Gina Maranto's List: Orientation 2008

• • Where does Bauerlein get his data? You might ask students to do their own research by using something like RescueTime, and having several people they know do so, also, to see just how much time they spend reading online. http://www.rescuetime.com/
    You could also ask them to define reading--when they are looking at Facebook are they reading? Writing?
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• In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day.

• • Making writing "transparent" makes the old notion of "writing for an audience" real--but, obviously, there are dangers involved.
    Students need to understand that there are public and private blogs, and that public blogs can be read--and that blog content shows up in search engines. Just like social networking pages, content stays in caches, even if deleted, and can be accessed many years later. As with email, students should learn that blogs are public (even when access is supposedly restricted).
    
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• • If you're interested in having students work with political blogging that also filters in media and development, Ethan Zuckerman's "My Heart's in Accra" makes a great stop: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/bernard-woma-playing-dagara-bewaa-music/
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    Blogging helps encourage teen writing
  Survey reveals that student bloggers are more prolific and appreciate the value of writing more than their peers
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   "In real ways, blogging and other forms of virtual debate actually foster the very types of intellectual exchange, analysis, and argumentative writing that universities value," he wrote in an op-ed piece last August.

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• Indeed, evidence is starting to come in that suggests web 2.0 applications in particular help students learn key skills for both schoolroom and workplace. Take the Pew Internet and American Life Project, reported on in eNews, which revealed that teens who blog write more--and possibly more competently--than those who don't. - Gina Maranto on 2008-08-14

• "What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today," said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university's College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study.

• • Although SWoRD is shutting down, some of the resources on the site are still available. One key factor is that the team at Pittsburgh has done research showing that their peer editing technique leads to measurable improvements in student writing--both for the reviewers and the students being reviewed. The tutoria on how to give feedback is worth listening to.
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• SWoRD is a web-based reciprocal  peer review system. In less fancy terms, students turn their class  papers into SWoRD, which then assigns this paper to five or six  peers in the class. The peers grade the paper and give advice for  how to improve it. Students revise the paper and turn it back in  to SWoRD, which distributes the paper to the same peers for final  review.

  • Evaluations of SWoRD have shown that summary of the sort required in SWoRD peer review helps both the reviewer's and the writer's work to improve

• This may be less relevant for students than for you--it gives some basics of peer feedback - Gina Maranto on 2008-07-02

• • This could be a great tool for those working with visual rhetoric, asking students to use either voice or textual comments to comment on images.

• • Cayra is another opensource program for mindmapping. It is dynamic, meaning that items can be easily re-arranged by drop-and-drag. Students can add images, notes, and color coding.
• lets you represent tasks, ideas, concepts and other items in a graphic, well-structured way

  • There are a number of good videos on YouTube about mindmapping. One example of the sort of assignment you might give involves summarizing a public lecture. See, for example, this reprise of Steve Jobs's commencement lecture at Stanford:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul4eI0bQccQ&feature=related

• • Note that Lee LeFever has a whole series of videos on Web 2.0. A great assignment using social bookmarking is to ask students to clarify essential concepts regarding writing by assembling resources on a single del.icio.us site--for example, on peer editing, or on making solid transitions, or informal citations.

• • Before students start tagging, you may want to have them find resources on how to tag most effectively.

• • google's Blogger has a very simple interface that is customizable with skins. It has easy RSS feeds, which allows you to monitor student posts very easily. It's simpler to use than WordPress. Students have to sign up for gmail, but they don't have to use the email account to gain access to the other google features, including Blogger.

• • Technorati is an aggregator that has digg-like features, in that stories are marked by readers, then ranked according to the number of recommendations. In addition, it provides lists of blogs that contain reaction to items that are marked; and allows for searches of the blogosphere.