SOS 4 Teachers

Nancy Pogue LaTurner: Beginnings

2012-02-19T15:06:00.000-08:00

Nancy Pogue LaTurner: Beginnings: What will this new year bring? New writing projects, a return to my pottery studio, more flute music? In the spirit of my first book, Volu...

Gifted Children - Steve Jobs Advice - Parenting.com

2012-02-08T11:17:00.000-08:00

Gifted Children - Steve Jobs Advice - Parenting.com

Putting Football Rivalries Aside, Mayors Unite Against Illegal Guns

2012-02-06T16:41:00.000-08:00

Santa Fe, New Mexico - Town Square at Night, Capitol Building, Oldest Church

2012-02-03T18:45:00.000-08:00

Santa Fe, New Mexico - Town Square at Night, Capitol Building, Oldest Church

Progressive Buddhism: Everything Happens for a Reason? - Macro-Karma

2012-01-24T11:39:00.000-08:00

Progressive Buddhism: Everything Happens for a Reason? - Macro-Karma: I wanted to take a few moments to talk about karma, less in a sense for what it means to humans exclusively, but in a larger sense of‘ a ‘ma...

Roque Dalton, El Salvador's tragic revolutionary poet

2012-01-10T12:41:00.000-08:00

Roque Dalton, El Salvador's tragic revolutionary poet

Creativity & Life Coaching: Robert Genn talks about the importance of journali...

2012-01-06T12:15:00.000-08:00

Creativity & Life Coaching: Robert Genn talks about the importance of journali...: My little black book January 6, 2012 Dear Sherrie, Like many artists, I've gone through periods of writing down fleeting thoughts in a l...

When the World Outlawed War | Let's Try Democracy

2011-12-22T13:05:00.000-08:00

When the World Outlawed War | Let's Try Democracy

Colson Whitehead: How to Write and the Art of Writing

2011-10-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

Teaching Through The Arts: Comic Books and Chemistry: a Perfect Match!

2011-10-18T09:59:00.000-07:00

Teaching Through The Arts: Comic Books and Chemistry: a Perfect Match!: When I was in 8th grade my history teacher had us learn about economics through, of all things, a comic book, and now almost 40 years later,...

Kucinich Report, The FACTS on the Trade Agreements

2011-10-13T12:20:00.000-07:00

Kucinich Report, The FACTS on the Trade Agreements

2011-10-13T12:14:00.000-07:00

Teaching Through The Arts: Bring a Poem to Class that You Don't Understand

2011-09-10T19:39:00.000-07:00

Teaching Through The Arts: Bring a Poem to Class that You Don't Understand: I love this idea tweeted by Carol Jago, she writes, "Don't be afraid to bring a poem you don't understand to class. Model your own process f...

Teaching Through The Arts: Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity? from...

2011-09-10T11:40:00.000-07:00

Teaching Through The Arts: Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity? from...: Sir Ken Robinson says that Creativity is as important in education as literacy and should be treated with the same status on Ted.com. You re...

Teaching Through The Arts: Constructivism and Critical Pedagogy

2011-09-10T11:31:00.000-07:00

Teaching Through The Arts: Constructivism and Critical Pedagogy: While perusing the Critical Pedagogy on the web site, I came across this discussion of Constructivism and its ties with critical pedagogy. ...

Teaching Through The Arts: Comic Books and Chemistry: a Perfect Match!

2011-09-10T11:28:00.000-07:00

Common Sense vs. The World: Resetting the Debt

2011-08-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

Common Sense vs. The World: Resetting the Debt: " With the United States Credit Rating falling to AA, and the world market in almost continual crisis, there is panic around the globe tha..."

