Course design, continued thoughts

Later: OK, the 2 Ds of ADDIE are Document, Design. We're learning not just course design, but getting a toolbox of design elements we can use. So I'm excited. My project will be some kind of tutorial on APA for Post students from the Writing Center. (not the website/workbook project for the French textbook I'm contracted to do, which would be way too big for this week anyway). I'm so grateful to be able to jump into this course, which I can audit (even if I do have to do comp time at night). It's occuring to me in my haste and diminishing attention span that I'm producing 'late blooming parentheses.'
But to return to the ostensible subject of this blog: the impact of technology on reading/writing/thinking skills, I just came across another article on how technology use reduces brain size in adolescents. What are we doing to our students when we encourage online learning? Would it matter if students were younger students doing hybrid or blended courses, or using Blackboard in a completely face 2 face class? Or would that brain plasticity just be caused 'normal' Internet use among young people: social networking, gaming, mobile apps--and texting in class
:-)? I'll read the article and get back to you... Most have read In the Shallows, about the lack of attention span among even adult readers used to more 'deep' reading time. It seems to me that the critical thinking required of online instruction would help mitigate this trend, although brains have plasticity, can be altered even at my advanced age, which is both exzciting and scary. Who knows what different kinds of reading, writing, and thinking we're accustoming ourselves and our students to? I've seen references to 'popcorn brain.' Pretty soon I'll fill in with proper APA format to cite these things, and do my job right.

Post Two: One year later

You can see how slow my learning curve has been. I am now taking a professional development course on course design, andverfy much looking forward to how the tools of this course are informing my writing and general online and face 2 face instruction. When I start face 2 face instruction, I can add how I've incorporated multiple modalitities into face 2 face. For now, I'll be posting what I learn here. Nows it's google apps, ADDIE for instructional design (Analyze, design, document, implement, evaluate (that's not right--I'll check) and now, course management system.

Welcome to my new blog

The title Write-Think-Learn seems to summarize for me not necessarily the order of the writing process, but what writing can do to help everyone communicate better. My starting point is the famous E.M. Forster quote, which I paraphrase: "How do you know what you think, unless you see what you say?" In other words, there's something about writing that helps us better conceptualize and organize our thoughts. That's step one. The next is a corollary: If we write about what we know already (although most writers will advise you "write what you know" and I understand that) we won't learn. We write to discover: new words, new ways of saying things, new connections, maybe even new ideas. The following caveat is in order to bring us a little down from the clouds: "Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible." (Sir Anthony H. Hawkins) This is not to disregard the spontaneous: Bernard Malamud has said that "I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought." Think to plan, write clearly and intelligibly, develop the thought, learn something from it by the way it's written, allow for the spontaneous and the unexpected, but think about whether it "fits" with what you've set out to say. Later I'll devleop my profile, introduce myself, except to say I'm doing this for a professional development exercise...but who knows what it will turn into? I'm always learning...