Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Podcasting and Blogs: A Professor Responds

Dear Class,

I've been a lurker on your blog for some time, and first of all, I want to thank you. I love reading your writing, and I love viewing your podcasts. The blog and you, as a class and as writers, are amazing. I've even shown my own university classes your blog, and they are amazed at the work that you do. I created a link below to a page that includes much information and rationale for using New Literacies, such as blogs and podcasts, in classrooms. Here's a sampling of info:

  • Over 80 percent of kindergarteners use computers, and over 50 percent of children under age 9 use the Internet.
  • At least 61 virtual colleges/universities (VCUs) currently educate students in the U.S.
  • In 2006, 158.6 billion text messages were sent in the U. S.
  • Over 106 million individuals are registered on MySpace.
  • There are at least 91 million Google searches per day.
  • The European Institute for E-Learning aims to enhance Europe’s position in the knowledge economy by achieving the goal “e-Portfolio for all” by 2010.

Mr. Neuburger is absolutely preparing you for the future. The person who responded only discusses sentence-level concerns and grammar. As a researcher of writing and reading, and as a professor, I know, and my colleagues do to, that there is much more to communication and writing instruction than a few typos. Composition researchers look at higher order concerns like ideas and even student motivation to write. As many of you have suggested, your writing and your interest has improved. People who write on blogs increase their fluency (# of words they can generate). If you return to your blog posts, I'm sure you will see the same thing. I'm also sure that you've learned a lot about yourselves as writers through writing and through reading the writing of others.

To be prepared for the future, you need to know multimodal literacies. That includes being able to create media, which is what you do almost weekly in your podcasts. Podcasts and blogs are some of the ultimate communication tools. You don't just READ media. You CREATE it. I only wish I were lucky enough to have an English teacher like Mr. N.

Research supports the use of blogs and podcasts as part of an English class. Recently, a researcher named Applebee (2007) found that in 40% of twelfth grade classrooms students write less than three pages A YEAR. Can you believe that? You've accomplished so much more.

I'm sure your parents have told you this. There will be many people in this world who will try to bring you down in some way. This person attacked your writing, but I want you to know there are many more people in this world who respect Mr. Neuburger's work and your writing. Keep writing everyday! This reader loves it!

11 comments:

MWS said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
cardinal_stud_61 said...

First of all i would like to thank you for your appreciation of what we are doing. I would also like to express my gratitude towards you for not only telling us that you enjoy what we do but as well as showing your students what we do. This is a real confidence booster for what we are doing. I am glad that a professor
is complimenting us. This really, really makes me feel good. So all and all what I am getting to is thank you

<><><><> said...

Thank you for the support of what our class is doing. The statistics that you provide really make me realize the extent of technology in todays world, 158.6 billion text messages is a whole lot of button punching. Also feel free to stop lurking and start giving us some more feed back on our work it really makes it a lot more fun. Thank you for the support.

MWS said...

Thank you for your support KF. I agree completely that there are more things to instructing a modern communications class than minor typos. For the first time since i have attended Miller high school a large percentage of the student body is actually some what well versed on modern communications via internet. I hope to see more of your posts on this forum.

Plowboys said...

You posted some great points as in the one about blogging increases a writers fluency. I have noticed that I have written more and more words every time I post. I also highly agree on the facts about elementary kids and younger children using the computers. Most likely there are going to be more and more computer based jobs in the future and blogging is the key to helping people get to know computers. After reading the post from Ninya Biznez, I felt that all this time when I thought my writing was getting much better, someone told us that it wasn't, which made us feel like we have accomplished nothing at all. Then you posted this post to our blog and I read it. After reading your post I felt as if my writing did get better and we are doing a good thing by blogging. Your post made us feel like we have done something productive. Thank you for your post.

~KATY~ said...

As I was reading your post I totally agreed with everything that you wrote, especially when you said that "their are people in this world who will try and bring you down." After reading none yas post I felt pretty bad, I just thought that we were not doing very well and that I should just give up. Then when I read yours I new that we were doing good and that not everyone is going to think the same way as us. So now everything is good and we are going to keep doing what we are doing no matter what any one says.

JUNK said...

I totally agree with you. Your right, some people don't think we are doing such a good job on this blog, but others think we are doing a really good job and think this blog is a really good idea. NO we don't just read it, we create it, and personal I think we do a heck of a good job at it. Thank You KF

thimjj said...

I am glad that you like what we are writing and what we are doing. It is nice to know that some people don't just look at what they see on paper, they look beyond it to see what we have really accomplished. Also i agree with what you said about the sentence-level and concern. There is much more to writing than missed spelling words and punctuations. Thanks for your kind words and encouragement.

Mr. Neuburger said...

Your the best Keri. :0 ;)

Keri said...

Thank you for the kinds words. Mr. N. I think we need to write an article about this.

Keep bloggin'!

Oprah changed my life ! ! ! said...

Thank you very much kf for the statistics you posted. They made it obvious that Mr. Neuberger's methods of teaching with the blog are actually good. Also thank you for the comments about how our work is good.