As Go Unions, So Goes The Middle Class | The Nation

2011-08-12T13:01:00.000-07:00

As Go Unions, So Goes The Middle Class | The Nation

Education Evolution

2011-08-12T12:37:00.000-07:00

Teacher Appreciation | Hotel Deals & Package Offers La Quinta Resort & Club

2011-08-11T18:45:00.000-07:00

Teacher Appreciation | Hotel Deals & Package Offers La Quinta Resort & Club

StudentsFirst.org - Michelle Rhee Answers Your Questions - Ask Michelle

2011-08-06T11:37:00.000-07:00

The George Carlin Clip Every American Needs To See

2011-07-19T11:24:00.000-07:00

The George Carlin Clip Every American Needs To See

Pass the People's Budget | Democrats.com

2011-07-15T12:38:00.000-07:00

Pass the People's Budget | Democrats.com

Event Detail - Hammer Museum

2011-07-02T14:19:00.000-07:00

Event Detail - Hammer Museum

Journalist, Author Roger Rosenblatt Outlines His 4 Reasons to Write

2011-06-27T11:19:00.000-07:00

Roger Rosenblatt Reads From 'Unless It Moves the Human Heart'

2011-06-27T11:17:00.000-07:00

Guest Post: Interview with Jerry Waxler on Memoir Writing | Write On~

2011-06-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

Guest Post: Interview with Jerry Waxler on Memoir Writing | Write On~

Dancing Jefferson Memorial, Take 2

2011-06-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

America Becoming an Idiocracy | Common Dreams

2011-05-25T18:57:00.000-07:00

America Becoming an Idiocracy | Common Dreams

Today’s disaster death tolls are falling - U.N. report - AlertNet

2011-05-25T13:09:00.000-07:00

Today’s disaster death tolls are falling - U.N. report - AlertNet

http://www.thenation.com/blog/160084/ten-protest-songs-matter

2011-04-22T13:39:00.000-07:00

http://www.thenation.com/blog/160084/ten-protest-songs-matter

Are You a Writer?

2011-04-09T09:38:00.000-07:00

Are You a Writer?
by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

People ask me about writing all the time. How does it work? How can they get their message out to the world? On the recent Hay House I Can Do It cruise, I spoke to the Writer’s Workshop which was one of the programs given on the ship. What a great group of eager, empowered, and energetic people! I told them that it all hinges on what Abraham Maslow taught me many years ago when I was a young doctoral student. He told me to put forth what I wanted, my work, my message, and then detach from the outcome. This is true for any life work because the work itself must be what is satisfying and fulfilling for you. Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow. If you incarnated to be a writer, if that is your passionate calling, then you’ll be getting messages from Source, from Spirit, leading you in that direction.

If you are thinking these thoughts and being guided to write, remember that you incarnated to be a writer, not necessarily an editor. Your first job is to write and not to apply a critical eye to your work without first letting it pour forth. Writing is like anything else—the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right. After my four decades of writing, I have a practice that works beautifully for me. I just let the ideas flow through my heart. I don’t write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper which is what is most comfortable for me. I just let it flow, and I have a wonderful editor who’s been with me for 32 years. I let her take care of all the details.

To get started, forget the details and let your ideas come out on paper. Get your passion on the paper. Let the passion that you feel come through. You won’t be able to stop and it will be the best writing you ever did. Detach from the outcome. Forget about whether it’s going to get published, whether it’s good or not good, whether it’s the right thing. There is no right in this. Let it come; be an instrument of flow. It’s the practice that makes it work out. If you told me you had a lousy backhand in tennis, wouldn’t I tell you to go out and hit 1000 backhand shots this week? Keep doing what you love to the best of your ability. Stop judging and get out of your own way. I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn’t something I do, writing is something that I am. I am writing—it’s just an expression of me. Is that how it is for you?

The Power of Words

2011-04-06T14:27:00.000-07:00

SOAW April Action Days: Hungry for Justice, Starving for Change

2011-04-06T11:41:00.000-07:00

Dear Woman

2011-04-04T10:49:00.000-07:00

Resist Militarization! Create a Culture of Justice and Peace!

