March 22nd 2009

Academic Earth

Academic Earth

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world class education.

Interesting site with a lot of lectures/information on many topics.  Needs more English topics!

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education?  At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.  Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

http://academicearth.org/

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March 13th 2009

Ethnographies of Men and Women

Ethnographies of Men and Women

I linked to the video below in another post, but I just came from a workshop on the different ways men and women interact in classes.  The Tannen stuff is not new, but the implications for students’ ethnographic research are interesting.  After all, what I think of as old hat is remade new with each generation.

Thankfully!

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March 10th 2009

4Cs-SF, PreWorkshop Wiki

4Cs-SF, PreWorkshop Wiki

4Cs begins, for me, tomorrow afternoon at what seems to me to be an exciting workshop on Cross-Cultural Connections.  And it starts with a wiki, a tool I’m learning to use in my online classrooms to get students to interact and create meaning.  The workshop promises to be overfilled with information, judging from the wiki contents, but I’m just so impressed at the possibilities for collaboration the internet allows.  Amazing.  I’ll report tomorrow.

One of the newest waves in composition and rhetoric studies is the interdisciplinary area of Cross-Cultural Rhetoric.  At the intersection of digital writing pedagogy, intercultural communication, and contemporary rhetoric, the aim of cross-cultural rhetoric might best be described as helping to transform students into global citizens, equipped with the communication and collaboration strategies they will need for active, ethical participation in a world community.  Yet how can we prepare our students, classrooms, colleagues, and governing institutions to meet the necessary challenge of global learning as the next wave in higher education?

New pedagogical approaches, curricular materials, technology tools, and WPA initiatives are needed to adequately address the current rhetorical situation that faces first-year composition and writing centers.

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March 9th 2009

Puente Pedagogy and Praxis

Puente Pedagogy and Praxis

To piggy-back on yesterday’s post, I should add that I am presenting at 4Cs, not just attending.  I’m in a panel of Puente Instructors (which has dwindled as life caught up to us) presenting on the Puente Project and it’s possibilities for teaching in other places, near or far.

So, 9:30 to 10:45 this Friday join me in SanFrancisco!

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March 8th 2009

CCCC San Francisco

CCCC San Francisco

If you are a Composition Instructor, the CCCC Conference is the premier conference.  This year the theme is Making Waves and the conference is in San Francisco, my favorite city in the world.

Last year, I blogged my experiences from New Orleans.  This year, I’ll do my best to reproduce my experience in SF on this blog.  Stay tuned.

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November 11th 2008

Fair Use

Fair Use

Because I often teach online; and because I often use movies and other visual content in my face-to-face classrooms, the subject of fair use is important to me.  There’s a lot of sturm und drang about it, but I pretty much do as see fit for my learners–everything I do in the classroom is for the classroom, so I figure I’m covered… at least I hope so.

Anyway, this month, The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education was released by a group of media literacy educators (more than 150 members of leading educational associations)–and it’s both comprehensive and activist.  It addresses “the transformative uses of copyright materials in media literacy education that can flourish only with a robust understanding of fair use.”

This document is a code of best practices that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances—especially when the cultural or social benefits of the use are predominant. It is a general right that applies even in situations where the law provides no specific authorization for the use in question—as it does for certain narrowly defined classroom activities.

This guide identifies five principles that represent the media literacy education community’s current consensus about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials, wherever and however it occurs: in K–12 education, in higher education, in nonprofit organizations that offer programs for children and youth, and in adult education.

The Guide does not explore the limits of Fair Use, but it does exhort educators to be leaders and to challenge “misguided institutional policies” that may restrict Fair Use.  The Guide was created to deal with the recurring activities teachers must use in media literacy education and to outline principles that apply to such teaching.  There’s a short video (below) and you can download the full report.

More information on Fair Use can be found on the NCTE blog.

[img source]

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