Imagining the New Humanities

Here is a video from Richard E. Miller, the Chair of the Department of English at Rutgers, explaining his thinking about the shift to a new vision of the humanities and how that vision will be enacted through physical space at the university. It certainly suggests some of the changes that we will have to make in our thinking, especially at the universtiy level.

One particular element of this video that makes it compelling is his idea about the missing piece of the Wikipedia puzzle, and what universities have to offer students as they make their way in a read/write web world.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/z65V2yKOXxM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

OLPC: Helpful or Harmful?

Over the holiday break, there has been an interesting discussing on the TechRhet list about the OLPC initiative. Aaron Barlow has been leading the con side of the debate, and outlines the argument in his blog, here, and points to articles about failed development projects such as the one here; the pro side generally gives the opinion that we should at least be doing something, both at home and abroad, to close the digital divide.

One of the elements of the pro side of the argument comes from the idea that this is a program built on open-source ethos, and that makes it an honorable project, despite a history of failed development efforts. This is a valid point, yet I think I agree with Barlow’s point that we are still imposing our technological values on other cultures in that sense (having a word processor and other office tools installed, for instance).

What I find lacking from the conversation that would refute his point, however, is the explicitly constructionist approach that the OLPC team has taken in developing software and collaborative properties of the laptops. For instance, the OLPC News Page had a recent post about how the program is designed around constructivist principles, and teachers and students are reporting the benefits of collaboration, such as in Digital Planet‘s 12/21/07 story.

As I reflect on the ideas behind OLPC, and the fact that I donated in to the program for my children and children somewhere else in the world, I still feel that this was a worthwhile cause. I agree with Barlow’s main point — that western countries need to be conscious of what we “give” when we give aid. That said, I feel that we all need to be critical consumers of any technology given to (or purchased by) us, including the OLPC. I see this as the basic literacy issue involved — to what extent are the users of this, or any, technology able to compose their own thoughts with it? For the OLPC, I think that the options are wide open.

I look forward to continuing this discussion and exploring the potentials of the OLPC initiative, both with my own kids and in the larger educational communities that are forming around it. So far, we have figured out some of the basic options, individual and collaborative, in the writing, chat, browser, draw, and tamtamjam programs. More soon

Social Networks, School Policies, and Surveillance

My colleague Rob Rozema from GVSU has invited my students and I to participate in a new Ning social network, Teach English. I am very excited about the opportunity to be involved in this project, and we will also have students from Allen Webb‘s course at WMU join in, too.

As we consider what we will do with this network, I think that we have to ask ourselves a key question about its implementation and potential for use: how do we account for and respond to the contradiction in local, state, and federal policies regarding internet use (for instance, no blogging or social networking) and the call to teach these skills in our schools?

In other words, if we teach students how to use social networks, will they be able to use those skills once they are teaching?

Moreover, this raises another issue that my best friend Steve Tuckey and I were discussing a few weeks back — does taking a technology and reappropriating it for use in schools undermine the excitement and potential uses for that technology?

As an example, we talked about the idea of a “cheese sandwich blog,” one that tells basically accounts for the mundane happenings in everyday life. (If we build 20 million blogs, will the readers come?). Contrast that with the more substantive kinds of blogging that many edubloggers are calling for and teaching; that is, a more “academic” form of blogging. Steve asks, what’s wrong with the cheese sandwich?

He asks this not to be sarcastic (well, OK, maybe a little bit), but more to take a critical approach to how we use blogging. From an email conversation, he says, in part:

by trying to call for highfalutin standards of rigor in what our students blog about, we are essentially trying to colonize one of the most democratic spaces with the self-important hierarchy of academia. We try to set up the same old benchmarks for “good writing” in a new environment, all the while touting the greatness of its promise as something “new.” Seems schizophrenic to me. And don’t get me started on how real-time authoring serves to feed the dragon of continuous assessment…

In other words, if we reappropriate “blogging,” into an academic setting, is it blogging anymore? Or, is the definition of “blogging” (or, perhaps, edublogging), such that a higher level of discourse is now becoming expected above and beyond the typical diary/journal/update blogs of the past. And, with microblogs in Facebook and Twitter, are we going to have to think about how to make that academic blogging, too?

