CogBlogged from ‘May, 2004’

Sometime recently we passed another milestone in the 10th year of continuous web presence by our Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction. In Spring of 1994 we were doing support for faculty at South Mountain Community College in helping them get started with a local “center” for teaching, learning, and technology– we had convinced the college to donate space for an “Educational Technology Center”, a small room in the back of the library (now realized as robust, staffed, and established Teaching and Learning Center located in the Computer Commons). We dragged down a few computers, publicized some workshops in the Spring of 2004. most of them lightly attended. I had been using HTML for a few months, and thought it could be a great way for faculty to create hyperlinked multimedia content, especially since it could be tossed on a little old floppy disk. Se in creating a workshop on [...]

Yesterday the inventory at the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) climbed higher. As blogged earlier, the Civic Responsibility: From Awareness to Commitment Dialogue Day held yesterday (Apr 30, 2004) included activities where faculty from across our system submitted to the MLX their lesson ideas the involved some aspect of Civic Engagement- from a range of disciplines (English, Sociology, Economics, Writing, etc). These are now collected in a MLX special collection, making it easier to see these 32 packages with a common theme in a group, piled one palette in the warehouse. You may notice that the boxes are, ahem, a bit “light”– this is because there is a different strategy at work here. Rather than just collecting nicely wrapped finished packages (or learning objects), there are just the starts of some new ones. The activities involved working in groups to generate these new ideas, and they used the MLX to post [...]

Over at Common Craft, you can now find Wikis Described in Plain English: You may have seen the word “wiki” used to describe a website used by a group to collaborate. My intent with this post is to describe wikis and the basics of how they work- in plain English. It is not bad, but not so enlightening anyone would slap their forehead and say “Ahah!” It would be nice to see a set of examples of high quality or effective uses of wikis in different arenas, at least something beyond the WikiPedia… OK, wikis change constantly, everyone can edit, no programming required. Doesn’t someone have to be in charge for it to work? Yes and no. Wikis work best when they are “gardened”. Usually, the people dedicated to the wiki (the community) will work to organize it over time. Not every user will consistently make changes effectively, so someone [...]