למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

אם אתה מורה בתיכון ואתה נותן מטלת כתיבה, תלך הביתה עם 150 מאמרים ותצטרך עזרה.

הוא יכול לנתח מאמר בתוך שניות ולזהות שגיאות איות, דקדוק, ארגון ותכונות אחרות כמו גם לעודד את התלמידים לבצע תיקונים. התוכנה סורקת מילות מפתח ומנתחת דוגמאות סמנטיות, ופירסון מתפארים בכך שהיא "יכולה 'להבין' את המשמעות של טקסט בדיוק כמו קורא אנושי".

ג'ן אמר שהוא חושש שתלמידים יוותרו על הניסיון ליצור מטאפורה יפיפיה או אנלוגיה מלאת מחשבה עליה לא חשבו מעולם אם הם ידעו שהמאמרים שלהם לא נקראים, אלא נסרקים במשך שניה על ידי תוכנת מחשב. "אני רוצה לדעת שאני כותב לקורא אמיתי, בשר ודם, שמתרגש לשמוע את המילים שעל הדף", אמר ג'ן, "ואני בטוח שכך מרגישים גם ילדים".

And oh, the labor. Grading essays – whether in comp or in other writing-heavy classes – is incredibly time-consuming. That makes the move to robot graders one of efficiency, time- and cost-savings. Grading essays is also incredibly grueling intellectually, I’d argue, as giving meaningful feedback on student writing (and by extension on student thinking) is hard work.

College-level writing requires critical reading. It requires critical thinking. It requires tackling a “question at issue” for the community you’re a part of – whether that’s the class or the university at large. It requires thinking about assumptions – of the writer and the reader. It requires taking the reader carefully through the logic of the argument, building connections throughout the essay so that a writer’s claims are supported by reasoning throughout. It means revising. It means rethinking. It means rewriting. It is a process, not a product.

We were tired of getting these e-mails from these conference people, so we thought it would be fun to write software that generates meaningless research papers and submit them.

תוויות: כתיבה, סתם מעניין

תוויות: דיגיטאליות, חיפוש, כתיבה

I had an odd half thought looking out at the audience during one moment of the keynote. I was noting how many people were busy taking notes- in that photo above are people note-taking on an iPad, a laptop, and good old fashioned paper. I found myself wondering about the effectiveness of pretty much half? three quarters? of the audience individually taking notes, essentially more or less the same content. Those notes then go back to various silos, files, buried folders on computers. It seems on one level a huge missed opportunity in collaboration, and super redundant of people’s energy.

Let me be clear that I see nothing wrong with note taking - it is that we are missing a valuable opportunity for power of using the minds of the group together when people take notes alone - they are all pretty much writing down the same things.

תוויות: כתיבה, רישום

This is a very easy way for your students to begin the writing process, eliminating the struggles with holding a pen, or keyboarding, or spelling, or just the mechanical transfer from brain to hand.

Remember: Pens, pencils, typewriters, keyboards... these are all tools for getting words from your brain to "paper." These tools have no particular value in and of themselves, they are simply a means to an end. If there is a better tool for many of your students - and now there is - you are doing nothing but holding your students back by not using it.

Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form.

תוויות: אוריינויות, טקסט, כתיבה

Independent learning, even with the affordances offered by online communities and classes, can feel the same way. Autonomy is great. It enables learners to create their own Personal Learning Environments and be self-directed. Many people have the desire for autonomy — some studies have correlated it with happiness and as a preventative for depression. But does that mean they want to be alone and unrecognized?

And perhaps it’s like teaching, and I don’t know who I’m influencing with my work. And maybe all the people who learn autonomously and in the open also feel a bit lonely, because they can’t know the impact they’re having, and one would think that with ones work available all over the world, there’d be more than a comment or two. Is there thus an inherent loneliness that goes along with autonomous learning, even (or especially) when it’s open?

