processing centers of the brain, and extension of Ware's ideas. Why droodles are more satisfying than doodles.

Ah, back in the day.

A close and thorough look at three or four ways of analyzing and grouping students. Opens up a general critique of the method and those who base their assumptions and actions on the results. Valuable for FYC.

""There's this expectation that your No. 1 job is to pander to this exotic alien consumer," says Mr. Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. "At that point, you cease being a teacher and you are simply selling yourself to an audience that might not be interested in buying.""

says Mr. Vaidhyanathan. "Generational thinking is just a benign form of bigotry, in which you flatten out diversity. This is debilitating to the job of trying to work with young people."

"Some folks are using this as a template and a cookbook," Mr. Bonner says of Millennials descriptions. "It makes it very difficult to see and understand variations because people who don't fit the recipe may be viewed as outliers. That anesthetizes nuances."

Now that you’ve learned to use Twitter to communicate with friends and colleagues, it’s time to think about how to use it in the classroom.

Light-hearted consideration of Palin's speech patterns broken into phrases.

List of faculty at Marquette who are using twitter for classes and why. The usual reasons and uses. One warning to limit personal exchanges.

OV of the Stanford study, and the usual suspects comment on facility v quality.

ambient awareness. An ok entry article for FYC students. Deals with live twittering as a fundamental move / difference: "Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching. " Follow up with students twittering a class session for another group of students who aren't attending.

A history writing project at Richmond.

A new touchstone in online research. Readme

Brief teacherly article on creating and using a wikipedia-like set up in fyc.

Javascripts that check text on web or file.

A rough guide to Marino's Elit course ideas, and a table linking a work of elit with web 2.0 tools.

a facebook app: a dynamically generated graphic novel built on the Facebook platform. The work assembles a stream of images from Flickr that match certain tags and dynamically mixes them with original text in order to produce a perpetually changing narrative.

Brief article from a U Bucks lecturer to lighten up on commonly misspelled words.

CW presentation on using wikis in writing at Penn State. "students produce better work in a peer-reviewed environment". Find the same thing locally. Pity BSU couldn't move this direction.

Old hat for rhet/comp types - anecdotal, but a conversation starter. media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

Turning historical and social-science data into pictures could help scholars identify new patterns in old records,

Brief polemic on online publishing - It is impossible to be pro-book and anti-revolution -- the printed word is revolution incarnate,

Purdy and Walker look into how undergrads perform research for course work.

Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.

Most teens, 87 percent, use some kind of electronic personal communication. Yet 60 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds said they do not think of these forms of communication as “writing.”

It would be nice if all students wrote essays in their spare time, but Pew tells us that only 8 percent do. Nearly all of them, however, use text and instant messaging, so if the far shore turns out to be a chat room, then we should start teaching critica

An attempt to recontextualize what has been de-contextualized: After separating content from courses, we now seek to put them back together.

Even though SMS messaging may beat out other technologies in terms of popular appeal, it suffers from several disadvantages including inherent design problems, the opt-in process, character limits, and vulnerability to abuse.

the tacit epistemologies that underlie its activities differ dramatically from what I will call here the “Classical” perspective—the historic views of knowledge, expertise, and learning on which formal education is based. I

Brian Lamb on mashups - for art and for education - learning objects (RIP), conditions of acceptance, and "Educators and higher education decision-makers have an obligation to carefully and critically assess new technologies before making radical changes.

An extended and close debate on web 2.0, the values behind it, and the representation of it.

Captures and plays back composition in real time.

About projects capturing and playing back the writing process (micro level) in real time. Follow the link to Dlog and have a go.

Part of Stanford Web Cred Research. A table of 10 guidelines,

Draft of the most current WPA statement, with an emphasis on learning in context and multi-literacies - two aspects that College in the High Schools cannot address.

Interesting for its (ahem) use of Pachyderm new media authoring system. Essentially yet another repackaging / re-mediation of advice far removed from any particular situation. Focus is on stasis by way of discovering a paradox. The Flash media text is t

In the name of entertainment, the videos represent academic integrity as the demands of a bobble-headed school marm, while the i"real life" examples are from a nonsense paper and illustrate poor practices.