2011-03-29T14:02:00.000-07:00

Not One Dime for Libya | Democrats.com

2011-03-23T07:27:00.000-07:00

Not One Dime for Libya | Democrats.com

Governor Brown Checks In With the People of California 3.21.2011

2011-03-22T15:22:00.000-07:00

Take Action » Food & Water Watch

2011-03-22T12:38:00.000-07:00

Take Action » Food & Water Watch

Cherry Blossom Memories: Editing memoirs: Are any memories too trivial?

2011-03-22T10:22:00.000-07:00

Cherry Blossom Memories: Editing memoirs: Are any memories too trivial?: "This question came up on the Life Writers’ Forum Yahoo group lately about editing out memories. A few of us answered that it depends on the ..."

Cherry Blossom Memories: Black History Month and The Warmth of Other Suns

2011-03-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

Cherry Blossom Memories: Black History Month and The Warmth of Other Suns: "It happens to be Black History Month, and I happened to read a little book called Suitcase Full of Dreams, a memoir of a girl growing up in ..."

Cherry Blossom Memories: Joyce Carol Oates and the healing memoir

2011-03-22T10:17:00.000-07:00

Cherry Blossom Memories: Joyce Carol Oates and the healing memoir: "Joyce Carol Oates was in town last week to talk about her memoir, Widow’s Story. Her hand was probably still tingling from shaking hand..."

The Heart and Craft of Life Writing: Desiderata

2011-03-20T18:02:00.000-07:00

The Heart and Craft of Life Writing: Desiderata

Message from Niigata

2011-03-20T16:23:00.000-07:00

Message from Niigata

One Power Video

2011-03-15T11:09:00.000-07:00

Manha Do Carnaval - Sungha Jung

2011-03-13T19:13:00.000-07:00

Antonia Juhasz on How Big Oil Wields Political Influence

2011-03-10T14:13:00.000-08:00

First 7 minutes of Return to El Salvador

2011-03-09T11:39:00.000-08:00

Michael Moore on Wealthy People's Money: "That's a National Resource"

2011-03-07T15:54:00.000-08:00

The Right to Write

2011-02-24T11:09:00.000-08:00

The Right to Write

Roque Dalton - Usufructuandome Los Canones

2011-02-20T12:13:00.000-08:00

Lisa Gerrard & Pieter Bourke "Sacrifice" & Igor Mitoraj

2011-02-17T12:08:00.000-08:00

Feeding America PSA with Ben Affleck

2011-02-15T11:19:00.000-08:00

The Sun Magazine | Throwing Away The Key

2011-02-11T11:42:00.000-08:00

The Sun Magazine | Throwing Away The Key

A Tea Party Foreign Policy - By Ron Paul | Foreign Policy

2011-01-23T13:38:00.000-08:00

A Tea Party Foreign Policy - By Ron Paul | Foreign Policy

Palabras para Julia - Paco Ibañez.

2011-01-18T14:08:00.000-08:00

Create Jobs Now | Democrats.com

2011-01-18T12:22:00.000-08:00

Create Jobs Now | Democrats.com

Kevin Bacon & SixDegrees.org Invite Change.org Members

2010-11-18T18:13:00.000-08:00

US Financial Aid to Israel - (Occupation 101 Movie Clip)

2010-11-10T15:27:00.000-08:00

Married at Age 12

2010-11-04T14:20:00.000-07:00

Counter

2010-10-31T21:38:00.001-07:00

How to create new market opportunities

The Sun Magazine | Brewing Up Trouble

2010-10-31T16:26:00.000-07:00

The Sun Magazine | Brewing Up Trouble

The Sun Magazine | Rise Like Lions: The Role Of Artists In A Time Of War

2010-10-31T16:25:00.000-07:00

The Sun Magazine | Rise Like Lions: The Role Of Artists In A Time Of War

Are You Ready for the Write Nonfiction in November Challenge?

2010-10-31T14:52:00.000-07:00

Are You Ready for the Write Nonfiction in November Challenge?