תוויות: בלוגים, כתיבה, למידה

Authors work hard to write in a book what they think about a topic, and obviously they work harder to make the arguments better than they casually make them in discussions with colleagues. Because some people have been very good at writing out their ideas, we tend to think of the completed book as some kind of more secure and established expression of our ideas than those casual conversations. And so it ought to be. But I think we often tend to forget how most books are made up of a set of passing thoughts that are variously in the process of changing. All this is a mumbling acknowledgement that this book is no canonical document. And by the time it is printed and in your hands, I will be curled in a corner moaning and groaning about all the things I now regret having written here and don't any longer quite believe in the way I have state them and, worse, all the things I wish I had written. Perhaps better to see the book as merely a large and unwieldy chunk of conversation about the topics it considers. (p. 183)

תוויות: בלוגים, כתיבה

ומה באשר למטרות? מטרתה של הכתיבה המונחית על פי ההשוואה היא להביא לכך שידעו לכתוב ואילו מטרתה של הכתיבה החופשית להביא לכך שהכתיבה תהפוך לשגרת חיים.

מה ראוי שיעשה בבלוג בשרות הלמידה? שוב משימות? תחליף מחברת?

תוויות: הוראה, כתיבה, קריאה

Teachers and experts said they feared young people were missing out on the pleasures and developmental benefits of letter writing.

But in the previous week alone, almost half had either sent or received an email, or a message on a social networking site.

Handwritten letters are much more personal than electronic communication.

By going to the trouble of physically committing words to paper, the writer shows their investment of time and effort in a relationship. That's why we tend to hang on to personal letters as keepsakes.

If we care about real relationships, we should invest in real communication, not just the quick fix of a greetings card, text or email. What's more, if we care about civilised human thought, we should encourage our children to invest time and energy in sitting down to write.

תוויות: דיגיטאליות, כתיבה

I’d put it to you that many students are just not certain what a digital text is, or what digital writing is, not really, and yet I feel that the worst thing we can do, as tutors, is attempt an exacting definition.

... are we talking about any written work which appears on a screen? And any screen? Will a television or a mobile phone do? Or must it be a computer? Is a Kindle or an iPad enough of a computer to qualify? And why? Do we really read differently on these things? And once we’ve settled on a carrier medium does a digital text include scans of a paper document? .pdfs? Photographs of existing texts?

But these structures evolved over centuries in ways that map our collective endeavor to understand and express our world. The book is part of a system. And that system stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly.

... he (בירקירטס) is defending “the contextual order that books represent” while a new contextual order is developing all around him. For him this new order is insufficient – for me it is just different (if not better). The contextual order that books represent is essentially linear, while the emerging contextual order is weblike. Birkerts clings to an understanding of knowledge and context as rooted in chronology and history, whereas new conceptions of knowledge are understood as networks not lines.

We are, potentially, on a road to no longer needing books, which is why we need to be able to articulate just why we might want them. When we are talking about what they do best, when we are teaching how the words on their pages are different to their words on the screen then we need to fully appreciate aspects of the form that we have often previously taken for granted.

The magic of writing arises not so much from the fact that writing serves as a new mnemonic device, an aid to memory, as from the fact that writing may serve an important epistemological function. Writing not only helps us remember what was thought and said but also invites us to see what was thought and said in a new way. It is a cliché to say that there is more to writing than the abc's and more to literacy than the ability to decode words and sentences. Capturing that "more" is the problem. I have suggested that it is the ability to step into, and on occasion step out again, from this new world, the world on paper.

תוויות: טקסט, כתיבה, קריאה

Reading is NOT the goal

Let me say it this way: There is no reason, in and of itself, to "read." We read to access the information in written form. There is no reason, in and of itself, to "write." We write to distribute information to others.

"Oh, they can read," he said, "but I'm not so sure they know how to think. That's where teaching has to go."

