I'm teaching a course on slam poetry as part of our first year experience (FYE) initiative here at CofC. This course is titled the "Revolutionary Poets Society" and it is a reboot of an after-school club I facilitated when I was teaching middle school. The Revolutionary Poets Society focuses on global opportunities to respond to…
First principles thinking is the act of boiling a process down to the fundamental parts that you know are true and building up from there. Learning, developing, and planning from a set of first principles is an effective strategy that you can employ to break down complicated problems and generate original solutions. Great thinkers throughout time have…
In a recent publication to the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Kristy Pytash and I contend that if we really want students to be digitally literate, they need to have a personalized learning space online that provides more than just a snapshot of their participation in one class or one school year. We argue…
Due to the ubiquity of the Internet and other digital technologies, individuals have tremendous opportunities to develop their digital identity. These new spaces and tools bring with them specific literacy practices that help us think about how these tools might be used to read, write, and communicate. If thoughtfully utilized, we have tremendous opportunities to…
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut Web literate individuals have a multitude of opportunities to utilize digital spaces and tools to create versions of our identities. We can create and host our own websites to share and archive our work. We can…
I'm currently a part of a professional learning community (PLC) that is focusing on digital portfolios in our teaching and assessment. As part of this work, we're moving quickly into thinking about developing a domain of one's own across a couple of our programs. In this post, I'll identify my initial thoughts about the elements,…
As new digital and social technologies become ubiquitous in society, there is often a certain amount of negotiation or hesitation as we adjust to these texts, tools, and spaces. Despite the transformative possibilities associated with the inclusion of the Internet and other communication technologies (ICTs), relatively little is known about the regular use of these…
In our everyday interactions, we utilize a variety of digital texts and tools to create and curate a digital identity. We have websites linked to other websites. Social media links connecting this work to the work of peers and colleagues. We use social networks to tweet, blog, and post our ideas and share his out with the world to…
In a previous post I discussed the possibly of using Known for getting a simple website started. Known is a "simple, social publishing platform for groups and individuals. In these posts I'm focusing on the use of Known for your own personal or professional use. Keep in mind that Known may not work for everyone. In…
For Make Cycle #1 of the Connected Learning MOOC (CLMOOC) 2015 we were to "unmake an introduction" to ourselves. We/I spend a lot of time polishing my digital identity. I partially do this so I can learn best practices and guide educators and their students as they build up their digital identity. I'm intrigued by…