Children Full of Life (1 of 5)

2010-10-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

Wisdom Trailer - Wisdom Book by Andrew Zuckerman

2010-10-29T16:09:00.000-07:00

Reuniting America-What Unites Us as Americans?

2010-10-29T16:05:00.000-07:00

Generosity and the Vote

2010-10-15T17:37:00.000-07:00

Generosity and the Vote

Mechai Viravaidya: How Mr. Condom made Thailand a better place | Video on TED.com

2010-10-07T16:02:00.000-07:00

Mechai Viravaidya: How Mr. Condom made Thailand a better place | Video on TED.com

President Obama Attends Ministerial Meeting on Sudan

2010-10-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

The Horacio Castellanos Moya Interview

2010-09-26T13:42:00.000-07:00

The Horacio Castellanos Moya Interview

Lilly Ledbetter Video - I Am Not WorthLess

2010-09-20T13:33:00.000-07:00

President Obama Declares September to be National Child Obesity Awareness Month | Savor The Book

2010-09-10T12:09:00.000-07:00

President Obama Declares September to be National Child Obesity Awareness Month | Savor The Book

Programme 2010 - World Water Week

2010-09-07T20:27:00.000-07:00

Programme 2010 - World Water Week

Vince Vance's Musical Video Called I am New Orleans

2010-08-30T19:11:00.000-07:00

Far as I'm concerned, this IS educational!
Peace, Sherrie

Target Ain't People

2010-08-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

Now this is real ART that makes a difference!
Democracy In Action!!!

Imagine Live - John Lennon - 72

2010-08-13T18:21:00.000-07:00

This IS HISTORY!!

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 – Plog Photo Blog

2010-08-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 – Plog Photo Blog

5 More Memoir Book Reviews

2010-08-10T11:56:00.000-07:00

5 More Memoir Book Reviews

Teaching Through The Arts: Critical Pedagogy: Paulo Freire and the Banking Th...

2010-07-26T12:41:00.000-07:00

Teaching Through The Arts: Critical Pedagogy: Paulo Freire and the Banking Th...: "Paulo Freire's Banking Theory of Education positions students as empty vessels to be filled by the teacher. ..."

Teaching Through The Arts: Constructivism and Critical Pedagogy

2010-07-26T12:39:00.000-07:00

Teaching Through The Arts: Constructivism and Critical Pedagogy: "While perusing the Critical Pedagogy on the web site, I came across this discussion of Constructivism and its ties with critical pedagogy. I..."

Teaching Through The Arts: "We are standardizing our kids to fit the test" -S...

2010-07-26T12:37:00.000-07:00

Teaching Through The Arts: "We are standardizing our kids to fit the test" -S...: "Sir Ken Robinson elaborates on many of his earlier points in this conversation at Penn State with Patty Satalia. Many things resonate with m..."

Johnny Cash - Man in Black [A Tribute to Mr. Cash]

2010-07-06T19:43:00.000-07:00

Normally, I don't post stuff like this, but this would be a great song to include in a lesson on the social justice movement.

RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism

2010-07-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

What the media ignored: 25,000 peacefully demonstrate against G20 polici...

2010-06-27T16:28:00.000-07:00

What The Pittsburgh G-20 Riots will Look like...

2010-06-26T15:01:00.000-07:00

Traci Gardner "10 Things to Read This Summer

2010-06-01T12:39:00.000-07:00

Ten Things You’ll Want To Read This Summer

Whether summer means time to read for fun or to prepare for teaching in the Fall, I bet you’re beginning to gather that reading list.

You probably know where to find details on the year’s award-winning children’s and teen books. You can always check the NCTE Online Store for the newest pedagogical books and some great bestsellers. And I bet you plan to spend some time this summer digging into the constantly expanding resources on the ReadWriteThink site.

