English Education Professor

Hard to express how much I love this concept, and this design.

MediaCommons Press.

Been playing around with this bad boy.

• Let your audience decide

  Get to know your audience by letting them decide which questions, suggestions or ideas interest them most.

• Everyone’s voice is heard

  The voting box at the top of page focuses attention on submissions recently added and on the rise, making it simple and easy to participate.

• Be creative

  Include people in your preparation for lectures, interviews and hard decisions or work together to organize feature requests and brainstorm new ideas.

Google Moderator.

Edutopia article

I’m a believer.

via 14 Practical Ways to Use Evernote : The World : Idea Hub :: American Express OPEN Forum.

I’m big on throwing everything into Evernote.

I know this will shock the Prof. Hacker community, but I recommend saving almost no paper copies of teaching materials–this is what computers are for.  You don’t need a filing system; you need to be able to search for the right file at the right time. Your Mac doesn’t care about your elaborate filing scheme–you’re going to use Spotlight to find the file anyway.  You can use applications such as Evernote or DevonThink to index your files, or you can do cool keyboard ninja searches with Quicksilver–it doesn’t matter which.

via Organizing class files, student work, and the like.

Rhetorical Analysis:

Exercises in Imitation, Amplification, and Variation

Rhetorical exercises in imitation, amplification and variation are found broadly within rhetorical pedagogy, both at the most rudimentary and advanced levels. Instruction in imitation, and exercises to amplify and vary would precede doing practice speeches, but would also be employed to help polish and develop the progymnasmata or declamation exercises. The various exercises in imitation, amplification, and variation are based upon or make use of the four categories of change, and are permutations of the basic notion of imitation: to change the content of a model while retaining its form, or to change its form while retaining its content:

* Varying a sentence
Eramus demonstrates how to add, subtract, invert, and substitute both grammatical and rhetorical elements of a model sentence (giving 150 ways to say “Your letter pleased me greatly” as an example).
* Double Translation
A favorite exercise of Juan Luis Vives, this included translating a passage from Latin to English, letting it rest a day, and then (without help of the original) attempting to retranslate the English back into Latin.
* Metaphrasis
This included “translating” within a given language from one genre to another, such as a prose letter into a poem.
* Paraphrasis
This exercise did not mean to shorten a model text but to express its meaning using other words.
* Epitome
To abbreviate a model text or passage, boiling its content down to a pithy summary.

Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric.

Marek’s Blog on www.MarekBennett.com » Blog Archive » What? Are? Comics?.

Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States. Although America leads the world in spending on health care, it is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have coverage. To help policy-makers, elected officials, and others judge and compare proposals to extend coverage to the nation’s 43 million uninsured, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies offers a set of guiding principles and a checklist in a new report, Insuring America’s Health: Principles and Recommendations.

The Ignite format has particular salience here:

There have been several recent articles written about the idea of microlectures as an alternative to traditional, longer lecture formats. Short & energetic presentation styles such as Pecha Kucha and Ignite are becoming more popular in conferences & classrooms. A similar style of concise instruction has become common through websites such as Instructables and 5Min.com. Microlectures seems to satisfy the need for discrete units of knowledge coupled with decreasing attention spans.

Submit Your Microlectures.

Ways that Google Wave could enhance education:

- Building a more interactive / creative learning environment
- Proofreading / writing papers
-Brainstorming potential project ideas
- Interactive tutoring from home
- Collaborative Environment for Cyber Schooling

With more widgets, you could embed streams and communicate with professors in real-time. We’re excited about Wave’s potential to transform education.

via Mashable: 5 Ways It Could Change the Web.