That Teacher Has Widget Rules

Virtualpolitik pal Mark Marino has confessed to having "widget fever" of late. As Marino argues, although widgets are "directed toward diversion and novelty," they can have pedagogical value to facilitate user-friendly "ripping, sharing, and re-purposing" and to create "page aggregators" with "multimodal learning pages centered on a given lesson."

You can check out his Pageflakes page on that rhetorical classic, "The Topoi," which dates back to the ancient Greeks, here. Marino has updated these tried-and-true composition methods with online video and various note-taking and brainstorming tools.