The Internet Really Works
I suppose that should not surprise me after I've used it for 13 years, but my earlier post about using the speed dating structure in the classroom has found its way, almost certainly via Teaching Carnival V, over to the University of Virginia's Writing Program, where Greg Colomb combined it with his "elevator stories" concept.
What's cool about this is that I wrote my post on 2 February 2006, Teaching Carnival V went up on 15 February 2006, and I got my first hit from Colomb's lesson plan on 3 March 2006. In a month, the idea went from my reporting something that worked in a classroom to being read by hundred of people to being adapted into a lesson plan by at least one of those people to getting back to me. That may not be zippy in the way that email is, but given that this is pedagogy, it's pretty good.
The best part about this is that it gives me great hope that all of those academic blogs are going to have a real impact on the ways we teach. Until now, it has all seemed like theory, but this is reinvigorating. Pretty soon I will be living in parts far removed from Los Angeles, and it may take me a few months to get into the system at my destination. In the down time, I have a few blogs to mine for ideas.
posted by Andrew Purvis @ 11:20 PM
3 Comments:
Nice Work...
There can be only two
I was talking to a colleague the other day via instant messenger and he mentioned this idea, said he had gotten if from your blog. He was using it in his classroom that day. And I am going to the CCCC conference next week, and it's likely to work into some discussions there. Ideas do spread quickly via the internet ....
This is increasingly bizarre to me. I always imagined I would go through my quirky-but-successful (based purely on what I learn of future performance) motions in the classroom and turn my students into better readers, writers, and thinkers. That's what I do. Indeed, so many of us are quirky that perhaps we aren't the quirky anymore.
Nonetheless, though my speed-dating idea is not exactly new, it seems to be getting tied to me. I expect that my name will, in the general scheme, not really get remembered, but it always seems odd to have my ideas discussed, at least in my absence. They never seemed to reach that far before.
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