I hope you already know that Michael Pollan is giving his public talk tonight at the Kohl Center (7pm), as one of the highlights for this year's Go Big Read book, In Defense of Food.  I hope you've read the book and have already been engaging your students in the topics it raises.  There are a lot.  Share what you're learning here--we've set up a special page on the TLE site just for this purpose.

I read the book over the summer and I liked how Pollan's book got me thinking differently about food--what it is, where it comes from, how I eat.  I think I eat reasonably healthy (though those who know me also know that I eat way too much) and thought I already knew a fair amount about what I was eating.  I still learned a lot.

What has stuck with me after several months is a desire to be more conscious and intentional about what I put in my mouth, and so I've decided to try to eat for a month like Pollan suggests--eat food, not too much, mostly plants.  Here are the 7 rules he lays out (I found this summary on the WebMD website, of all places):

1.  Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says.

2.  Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.

3.  Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.

4.  Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.

5.  It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'"

6.  Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks.

7.  Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.

I'm not going to be all that strict about this, but I do want to give it a good try.  Some things I want to do anyway, like eat less.  Some things I don't do now, like buy food where I buy gas (except the Kwik Trip in Cross Plains when I'm biking out that way and still have 20 miles to go before home).  Other things are just not practical--while Nancy and I eat dinner together almost every night, we don't eat breakfast together, and lunch is usually eaten at my desk.  And I have no idea what my great grandma ate, though my grandma ate a lot of things I'm not about to start eating (kiske and boiled tongue come to mind...).  But like I said, I'm going to give this a good try.  To me, this experiment will largely come down to eating the least processed food I can, cooking more, and eating and buying locally whenever possible.

I'm going to start tomorrow, in commemoration of Pollan's talk tonight.  If you see me feel free to ask me how it's going, and I'll periodically update this blog with observations.

I wrote this essay for Brad Hughes's Writing Across the Curriculum Sourcebook and thought I'd also post it here.  It's about how we can teach our students to write in the web 2.0 world of twitter, wikis and facebook.

I’m a latecomer to web 2.0—you know, all the new ways in which we contribute to the web, and connect to each other, through facebook, wikis, twitter, flickr, youtube, blogs; all of it searchable through google.  Some research finds that over 50% of people in the U.S. regularly contribute to information on the web—and that percentage is even higher for those under 25. 

We’re living through an information and technology revolution as significant as the one sparked by Gutenberg’s printing press.  Gathering information is no longer a premium; instant access is the thing.  We are moving from the “card catalogue world,” where information is pre-sorted, organized and categorized, to the “google world” where access is instantaneous, and where we literally create connections each time we do a google search.  Michael Wesch, professor of anthropology at Kansas State, has a great youtube video on this called The Machine is Us/using Us.  Take a look.

So, while I love my macbook pro, I have been a latecomer to embracing the google world.  But I have come around, and now, I’m an advocate for how to best use web 2.0 in our classrooms and other educational experiences.  It is my feeling that colleges and universities are way behind—we grew up within the card catalogue world.  Just think about how our courses, our gen ed requirements, our majors, our transcripts are all structured to access information and gain knowledge through a framework that values pre-structured, pre-sorted information that is more-or-less communicated in one direction.

We can lament that students don’t have the writing, research, and critical thinking skills—or attention span!—to write a 20-page term paper.  We can lament the flippancy that twitter seemingly promotes.  We can lament the lack of reflection that seems to come from the instant gratification, constantly-connected world of facebook and youtube.  Yet the world is literally changing around us, and we need to teach our students the writing and communication skills to live and work productively in the google world.  Just ask their prospective employers.   Or better yet, ask your students.

Many of you are likely light-years ahead of me here—you may already be using wikis in your classes, or asking students to create youtube-like videos as class assignments.  Please share your activities and experiences with the rest of us!  Go to https://TLE.wisc.edu and you can share what you’ve done.  For the rest of you, and to get some ideas of what others have done, I gave a keynote at the May 2009 Teaching & Learning Symposium where I shared some examples of how web 2.0 technologies are being used on campus.  You can find my presentation at

https://TLE.wisc.edu/symposium/archive/2009/keynote-teaching-learning

Maybe these examples will prime your creativity pump.

It’s our responsibility to help students recognize that the best twitter comments only appear casual and flippant—instead, we need to teach them the discipline and power that comes from condensing research and critical thinking into 140 characters.  It’s our responsibility to go beyond assignments that simply ask students to seek information and summarize what they find—instead we need to teach them to discern value in information—to sift and winnow.  It’s our responsibility to teach the communication skills necessary for students to figure out how truly powerful web 2.0-based social networking can be.

This will be the university education of the future, the one that teaches the writing, communication, and thinking needed for our students to become the leaders we want them to be.