Reading matters because we want our students to have effective and efficient ways to access stories and information. Writing matters because we want our students to be creators and distributors of stories and information.... But you know what? How they get to these things, should matter a whole lot less to us.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, כתיבה, קריאה, רכישת מיומנויות

Children who use technology are 'better writers'

Children who blog, text or use social networking websites are more confident about their writing skills, according to the National Literacy Trust.

Relatively little is known about young people’s views about writing in the UK. The key objectives of this survey were therefore: to explore how much young people enjoy writing, what type of writing they engage in, how good at writing they think they are, what they think about writing and what the role of technology is in young people's writing.

Does it damage literacy? Our research results are conclusive - the more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills.

תוויות: בלוגים, כתיבה, רשתות חברתיות, SMS

When having audience is no longer novel, simply having one is no longer motivating. We still must help kids have something powerful to say.

Many students still are driven to do well with the knowledge that they have an audience. But this is changing. Now, as many students already have an account at a place like Facebook or YouTube before they come to my classroom, the idea of posting content of your own online is not as novel as it used to be. The idea of having an audience is not as appealing.

Many bloggers seem to take the view that all that matters is numbers: the bigger the audience the better. This lack of discernment and discrimination is both disappointing and, more important, damaging to students' potential achievement. It is essential to make students understand that there is a right audience, and a wrong audience.

תוויות: כתיבה

This is valuable no matter who your students are, but for my second language elementary school students, it has been even more than I could have hoped for them. Between blogging, designing wiki pages, Skyping, doing general research and reading and writing about topics of their choice, my students are constantly immersed in language.

One of my biggest takeaways from this experience was how even though we blogged and blogged and wrote stories constantly and wrote about what we were learning in science and social studies and other areas, my students didn’t burn out.

תוויות: 1:1, אוריינויות, כתיבה, קריאה

this is the time of the year when (at least since I was in college) some academic or other pronounces on how literacy has gone to the dogs and this generation is the most illiterate in human history.

Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The overall pattern of results is pleasing: on every measure the children who were given mobile phones were found to outperform the children who were in the control condition ....

Texting sees children explicitly demonstrating an understanding of how words can be manipulated, segmented and blended to allow for succinct and successful communication. Indeed, many of the abbreviations that children use when texting are phonological reductions, such as ‘wot’ and ‘nite’. This form of abbreviation suggests the role that phonological awareness – awareness of the sound structures in spoken language - may play in mastering text language.

תוויות: כתיבה, סלולארי, קריאה, רכישת מיומנויות, SMS

Initially, I decided to remove comments which contained profanity or which were disparaging / demeaning to my daughter, Sarah. While I was tempted to just approve comments which were positive and supportive of Sarah, it is true that she made some factual errors in her video which commenters were quick to highlight. Commenters also criticized her delivery, speculated on whether she was reading a script, debated whether she was being brainwashed by her parents, wrote supportive comments for President Obama, and frequently lashed out against the President or one of our main political parties. I did not keep detailed statistics, but I’d estimate about 10% of submitted comments included profanity.

Is it dangerous and undesirable to garner worldwide attention via YouTube, even if it is fleeting, when you are nine years old? I have had some close acquaintances suggest that it is.

Is it amazing and positive for a nine year old to be able to share her perspectives and ideas with tens of thousands of people around our globe, all within the space of 48 hours? I’m inclined to think it is.

תוויות: כתיבה

As Rogers (המנהל) ended his remarks, the lights dimmed and a series of coming attraction trailers began showing on the big screen. The group sounded like any theater audience, with the rustle of popcorn bags — the concession stand was open — and outbursts of laughter during comic moments. But teachers' eyes darted from the screen to their cell phones as they tapped in their messages.

During the early minutes the tweets included comments on a character's cat or the food. But as the movie progressed, tweets focused on the conversations between characters and obstacles and reversals they experienced. They talked of the importance of encouragement, support, toughness and resilience.

That's why we're here in this building. ... I want students to realize, I don't only write in English. I write in science, in art, in P.E. There's a connection with writing across all disciplines.

תוויות: בלוגים, כתיבה