Now that the winter break is upon us, it’s great to have some time to spend with family and friends. Every teacher knows that moment of guilt when we realize we have let grading or planning come ahead of those we care about. The days between Christmas and New Year’s give us a chance to even things out a little. Sometimes we neglect ourselves, too. The winter break is a good time to sleep in a little later or to grab a catnap in the afternoon if we can. The Warning Sign Generator and companion sites The Warning Label Generator and The Street Sign Generator may prove useful during the break. Create your own signs and put them where they’ll be most useful. Yes, these sites have classroom application, too. But that can wait until after the new year.

Special thanks to Kevin Jarrett of NCS-Tech.org!

Last week the Pew Internet and American Life Project released its report, Teens and Social Media. The home page summary discusses the findings about teens and how they use Web 2.0 tools.

As a writing teacher, though, I was very surprised by the format of the complete report. I expected bullet points and graphs, but I was not prepared for the impact of design choices in the document. For example, horizontal lines rest atop large-font summaries preceding a section of information, signalling the end of one part and the beginning of another visually instead of rhetorically. I was surprised at how short the sections were, most only 2 or 3 paragraphs. If a section of text grew much longer than that, it was consistently interrupted by a visual element such as a table or text box. The longest section of text began on p. 22 and ran for all of 6 paragraphs before there was a table, followed by another paragraph, and that was the end of the section.

Most of the text summarized in words what the data revealed. There was little analysis of the implications beyond catchphrases like “super-communicator.”

I’m preparing my students to write analytically and thoughtfully, starting with an idea and following it through. I don’t incorporate design elements into my teaching beyond an insistence on 1-inch margins, black ink, and a single, standard, 12-point font. (Come to think of it, the Pew report doesn’t observe those conventions consistently, either.) I teach them to use a style guide. I teach them to develop an argument. Developing those skills takes all the instructional time I have. The format of this report, though, suggests that I’m teaching the wrong things.

If I am to prepare my students for this kind of writing — and apparently I should be — what do I leave out?

Family gatherings at holiday times are rich with telling of stories. Happy, sad, inspirational, or funny, these stories help us define ourselves. There will always be an audience for a good storyteller.

Story Corps understands that. This nonprofit organization records people’s stories, gives them a copy and stores a copy in the Library of Congress, makes them available online, and broadcasts some via public radio. Founded in 2003 by Dave Isay, the project includes StoryBooths in selected cities, mobile studios, special initiatives, a book, and a companion CD. (You know you’ve arrived when you’re featured at Starbucks!)

Oral histories are not new. During the late 1800s anthropologists recorded Native Americans talking about the past. During Depression the WPA recorded slave narratives. Beginning in the 70s, the Foxfire books recorded the stories of the people of Southern Appalachia, bringing oral history into the classroom.

I used to do an oral history unit in my expository writing class. During the course of a semester, students selected a theme, practiced writing open-ended interview questions, conducted interviews, transcribed, edited, and produced a booklet. We spent a lot of time talking about editing, dialect, and respect for the speaker. (Do we edit out ain’t or leave it in when we know the interview will be published?) Themes included first cars, famous bad weather, and war; but the best one was the first one: mischief. Students happily reported seeing their parents and other elders in a completely different light once they had conducted those interviews!

Transcribing was a time-consuming task in those days of cassette recorders, but the gains in editing skill, I felt, justified it. Eventually, though, the technology changed, and students just didn’t have access to recording devices. With the advent of inexpensive digital voice recorders and voice recognition software, perhaps oral history can return to the classroom now.

Story Corps demonstrates that the interest is still there. Once students understand the value of Grandpa’s stories from the past, perhaps they’ll be more willing to listen.

In 1897, 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon was looking for the answer to an important question: Is there a Santa Claus? Her father advised her to check with an authoritative source of information, such as New York’s newspaper, The Sun. His guidance, her letter, and the Sun’s editorial response produced a staple of holiday reading:

DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET.

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

David Pogue’s column last week, “The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality,” provided some eye-popping insight into the way young adults approach Web resources.

Pogue describes an activity he has used with audiences, providing scenarios like, “I own a certain CD, but it got scratched. So I borrow the same CD from the library and rip it to my computer” and asking whether they think that is wrong. The scenarios progress into increasingly complex situations, all involving copying DVDs and music.

“The exercise is intended, of course, to illustrate how many shades of wrongness there are, and how many different opinions,” he writes. “Almost always, there’s a lot of murmuring, raised eyebrows and chuckling.”

Pogue says that he recently spoke to about 500 college students and used the same activity, but the students didn’t think the scenarios described anything wrong. “No matter how far my questions went down that garden path, maybe two hands went up. I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids’ morality alarm. They listened to each example, looking at me like I was nuts.”

