CogBlogged from ‘April, 2004’

Here is an example of how we are tying events, projects into the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), and using syndication technology to provide a service. Today is yet another of our Dialogue Days, one day topical faculty development activities– Civic Responsibility: From Awareness to Commitment: What is the role of civic responsibility in our classroom and in the lives of our students? The American Association of Community Colleges’ civic responsibility initiative counters what is known as “civic disengagement” and provides a way for community colleges to establish a value of good citizenry across the continuum from educational institution to community. Many Maricopa faculty are using civic responsibility as a part of instruction to help students learn as they increase their awareness of issues, gather meaningful information, and explore ways to take action. This interactive dialogue day is designed for faculty with any interest or involvement with civic responsibility. You cannot [...]

A faculty member I work with has decided to use our experimental Maricopa ePortfolio to create an online portfolio for his Faculty Evaluation Plan review (acronymically known here as “FEP”)- something never done before in what is a byzantine paper bound process. John Arle teaches online and hybrid biology courses at Phoenix College, and has used his eP to provide the examples documenting his efforts in 2 Anatomy and Physiology courses including examples and desciptions of his syllabus, course schedule, lesson design, use of CDs (ADAM Virtual Dissections, yum!), Self Tests, Vocabulary Lists and INteractive Puzzles, Take Home Tests & Proctored Exams, Gradebook, Communication Examples, Student / Course Evaluation results, and data reports on student retention. His committee review takes place today, and he informed me that his college President is on the committee and she has easily accessed and reviewed his ePortfolio content. Also new on the eP front, [...]

A number of our Maricopa colleges have their own faculty support centers for faculty development and technology infusion… we try and build some collaboration amongst them. Three of them now have been or are starting to, use weblogs to publish resources and events of interest tot heir faculty, actually all hosted in this very MovableType blog host. You can see the RSS feeds from all three listed at our Ocotillo College Centers web site and two of them have on their blogs, the RSS feeds from the Maricopa Learning eXchange that list just the contributions from their respective sites, e.g. the weblog for the South Mountain Community College Teaching & Learning Center is able to synidcate in tis right side bar, the most recent MLX packages from South Mountain. RSS can go in circles like that (hey, like a dog chasing its own tail??? maybe not). Actually we had set [...]

Not relevant to anything but what’s happening around the office… When I started at Maricopa, I found the building had a locker room available, and for about 3 or 4 years, I was an everyday bicycle commuter- you can tell be the later 90s vintage of my “Wacked Out Bike To Work Page”. Part was economic driven as my wife and I had one vehicle between us, but I also enjoyed the scenery, found the exercise essential to managing my diabetes, but best of all, it was good thinking time. Fats forward to now, we have 2 cars, more things to do, and I bike maybe 2 days a week, but have had some 2 month stretches of no biking. But a few weeks ago, Todd, who runs our Wellness Program, asked if they could use a photo of me in bike gear to promote a Bike To Work campaign [...]

Well I think it went well. You just are not 100% sure doing an online presentation who is snoring at the other end. But we had some good discussion and some folks finally popped some images to a Conference PhotoBlog– oops, I forgot the context. Last week, I presented “Publish and Build Communities Around Digital Images” for the Teaching in the Community Colleges 2004 Online Conference. It was a half baked idea when I proposed it in December, as I had not even tried nor had access to a mobile telephone capable of posting images. But I had been playing around with FotoLog and Buzznet, and had even gotten Robert Burget, an adjunct art/computer photographics instructor at Chandler-Gilbert Community College to try using Buzznet this semester for his students to post examples of their work. See his experiences blogged as Testing the Waters and his shared Buzznet Gallery for his [...]

An online workshop of interest (tip of the blog hat to my colleague Jim Tipton) “RSS115: The Beginners Guide to Weblogs and RSS” led by Library Stuff guy Steven Cohen: If you have ever thought about creating your own weblog or utilizing an aggregator to read news but have been a bit skeptical then this training session is for you. This hands-on training will explore some of the current software tools that are being used to publish to weblogs as well as read content via RSS. During this online workshop, the attendees will have the opportunity to post/publish to a weblog, explore the features available with the software, as well as examine content via a news aggregator. It is offered via LearningTimes as a 4 week workshop, with live online sessions once a week starting May 11, 2004 and costs $150. Looks like a good hands-on event for RSS newbies [...]

SBL seeks S/DWC for.. nah, it is not one of those! I have just installed iChat/AV v2.1 which is now compatible with AOL Instant Messenger 5.5 for Windows and would like to try it for sure (see specs on AIM Video IM FAQ). If anyone out there is using AIM 5.5 with a video camera, and is willing to test this out, please leave me a comment below. We can trade handles via email.

We are doing some tinkering soon on our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) “packing slips” to increase the visibility and usage of the commenting tools, which are relatively unused situated near the very bottom of each packing slip. Ideally, this is the place MLX users would describe their potential, or real, re-use of MLX content. As it works now, comments are linked to each packing slip, and a copy is sent to the MLX package author. The comments can be anonymous, but if an email address is provided, the author can answer a question directly via the email copy they receive (the comment-er’s addresses is inserted in the FROM e-mail header). Currently, the comments are tacked into simple text files, but we are going to be rolling them into the MLX database, so they can be managed, sorted, and likely deleted by the author or an admin. But getting back, how [...]

Maybe minutes after mentioning I was in San Francisco for a Pachyderm meeting, I was contacted via em-mail and then iChat by Pat Delaney who offered to meet up and show me the sites off the tourist beaten track. This was great,a s was hearing some of Pat’s work at Gallileo High School, the Bay AreA Writing Project, and his recent stories of being “Shanghai-ed”.

Just returned from an eventful Pachyderm Project meeting in San Francisco. Much time was spent refining an unbelievable thorough requirements document (100+ pages) based on the last few months of creating user scenarios, culling those into requirements, sorting, prioritizing, and refining them towards the specs the programming team will use to produce the first Pachy 2.0 by October 2004 (we’re counting on seeing it!) Bigger than that, those present got, for the first time, to create content with a copy of the Pachyderm 1.0 (same as created by the