New Media Consortium NMC Campus Observer

• By Trent Batson
• 02/18/09

The nature of cultural communication has changed so abruptly, people may not be aware of the changes. One fascinating new development is a discourse analyst's dream phenomenon: communicating in writing so often in short-term memory span that context is unnecessary. Writing teachers may lament brief text messages, Tweets, one-line e-mail messages, or jump-to-the-bare-necessity blog entries, but the lament may be misplaced: This is conversational writing, not "writing-writing." When we say "join the conversation," we mean it literally.

The New Media Consortium's NMC Campus Observer (http://sl.nmc.org/) is a site rich with short blog entries about technology and learning. Here you'll find 14 departments, such as Arts, Campus Headlines, Resources and Information, Teacher's Buzz, Teaching and Learning, and more. In each department, you'll find an average of about 60 blogs.

NMC's main (http://www.nmc.org) page leads you to other NMC sites like the Campus Observer, and of course to the Horizon Report Wiki (this year's Horizon report was just released). You can sign up for an RSS feed to your e-mail, kept in a separate folder, and read--or "listen"--at your leisure.