Educators must prepare students to be the multiliterate individuals that they will need to be successful in their futures. Schools are ultimately responsible for preparing students to be critical users of available technologies (Damarin, 2000; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, 2004), problem solvers, and good communicators in networked civic spaces (Mishra & Kereluik, 2011; Binkley…
To behaviorists, the mind is a “black box.” In science and engineering, the term black box refers to any complex device for which we know the inputs and outputs, but not the inner workings. For example, to many of us, our mobile devices are a black box. We push the buttons on the phone, select the app…
If you're a regular reader of this blog and my social feeds, you've noticed the topic of the "IndieWeb" showing up quite a bit. Chris Aldrich has an excellent post defining the IndieWeb that I recommend you checking out if you really want to understand what this all means. Aldrich indicates: In broadest terms I…
I've written quite a bit about blogging, and my creation of open education resources over the past on this website. A lot has changed in my blogging habits, and general digital identity construction since those posts. Most of the response that I get from colleagues, students, and tenure committees is "why in the world would…
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,…