Steve was interested in seeing me raise this point with the other edubloggers that are thinking about similar ideas, perhaps in another forum beyond our blogs, too. Perhaps I will write a letter to EJ or something like that. If others have an idea about where and how we might discuss this issues — the appropriate use and reappropriation of blogging for academic purposes — let me know. It will certainly be on my mind as I prepare for next semester.


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Thinking about Multimodal Assessment

Yesterday, our RCWP Project WRITE team had the good fortune of being able to work with NWP’s Director of Research and Evaluation, Paul LeMahieu, on an analytic writing continuum workshop. In his talk, which was similar to the session that I attended last summer, he talked about how the continuum has been developed, the pedagogical uses of it, and how we, as professionals who teach writing, need to not just tell those who value tests to “stop,” but to also offer them something better to use instead (we hope to post some notes on the session soon on the Project WRITE wiki).

Particularly useful for the Project WRITE teachers, as he talked about the different categories for assessment on the continuum (content, structure, stance, diction, sentence fluency, and conventions — modeled, with permission, after six traits), he also talked about how this structure of assessment works for most kinds of writing, but not all and not the least of which is multimodal writing. He mentioned how there are not really any models that explore how to assess multimodal composition and how, perhaps, we could develop one through this work in Project WRITE. That is a very exciting component of this project that I had not anticipated when we originally started, and I look forward to pursuing it more soon. (NOTE: I do think that Bernajean Porter has got our thinking moving in this direction for K-12 students, and put up some good criteria and an interactive rubric maker on her Digitales Evaluation site.)

Coincidentally, I have been chewing on this idea now for the past few days as I was trying to help my students in ENG 201 come up with criteria for evaluating their final multimodal projects. As I asked them to reflect on what they have been doing and how they have been working over the past few weeks on these projects, we talked on Tuesday about how the categories of the analytic continuum (which we have been using all semester) just didn’t quite line up with what they were thinking about in terms of what to earn a grade on. Along with some criteria for judging group member performance, they went back to our discussions earlier this semester about rhetoric, and we came up with the following ideas for grading this project:

  • Ethos: the credibility of the author is established through professional language, use of appropriate sources, and evidence of author’s perspective (within or in addition to the main multimodal documents)
  • Pathos: the texts make appropriate emotional appeals that both engage the reader and provide insight into the chosen topic
  • Logos: the texts present a clear and coherent central idea, supported with appropriate evidence and argumentative strategies
  • Content and Structure: the choice of mode and media support the message in the texts and elements of multimedia are thoughtfully integrated into the project rather than as a gratuitous add-on
  • Design: the choice of design principles (contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity) as well as rhetorical decisions (transitions, word choice, stance) combine to make an attractive and effective presentation

So, it will be interesting to see how this turns out. Students, in groups, will be assessing the other groups’ work and I will be throwing in my grade with the whole bunch to get an average. I haven’t graded anything multimodal yet, let alone a collaborative grading where students are involved in the process. I’ll write more about it once we are done, and look forward to hearing your ideas about how you are teaching and assessing multimodal writing, as well as any resources that you can point to about this messy, yet engaging, component of the writing process.

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Comments on NYT: New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology

Here is a clip from Samuel Freedman’s article in today’s NYT:

New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology – New York Times

The poor schoolmarm or master, required to provide a certain amount of value for your child’s entertainment dollar, now must compete with texting, instant-messaging, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, Addictinggames.com and other poxes on pedagogy.

“There are certain lines you shouldn’t cross,” the professor said. “If you start tolerating this stuff, it becomes the norm. The more you give, the more they take. These devices become an indisposable sort of thing for the students. And nothing should be indisposable. Multitasking is good, but I want them to do more tasking in my class.”

To which one can only say: Amen. And add: Too bad the good guy is going to lose.

This story troubles me on multiple levels. First, it argues against an approach that appeals to the least threatening form of technology use — the occasional cell phone ring, the small number of students who engage in chat or “facing” (the abbreviated form of “facebooking” that my students tell me is now the correct verb to use), or the multitasker who perhaps, after all, is able to multitask. Didn’t we used to yell at students for doodling in their notebooks, too? Then, we called that a “multiple learning style” and embraced it. Now, we yell at those who are engaged in online activities instead.

