Text and Print

Between Print and Web: Digital Portfolios

Many English composition classes currently use portfolios as a means of assessment. These involve countless sheets of paper and some very large staples to collect student work into a single representative document. Some teachers are transitioning to ePortfolios, in which students build a website to host their portfolios, often as a series of individual PDFs.

Based on a poster presentation from last week, I propose a middle ground: digital portfolios that retain the single-document approach of a familiar traditional portfolio, but using documents that employ more advanced design elements to take advantage of the electronic medium.

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Organization is Old-Fashioned

When I read a book, I expect the author to have organized the information in an efficient manner and to help make that information relevant and accessible. In essence, I want an author to teach me something through the text. A recent trend in thinking seems to make such expectations reminiscent of pre-Internet days.
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Getting With the E-book Program

This morning, my mother sent me a link to E-Book report: Nook is up, iPad still catching up, an article from the Associated Press that’s assessing the major players in the digital-book industry. Her comment: “Come on, Apple…get with the program.”

As I finished my reply, I felt I’d share my thoughts, in case the wider audience wanted to weigh in.
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Digital Parenting

Giving over parenting responsibility to technology: Does it make kids’ attention problems worse? Do we all suffer from attention problems thanks to the Internet?
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On Scrabble and Dictionaries

A recent round of Scrabble got me thinking about how things would change without writing.
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Read This and Learn Something

Classroom teachers uttering that phrase are usually being rude and dismissive; why do we accept that from distance education?
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