קטגוריה: כתיבה

Effective note-taking implies that a lot of thinking is done by the student to help him sort out the relevant from the irrelevant and to get the information into some organized and effective structure. A student will also be a very much more active learner if he makes his own notes. Independent learners need to be active learners, in fact they have to be pro-active about their learning.

I don't care how you take notes. Use the computer, like I did today. Use paper and ink, like I did at the collaboration workshop last week. … The main thing is, if you want to learn, take notes. Learning is not a passive act; it is an act of engagement, where you involve yourself physically and mentally, where you struggle to understand and integrate the material.

במשך השבועיים האחרונים, מיכאל פלדשטיין, בבלוג שלו e-Literate,

In the conversation over distributed learning environments, it is important to begin by recognizing that the question is not IF our learning environments can be or should be distributed but rather HOW. A professor teaching in a lecture hall back in the halcyon days before wireless connections or mobile phones still taught in a distributed learning environment.

That professor stood connected to an elaborate, non-local, distributed network of knowledge, materials, laborers, institutional polices, and social contracts that governed the relationship between professor and students and provided authority, context, and cultural value to what s/he said. Certainly a course operating in an institutional CMS is connected to a distributed network of technologies, standards, and protocols, as well as institutional budgets, bureaucracies, and practices. Students’ learning experiences are shaped by these distributed networks, and our pedagogies circulate through these networks.

Despite the perceived tech-savvy nature of these Millennials, this context challenges my students. My students are so trained by classrooms where all the connections are pre-made and the only risk is boredom that they are often frustrated when I don’t tell them exactly how to connect the things we are learning, as if the world were just a larger version of the screw-together furniture in their apartments. Of course they know the world is more complex than that; they just don’t expect their classes to reflect that complexity.

They felt that giving students access to bold, resizing, indenting, and COLORING of text would distract the students from the communication. Learners would spend more time playing with the look of their blog entries, and less time with the wording — and I think that this objection is well founded.

It’s ok if students turn a line in their blog to pink, as long as they can convincingly answer the question you ask nearly every day, “Why did you use pink for that line? How did that improve the communication of your ideas?”

When in the “real world” would students ever do writing where they didn’t have the option of text formatting?

understand that the look of words can add to meaning, impact, and understanding. They need to be able to know how to write well in this medium, at a very early age.

Ironically, the main problem I have with UStream is that it’s almost too easy to do, and therefore we’re bound to see a lot of pretty bad content coming across our screens. How do we get ourselves and our kids invested in a process that moves us all towards more “quality” in a traditional sense? Or should we even be worrying about that? Will the best content, the best uses bubble up? Should the traditional measures and standards apply, and, if so, to what extent?

What do we really mean by "community" when we think about virtual participation? We know from many studies that far more people "lurk" than respond … are lurkers part of a community?

For better or worse, authorship is my Cartesian cogito: I write therefore I think. I write therefore I feel. I write therefore I am. Blogging works for me.

I don't want to feel as if this marvelous "lurker" – someone who reads blogs, who spends much of her time on line, and who works so hard on behalf of our HASTAC community – is somehow not participating. In fact, the word "lurker" sounds like some nasty guy in a trenchcoat and with evil designs on his mind. Not so. The person who reads but does not contribute, who surfs but doesn't respond, may well be contributing emotional and mental energy in the same way that, sometimes, it is the quiet person in the back row who turns in the most brilliant paper at the end of the semester.

If you were not there (however silently), I would not be writing.

The panic about texting and its effects on language is totally misplaced.

It adds a new dimension, enriches language, gives you a new option.

People have always used abbreviations. … They do not actually use that many in texts but when they do they are using them in new, playful and imaginative ways that benefit literacy.

My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc.

תרגום, עבור מי שזקוק, נמצא במאמרון של פרידמן.

given that the real audience for such a mundane piece of work would probably be her friends, writing it in texting language seems to me to be completely appropriate from that point of view. Where she "failed" was in not recognising that, in order to demonstrate her writing ability to her teacher, she needed to use a form of expression that her teacher would understand.

For example, I've had great success occasionally using instant message conversations as a critical inquiry tool in the classroom. My students love the chance to use their social milieu as a space for learning.

Imagine 20 students in invisible groups of three, all silently, furiously typing and reading, immersed in conversations about the dialogues of Socrates or the teachings of Confucius. That classroom time is incredibly intellectually productive: all 20 students are simultaneously sharpening their arguments, supporting them with evidence, and questioning their colleagues.

… we can embrace the writing that students do every day, help them learn to use their social networking tools to create learning networks, and ultimately show them how the best elements of their informal communication can lead them to success in their formal writing.

This raises a major question: What, if anything, connects the formal writing teens do and the informal e-communication they exchange on digital screens? A considerable number of educators and children’s advocates worry that James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, was right when he recently suggested that young Americans’ electronic communication might be damaging “the basic unit of human thought – the sentence.” They are concerned that the quality of writing by young Americans is being degraded by their electronic communication, with its carefree spelling, lax punctuation and grammar, and its acronym shortcuts. Others wonder if this return to text-driven communication is instead inspiring new appreciation for writing among teens.

At the core, the digital age presents a paradox. Most teenagers spend a considerable amount of their life composing texts, but they do not think that a lot of the material they create electronically is real writing. The act of exchanging emails, instant messages, texts, and social network posts is communication that carries the same weight to teens as phone calls and between-class hallway greetings.

“I think this is not a worrying issue at all,” …

When e-mail shorthand – or for that matter, slang – appears in academic assignments, Professor Sterling said, it is an opportunity for teachers to explain that while such usages are acceptable in some contexts, they do not belong in schoolwork. And as the English language evolves, he said, some e-mail conventions, like starting sentences without a capital letter, may well become accepted practice.

“I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,” said Professor Sterling… In fact, he said, when his teenage son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.

There is a fundamental difference between brainstorming and publishing. We do our students a grave disservice if we lead them to believe that they are so precious that every thought they have or sentence they type is worthy of an audience. Kids are wonderful and it’s great that educators have the potential to network online, but unless a venue is specifically for the purposes of peer-editing or review, publishing should remain at the end of the creative process.

Rough drafts “published” online disrespect the audience the web so generously affords.

it’s about helping adults, kids, everyone being able to distinguish, “in draft” work from “this is my best”.

Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument.

It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have found that while Internet searches do bring up a variety of useful materials, people pay more attention to information that matches their pre-existing beliefs.

Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty. And so we tell ourselves simple stories to explain complex things we don't – and, most importantly, can't – know.