Second, it generalizes the technology use in a way that is not so simple. For instance, I actively invited my composition students to use the survey feature in Facebook in order to conduct primary research. We talked about multiple research methods — and the ethical considerations one must take when engaging in those methods — and why a survey on Facebook or Survey Monkey might be a useful tool. Had the professor mentioned in this article walked into my computer lab classroom last week and seen everyone on Facebook, he might have mistaken what they were doing as “off task” behavior when, in fact, they were engaged in designing surveys for primary research. One student reported that nearly 30 of her friends had completed the survey — before the end of our class period that day — 30 friends who were not classmates in our room, but others on Facebook who were able to answer her survey about linguistic diversity and the prevalance of Spanish in the USA. My students were, I argue, using a tool that they are familiar with to ask questions that matter. Not the typical Facebook survey fodder of “where are you going on spring break” or “what did you do last weekend,” but questions that can matter, if we teach them how to ask the right kinds of questions.

Third, it does not complicate ducation at all, rather showing how teaching and learning is a didactic model and technology interferes with that method. Are there times for direct instruction? Sure. And I teach directly at different points each day in my classes, especially when students ask for clarification or seek specific examples. Yet, I also integrate times for pairs and small groups to work together, for me to confer with students on their writing, and for large group discussions and activities. Some content (like the teaching of writing), lends itself better to that kind of interaction, while other classes do not; I realize this as a limitation (for full disclosure, I am fortunate enough to teach writing and writing methods classes that my department has fought hard to keep capped at 22 students each.) Yet, the technology is not the problem here; instead, we need to reexamine our model of education that, despite its best claims to the contrary, still values individualism, competition, and memorization over collaboration, synthesis, and action.

Finally, I point to Michael Wesch’s latest video: A Vision of Students Today. This video made its way into my classroom when some students showed it for their text analysis assignment. It generated a long discussion about education, privilege, technology, power, and the ways that we interact with one another (or not) in academic settings. In the context of a controversy about how video taping could and should be used on campus, it offered a different rhetorical approach for us to consider in how to use video to make an argument about our lived lives. For instance, students noted:

  • Like the students in the video, their lives are quite busy and complicated, making class one of many priorities (this is not to say that they didn’t want to learn, but that they wanted class to be engaging and relevant and that using online tools for collaboration can help that)
  • They often forget the privileges that they have such as laptops and the ability to be in class; thus, being reminded periodically about the power that comes from education — rather than being lectured at about why they should be paying attention — makes sense.
  • The way that students engage with professors (or not), means a great deal to them. One student said that I am the only one of his five professors that knows his name, thus supporting the statistic that was in the video.
  • The fact that the chalkboard was heralded as a technological godsend for education. And, 150 years later, it (or its digital counterpart, power point) is still one of the primary means of transmitting knowledge. We are not asking students to engage in collaboration and design of their own learning, despite having the tools to be able to do so.
  • The way in which the video was produced, as a collaboration between a professor and dozens of his students.

There was more to that conversation, and I wish that I had blogged about it sooner. Yet, this NYT piece required an immediate response and made me think about this more. As a professor and long-time educator, I am quite tired of hearing the counter argument offered by Professor Bugeja that “‘The idea that subject matter is boring is truly relative.'” While I agree that we are not here to entertain and that we want to stimulate the mind, I think that we, as the subject matter experts, have a responsibility to show students how the subject matter is relative. This is not entertainment. This is our job.

If we can utilize digital tools to do that, then would should. If we can’t, then that’s fine, too. But don’t ban them. In doing so, we are criticizing the students that we are trying to teach and the way that they interact with the world. If we want them to engage in critical thinking, dialogue, and debate, then banning their means of communication doesn’t make us better teachers.

It makes us hypocrites.

Let’s seek to engage our students rather than simply disconnecting them.

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Bridging the Computerized Scoring Divide?

Last month, TechCruch featured a story on a new web-based tutoring service, PrepMe. I was contacted by Calvin Truong, PrepMe’s Operations Manager about writing a post on the service here in my blog. From the TechCrunch review, it sounds like a different take on the model of submitting a piece of writing only to have it graded by a computer, a model that many, including Nancy Patterson (in this month’s Language Arts Journal of Michigan) and  Maja Wilson, have been critical of:

Prepme is one online test prep company coming out of the University of Chicago’s business incubator. Founded in 2001, the company offers test preparation for the SAT, PSAT, and ACT, using an adaptive algorithm to customize the preparation course for each student.

Unlike Kaplan’s online offering, Prepme doesn’t calculate the best lesson plan once, but continuously as you work your way through the material. Their system keeps track of what questions you get right and wrong, working you harder on the types of questions you miss.

Additionally, customers can connect electronically, using real time chat, with high scoring college students who serve as tutors.

Source: TechCrunch, “Starts-Ups Change How Students Study for Tests,” 9/1/07

When Calvin wrote to me, he wondered if I would blog about PrepMe here. I replied with some initial concerns:

Prepme does seem like an innovative service that takes advantage of computerized scoring while still adding the element of human judgment. Most of the outright computerized scoring systems out there really worry me as a writing teacher (as well as turnitin.com), so this is a clear departure that blends technology and pedagogy…

… although I do think that your service is innovative, I am still concerned about writing items that seem to support computerize scoring, as many of the professional organizations that I belong to have statements that expressly condemn computerized scoring.

NOTE: After some closer reading, I should note that the writing itself appears to be scored by the tutors, while multiple choice items that are like those encountered on the ACT, SAT, and other tests are the ones being computer graded.

To continue the conversation, Calvin wrote back immediately, and with his permission, I share parts of that response here:

About your concerns, I completely understand, and I think we’re pretty in-sync on both points. We’re working on a few initiatives that would speak more generally to trends in education, and since we’re only grading multiple choice tests and hand grading essays to enable detailed feedback it seems we’re on the same page. I would expect there is much less resistance in using technology to automate grading multiple choice exams since this minimizes human error, but perhaps I’m mistaken on this.

As to the interesting trends that may be worth writing about, there are two that we’re working on that may be of interest. The first is our work with the State Dept of Education in Maine, and the second is more generally about what’s happening in online education.

Maine recently enacted legislation that required the SAT to graduate from high school. We’ve committed to a 3 year program with the Dept of Education where we provide free test prep to every public high school student in the state. Here’s a press release from the Maine DoE website: http://www.maine.gov/education/edletrs/2007/ilet/07ilet072.htm. This initiative is interesting in and of itself, and may provide fodder for an interesting discussion. As far as we can tell they’re doing it to not have to invest tremendous resources to create their own state standardized test and to also drive students to consider applying to college. It’s an interesting social experiment and we’re proud to be a part of it.

Another approach might be to talk about the general trend in online education of trying to find the sweet spot between scalability, quality, and cost. We believe that using technology to give you scale while having high quality services with tutors from top universities, at a significant cost advantage is the way to go. In the pre-college market, having tutors at top universities is a quality win because these are exactly the sorts of students that our users want to be and exactly the sorts of students that our parents want their children to be, and this fosters great relationships online. There is some inherent cost in this approach but we believe it’s worth it.

Clearly there are others out there that disagree — some go for the no-compromise in quality, 1-on-1, in person is the only way to go but that has tremendous cost and little scalability. Other companies are trying the low cost online model with outsourced tutors and we believe this sacrifices too much quality in favor of cost.

It may be interesting to consider the implications of this because what is commercially viable may not actually be what is the most pedagogically pure.

All in all, it was an eye-opening discussion and gives me hope that hybrid models of online grading with humans sharing their insights could be a way to go. In my initial training as an online instructor for our state’s virtual high school, it seemed as though we relied more on the multiple choice items and writing that was highly scripted, almost not requiring a human response (even though I was grading it). As we ask students to write and share their writing online, this is not the best model of them composing digital texts per se, but it is a model that we could consider using in our own classrooms to foster peer response on traditional texts in digital environments.

Also, it points to the need in our field to more fully analyze this phenomenon and come up with alternatives that we feel are viable. I am not an expert in the topic of computerized writing assessment, yet am becoming more familiar with the field. A search in Google Scholar for “computer based writing assessment” didn’t yield anything since 2003 (in the first ten pages of hits). The most recent an comprehensive article that I saw was Goldberg, Russel, and Cook’s “The effect of computers on student writing: A meta-analysis of studies from 1992 to 2002,” originally published in the Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment. (An article in the current issue, found after I accessed the JTLA website, “Toward More Substantively Meaningful Automated Essay Scoring,” looks interesting, too).

