Valdosta State Workshop: Small Steps Lead to Big Strides

Welcome to the resource page for today's (March, 16, 2015) conversations and workshops. 

Here are ten premises for today's work:

1. Every professor already teaches with technology.
2. Every professor already teaches a hybrid course.
3. Different technologies offer different gifts for teaching and learning, opening new doors and giving professors more options when designing an assignment or a course.
4. No professor has to be an expert at any given technology to use it.
5. Students may be digital natives when it comes to using technology socially, but they are decidedly digital strangers to using technology academically. 
6. Teachers should never work harder than their students.
7. Students really do want to learn, and will work hard in a course if they understand the value and purpose of the course work.
8. Both teaching and learning can and should be hard fun.
9. Failure and mistakes are not only o.k. in a course, they're necessary and sometimes even cause for celebration.
10. Students can transfer skills learned in writing courses to other course and writing down outside of courses -- if they are taught how to transfer those skills. 

Readings I Always Recommend:

  James Lang on teaching transfer:
"Why Don't They Apply What They Learned,  Part I" and Part II

Daniel Willingham on understanding transfer:

"Why Transfer is Hard." -- from his collection of online articles on how students learn at http://www.danielwillingham.com/articles.html

Paul Krebs on learning from mistakes in the humanities:

"Next Time, Fail Better."

Robyn R. Jackson on the first two steps on not working harder than your students:
"Start Where Your Students Are." and "Know Where Your Students are Going," chapters 1 and 2 from her book, Never Work Harder than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching.

Other good stuff:

"The Processing Demands of Writing" by Mark Torrance and David Galbraith in The Handbook of Writing Research ed. by Charles A. MacArthur, Steve Graham, and Jill Fitzgerald via Google books at http://bit.ly/1GLyr0R.  You can purchase the full book directly from Guilford Press.

Addressing plagiarism by Nick Carbone: http://plagy101.blogspot.com/

Seeing the Field from the Field, Nick Carbone -- http://teachnet.blogspot.com/2011/05/c-and-w-2011-seeing-field-from-field.html

The Writing Classroom as Functioning Ecology and Economy, http://watson12carbone.blogspot.com/?view=magazine

Charles Moran, "From High-Tech to a Low-Tech Writing Classroom: You Can't Go Home Again." http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/782

Stuff we happened upon during discussion:

The Citation Project by Rebecca Moore Howard and Sandra Jameison: http://site.citationproject.net/

Nick Carbone's experiment analyzing grammar checkers (scroll down to posts on the grammar checker analysis): http://nccei12carbone.blogspot.com/

Handout on turning essay into list of sentences: http://cbwshare.wordpress.com/2014/02/ Scroll down to entry by Nick Carbone