November 13, 2006
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What a rush of a weekend! Whew!
1) Went to a conference in Mankato Thursday evening-Friday night (Talking with attendees at The Sugar Room in Mankato was a good time)…
2) Met people from Iowa State who know Sarah! (Fantastic)…
3) Thought really hard about certain teaching issues as well as got many assignment ideas (I love when I think too much at conferences but also get actual assignment possiblities to try out)
4) Tried out a new place on the way back: Chipotle (Yum!)…
5) Had a Movie Night Saturday: Dodgeball and Anchorman (“Knights of Columbus!”)…
6) Watched the Vikings’ sad attempt to beat the Packers yesterday, and
7) Drove & shopped in FF before catching my favorite Sunday night shows…
Thoughts from the GPACW:
English 110 Profile assignment where students create a profile of some stereotype (either on MySpace or Facebook or just via Word); English 105 assginment where students write up a report about 5 people on MySpace who would be/would not be great employees for their Fake Company given certain criteria; Get Aristotle quotes on education!; Cornell has an essay out called “Thoughts on Facebook;” English 110 Minute Papers on how students online use semi-colons, ellipses, commas, emoticons, LOL, etc; English 110/120 Compare & Contrast assignment where students find two bloggers (male and female?) and come up with a question (Do males swear more online? Do women gossip more? Do males link to other sites more? etc) and research (read parts of Tannen’s research too?); English 110/120 quiz on summarizing/quoting/paraphrasing to actually show differences, then discuss why they aren’t plagiarized?; Have IM office hours as well as regular office hours?; Attempt to make assignments geared towards the audience of their friends and family more (they are more likely to do better on those types of assignments – reminds me of the Writing Partners letters); Pedagogy of Dissonance (could use MySpace to teach dissonance vs concordance); Got a poetry book (if I teach it next fall, I don’t know if I’d want to use one book & I definitely want to try out a Poetry PowerPoint assignment).
Links & Items to Note:
The Horseflies; Keynote: www.engl.niu.edu/mday/gpacw06.html; Secondlife?; Vox.com, Moodle, Mike’s presentation: biro.bemidjistate.edu/TheLodge; Jen’s presentation: www.pedagogyportal.com; Media Master; del.icio.us; naked conversations.
And Lastly:
Does reading more (amount) make students better readers? Does writing more (amount) make students better writers?This Week is yet another shortened one. English 110 students have an in-class Work Day today before handing in their Paper 3s on Wednesday. Then I don’t see them until next Wednesday when I’ll introduce our last project. English 105 students will hand in the letter assignment from last Thursday today along with a memo assignment they’ll complete in class. They start a new project tomorrow that will take them until after Thanksgiving.