So, I thank Calvin for beginning this conversation, and giving me something more to think about as I evaluate my students’ writing this week (all of it submitted digitally, incidentally) and consider what else might help them become better writers in the future. I also hope that you — as teachers of writing — share your thoughts both in comments here and by emailing Calvin as well.

A (Somewhat Surprising) Survey of Digital Natives

Inside Higher Ed shares some results from a recent survey of college students about their uses of technology. Among the more interest findings:

Instead, students appear to segment different modes of communication for different purposes. E-mail, Web sites, message boards and Blackboard? Viable ways of connecting with professors and peers. Same for chat, instant messaging, Facebook and text messages? Not necessarily, the authors write, because students may “want to protect these tools’ personal nature.”

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education – Inside Higher Ed :: Students’ ‘Evolving’ Use of Technology

This trend reflects what I have been seeing in my classes this fall — many students are used to doing online research, will email me, and participate in Blackboard to the extent that I require it. The other tools for communication are popular amongst them, and I do not “invade” those spaces (for instance, even though I know nearly 100% of my students are on Facebook — because I asked them in class — I have not looked them up or tried to make them my friends).

What I find more compelling though is that many colleges and professors are not responding to the “sea change” (noted later in the article). Our digital natives may be able to use Facebook, but the article notes that using a tool like Google Docs is still seen as innovative for both students and professors. At risk of sounding a little self-congratulatory (but noting that much of what I do in my classroom comes from my colleagues in the NWP), I don’t understand how professors can not be using Google Docs or other read/write web tools. For instance, I have students (some of them at least) submitting papers to me through Google Docs and, later in the semester, will be composing collaboratively written papers in there. None of my students knew about Google Docs at the beginning of the semester, and I hope to have them all proficient at using it by the end.

At any rate, the final note in the article from the report was this:

The report also finds challenges in addressing skills gaps for using spreadsheets and CMS software, highlighting the need for colleges to provide instructional technology to bring students up to speed.

Indeed, this skills gap needs to be addressed in all classes, not just a Computers 101. We need to continue to offer contextualized and useful technology learning. For digital writers, at a minimum, that should include tasks like blogging, collaborative word processing, creating and collaborating in a wiki, tagging, social bookmarking, online citation managers, composing multimedia including video and audio, and giving and getting feedback in multiple formats (written and aural). I look forward to continuing to teach these skills in my courses and hope that the ECAR survey, like the annual Horizon Report, continues to push us in that direction.

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Google School Interview and Mapping a Composition Course

Digital Planet, and excellent program that is on the top of my podcast playlist each week (subscribe to it here), offers us some insights from Google about the future of their work with education:

GOOGLE SCHOOL

Could Google expand its empire into education as well?

Google is expanding into many fields such as advertising, mapping and television. But recently, the search giant’s head of research, Peter Norvig, also talked about plans to educate children.

Speaking at the Learning Technology for the Social Network Generation conference Peter Norvig proposed setting children free to develop their own learning, with a teacher taking on the role of assessor at the end of the project.

Google see their search engine as the primary search for this new free self education, but there are warnings about the use of unmoderated and undirected searches across the internet.

This couldn’t have popped into my podcast playlist at a more opportune time. As I have begun teaching at CMU this fall, I have been relying heavily on Google’s tools for running my classes, especially my Intermediate Writing course. (Why they don’t have their reader and notebook listed on that page, I don’t know).

At any rate, in thinking about how my course is structured and what I hope for students to learn, I ended up drawing a concept map of the course and then created two screencasts: one describes my overall vision for what they will do and learn in the course while the other demonstrates how a particular student interested in a topic (I chose marketing as an example) might do his/her work in the course.