Maybe you’re looking for something new though. How about some online resources to explore? Here are some great sites you’ll want to read and explore this summer:

The Goddess of YA Literature
Blogger Teri Lesesne posts excellent reviews of young adult novels regularly. You can keep up with the newest books as well as find titles to add to your reading list. Be sure to check out her Picture Book Monday category for fast recommendations on books you can use with students from kindergarten to college. Looking for more blogs? Try YA Books Central Blog, Abby the Librarian and Charlotte's Web.
Profhacker
Just settling into its new home with The Chronicle of Higher Ed, this must-read blog shares “tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.” Recent entries have explored Effective Summer Planning and Modeling Civility and Use of Evidence in the Classroom.
TEDTalks
Spend some time viewing videos of the wonderful conversations that are part of the TED program. Any of the videos is bound to get you thinking, but be sure to look for useful “Ideas Worth Spreading” in those tagged Education, Writing, and Literature.
inkpop: The Online Community of Rising Stars in Teen Lit
Want to read young adult texts so fresh they aren’t even on paper yet? This HarperCollins site always has five texts available for reading and commentary. Meant to supplement the publisher’s submissions process, the site also gives teens and teachers access to the freshest drafts out there.
Text Messages: Recommendations for Adolescent Readers
Listen to this monthly ReadWriteThink podcast for recommendations on great books you can share with young adult readers. The most recent episode focuses on New Voices in Young Adult Literature.
Chatting About Books: Recommendations for Young Readers
ReadWriteThink’s monthly podcast on children’s literature for ages 4 through 11 discusses resources related to a specific theme and includes suggestions for related activities. Check out Shiver Me Timbers: Books About Pirates or Chapter Book Series Worth Starting for some great reads.
One Book, One Twitter (1B1T)
Based on the Big Read projects, 1B1T is connecting readers across the Internet. There’s a School Library Journal article that explains the project in more details. To see it in action, check the community discussion now going on about Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. It’s a great demonstration of how online tools can bring readers together!
The Daily Riff
Looking for a new approach to educational news? The Daily Riff promises to “‘sniff and sift’ through our edu-culture, ‘curating’ news and opinion in quick, digest-sized take-aways for you to use and share.” You may not agree with everything you read, but you’ll find some provocative (and cool) stuff.
Edutopia
Check in on the work of the George Lucas Educational Foundation for inspiring classroom success stories, educator blogs, and special reports. Try the Magazine link for new resources each month. Right now, you can read about College Applications and Improving School Communication with Google.
National Gallery of Writing
Get lost for a while reading the submissions in the gallery exhibits. Browse the galleries or search for something specific. Either way, there are some excellent texts waiting to be read!

Posted by Traci Gardner

Tim Rue on Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers

2010-06-01T11:55:00.001-07:00

Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers

Tim Rue for The Chronicle

As a student at Stanford University, Mark Otuteye wrote in any medium he could find. He wrote blog posts, slam poetry, to-do lists, teaching guides, e-mail and Facebook messages, diary entries, short stories. He wrote a poem in computer code, and he wrote a computer program that helped him catalog all the things he had written.

But Mr. Otuteye hated writing academic papers. Although he had vague dreams of becoming an English professor, he saw academic writing as a "soulless exercise" that felt like "jumping through hoops." When given a writing assignment in class, he says, he would usually adopt a personal tone and more or less ignore the prompt.

"I got away with it," says Mr. Otuteye, who graduated from Stanford in 2006. "Most of the time."

The rise of online media has helped raise a new generation of college students who write far more, and in more-diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both for the future of students' writing and for the college curriculum.

Some scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands.

A new generation of longitudinal studies, which track large numbers of students over several years, is attempting to settle this argument. The "Stanford Study of Writing," a five-year study of the writing lives of Stanford students —including Mr. Otuteye —is probably the most extensive to date.

In a shorter project, undergraduates in a first-year writing class at Michigan State University were asked to keep a diary of the writing they did in any environment, whether blogging, text messaging, or gaming. For each act of writing over a two-week period, they recorded the time, genre, audience, location, and purpose of their writing.

