The Crash Course

Comp/Rhetoric  |  Culture  |  Design  |  Learning & Education  |  Linguistics/Language   |  Software Skills   | Technology in Education

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Comp/Rhetoric

• Bits – Ideas for Teaching Composition  — various writers associated with Bedford/St. Martins, but I’ve always liked their books

Culture

• Sofia Quintero — The Ivy League Homegirl. Writer, cultural activist, social media use designer

Design

in this “quick glance” world, you need to play attention to elements of design if you want to grab people’s attention and keep them focused on your ideas.

• DesignTaxi — talk about Design, Art, Photography, Advertising, Architecture, Style, Culture, Technology, and Social Media
• Inkbot Design — the company blog about graphic design, specifically logo design, brand inspiration and freelancing
•    The Fox is Black — an art and design blog focused on creativity and inspiration
• Design Thinking — Tim Brown’s blog. He’s CEO of IDEO. His talks on Serious Play and Change by Design appear on TED.com … I love serious play 😉

 

Learning & Education

• — edutopia‘s blog (various writers) about learning based on cognitive & neuro sciences

• Cathy Davidson’s Blog — a scholar whose work focuses on technology, collaboration, cognition, learning, and the digital age
• Christine Cheng — a lecturer (assistant professor) in War Studies at King’s College London whose research focuses on post-conflict transitions, natural resources, corruption, African politics, and women in politics. Her blog is a good example of an academic sharing her thoughts about the ideas she encounters and interacts with, or as she puts it,
  • This blog is an opportunity to share some of the interesting things that cross my desk in my research and in my day-to-day reading– an interesting perspective on a controversial issue, experiments with surprising results or a debate that forced me to re-evaluate my principles.  I use this space like a public notebook. I use it to scribble and vent, and to draw attention to ideas, opinions, and ways of thinking.
    • I think this is a good explanation of what an academic’s blog should strive to be
• Mimi Ito — a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use to support socially connected learning experiences for young people
• Marie Norman — writes about current issue in higher education in a crisp, informative style; she is the Senior Director of Educational Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University
• The Synapse — the Teaching, Learning, & Education collection of stories, opinions, reports, letters, essays curated by Shawn White on Medium (Medium is a blogging site that reminds me of Scoop.It!).

Linguistics/Language

• Leaky Grammar — a blog focused and linguists and second language studies by Gavin Lamb
• The Lousy Linguist — a blog focused on linguistics and cognition by Christopher Phipps
• The Noun Project — some may protest my inclusion of this site in the linguistics/languages category, but this repository of icons to communicate ideas without writing in a specific human language counts as a language to moi.

Software Skills

• Tip Squirrel:Nuts about Photoshop — advice about using Adobe Photoshop (and everyone needs advice about Photoshop!)

 

Technology in Education

• Learning technologies for EFL — A Scoop.It! blog written by a friend of mine, Shona Whyte from my days as a graduate student in general linguistics at Indiana University. She’s a Scot living and teaching in France…and one smart cookie.
  • N.B. Scoop.It! is kind of like Pinterest without the focus on recipes, DIY, etc…an interesting site in itself –> here’s my profile with my Scoop.It! pages listed; I like using the service, but I find have limited time to curate them as often as I would like to.
• Sean Junkins — educational technology guy; helps faculty intergrate creativity & technology into teaching
• Commercially sponsored/generated
  • — a company that builds software that allows students to view and manipulate interactive demonstrations on their browsers; presents interesting ideas that you can use without their software.
  •   — an “independent information resource and community for everyone involved in education technology” — but they do have a crap load of corporate/business partners; even so, I find good stuff here frequently.