Some peer pressure may have affected the results, he acknowledges, adding, “Nobody wants to look like a goody-goody.” But even with his most blatant example of obtaining media without paying for it, only 2 students indicated they saw anything wrong.

Pogue’s focus was on file sharing, but I couldn’t help thinking that students probably feel the same way about text they find online as they write research papers. “Copy and paste” doesn’t seem at all wrong to them. They changed the font — isn’t that value added?

I gave up trying to explain plagiarism as “stealing” a long time ago. After all, the original writer of the copyrighted material still has it. I have had better luck with the line “give credit where credit is due,” appealing to their sense of justice. Still, with every batch of papers I grade, I have one or two students who seem to think it’s not wrong unless they get caught.

As teachers we may need to spend more time helping kids understand understand the concept of intellectual property. In fact, it might make a good focus for a research paper.

We could learn a lot from crayons:
some are sharp,
some are pretty,
some are dull,
some have weird names,
all are different colors–but they all have to learn to live in the same box.

162 Tips and Tricks for Working with e-Learning Tools The eLearning Guild asked members for their favorite tips for using software for the creation of e-Learning. Members could submit tips in any or all of the following five categories: Courseware authoring and e-Learning development tools Rapid e-Learning tools Simulation tools Media tools Combining and deploying authoring tools

A total of 122 members responded to the survey, contributing 162 usable tips. As with [their] previous Tips eBook efforts, the tips range in length from one-sentence ideas all the way up to page-long discourses. Some are very basic in nature, and others are quite advanced. … everything you see in this book is in the tipsters’ own words. As a result, these tips will be useful to any designer or developer looking for best practices to incorporate into their own production process.

This book is available as a FREE download for anyone who is interested in integrating technology into their classroom practice. Thanks, eLearning Guild!

Research at the University of Liverpool has found that Shakespearean language excites positive brain activity, adding further drama to the bard’s plays and poetry.

Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the function of the word within a sentence. This process causes a sudden peak in brain activity and forces the brain to work backwards in order to fully understand what Shakespeare is trying to say.

Professor Philip Davis, from the University’s School of English, said: “The brain reacts to reading a phrase such as ‘he godded me’ from the tragedy of Coriolanus, in a similar way to putting a jigsaw puzzle together. If it is easy to see which pieces slot together you become bored of the game, but if the pieces don’t appear to fit, when we know they should, the brain becomes excited. By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity - a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things.”

Experts believe that this heightened brain activity may be one of the reasons why Shakespeare’s plays have such a dramatic impact on their readers.

Professor Neil Roberts, from the University’s Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre, (MARIARC), explains: “The effect on the brain is a bit like a magic trick; we know what the trick means but not how it happened. Instead of being confused by this in a negative sense, the brain is positively excited. The brain signature is relatively uneventful when we understand the meaning of a word but when the word changes the grammar of the whole sentence, brain readings suddenly peak. The brain is then forced to retrace its thinking process in order to understand what it is supposed to make of this unusual word.”

Read the entire article.

Special thanks to Sue on the Net-Gold list!

The Research Paper. The term casts a pall on the room. Students blanch. Adults cringe. It’s always one of the most difficult units of the year, right up there with reading Shakespeare.

One of the more challenging components of the research paper unit is citation. In the Dark Ages, when your humble blogger learned citation, we had to master a complicated style that involved commas in some places and periods in others, single spacing, and a very unusual page layout. (With a manual typewriter, the hanging indentation was actually the easy part.) And that was just the bit at the end — we called them bibliography pages then. We won’t talk about footnoting on a manual typewriter, with Latin abbreviations and a line that had to be exactly 18 keystrokes long on a pica typewriter and 19 on an elite. Yes, my teacher used a ruler.

Today the research process is much easier with online databases and other digital resources. Simplifying the research, though, has complicated citation. How do you handle it when a piece has been translated by one person and then included in an anthology edited by another, originally published in a book but also available online, where you found it? If information comes from a post in an online forum, how do we cite a screen name? Or if you find a really good quote that appeared in a newspaper you accessed via a subscription service such as SIRS?

Sometimes it’s just a hard slog with a style guide. Patient teachers try to explain it. Adolescents roll their eyes.

Citation Machine is a great tool. Sponsored by the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, the site asks students to identify which citation style they are using (MLA, APA, Chicago, ISO, or CBE). Students then enter information about their electronic resources into a series of data fields. Citation Machine then creates the citation.

Citation Machine is for online resources only, and it provides a valuable service to researchers of all ages. It lets us focus on the important part: giving credit where credit is due.