"What was interesting to us was how small a percentage of the total writing the school writing was," says Jeffrey T. Grabill, the study's lead author, who is director of the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center at Michigan State. In the diaries and in follow-up interviews, he says, students often described their social, out-of-class writing as more persistent and meaningful to them than their in-class work was.

"Digital technologies, computer networks, the Web —all of those things have led to an explosion in writing," Mr. Grabill says. "People write more now than ever. In order to interact on the Web, you have to write."

Kathleen Blake Yancey, a professor of English at Florida State University and a former president of the National Council of Teachers of English, calls the current period "the age of composition" because, she says, new technologies are driving a greater number of people to compose with words and other media than ever before.

"This is a new kind of composing because it's so variegated and because it's so intentionally social," Ms. Yancey says. Although universities may not consider social communication as proper writing, it still has a strong influence on how students learn to write, she says. "We ignore it at our own peril."

But some scholars argue that students should adapt their writing habits to their college course work, not the other way around. Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, cites the reading and writing scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which have remained fairly flat for decades. It is a paradox, he says: "Why is it that with young people reading and writing more words than ever before in human history, we find no gains in reading and writing scores?"

The Right Writing
Determining how students develop as writers, and why they improve or not, is difficult. Analyzing a large enough sample of students to reach general conclusions about how the spread of new technologies affects the writing process, scholars say, is a monumental challenge.

The sheer amount of information that is relevant to a student's writing development is daunting and difficult to collect: formal and informal writing, scraps of notes and diagrams, personal histories, and fleeting conversations and thoughts that never make it onto the printed page.

The Stanford study is trying to collect as much of that material as possible. Starting in 2001, researchers at the university began collecting extensive writing samples from 189 students, roughly 12 percent of the freshman class. Students were given access to a database where they could upload copies of their work, and some were interviewed annually about their writing experiences. By 2006 researchers had amassed nearly 14,000 pieces of writing.

Students in the study "almost always" had more enthusiasm for the writing they were doing outside of class than for their academic work, says Andrea A. Lunsford, the study's director. Mr. Otuteye submitted about 700 pieces of writing and became the study's most prolific contributor.

The report's authors say they included nonacademic work to better investigate the links between academic and nonacademic writing in students' writing development. One of the largest existing longitudinal studies of student writing, which started at Harvard University in the late 1990s, limited its sample to academic writing, which prevented researchers from drawing direct conclusions about that done outside of class.

In looking at students' out-of-class writing, the Stanford researchers say they found several traits that were distinct from in-class work. Not surprisingly, the writing was self-directed; it was often used to connect with peers, as in social networks; and it usually had a broader audience.

The writing was also often associated with accomplishing an immediate, concrete goal, such as organizing a group of people or accomplishing a political end, says Paul M. Rogers, one of the study's authors. The immediacy might help explain why students stayed so engaged, he says. "When you talked to them about their out-of-class writing, they would talk about writing to coordinate out-of-class activity," says Mr. Rogers, an assistant professor of English at George Mason University. "A lot of them were a lot more conscious of the effect their writing was having on other people."

Mr. Rogers believes from interviews with students that the data in the study will help show that students routinely learn the basics of writing concepts wherever they write the most. For instance, he says, students who compose messages for an audience of their peers on a social-networking Web site were forced to be acutely aware of issues like audience, tone, and voice.

"The out-of-class writing actually made them more conscious of the things writing teachers want them to think about," the professor says.

Mr. Otuteye, who recently started a company that develops Web applications, says he paid close attention to the writing skills of his peers at Stanford as the co-founder of a poetry slam. It was the students who took their out-of-class writing seriously who made the most progress, he says. "Everybody was writing in class, but the people who were writing out of and inside of class, that was sort of critical to accelerating their growth as writers."

Although analysis of the Stanford study is still at an early stage, other scholars say they would like to start similar studies. At the University of California, several writing researchers say they are trying to get financial support for a longitudinal study of 300 students on the campuses in Irvine, Santa Barbara, and Davis.