ENG201 Course Map

This whole process — taken in context of the Google interview — has been an engaging intellectual exercise and makes me think that I should have done a course map at the beginning. Since I am asking them to both use technology and examine its uses at the same time we are writing and examining how writers write, I think that some of their concerns, questions, and confusions are warranted. I hope that this diagram, as well as my screencasts, help them think through the possibilities for the course. Some that I am think of, in relation to Google tools, are:

  • To use Blogger to post critical responses as well as give and get feedback on their responses
  • To use Google Docs to share drafts with me and peers; to develop parts of their final group project
  • To use Google Notebook as a way for me to comment on their blogs in a private space and keep a running list of comments
  • To use Google Notebook as a way to document their own research
  • To use Google Scholar to find articles for their research
  • To use Google Reader to identify blogs, news sites, and Google news alerts about their topics

Of course, there are tools other than Google’s that we will be using, like Wikispaces, del.icio.us, and Zotero, but this is where my thinking is at right now for the beginning of the semester. I am hoping that this multiliteracies approach to reading, researching, and writing will help scaffold students into writing within their disciplines as well as learn how to use digital tools for productive purposes. I feel that they are starting to understand what I mean when I say that I define “composition” broadly, and all the groups are developing some great topics (check out their brainstorming from our wiki homepage).

I look forward to hearing what they think about the course map, screen casts, and this Google interview.

IMing Back in the News

It’s been about a year since I’ve seen an article like this pop up — perhaps it has to do with going back to school and all the negative ideas that technology can bring in relation to the state of our language and culture:

The walls between the school and the cellphone or computer screen are permeable, and the key is to get students thinking about language so it’s used intentionally and effectively in context, says Florida State’s Yancey. “Language users will take a practice from one setting and take it to another. That’s the nature of language. What I really hope is that people will translate appropriately.

“It’s like flip-flops, she says. “There’s nothing wrong with flip-flops, worn at the appropriate time in an appropriate way. But soccer players don’t wear flip-flops in a game.”

15 years after birth, book’s not closed on textingUSATODAY.com

I find this particularly interesting right now as I am reading Postman’s Technopoly with my ENG 201 class. His basic argument is that technology becomes culture and thus an all-consuming march towards progress that we don’t question. So, I do sometimes appreciate those who question why and how new literacies like IMing are changing our language (even if I disagree with the principle behind the question).

Also, it reminds me that I need to be very conscious of what technologies I choose to use in my teaching and research, how I explain those choices and technologies to others, and to reevaluate them in light of how well they worked for the task at hand. IMing, for instance, is not useful as a genre for the types of writing that we are doing in the ENG 201 class, but is interesting as a subject of research.

You can see more of what my students are writing about related to Technopoly in their blogs, which you can link to from here.

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Back to School (2.0)

Things have been absolutely crazy the past two weeks, but that has been good for me especially as I get back in the swing of teaching. As I begin the semester, there are a few things that I’ve been thinking about that I want to capture here and come back to think about more later.

First, in my writing class, the students have pretty much jumped up to each new technology that we try. On the first day of class, we began a wiki and I had students post some intro material there. This week, we created Google accounts and got set up with Blogger and Google Reader. All this is leading them to create their own research agendas, affinity groups for a multimodal presentation, and to become writers in their professions in the 21st century. Based on their initial surveys, there was a wide range of tech skills, and they are willing to help one another in the classroom, so that is good. Based on what I have seen, this will be a very “school 2.0” type of experience for them.

Second, in my methods class, we began a wiki, too. Unlike my writing class in which things are organized more thematically and students will have some choice about the types of writing that they do, I have to organize this class around a slightly more structured curriculum. That said, there is still lots of room for flexibility and I will be inviting them to do some digital composition as well. They, like the writing class, were a bit apprehensive at first about writing on the wiki, but in an activity tonight, they were doing quite well. In fact, one student synthesized a few lists of responses from separate groups on one page without being asked (as we learned last week that overwriting can be a problem). I also showed them Google Docs, and some seemed intrigued. So, we might go in that direction a bit, too.

All of this is just to say that I have been reminded again and again about taking things in slow, manageable chunks. One student half-joked that she was thinking about dropping the writing course after the first day (she didn’t, thank goodness, and did well today setting up her blog). It reminds me that some students know quite a bit about this and can help others. And, for everyone, it is nice to have reminders and tutorials; thus, I am going to look for tutorials on YouTube for everything that we do so they can go back to it later to be reminded (or, perhaps, I will make my own with Jing).

At any rate, this has me very excited about the semester and the fact that students are taking to the school 2.0 kind of learning. I appreciate all the podcasts, blog postings, and one-on-one coaching that my colleagues have provided to me so I can be at this point — and look forward to sharing thoughts back here. More to come as the semester progresses.

Happy back-to-school (2.0) to all of you!