In honor of National Day on Writing, Professor Charles Eastman, @profceastman, Director of the Whittier College Writing Program, is giving away prizes for tweets about writing. Whittier College students can win one of “three beautiful, bound journals” by writing 140 characters.

Seriously? 140 characters to create something meaningful?

“Entries will be judged, by a crack panel of experts, for wit, style, relevance, and retweetability.”

To participate, tweet to #writingatwhittier hashtag by October 20, 2014. Answer one of the following questions. Enter soon! Enter often!

1. What role has writing played in your academic or intellectual development?
2. Who or what has had the greatest influence on your writing?
3. What is your favorite writing tip for other students?

All are eligible to participate, but only Whittier College students may win a prize.

“May the best tweet fly highest”

#WSP101 members created a set of values to describe the blog posts which will be added to this collection

STRUCTURE:

• concise word choice
• appropriate length for topic (no less than 2 mins read)
• page layout appropriate to subject
• posts include very few (less than 3)total grammar and spelling errors

AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT

• creative approach to topic
• humorous or engaging tone
• ideas original
• media integrated appropriately into writing so that images/videos add to meaning
• catchy title
• subheadings or textual divisions enable ease of reading

CONTENT

• demonstrates original perspective
• clear theme/ thesis
• works cited adequately using the affordances of the medim (hyperlinks, etc.)
• develops ideas through reference…

Here’s what we’ll be doing this semester. Join us!

Read and àWrite before class

In class

Unit One: Individual: How do you want to learn?

Week One

R 9/4

In class:

Wallace, David Foster: “This is Water” Commencement Speech on Youtube.

Abridged (illus) http://youtu.be/DKYJVV7HuZw

Complete

http://youtu.be/PhhC_N6Bm_s

Attention Experiment

After class: Update your Moodle profile.

Week Two

àKeep Attention Log this week to discover your attentional practices

T 9/9

Cronon, “Only Connect…”

http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Cronon_Only_Connect.pdf

Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox”

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9981.pdf

[Optional: Nussbaum, “Liberal Education and Global Community” AACU Winter 2004

http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-wi04/le-wi04feature4.cfm]

àSummarize Cronon reading (1–2 pgs typed, dbl-spaced)

Discuss readings and…

This collection will feature blogs written by members of Whittier Scholars 101, Fall 2014. We will also be tweeting about our learning experiences. Please join us on Twitter as well.

By Andrea Rehn (@profrehn)

This post describes my experience playing Twitter vs Zombies, then reflects on the pedagogical innovations of the game, then poses some ideas for adapting it for Femtechnet’s DOCC 2014.

Note: I really appreciate comments, and will respond asap. To leave a note, hover over a paragraph and you should see a gray + sign to the right of that paragraph. Type in your note, select public or private, and hit return. You can also respond to other’s notes in the same way.

Games that build community

I recently spent an unexpectedly fun summer weekend playing a game on Twitter called “Twitter vs. Zombies,” a…