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Close reading can be done very successfully through Socratic Seminar. The key is to have complex texts, interpretive questions and then unrelenting follow-up questions to dig deeper.

This is really useful! 

excellent Foundational Insights contained in this article

Handy!

This article does a great job and helping us realize the real and perceived reasons why people feel that reading on paper is more benefitial for them. At this point in history, people do tend to remember more if they read from paper.  We can often remember which region of a page we learned something even if we read it several weeks ago.  We like the transition of one side of the book being heavier than the other as we progress through the pages.  Book designers take great efforts to design how books look, feel and smell.  Digital books are disrupting our experience and interaction with the written text.  Many people are in a mental state before reading a printed text that it is more serious and meaningful.  This mindset may be changing how we engage the brain and thus how much we remember.

But why, one could ask, are we working so hard to make reading with new technologies like tablets and e-readers so similar to the experience of reading on the very ancient technology that is paper? Why not keep paper and evolve screen-based reading into something else entirely? Screens obviously offer readers experiences that paper cannot. Scrolling may not be the ideal way to navigate a text as long and dense as Moby Dick, but the New York Times, Washington Post, ESPN and other media outlets have created beautiful, highly visual articles that depend entirely on scrolling and could not appear in print in the same way. Some Web comics andinfographics turn scrolling into a strength rather than a weakness. Similarly, Robin Sloan has pioneered the tap essay for mobile devices. The immensely popular interactive Scale of the Universe tool could not have been made on paper in any practical way. New e-publishing companies like Atavist offer tablet readers long-form journalism with embedded interactive graphics, maps, timelines, animations and sound tracks. And some writers are pairing up with computer programmers to produce ever more sophisticated interactive fiction and nonfiction in which one's choices determine what one reads, hears and sees next.

When it comes to intensively reading long pieces of plain text, paper and ink may still have the advantage. But text is not the only way to read.

Interesting to hear what the NEA is saying about the CCSS.

A very interesting discussion facilitated by Dr Tony Bates who argues that hybrid learning is probably the most significant development in e-learning and teaching in general. He explores why this is happening and takes a look at current hybrid models and then poses some really key questions to stimulate discussion. "What should be done in face-to-face class, and what should be done online? What is the university offering these students on campus that they couldn’t get from studying online? And what models or design principles can guide us in answering those questions? What should the instructional design strategy be for hybrid courses?‘’

According to Tony, very little on the comparative "affordances" of face-to-face vs online learning exists in current literature.. Will be interesting to follow the development of this discussion and any further research on this that becomes available.

Questions of my own: "What principles guide the shift from 100% face-to-face teaching to a blended learning model? In a 3 year undergraduate degree that is historically delivered through an on campus face-to-face model, where does one start to create a blended model - a % within each module or a % of modules across the 3 years or both?"

This is not new - I taught the International Writing Exchange (IWE) from 1993, but technology allows much more nowadays. Go for it and learn whatever your heart desires!  Go for challenging courses though, not a book on the Web!! 

Information and knowledge is there. Only you decide what to make of it.

Sharing knowledge will always give you back more than what you give.

I have participated in one...have you? Try them out. Check out www.coursera.org for courses!

Interesting to hear what the NEA is saying about the CCSS.

An automated tessellated Escher-esque drawing toy;
Levskaya's Eschersketch produces Escher style tessellated drawings.
One for design, maths and other courses.