[winter walk]

At the end of our crescent there's a little pond (which locals call a lake) in a treed park. I love this spot as there are lots of trees so our new area feels a little older and worn in. 

Besides a few others walking, there was a cross-country skier and a family toboganning down a small hill. Now this feels like Canada.

[lemon cake with chocolate buttercream icing]

Yesterday, in between some lesson prep., a telephone interview and journal article editing, I found some time to bake a cake. Here's my lemony light cake with chocolately frosting:

 

Yes, you'll notice that a few slices are already missing...it really is that light and fluffy. Note, this is not for those of you on a diet...you need a bit of butter for this but it's good!

For the cake:

3 eggs

1 cup of butter (I used softened, room temp.)

1 cup of sugar (I used caster suga)

Zest and juice of one lovely lemon

2 cups of flour

2 tsps baking powder

Dash of salt

I creamed the butter, then added the sugar. Slowly I sifted in the flower and then stirred in the eggs (which I'd beaten seperately) and the lemon juice and zest. With a mixer I'm sure you could just throw all the ingredients in.

Pour into two round tins (that's what I had but use whatever tins you have available. You might need to adjust the timing) and bake at 350 for 30 min. 

For the buttercream icing:

1/2 cup of butter

icing sugar (enough to reach your desired consistency)

cocoa powder (to your taste)

I creamed the butter and added in my sugar and cocoa powder. I added about 3 tbl spoons of cocoa to ensure a velvety chocolate taste. We weren't disappointed.

[your amazing brain]

I came across this inspiring video via @ontarioliteracy on twitter:

[new media & innovative curriculum]

Via New Media Literacies Blog:

New Media Literacies Newsletter NML Announces its Monthly Webinar Series

Webinar Series NML has recently partnered with New Hampshire's Department of Education to facilitate a year-long professional development initiative using the new media literacies as a springboard for developing innovative curriculum. Our goal is to help foster a broader perspective of what it means to be media literate in the digital age, and offer tools for translating the social skills and cultural competencies outlined in the white paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Jenkins et al., 2006) into meaningful and engaging learning experiences in the classroom and beyond. These NH educators are exploring the urgent challenges that 21st Century learners face by expanding their own learning experiences using a participatory, digital model of professional develmopment. In this context, educators are able to practice their own skills as teachers by creating, collaborating, connecting, and circulating with one another in an interactive, multi-media environment. Not only are they developing new materials for their own schools and districts, but also an 8-part webinar series focused on a comprehensive, practical understanding of the NML skills for the larger educational community. The 8-part series will begin on February 11th and share the framework of social skills and cultural competencies which shapes the work of New Media Literacies, and illustrate the skills by looking more closely at learning through such cultural phenomenon as computer game guilds, youtube video production, Wikipedia, fan fiction, Second Life and other virtual worlds, music remixing, social network sites, and cosplay. Each webinar will examine closely new curricular materials which have emerged from New Media Literacies, Global Kids, Harvard's GoodPlay Project, Common Sense Media, the George Lucas Foundation, and other projects which are seeking to introduce these skills into contemporary educational practices and leave participants with plenty of opportunities to take the material, information and methods back into their classroom. We will host the first webinar on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 7pm EST and focus on the new media literacies, judgment and appropriation as well as copyright, fair use, and creative commons. Our special guests will be Flourish Klink, a graduate student at MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program, and Erin Reilly, NML Research Director. See the full listing of upcoming webinars and get information on how to join the sessions at http://projectnml.ning.com/page/nmls-monthly-webinar-series.

[west edmonton sunset and construction-scape]

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

[literature relationship manager: employment opportunity]

For those living in or near to Nottingham, this looks like an excellent opportunity, there's even a specialisation for the digital and creative economy.

Job Description East Midlands, Nottingham Relationship Manager, Literature Salary up to £35,000 plus excellent benefits package Contract: Permanent working 35 hours per week Arts Council England champions, develops and invests in art that enriches people’s lives. Our mission is to deliver great art for everyone, whatever the economic circumstances around us. Following a recent restructure, we are passionate about transforming our organisation to ensure we continue to deliver our aims. There has never been a better time to join us. The closing date for this position is 08 February 2010.

