Article: New Literacy and ePortfolio Audiences

Clive Thompson on the New Literacy
Wired Magazine
August 24, 2009

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson

This brief article includes an interview with Professor Andrea Lunsford and a compelling conclusion that has obvious implications for ePortfolio reflections and audiences.

We think of writing as either good or bad. What today's young people know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the most crucial factor of all.

Thought provoking post on "Reflective Twitter" from the POD list

Thoughts anyone?

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:07:00 EDT

Reflection (or do you spell it reflexion?) - now there's an inspirational thought and one where I have to own up to a technological thought or two. Quite some time ago now I was discussing the concept of reflective log with a Math professor at a
residential (= boot camp). He had already sat through my standard lecture and the discussion in the bar got him no further until he turned to leave in order to go and contribute to his blog. That proved a turning point in the discussion.

However, I have some concerns about the directions that many of us are going with reflective logs or portfolios. A colleague of mine sought to improve students' reflection by providing a high degree of scaffolding - this improved the quality of the work that she received but I am concerned that the students merely responded to the questions provided and didn't actually reflect. I guess that over time we have to remove the scaffold and hope that the edifice retains the same quality.
--
Bland Tomkinson
University Adviser on Pedagogic Development
http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/pdo/meet/bland

Any views expressed in this email are personal to me and not necessarily those of the university.

Article: The $5,000 Approach to Teaching Writing

An interesting take on motivating students, external validity and relevance of classroom work with implications for how we might scaffold and support reflection.

The $5,000 Approach to Teaching Writing
By Bob Kunzinger
The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 29, 2009
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i40/40kunzinger.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Article: Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers (6/15/09)

Emerging findings from the "Stanford Study of Writing," a five-year study of the writing lives of Stanford students, have important implications for how and where written reflection occurs in students' lives and the role of ePortfolios in supporting these activities.

STUDY EXPLORES WHETHER INTERNET MAKES STUDENTS BETTER WRITERS
The Chronicle for Higher Education
June 15, 2009
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=Mr9MvgS2wzmnzwTKdqfgDgdfh9nQMpVp

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.

From The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching