Below are two great resources for teaching. The first one is a link to "Ted Talks" which are "inspired talks by the world's leading thinkers." There are great to use as prompts for writing and/or class discussions.
http://www.ted.com/
The second resource is a link to finding almost any text that you would like to have your students read in digital format. It is called The Guttenberg Project and it contains thousands of free ebooks:
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:No_Cost_or_Freedom%3F
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Testing! Testing!
I shall return to this newfangled tool as soon as I can. What do you want to hear from me?
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Ahoy Mates!
That's Twitter, BTW. I don't see a flurry of activity on the Blog, so I'll start sotto voce. Jayne brings up a good point about documenting our sources, whether they be words or images. All of us (especially students) need to understand that we are taking part in a long-standing conversation where identifying the participants is important to our collective memory of being and time as marked by events that illumine our lives (ah-oh, sounds a bit Walter Cronkiteish).
We all borrow thought-forms all the time and sometimes the expectation is that we will be allusive and imitate others at will, to participate in the social play of language. But in more formal situations, we are called to document our sources because the stakes are higher (read intellectual property) and we need to acknowledge the nodes of meaning and change in the currents of thought--their origin, their disposition, their possibilities for disputation and contestation--and hence, we need a SOURCE. Students don't always see the difference; an IDEA is and idea, and it should go right here in my paper. How else in some cases are we to have authority?
That brings me to the multimodal instantiation of ideas. It has become the new AUTHORITY, the new prestige language that we all need to appropriate to be on the cutting edge of digital rhetoric, to reach the vast and not-so-vast host of other interlocutors who wish to be partners in creating, recirculating, and integrating ideas--in phatic and formal ways.
That's Twitter, BTW. I don't see a flurry of activity on the Blog, so I'll start sotto voce. Jayne brings up a good point about documenting our sources, whether they be words or images. All of us (especially students) need to understand that we are taking part in a long-standing conversation where identifying the participants is important to our collective memory of being and time as marked by events that illumine our lives (ah-oh, sounds a bit Walter Cronkiteish).
We all borrow thought-forms all the time and sometimes the expectation is that we will be allusive and imitate others at will, to participate in the social play of language. But in more formal situations, we are called to document our sources because the stakes are higher (read intellectual property) and we need to acknowledge the nodes of meaning and change in the currents of thought--their origin, their disposition, their possibilities for disputation and contestation--and hence, we need a SOURCE. Students don't always see the difference; an IDEA is and idea, and it should go right here in my paper. How else in some cases are we to have authority?
That brings me to the multimodal instantiation of ideas. It has become the new AUTHORITY, the new prestige language that we all need to appropriate to be on the cutting edge of digital rhetoric, to reach the vast and not-so-vast host of other interlocutors who wish to be partners in creating, recirculating, and integrating ideas--in phatic and formal ways.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Plagiarism????
I have been pondering the whole notion of plagiarism. When I taught Survey of American Lit. 1 & 2 online last year, I required my students to do "Multimedia Presentations." A majority of them uploaded a ton of information about a particular author, along with images, into Powerpoint slid shows and posted them. They were indignant when I accused them of Plagiarism and told them that they needed to document their souces, use in-text citations for all quotes, paraphrases, summaries, and images, and include a Works Cited page. Of course, all this had been explained on the Assignment Sheet under Course Documents, along with specific examples of Pp presentations from previous classes--which none of them had bothered to consult.
In my English 1120 classes, I also require them to use a parenthetical citation for any images they use in the body of their research paper and include a separate citation for the image on the Works Cited page.
Am I being too "old school" here? Nobody today said a word about citing the sources of images that we incorporate either into our course handouts or Powerpoint presentations?
In my English 1120 classes, I also require them to use a parenthetical citation for any images they use in the body of their research paper and include a separate citation for the image on the Works Cited page.
Am I being too "old school" here? Nobody today said a word about citing the sources of images that we incorporate either into our course handouts or Powerpoint presentations?
Friday, February 20, 2009
Today's Workshop
I found today's workshop activites very useful. I liked the poetry assignment very much, and I think my group found real value in searching for images that were representative of our interpretation of the poem. The assignment allowed us to be creative, and I enjoyed that.
More later!!
I'm pretty overwhelmed, but the trial by fire this morning was helpful. I am getting a little better at PowerPoint which is a big accomplishment for me. Hope that when I get back home to my iMac I can transfer some of these skills to it.
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