Steve Krause responds to several articles about the impending death of higher education. I like this bit: "I think the days of printing on paper are numbered, sure. But words in a row– even when those words in a row are about multimodality or digital rhetoric or what have you– aren’t going anywhere."

Great resource from the University of Minnesota. Not much in the catalog right now, but it shows a lot of promise.

Odd article in the Chronicle about Michael Wesch, who apparently just discovered that technology alone is not enough to make a great class: "Mr. Wesch is not swearing off technology—he still believes you can teach well with YouTube and Twitter. But at a time when using more interactive tools to replace the lecture appears to be gaining widespread acceptance, he has a new message. It doesn't matter what method you use if you do not first focus on one intangible factor: the bond between professor and student."

Audrey Watters, in Inside Higher Ed: "But it's not just the Nineties that we need to think about. It's the Eighties, the Seventies, and the Sixties. See, education technology is hardly new. The idea of having technology change teaching and learning isn't some sort of revolutionary insight that folks have suddenly stumbled upon."

Inside Higher Ed: "With online gateways such as Google exerting a great deal of influence on how information is organized and presented, it is incumbent on humanities instructors to teach undergraduates how to read websites and digital discovery tools with the same critical vigilance with which they are taught to read textual arguments"

Caroline Lego Muñoz and Terri Towner, in First Monday: "[T]he purpose of this article is to examine the role of social networking in education and demonstrate how social network sites (SNS) can be used in a college classroom setting. To do this, existing research relating to SNS and education is discussed, and the primary advantages and disadvantages of using SNS in the classroom are explored. Most importantly, specific instructions and guidelines to follow when implementing SNS (i.e., Facebook) within the college classroom are provided."

Assembled by Bill Wolff, Rachael Sullivan, Julie Meloni, and Karl Stolley for a 2010 Computers & Writing workshop.

A great definition of digital literacy geared toward students: "On a broad level, digital literacy refers to the ability to find, navigate, evaluate, and participate in digital environments for a variety of purposes. Digital literacy also includes the ability to adapt to new digital technologies as they emerge, so what counts as a digitally literate person is continually evolving."

"As its primary focus, the course must cover current humanities research skills, corpora, and trends — both digital and archival or material. But it should also address issues like: intellectual property and open access; the intersection of scholarship with the public humanities; publishing, preservation, and scholarly communication; funding and material support for research and teaching; interdisciplinary collaboration; matters of credentialing and assessment (peer review, tenure and promotion), faculty self-governance; and the under-interrogated policies that cover and shape the humanities in the modern college and university."

John Jones tackles a tough question: "How do we prepare our students to write effectively in environments that don't yet exist?"

Kurt Schick, writing in the Chronicle: "Citation style remains the most arbitrary, formulaic, and prescriptive element of academic writing taught in American high schools and colleges. Now a sacred academic shibboleth, citation persists despite the incredibly high cost-benefit ratio of trying to teach students something they (and we should also) recognize as relatively useless to them as developing writers."

Nice article in the Atlantic debunking the notion of the "digital native": "Another set of issues stemming from the notions of 'digital native' is the lack of critical literacy. Since students of the Digital Age have not had to acclimate to this sweeping change from analog to digital and are assumed to possess some innate technological knowledge based solely on the year they were born, they don't necessarily have to acclimate to the sheer velocity of recent innovations."

Rob Jenkins offers some great advice to first-year composition students: "Writing is not a magical ability that some people just have and others just don’t. Writing is a skill, and like any other skill — playing the piano, learning a sport — it can be acquired through hard work and dedication. We’re not all going to write the Great American Novel, but anyone with at least average intelligence can learn to write reasonably well."

Thomas Bertonneau: "The research paper originated in the German universities in the nineteenth century, reflecting a bureaucratic concept of higher education in which faculty and student body alike performed largely clerical functions. The research paper entails deferential activity, through which the writer links up with the chain of academic diligence while cataloguing minute discrepancies of scholarly judgment."

An interesting roundtable in the New York Times: "If research papers — or dissertations, for that matter — were to become a thing of the past, what would we lose in our pursuit of knowledge? Is there a better way to assess knowledge?"

A brief overview of a new study from the Carnegie Foundation and the Alliance for Excellent Education. Among the findings: "Feedback on writing, including how well you were learning a particular writing strategy, had a large positive effect on improving student writing. When teachers monitor students' success on writing and adjust instruction accordingly, student writing gets better. When kids assess their own writing, their writing gets better."

"Students new to college-level reading can need guidance on how to read original source documents like journal articles. The rhetorical précis is a structured four-sentence paragraph designed to help students break down a reading into its essential components."

Alex Reid, on the grand enterprise known as first-year composition: "There is no definitive 'how to write.' In short, the goal of the course is to help students become better writers, but there is no definition of 'better,' there is no clear, general writing practice, and there is no set body of knowledge to impart."

Andy Selsberg, in the New York Times: "I’m not suggesting that colleges eliminate long writing projects from English courses, but maybe we should save them for the second semester. Rewarding concision first will encourage students to be economical and innovative with language."

Rob Jenkins, in the Chronicle: "It comes down to this: Either you can be a teacher or you can be the plagiarism police. I choose to be a teacher. As such, part of my job involves catching the occasional plagiarist. When that happens, I chalk one up for the good guys. Otherwise, I don't worry about it. I find that I'm much happier and more productive that way."

