Friday, March 28, 2014

Friday

After a long very rainy day, the sun has finally come out (sort of--I still can't see the mountains). I had a topsy-turvy day, sort of. Woke up early as usual but left without breakfast for the technology Showcase, where Dawn Bikowski, Chris Hitchcock and Christine Sabieh presented on "Technology Use to Help Avoid Plagiarism: Resources for Teachers and Students." Annelies also went, and we added Jane on the way. Dawn and Chris's approach was to empower student writers by putting plagiarism checkers into their hands and encouraging them to use them to improve their writing. They also emphasized teaching students very explicitly about such things as citation boundaries (when proofreading, check to see that each paragraph has at least one citation); the goal is to make checking for plagiarism part of the writing process for students. Christine favored a more traditional approach of laying down strict rules with clear consequences (failure) which providing many opportunities for writing and rewriting, using the student's dedicated website including the paper, the sources, and the list of references with links among them.

That finished at 9:15, and I stopped in at the EV to catch the end of Kim Benedicto's presentation. Kim taught for a year at MEI (2007-2008); she is now at MSU. It was nice to see her.

Then I went up the street to the WATESOL breakfast get-together at JCafe. I met Caralyn leaving on the way there; but there were only a few WATESOLers left when I arrived: Jacquie (president) and Polina (vice-pres.) and two others whose names escape me. I got a decaf latte but ended up taking most of it back to the hotel with me. There I had some granola, but first I had to melt my frozen almond milk! The little fridge in our room had frozen the milk, and Annelies' orange juice, into more or less solid slush. I microwaved it until I could get some out into the cereal bowl, and a maintenance man came and adjusted the temperature of the fridge (the temp control knob being missing). Then I returned to the CC, about 11, but I didn't watch any of the mobile technology presentations; since I don't use mobile technology (for a webhead, I'm a real Luddite).

Here's a snap of the lovely corridor leading to the Electronic Village: not very inviting, wouldn't you agree?

I'm headed out to dinner with Jane and Carla at some brewery (!); more later.

1 comment:

  1. It looks as if the ev is "off to the side"--wasn't it New Orleans that had a similar long corridor?

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