Curricular Implications
The implications of the change in students' writing habits for writing and literature curricula are up for debate. Much of the argument turns on whether online writing should be seen as a welcome new direction or a harmful distraction.

Mr. Grabill, from Michigan State, says college writing instruction should have two goals: to help students become better academic writers, and to help them become better writers in the outside world. The second, broader goal is often lost, he says, either because it is seen as not the college's responsibility, or because it seems unnecessary.

"The unstated assumption there is that if you can write a good essay for your literature professor, you can write anything," Mr. Grabill says. "That's utter nonsense."

The writing done outside of class is, in some ways, the opposite of a traditional academic paper, he says. Much out-of-class writing, he says, is for a broad audience instead of a single professor, tries to solve real-world problems rather than accomplish academic goals, and resembles a conversation more than an argument.

Rather than being seen as an impoverished, secondary form, online writing should be seen as "the new normal," he says, and treated in the curriculum as such: "The writing that students do in their lives is a tremendous resource."

Ms. Yancey, at Florida State, says out-of-class writing can be used in a classroom setting to help students draw connections among disparate types of writing. In one exercise she uses, students are asked to trace the spread of a claim from an academic journal to less prestigious forms of media, like magazines and newspapers, in order to see how arguments are diluted. In another, students are asked to pursue the answer to a research question using only blogs, and to create a map showing how they know if certain information is trustworthy or not.

The idea, she says, is to avoid creating a "fire wall" between in-class and out-of-class writing.

"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."

Writing in electronic media probably does benefit struggling students in a rudimentary way, says Emory's Mr. Bauerlein, because they are at least forced to string sentences together: "For those kids who wouldn't be writing any words anyway, that's going to improve their very low-level skills."

But he spends more of his time correcting, not integrating, the writing habits that students pick up outside of class. The students in his English courses often turn in papers that are "stylistically impoverished," and the Internet is partly to blame, he says. Writing for one's peers online, he says, encourages the kind of quick, unfocused thought that results in a scarcity of coherent sentences and a limited vocabulary.

"When you are writing so much to your peers, you're writing to other 17-year-olds, so your vocabulary is going to be the conventional vocabulary of the 17-year-old idiom," Mr. Bauerlein says.

Students must be taught to home in on the words they write and to resist the tendency to move quickly from sentence to sentence, he says. Writing scholars, too, should temper their enthusiasm for new technologies before they have fully understood the implications, he says. Claims that new forms of writing should take a greater prominence in the curriculum, he says, are premature.

"The sweeping nature of their pronouncements to me is either grandiose or flatulent, or you could say that this is a little irresponsible to be pushing for practices so hard that are so new," Mr. Bauerlein says. "We don't know what the implications of these things will be. Slow down!"

Deborah Brandt, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies the recent history of reading and writing, says the growth of writing online should be seen as part of a broader cultural shift toward mass authorship. Some of the resistance to a more writing-centered curriculum, she says, is based on the view that writing without reading can be dangerous because students will be untethered to previous thought, and reading levels will decline.

But that view, she says, is "being challenged by the literacy of young people, which is being developed primarily by their writing. They're going to be reading, but they're going to be reading to write, and not to be shaped by what they read."

Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! | Video on TED.com

2010-05-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! | Video on TED.com

Imagine- John Lennon(Lyrics)

2010-05-11T18:17:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks | Video on TED.com

2010-05-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks | Video on TED.com

How to repair the world (Narrated by Stephen Fry)

2010-05-02T16:08:00.000-07:00

Lesson Plan - Family Memoir

2010-04-27T15:48:00.000-07:00

Lesson Plan by Ellen Greenblatt
Family Memoir: Getting Acquainted With Generations Before Us
Grades 9 – 12
Lesson Plan Type Unit
Estimated Time Nine 50-minute sessions
Lesson Author Ellen Greenblatt

San Francisco, California

Publisher

Preview Standards Resources & Preparation Instructional Plan Related Resources Comments

Overview

Featured Resources

From Theory to Practice

OVERVIEW
After reading a short memoir and reviewing the genre, students choose how to create a memoir of a family member who is at least a generation older. Students first select a family member to interview, and then craft a set of interview. Students create written memoirs, focusing on one or two unifying themes, and can be presented as a photographic collage, a series of panels telling a story, a painting, a video, a musical composition, a sculpture, or another creative way. Students accompany their work with an artist’s journal, explaining why they have chosen the particular method of presentation and analyzing their own successes and shortcomings.

