Published: 09-08 2009
Title: Critical Thinking and Learning
Topic: Teaching

Interesting brief over at boing boing on a book called How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer.

Published: 07-11 2008
Title: program assessment
Topic: Teaching

have students write reflective essay on course goals, or outcomes, or an element of a rubric(?) in addition to reflection on individual pieces.

 assessment strips rhetorical context of composition from evaluation. writing is situated, assessment is acontextual.

 http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Bibs/Assessment.htm

Published: 11-16 2007
Title: Expert Novice
Topic: Teaching

From Made to Stick,Cihp Heath and Dan Heath. Random House, New York: 2007

Published: 10-25 2007
Title: Are the kids alright?
Topic: Teaching

I've come across a number of "articles" about the stupification of American youth, most riffing on the idea that if you eat garbage and play video games you will get fat, lazy, and stupid (a good example). They are all variations on the ancient topic of the dissipation of the youth. Tacitus has a nice example from 79 BC. The problem with this topic is the problem will all topics -- it is an unexamined assumption dressed in brilliant examples of specific instances that seem to prove the assumption valid. Here's the thing to remember about the topic. Every generation is suspicious of its youth because the youth will get everything in the end. And they may not wait. They also get to define what is good and smart and useful and their opposites. So whatever skills their upbringing imparts, no matter how different from the skills their parents were brought up to acquire, those skills will define the good and the bad and the indifferent. If the kids can't read, that will mean that reading won't matter. To people of my generation this is disturbing, but that's because reading is central the the concept of civilization that we were born into. The kids weren't born into that world. And while the world they will inherit was literate, they may not wait to remake it into something else before we are done with it. The kids aren't bad. They're just going to outlive us and get everything we are going to have to leave behind and that makes us, in our more tired moments, resentful and suspicious. Plato represents Socrates as having thought that the youth of his day were having their minds and their characters warped by contact with printed words, that literacy makes people arrogant and unteachable. Plato inhabited the topic of the dissipation of the youth better than perhaps anyone. The inevitable irony being of course that for the next 2000 years literacy played a big role in civilization. Maybe not so much anymore.  

Published: 05-15 2007
Title: How to write a literature review
Topic: Teaching

Some one at the Critical Thinking workshop asked about a unit on teaching literature reviews so I've gone looking for some preliminary links.

Two useful sites and quotations from them:

USC

At the USC site they devidie the topic into components:

2. Components

Similar to primary research, development of the literature review requires four stages:

• Problem formulation—which topic or field is being examined and what are its component issues?
• Literature search—finding materials relevant to the subject being explored
• Data evaluation—determining which literature makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the topic
• Analysis and interpretation—discussing the findings and conclusions of pertinent literature

Literature reviews should comprise the following elements:

• An overview of the subject, issue or theory under consideration, along with the objectives of the literature review
• Division of works under review into categories (e.g. those in support of a particular position, those against, and those offering alternative theses entirely)
• Explanation of how each work is similar to and how it varies from the others
• Conclusions as to which pieces are best considered in their argument, are most convincing of their opinions, and make the greatest contribution to the understanding and development of their area of research

Deakin University

At the Deakin site they list the purposes of a literature reivew as:

• to identify gaps in the literature
• to avoid reinventing the wheel (at the very least this will save time and it can stop you from making the same mistakes as others)
• to carry on from where others have already reached (reviewing the field allows you to build on the platform of existing knowledge and ideas)
• to identify other people working in the same fields (a researcher network is a valuable resource)
• to increase your breadth of knowledge of your subject area
• to identify seminal works in your area
• to provide the intellectual context for your own work, enabling you to position your project relative to other work
• to identify opposing views
• to put your work into perspective
• to demonstrate that you can access previous work in an area
• to identify information and ideas that may be relevant to your project
• to identify methods that could be relevant to your project

University of Toronto

Besides enlarging your knowledge about the topic, writing a literature review lets you gain and demonstrate skills in two areas:

1. information seeking: the ability to scan the literature efficiently, using manual or computerized methods, to identify a set of useful articles and books
2. critical appraisal: the ability to apply principles of analysis to identify unbiased and valid studies.

A literature review must do these things:

1. be organized around and related directly to the thesis or research question you are developing
2. synthesize results into a summary of what is and is not known
3. identify areas of controversy in the literature
4. formulate questions that need further research

Published: 01-04 2006
Title: Decling literacy rates
Topic: Teaching

An interesting piece over at insidehighereducation.com about a recent study that indicated that college graduates are less literate today than 10 years ago. (link). See also the report that caused the stir.(PDF-link)

Published: 12-20 2005
Title: Post Ph.D.
Topic: Teaching

There's an article worth sharing over at insidehighered.com called. "What They Don’t Teach You in Graduate School" by By Paul Gray and David E. Drew. (link)

Published: 02-06 2005
Title: Teaching VS Advertising
Topic: Teaching

I've not had a chance to read this blog closely, but it looks like an interesting space for teaching and persuading written by someone who has taught programming. The blog is called Crating Passionate Users (link)

Published: 09-22 2004
Title: Reading online
Topic: Teaching

Wired.com reports today that the publishing company Norton received 600,000 orders for a printed copy of the 9/11 Commission Report that could be obtained for free over the web. It seems, no surprise, that people are willing to pay for paper delivery rather than read online for free. (link) 

Published: 06-11 2004
Title: Site of the day
Topic: Teaching

While talking with some fellow teachers about casual internet based writing assignments we came up with the idea of the "site of the day" assignment, where each day a student get up in front of the class and shows off a site they found that they find interesting and then we talk about it.

The skeptics dictionary caught my eye for this reason, despite the blatant advertising (link).

Published: 10-01 2003
Title: HTML tutor
Topic: Teaching

That's overstating the case a bit, but having a window into which one can type and a window that displays the results automatically could be a good way to learn HTML and CSS because you can see how what you do gives you what you get.

 (link)

Published: 06-19 2003
Title: CafePress.com
Topic: Teaching

CafePress will put your logo on stuff and sell it over the internet (link). It's an amusing way to promote rhetcomp @ gsu.

Published: 06-19 2003
Title: WebHosting
Topic: Teaching

I've been thinking about getting a host reseller's account to make the digirhetoric classes easier to admin. (link) An alternative is to set up somthing on rhetcomp but the interface I've seen isn't very good.

Published: 05-28 2003
Title: Writing and technology
Topic: Teaching

From an article on the devaluing of software engineering as a field. In sum, making software used to be a guild craft, handed down from generation to generation, now anyone can do it and now one wants to pay for it. I personally don't feel the need to lament, but what I've quoted here makes sense to me and underscores where I want to take my teaching.

Dave Winer

Published: 05-06 2003
Title: Cant
Topic: Teaching

Here's a collection of contemporary adolecent cant (sp?) might be useful for a discussion fo style.