Monthly Archive for July, 2010

Learning a Language From an Expert, on the Web

Published on July 31, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Livemocha Lesson on French

By Peter Wayner, from The New York Times

The message from the 14-year-old Tunisian skateboarder was curt. “Totally wrong,” he said of my French. My conjugation was off and I should study spelling. On a scale of one to five, he said, my French practice essay was worth a one. Then he disappeared into the anonymity of the Internet.

If there is any truth to the old Russian proverb that enemies parrot yes while friends say no, then it is easy to form fast friendships on Livemocha.com, a Web site devoted to helping people learn languages by swapping messages over the Internet and then correcting each other’s messages.

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Art of the Game

Published on July 29, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

artofthegame By Morgan Meis, in The Smart Set from Drexel University

Tom Bissell is a David Foster Wallace man. I mean that specifically. DFW’s essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again contains “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” In that essay, Wallace wrote these momentous sentences:

Most scholars and critics who write about U.S. popular culture … seem both to take TV seriously and to suffer real pain over what they see. There’s this well-known critical litany about television’s vapidity, shallowness, and irrealism. The litany is often far cruder and triter than what the critics complain about, which I think is why most younger viewers find pro criticism of television far less interesting than pro television itself.

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Ubiquitous Learning Journal, Volume 2, Number 4 now available

Published on July 25, 2010 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

ubiquitous_front The final issue of Volume 2 of Ubiquitous Learning: An International Journal has now been published.

Volume 2, Number 4 contains:

Changes to the Information and Communication Technology Skills of Pre-Service Teachers Over Time by John Kenneth Hope and Anthony Neil Hunt.
Sustaining Technological Innovation: Is it too Calm after the Storm? by Heather Hemming and Gregory MacKinnon.
Involving Students in the Development and Evaluation of a Ubiquitous Learning Application for a Design Practice Setting by Lisa-Dionne Morris and Anthea Connolly.
Dynamic Organizing and Evaluating Project-Based Collaborative Learning by Oleg Tilchin.
Using a Customized Wiki for Classroom and Online Learning by Arthur Taylor.
Learning Language, Content, and Collaboration through Group Projects by Paula Korsko, Kate Lyons and Carlos Guevara.
The Use of Instructional Technology to Impact Student Retention and Attitudes in a College Level Geology Course by Michelle McMahon.