Alan Jacobs, writing in the Chronicle: "Yes, I know that the word 'school' derives from scholia, meaning leisure. I have tried that one on my students, with no more success than anyone else who has ever tried that one on students. When we say that education is a leisure activity, we simply mean that you can only pursue education if you are temporarily freed from the responsibility of providing yourself with food and shelter. Maybe this freedom comes from your parents; maybe it comes from loans that you're going to devote a good many years to repaying. But somebody is buying you time to read, think, and study."

A great resource for students: "In 'Punctuation Made Simple,' we discuss several of the most useful punctuation marks that you will use as a communicator. Instead of listing many rules, as a grammar book does, we discuss these various marks in general so that you can get a sense of how to use them in your own prose."

An incredibly depressing confirmation of what many of us suspect—that cheating among college students is widespread and basically unstoppable. Kudos to Panos Ipeirotis for writing this.

Diana Laufenberg, in the NY Times: "Infographics work in the classroom because they grab students and allow an entry point to learning — and because they sum up pages and pages, even chapters, of information that would take a reader hours to process."

Randy Krum: "With today’s flood of information, infographics allow readers to quickly digest and understand complex data. A good infographic will not only inform readers, but will also create interest and convince people to read your article similar to how good headlines and photos attract readers."

Sick of reading papers that your students are sick of writing? Here are a few interesting alternatives to the dreaded end-of-semester paper.

Some really cool assignments here. Also, I'm tempted to try the online textbook + Gentle's "Conversations and Community."

Very cool syllabus for Henry Jenkins's "Introduction to Communications Technologies" class at USC.

Another NY Times piece by Matt Richtel that chronicles the evils of technology: "Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning."

A bold claim from Anna Debenham, via Matt Thompson: "[W]eb education in too many schools—both at the high school and university level—is out of date, lousy, and losing students. So much so that it's threatening our countries' digital and economic futures."

A good list for students, from U.S. News & World Report.

"Educators should constantly be experimenting with new technologies and pedagogies, refining their learning approach to constantly changing contexts."

"It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version."

Possible teaching resource. "View more than 57,000 historic videos and 7 million photos for FREE in one of the world's largest collections of royalty-free archival stock footage. Offering immediate downloads in more than 10 formats starting at just $2.97 (Consumer); $40 (Pro)."

Brett Lunceford, writing in the American Communication Journal, describes his approach to teaching rhetorical theory to undergraduate students. "Rhetorical theory is essential instruction for civic life, so the ability to recognize or recall theory is not a sufficient goal for the course. Students must be able to retain and apply theory to their own experience."

"In graphic design, nothing is what it actually is. Everything other than content is representative of something else. Additionally, much of the content is also merely representative of something other than what it actually is."

Aaron Fulkerson, writing for Forbes, argues that good technical communication is essential to business success: "Ten years ago documentation was a cost center and it was woefully inadequate at customer support, because books don't get written anywhere close to the speed of code. Today it has taken on the role of a core business asset--a mechanism by which you can make vast amounts of money."

"Future employment for technical writers looks very bright, especially for those with strong Web and multimedia skills, according to estimates by the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

Newsweek reports on one bright spot in the job market: social media. "The proliferation of sites like Twitter and Facebook as marketing tools has led to a boom in social-media positions at just about any company with a Web presence."

Dave at AcademHack provides a step-by-step approach to using Twitter for a class.

"Jason Travis ... snaps hipster Atlantans along with the contents of their messenger bags, backpacks and clutches to determine 'what they deem important in their lives.' You are what you schlep."

True words from the Onion: "Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words."

100,000+ vintage advertisements, broken down by type of ad, brand name, etc.

Good advice from danah boyd: "[Your students] don't use del.icio.us or Second Life or Ning or Twitter as a part of their everyday practices. And the ways that they use Facebook and MySpace and YouTube are quite different than the ways in which you do."

More tips for pedagogical uses of Twitter. I'm still not sure what to think about this. Will formalizing Twitter use make it less fun for my students?

A nice list of tips and links for using Twitter in the classroom.

Visualization of debates on controversial topics. Interesting UI, and strong potential for classroom use.

Robert Lanham hits close to home: "Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t!"

Finally! A helpful list of tips for using multimedia artifacts in teaching and in student projects. Of course, nothing can stop someone from suing you and/or your university, but the long list of organizations and government agencies supporting these guidelines should provide some level of reassurance for nervous educators.

Leslie Jensen-Inman has created what seems to be (at first glance, anyway) an incredibly useful resource for web design instructors. Her methodology? "I interviewed thirty-two leaders in the fields of web design and development, each of them is acutely aware of the importance of formally educating the next generation of web designers and developers."

"The photographic dictionary is dedicated to defining words through the literal, figurative, and personal meanings found in each photograph." Lots of interesting ideas here. Classroom application?

"The essays in this volume explore the complex issues of originality, imitation, and plagiarism, particularly as they concern students, scholars, professional writers, and readers, while also addressing a range of related issues, including copyright conventions and the ownership of original work, the appropriate dissemination of innovative ideas, and the authority and role of the writer/author."

"The standardization of writing pedagogy and assessment doesn't just encourage formulaic teaching and writing; it creates a pyramid scheme with students and teachers at the bottom and corporations such as ETS at the top."

Nice sarcastic piece on plagiarism.

Useful for my English 302 students.

Cool archive of sounds from the Free Information Society.

Collection of charts and graphs in popular publications. Excellent resource for business and technical communication classes.

Visual symbols and their meanings; an excellent resource for a tech comm class.

A good list of recent ad campaigns that might be useful for an ad analysis unit in English 105.

Required reading for my students!

"Oh no! One of my students emailed me! How inconsiderate!"