A bit more background on the role:


The relationship manager role is a new role created as part of the organisation review restructure. We require relationship managers to have a depth of knowledge and expertise in one or more particular specialism. At the Arts Council we have identified 11 different specialisms or areas of expertise. The specialisms are:

• dance

• literature

• music

• theatre

• visual arts

• combined arts and touring

• engagement and participation

• learning (children and young people, or learning and skills)

• diversity in arts practice

• digital and creative economy

• regional planning

In addition to this specialist knowledge our relationship managers will also need to be able to lead on relationships with artists and organisations, help to develop Grants for the arts applications, be an advocate for the arts and contribute to the Arts Council’s commitment to equality and diversity.




Read more here and here.

[beaumont winter sunset]

[teaching digital writing]

If I was still living in England..... This conference will be brilliant and my ph.d examiner (Ruth Page) and ph.d supervisor (Sue Thomas) will be speaking too along with "Inanimate Alice" author Kate Pullinger.



http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events/event_detail.php?event_index=281

Cost: No charge, but we reserve the right to charge a £15:00 non-attendance fee.

Last Date for registration: 14 Apr 10

Event Description:
Digital Writing crosses over Media, Creative Writing, Art & Design and English departments and demand for more higher education courses continues to grow. How are we meeting that demand and how is digital writing being taught? This free, one-day symposium is an opportunity to discuss, debate and sample Digital Writing with leading practitioners and university lecturers.

- How do we teach students to analyse digital writing?
- How do we teach students to create digital writing?
- What are the particular challenges and rewards of teaching and learning this developing genre?

These questions and others will inform the presentations and discussions.
The event takes place at the state-of-the-art Phoenix Square, in Leicester where delegates will have the opportunity to participate in a hands-on workshop and demonstration. Undergraduate and postgraduate students are welcome.

Confirmed speakers include: Award winning digital novelist – Kate Pullinger, Sue Thomas, Ruth Page and Tim Wright.
Programme: (subject to alteration) 

9:30 Registration
Coffee/Tea

10:00 Welcome
Brett Lucas, English Subject Centre

10:10 Presentation
The Transliteracy Research Group
Kate Pullinger & Sue Thomas, De Montfort University

11:00 Panel Presentation & Discussion
Doing Digital Writing
Tim Wright, Digital author
Donna Leishman, Digital author
Respondant TBC

12:00 Lunch

13:00 Panel Presentation & Discussion: Teaching Digital Writing
Digital Writing and Pedagogy: How do We Teach, What Do We Teach?
Matt Hayler, University of Exeter
Designing Narratives and New Media
Will Slocombe, Aberystwyth University
The Next Frontier? Teaching electronic literature in the undergraduate classroom
Ruth Page, Birmingham City University

14:30 Hands-on Workshop and Demonstration
Tim Wright, Digital author

15:30 Keynote Address
Michael Bhaskar, Digital publisher, Serpent’s Tail/Profile Books

16:30 Closing Remarks
Kate Pullinger & Brett Lucas

16:45 Close



Note: image from Engadget. 

[assessment in the digital age]

Via hastac:




How to grade, assess, teach, learn and structure the learning experience for students in the digital age?

Many interesting projects are working on this question, and we invite you to share others with us below. For example:

- The Learning Record, a portfolio-based evaluation system designed to emphasize student learning, not product-based outcomes
- Nils Peterson and his colleagues at the Center for Teaching, Learning, & Technology (at Washington State University) have been working on developing new assessment strategies and forms of classroom engagement
- Pecha Kucha in the classroom - reframing the presentation from the unstructured long-form speech to the conversation-starting breakdown
- Digital Youth Research was a 3 year project to investigate how kids use technology and media in their everyday learning. They have reports available on their site, and the group recently published a book, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out. 
- Re-mediating assessment, a blog considering participatory assessment models in education, authored by Daniel T. Hickey, Michelle Honeyford, and Jenna McWilliams (Indiana University).
 - The DML Research Hub, funded by a MacArthur grant, is supporting two projects. One, lead by Mimi Ito, is called Distributed Learning Research Network, and works on distributed learning that happens in social environments. The other, lead by Joseph Kahne, is called Youth, New Media, and Public Participation Research Network, and investigates the ways that youth, through social and political participation in online communities, affects their capacity and motivation to engage in social and political issues.
 - Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg's report, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (also available as a free PDF). The report found that students are learning in deeply collective and innovative ways, and that learning institutions - schools - have to keep up or risk obsolescence. They offer ten principles for redesigning learning institutions and pedagogical systems to better reflect the way students learn today. The book-length version of the project, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age will be coming out in 2010.

 Note: Image on flickr by violet.blue

[pedagogy news]

Interesting pedagogical tidbits:

State law requires digital college textbooks by 2020

"Companies that sell textbooks to California universities must offer electronic versions by 2020, under a new state law.

Electronic books are generally less expensive, better for the environment and often more suited to the way today’s students study, proponents say. And a Kindle weighs a whole lot less than a backpack full of 500-page textbooks.

'Think about kids carrying around all these books — or just carrying a Kindle wherever you go,” said Joan Wines, an English professor at California Lutheran University who is doing research on digital textbooks.'"

Read the article here.

U.K. Universities are now (also) facing huge classes:


Cash-starved universities will have huge classes, says union

"Universities in the UK will be among the most overcrowded in the world within three years if savage government cuts to higher education go ahead, ­academics warned today.


The lecturers' union, UCU, said more than £900m of cuts announced last month would fill lecture halls with "some of the biggest class sizes in the world" by 2013.


A report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development published last year shows that while the average ratio of students to lecturers in UK universities is 17.6, in OECD countries the average is 15.3.


Sally Hunt, the union's general secretary, said that "the dreams of many hardworking parents for their kids to go to university ... will be over". The cuts would send at least 14,000 academics to the dole queue.


The warning comes after top universities accused Gordon Brown of jeopardising 800 years of higher education, saying the cuts – which the Institute for Fiscal Studies says may reach £2.5bn – would 'bring them to their knees.'"

Read this entire article at the Guardian.

[special issue of e-learning and digital media]

Here's a call for papers pertinent to all those educators working with new media (via Chris Joseph's blog):

Special issue of E-Learning and Digital Media, Editor Dr. Norm Friesen







Media today are everywhere. From educational gaming through portable e-texts to cell phones ringing in class, it seems we can’t escape. Nor can we live without media; instead, they form a kind of ecology that we inhabit. In addition, media have an epistemological function: they shape both what we know and how we come to know it: “Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live,” as Niklas Luhman observed, “we know through… media.”






Speaking of media in education suggests a range of possibilities that are different from what is suggested by educational technology (electronic, digital or otherwise). Describing computers and the Internet specifically as digital media casts their role not as mental tools to be integrated into instruction, but as “forms” and “cultures” requiring “literacies” or acculturation. In this way, speaking of media in education brings instructional environments more closely together with the world outside. Explorations of these terms and possibilities have been initiated by the likes of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman and Elizabeth Eisenstein, and they are also touched upon in research on media literacies. However, more recent theoretical developments and accelerated mediatic change –from blogging through networked gaming to texting and sexting– offer innumerable opportunities for further exploration.






This special issue of E-Learning and Digital Media invites contributions that focus on media, particularly digital media, and their ecological and epistemological ramifications. Specific topics may include:


· School and classroom as media (ecologies) and the changing world outside
· Digital challenges to media literacy and literacies
· Media socialization and media education
· Histories of media and education
· The epistemological character of (new) media



Submissions for this special issue are due May 1, 2010


Length of submissions: generally 6000-8000 words


Further submission and formatting information is available at: http://www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/howtocontribute.asp


Direct comments and questions to: nfriesen[at]tru.ca