a brief plan

Are we dumbing down processes that ought to be difficult? valuing ease at the cost of growth? heard it before, but this is a sloghtly different angle: " The goal of design should be to turn the most difficult into the most enjoyable. While nothing below is particularly new, they are still worth noting." : "

Looks at some affordances in weblogs that enable "a new literacy practice characterised by what Lankshear and Knobel call an “active sociality” (2006: 1). This “active sociality” is exemplified by modes of participation and displays of identity and affiliation that mark it out as significantly different from other forms of textual communication."

Overview of recent studies and commentary on affects and position of online and extra-curricular writing. Ranges from "stylistically impoverished," to Yancey: "If we don't invite students to figure out the lessons they've learned from that writing outside of school and bring those inside of school, what will happen is only the very bright students" will do it themselves, Ms. Yancey says. "It's the rest of the population that we're worried about."

Draft in progress of a taxonomy to start making sense of what reading becomes online. Social practices from annotation to discussion boards to other alternatives.

Comment on Note taking cluster

A curated cluster media commons, considering how we take notes - the devices and the technques. #1 on my Instapaper list right now: That's a case where the note is the content. 

A modest prediction of more cultural catastrophe on the way. Too clever by half. But a good article for freshmen to read and say, 'meh.' Have a look at the comments.

Post on the accumulating research finding that net gen millenials is not a good discriminator of student knowledge of tech.

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

I'm trusting his exit strategy is better than his entrance strategy. He's not looking very far down the road - and the students will be short-changed when they enter university. "James Tracy, the headmaster of Cushing Academy, says that he sees books as an "outdated technology," and to that end, he's taken the drastic and expensive step of ridding the school's library of every single one of its books. Replacing the books will be a high tech "learning center," housing three flat screen televisions, laptops, 18 e-readers, and a coffee bar."

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.

R Beach at MCTE 2009. PPT OV of some web 2.0 moves in HS.

Paper persists owing to useful affordances. Easy review of a couple of books, c 2002.

Response to Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind: As a professor, I am in the constant company of 18- to-23-year-olds. I have taught at both public and private universities, and I have to report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technology varies greatly within every class. Yet it has not changed in the aggregate in more than 10 years.

Hard not to say ho hum once again. Over-generalizing, and assigning to e-reading the typical fare of too much skimming, etc. Agreed: Close reading of print is a good thing and absolutely necessary in lib ed. Now, can we move on? \\

So let's restrain the digitizing of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than that, given the tidal wave of technology in young people's lives, let's frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces. Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off.

Web Annotation Demo

This is a demonstration of Marginalia, my web annotation implementation.

efore blogs allowed people to offer comment on everything they read and tediously deconstruct arguments paragraph by paragraph for the world to see, people like Adams wrote witty remarks in the margins of their books. Lots of them.

Encountering books - Updike is talking about a certain kind of reading, the kind that is best suited to the sorts of things he writes: novels, short stories and criticism. But it would be a mistake to apply this as a universal principle for all books,

Projects and products that oscillate between digital and atoms, collaboration. digital / material mashups and re-mediations

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.

Transliteracy might provide a unifying perspective on what it means to be literate in the twenty–first century. It is not a new behavior but has only been identified as a working concept since the Internet generated new ways of thinking about human comm

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.

read me

I've seen just one too many times Frost's poem being quoted as hoorays for taking the rare and so heroic choice. It's not a poem about heroism or choice but about spin. Please

Books aren't dead. They're just gathering dust in the nooks and crannies of our libraries. Joe's latest look at the effects of changing literacies

Joe Moxley's latest effort in progress

IM and Facebook supplement email: instant and throwaway support teenage communication styles. Lorenz invents a generation gap.

RU Sirius starts with Clay Shirky on the spread of literacy, and a string of men (no women represented here) weigh in. The discussion's open.

"network literacy and how blogging is not simply keeping an electronic journal, it's distributed and collaborative; it's learning to think and write with the network. I'll also talk a bit about the ethics of insisting students blog in public."

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

Finally, FW goes on a wiki for global annotation

Chapters and sections as chunks of the hypertext called "book.: "a big part of the consumer market that book publishers have owned for 200 years want the nuggets, not a narrative" If books go the way of albums and chapers are singles, then tagging and a f

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.

Gorman goes back to the interplay of print = Authority and net does not. Good entry point to the main issues: "Print does not necessarily bestow authenticity, and an increasing number of digital resources do not, by themselves, reflect an increase in exp

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.

critique of the Chasing Crusoe multimedia presentation: squanders the opportunity to really develop the text. But it looks like the project is supposed to be a mass media story rather than a deep text.

JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF (application/pdf Object) Schools and afterschool programs must devote more attention to fostering what we call

The OED is using the internet corpus

Schwartz