English

To the Students: An Invitation to Twitter

Dear Writer, Twitter can be used for much more than publishing to the world what you are having for dinner. There’s a metaphor gifted to me from a former professor that goes like this: writing floats on a sea of conversation. Twitter is often about conversation. It’s great for making professional connections, accessing information published [...]

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Feedback and Revision are the Problem

Responding to student writing can be the toughest part of teaching First Year Writing / College Composition. This semester I spent a lot of time writing comments on paper-based texts. I got most of the students to hang on to my comments so they could turn them in with revisions. I do what I can [...]

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NCTE 2012 Handout: Twitter in the Writing Classroom

Dear Colleague, I use a metaphor gifted to me by a former professor to think about my professional life. It goes, Writing Floats on a Sea of Conversation. In the fifteen years I’ve been in writing classrooms, I’ve come to believe it’s important for me to help students navigate all of the conversations they are [...]

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Is This a Problem? Twitter in the Classroom

Each student Tweeted a reaction or question they had about the syllabus. Most of the students stared at their computer or cell phone screens. From my walking around the room, I saw that students were reading each other’s Tweets and responding to them. I had the website Tweetchat up on the projection screen with everyone’s [...]

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Twitter in the Classroom?

Depending on how many people you follow on Twitter, it could be impossible to keep up with Tweets during a real-time discussion. Imagine a screen with fifty or so Tweets, updating every ten seconds, and only about 20% of them being from students in the class.  In order to organize the students’ Tweets, we used [...]

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Podcast on The Craft of Writing Memoir: Derek Owens’ Memory’s Wake

The craft of writing memoir and the subject of recovered memories and post traumatic stress syndrome were among the topics as I visited with St. John’s University English Professor and Vice Provost Dr. Derek Owens. His latest book is entitled Memory’s Wake and tells the story of an abusive relationship between his grandmother and mother. [...]

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Using Twitter in the Classroom to Facilitate Discussion

Using Twitter to Enhance Discussion in the Composition Classroom I started with Twitter in the spring semester of 2012. I invited students to create accounts so that we could use them along with classroom discussion. We talked about privacy and potential problems with going public with writing, and I told the students that they might [...]

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