CAROL’S SUMMARY:
What influence does all of the brief-communication like texting, blogs, and twitter have on students’ ability to perform well in writing tasks for college, career and life? The article below cites a Stanford study exploring this very topic. While students are, arguably, writing more today than ever, the writing is of a brief nature. To get ready for college and career writing, students will need to think more thoroughly at the outset, review their work once the write it and often consider two or more drafts to get it high-quality. This is a process which most students will have to learn and high schools will need to teach so that students can be college-ready.

In the world of work, writing is often expedient. However, there are many times when writing cannot be done quickly without a high cost. Students will need to develop the judgment to know the difference.

Finally, faculty will need to understand the ways in which students write—texting, blogs, Twitter, FaceBook—so that they can help bridge the gap between what they do now and what they need to learn. If faculty cannot make this leap, they likely will not connect with students in ways that will be lasting.

ARTICLE
Chronicle of Higher Education
By JOSH KELLER

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.”

To view the entire article visit
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39writing.htm

The new employment statistics are out and, not surprisingly, they weigh in favor of those with college degrees especially in this economy:

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CAROL’S SUMMARY:
Northwest Missouri State piloted the entire curriculum on-line last year using the Sony Reader, the article below states. While there were many growing pains, the university should be given credit for pioneering in an area which is most certainly the future of learning and project-based study. If publishers want to prevent their industry from being the next automotive example, they need to do these things:
  1) Buy or partner with Kindle, Sony and makers of these machines. Publishers will need some stake in the hardware business so that they can develop the necessary learning platforms.
  2) Work with the gaming theorists. Students today have grown up on games, and we have a lot to learn about meaningful, dynamic ways to retain information from the gaming companies and people who produce these programs.
  3) Live and breathe with students– talented students, struggling students, learning disabled students, returning adults and everything in between. Technology allows us to moderate content for these learners to truly produce individuated instruction.
  4) Work with your authors. Training, as the article below indicates, is a huge area for both students and faculty. “Star” authors can help negotiate this divide and teach people on-line, in-person and through sessions like Web X.
  5) Don’t think book. Think learning experience and realize that technology opens the door for students to have experience as well as knowledge–two things they desperately need to be competitive in the global
world. In the future, publishers will look more like producers of television shows than creators of static books that need revisions every two or three years, as both students and professors will participate in this dynamic process. We need to consider how learning and teaching will be different because of the opportunities that technology affords.

ARTICLE
Chronicle of Higher Education
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

Northwest Missouri State University nearly became the first public university to deliver all of its textbooks electronically. Last year the institution’s tech-happy president, Dean L. Hubbard, bought a Kindle, Amazon’s e-book reading device, and liked it so much that he wanted to give every incoming student one. The university already runs an unusual textbook-rental program that buys thousands of printed books for students who pay a flat, per-credit fee. Mr. Hubbard saw in the gadget a way to drastically cut the rental program’s annual $800,000 price tag, since e-books generally cost half the price of printed textbooks.

To view the entire article visit
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=HrghYKYs4hspNRWQYd6YzpqydhgtTXZs