Saturday, February 12, 2011

The #writing Daily, Saturday, Feb. 12, 2011


View current issue of The #writing Daily at http://paper.li/tag/writing

FYI ~ paper.li generates the The #writing Daily by auto-aggregating tweeting links by tag, in this case "writing," or list of tags. The application annotates and formats writing links as an online newsletter updated daily, back issues archived. Content covers creative, script, fiction, non-fiction, web, technical and other writing as well teaching writing, calls for submission and other writing related news. 

Look for other dailies by hashtag (#), i.e. The #poetry Daily, The #bookreview Daily, The #books Daily, etc... or create your own.


Wednesday, February 9, 2011

ANT links

Behind blogging your MOOC? Don't be bashful ~ just jump in anywhere.

ANT... for Actor Network Theory. I look at the acronym and think, "not another learning theory!" NALT. I could feel my eyeballs starting to roll back in their sockets, just like the reaction to analytics, just as confusing but not as useful. Persistently (and sometimes perversely) self-regulated learner that I am, off I went looking for more about ANT. See cross-disciplinary selection below, faves highlighted.

I'm not the only one wondering "why ANT?" My mind went on a different track to get to my own "ANT,OK" moment, taking me through a variety of familiar disciplines, several I would not have thought to ANT up. Making connections, get it. 

Reading that Greimas influenced LaTour made yet another connection, a major aha moment at that to connect or at least associate the Greimas Schema as a structural tool for viewing schematics of linked networks. Sometime back, I was trying to do the same for urban chaos as expressed in literature. I used the schematic to organize the jumble of seemingly contradictory metaphors for the city across multiple literatures (a comparatist thing) from earliest literatures through contemporary cinema, from the Aeneid to Bladerunner. Familiar chaos... 

Semiotics, semantics, semantic web, metaphors and more.

Posted via email from Mooking About

Book Review: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

Although not immediately relevant to specific topics, assignments, etc on any MOOC, massive or modest, that I am currently following (albeit in a distracted, scattered fashion), this review and its subject is relevant ~ highly "connectible" ~ to data, multiliteracies, connectivism, networks (virtual and IRL). 

Popular culture is another rich source of data about cognition, learning, social behavior, crowdsourcing and networking. Connectivism on the hoof. 

More on social media theorist Clay Shirky in his own write:

reviewed by Nabeel Ahmad — January 05, 2011
coverTitle: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
Author(s): Clay Shirky
Publisher: Penguin,
ISBN: 1594202532, Pages: 256, Year: 2010
Search for book at Amazon.com

Citizens across the world watch an average of 20 hours of television per week, adding up to trillions of hours each year. The interest in this fact is not that we have this free time – or Cognitive Surplus, as author Clay Shirky describes – but how we choose to expend our most valuable resource. Shirky argues that our creativity and willingness to share in this connected world – the book’s subtitle, even on a miniscule level and especially through the Internet, can have great impact. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age succeeds in getting us to think about how we can better understand this phenomenon by dissecting numerous examples and threading them together into a smoothly read piece.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Review: Educating Emergent Bilinguals

reviewed by Lynn Zimmerman — January 04, 2011
coverTitle: Educating Emergent Bilinguals: Policies, Programs, and Practices for English Language Learners
Author(s): Ofelia Garcia and Jo Anne Kleifgen
Publisher: Teachers College Press, New York
ISBN: 0807751138, Pages: 192, Year: 2010
Search for book at Amazon.com 
For Garcia and Kleifgen the question: What’s in a name? is more than an existential question. In their book, Educating Emergent Bilinguals: Policies, Programs, and Practices for English Language Learners, they assert that how the question is answered not only gives a different meaning to the experience of people who are labeled in various ways as learners of English, but also has profound implications for educational policies and practices that impact them. Rather than using the “deficit model” of naming which has been the norm in the education of non-English speaking learners, Garcia and Kleifgen suggest calling them “emergent bilinguals.” This critical act of “re-naming” shifts the focus to the knowledge that they have and to the possibilities of bilingualism instead of focusing on their lack of English and the narrow goal of learning English.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...