The Campus Writing Program invites proposals for Brown Bag talks for Spring 2010.

The Brown Bag talk is an excellent venue for sharing with the campus community teaching experiences, ideas, theories, and research about writing.

Brown Bags also give faculty the opportunity to learn from one another in ways not traditionally supported in the university.

The theme for Spring 2010 is Creative Assignments. We invite you to present on innovative Writing Intensive ssignments you have taught or are planning to teach. All topics from all disciplines are welcome.

Please send proposals/ideas/questions to Jeff Rice, Director, ricejr at missouri dot edu

• It was formed by two high school students (for homeschooling purposes) and shows what students are capable of creating with free software.
• It counters many of our narratives regarding doing research on the Internet (i.e., that we should discourage students from doing Internet research) since the site is rich in high quality materials.
• It provides an example for our own classes (can we create similar sites with Ning or related free software so that students can create their own learning modules for writing in our courses?).  How can we tap into students’ creativity to produce content that will help them learn?

Take the “25 Things About Me” meme that raged around Facebook a few months
ago. This time-waster, as many saw it, is precisely the kind of brainstorming exercise I used to assign to my freshman writing students decades ago. I asked undergraduates to do free-writing, as we called it, because most entered my classroom with little writing experience beyond formal, assigned essays. They only wrote when they were instructed to, and the results were often arch and unclear, with ideas kept at arms length. Students saw writing as alien and intimidating–a source of anxiety. Few had experience with writing as a form of self-expression. So when I stood in front of a classroom and told students to write quickly about themselves, without worrying about grammar or punctuation or evaluation—”just to loosen up,” I would say—I was asking them to do something new. Most found the experience refreshing, and their papers improved.

WI faculty interested in technology might find this event worth attending:

The 2009 Focus on Teaching and Technology Conference is scheduled October 15-16 on the campus of the University of Missouri – St. Louis. We are soliciting proposals for workshops, concurrent sessions, and for a poster session, with the theme of Beyond Gadgets: Connecting Teaching and Learning with Technology. Please distribute this information to interested colleagues on your campus.

Call for Proposals. Please see more details about the call for proposals and the online proposal submission link at:

http://www.umsl.edu/services/ctl/ (click on the conference ad in the left frame). Deadline to receive proposals is July 15, 2009. Please act now!

Cole W. Camplese, director of education-technology services at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, prefers to teach in classrooms with two screens — one to project his slides, and another to project a Twitter stream of notes from students. He knows he is inviting distraction — after all, he’s essentially asking students to pass notes during class. But he argues that the additional layer of communication will make for richer class discussions.