wallen's blog

From the LearningTimes Network, learningtimes.org on blogging in an educational setting:

"The "blog phenomenon" seems to have been growing to a frenzy over the last few months. Everyone has a blog, reads a blog, or wants a blog. At a fundamental level, blogs are the true promise of the Internet encapsulated in a new four letter word. Blogs give everyone a soapbox, a place to state or shout their mind, whether it be about the tedium of their own lives, politics, or eLearning. Author David Weinberger has recently paraphrased Andy Warhol and said that 'on the web, everyone is famous to fifteen people.' Blogs are exactly the kind of tool that make this possible, and increasingly accurate. They are the first foolproof tool of the Internet's "me" generation.

In the eLearning world, blogs represent the pendulum swinging the other way. Their growing popularity is a reaction against the bulky nature of most course management systems -- Who needs a $60,000 LMS to announce that donuts will not be served at next week's training session? It's the 'dumbing down' of technology to the point that truly anyone can "post their say, and read it, too".

I posted on The EDUCAUSE Instructional Technologies Constituent Group a description of how I use the discussion board to build community in online classes. Having summarized the experience, I will add it to my blog. As follows:

At the beginning of the course I find that I have to put out a blanket rule about participation. For each discussion topic that I post you will receive three grades, 0-5.

1. On time. I will post the topic on Sunday and you have until Tuesday to post your first response. Do it by Tuesday and it's an automatic 5

2. Substance. I expect the first response to show that you have read the material (or other media), thought about the discussion topic, thought about the problem involved, organized your thoughts, and then posted the results. I advise you to compose this first response on a word processor, check spelling and grammar, and then copy and paste.

3. Participation. You are expected to respond to at least eight posts put up by classmates. Responses such as "I agree" or "You are right" or "I had the same reaction" are automatic zeros. Thoughtful responses that help push the discussion along move up your chances of making a 5 on this part of the assignment.

Until recently I saw my job as fairly straightforward. I help faculty learn new technologies that they may use in teaching. It was a "our side" job. We had the stuff and we learned it and then we shared our stuff with students.

Now the job is to anticipate what reception technology students are/will be using. This is the season of the podcast. Do we have at least two years before everything has to fit within the confines of a phone?

The Bryn Mawr Classical Review has wonderful materials for academics interested in classical and medieval studies. The Editor's Disk (yes, disk), laments the difficulty in getting people to review materials on the WWW.

But if it is true that reviewers are so strongly enticed by the prospect of a free book or a free CD that absent such an enticement they are unwilling to come forward, then we will soon be at an impasse, as more and more important material becomes available in a form unsusceptible to the enticement of reviewers. Now the future of reviewing itself is a subject of interest to us, not least because one of us will be participating in a panel on that subject at the APA meetings in Montreal, but we are for now convinced that the first and most obvious way forward is to insure that serious scholarly work, however published, gets serious scholarly reviews.

See http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2005/2005-12-20.html 

Does anybody happen to know of an Educause group interested in the need for Educause to create a rich library of learning objects to be freely shared? Looking across Google searches one finds that objects exist for K-12 and for math and the sciences K-20. We have a huge need for objects for the arts and humanities.

Laptops are out; tablets are in.
Stylus is out; thumb is in.

Most truths are one-liners. That's why we have 14, 16, 18 week terms. It takes time and paychecks to explain truth beyond itself.

Why do most teachers demand that cell phones, pda's be turned off when class begins? One professor demanded they be turned on. Grabbed a conversation and asked what other end was doing. "I was giving her a website about what you were saying."

From SAC "What are we Playing at?"

Most of us teachers are digital immigrants. Our students are ALWAYS connected.

If most students do their best work midnight to 4am, why don't we schedule classes then? Who owns the schedule?