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Showing posts from October, 2008

Why do blue book exams still persist?

ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE: click My Personal opinion is that Blue Books are great. They allow you to THINK before you write. Editing is a great feature but it all too often is abused when people just 'vomit' their thoughts on paper and never bother editing their papers well. I also like blue books for the same reason that I like reading paper books and not ebooks - no need for electricity. ARTICLE: UNC trying to update by using software that keeps students from cheating on laptops. By Eric Ferreri (Raleigh) News & Observer Posted: Sunday, Oct. 19, 2008 CHAPEL HILL College students communicate with text messages clicked out on cell phones. They take class notes on their laptops. Yet, when they take an American history exam, they do what students a generation earlier did: They scribble in a blue book, pausing only to grimace and shake a cramping hand. The blue book is widely loathed by students, who must write coherently without the benefit of a backspace key, and by professors,

Back to blogging (about classes)

I started this blog last summer so that I could use it for two of my instructional design classes and it's been dormant since the end of the semester. I thought of integrating the content with my main blog, but what the heck, I may as well just use this! This semester I was not able to afford any instructional design classes. The university pays 45-50% of the tuition for ID classes, and I pay the rest. So what am I doing this semester? Well I anticipated that I would not be able to pay for my ID classes, so I decided to enroll in two Master's degrees. The first of course being an MEd in Instructional Design, and the second being an MA in Applied Linguistics. Applied linguistics is completely free so I can still maintain my active student status and not have to pay those continuance fees that I can't afford anyway. The other benefit of doing two masters concurrently, at least for me, is that Linguistics and ID exercise two different parts of the brain. Instructional Design