This lesson was developed as a companion for The Mystery of Love, a PBS documentary featured in the lesson. For additional information on the documentary and those who made it possible see The Mystery of Love Website.

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FEATURED RESOURCES
ReadWriteThink Notetaker: Using this online tool, students can organize, revise, and plan their writing, as well as take notes as they read and research.

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FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
Speaking of using memoir in the classroom, Katie Van Sluys states: "Through exploring personal histories and rendering these histories public through writing, memoir further connects the lived experiences of writers with their readers. In a classroom context, readers are often members of the writer’s class; hence these shared experiences speak to who the writer is and possibly wants to be in the classroom community." (179) In The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, Vivian Gornick, a gifted writer of personal narrative, discusses how important it is for a writer to create a persona. “The creation of such a persona,” she notes, “is vital in an essay or memoir. It is the instrument of illumination. Without it there is neither subject nor story. To achieve it, the writer of memoir or essay undergoes an apprenticeship as soul-searching as any undergone by novelist or poet; the twin struggle to know not only why one is speaking but who is speaking.” In this lesson students participate in such a journey as they identifying the unifying themes in their family interviews and compose their own memoirs.

Further Reading
Gornick, Vivian. 2002. The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. NY, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Van Sluys, Katie. "Writing and Identity Construction: A Young Author’s Life in Transition." Language Arts 80.3 (January 2003): 176-184.

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A Hippies Guide To The Laws of Attraction

2010-04-26T16:38:00.000-07:00

A Hippies Guide To The Laws of Attraction

NCTE asks "What Makes an Effective Teacher?"

2010-03-03T17:28:00.000-08:00

What Makes an Effective Teacher?
The federal government has begun discussions on how the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, currently known as No Child Left Behind) will look after the next reauthorization. One aspect of that discussion concerns teacher effectiveness (a new definition to replace the Teacher Quality definition in NCLB). Reports such as the one from the Center for Education Policy at Harvard and those of pundits such as Jay Matthews of The Washington Post have joined that conversation as well.

NCTE's 2010 Legislative Platform urges that federal policy define teacher effectiveness as professional practice that:

*Applies deep content knowledge
*Uses pedagogical strategies and assessment strategies to enable diverse students to meet learning goals
*Is characterized by continuous engagement in and application of professional learning
*Includes participation in teacher learning communities to plan, assess, and improve instruction
*Connects students' in-school and out-of-school learning
*Incorporates current technologies in learning and teaching
*Engages parents and community members as partners in educating students
*Uses evidence about student learning to improve instruction

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Bill Gates: the Most Important Climate Speech of the Year

2010-02-22T17:59:00.000-08:00

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Bill Gates: the Most Important Climate Speech of the Year

¡Presente! - Graphic History of the Honduran Coup

2010-02-11T18:59:00.000-08:00

¡Presente! - Graphic History of the Honduran Coup

School in Ruins, Haitian Filmmakers Get to Work - Sphere News

2010-01-15T17:01:00.000-08:00

School in Ruins, Haitian Filmmakers Get to Work - Sphere News

http://support.edf.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=7801.0

2010-01-08T11:55:00.000-08:00

http://support.edf.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=7801.0

'Avatar': Fun Fantasy or Political Statement? - Inside Movies

2009-12-23T18:36:00.000-08:00

'Avatar': Fun Fantasy or Political Statement? - Inside Movies