CogBlogged from ‘September, 2004’

More on the MLX front. An item that came in recently got me thinking more so about the value of reusable ideas- sure it is great to have some complex, engaging Flash animated do-hickey, but what great teachers have in great volume, and worth sharing, are smaller gems of great re-usable teaching ideas. So take a spin to the MLX and look up Pop Culture Bingo created by Analicia Buentello (Estrella Mountain Community College). I like to start the first day of class with an icebreaker for students to get to know each other. My ENG 102 class is centered around pop culture, so I decided to ask questions to test pop culture literacy. The sheet also serves as a contact sheet for students should they need to contact a classmate. I start the class as a game show and issue nametags. I tempt my students with a fabulous prize [...]

For the last two years we have tried a myriad of methods for soliciting people in our system to contribute their teaching ideas, class activities, course materials, heck even “learning objects” to our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) (see more about our incentive methods) Even getting closer to the 1000 item mark, I know for sure we are just scraping the surface of what is “out there”. I get anecdotes, faculty letting me know that their adjuncts are making re-use of a lot of items, others thankful for specific resources, etc. At our most recent Online Learning Group meeting, one participant thanked us for the “prize patrol picker” we use to give away door prizes (a Flash thing that picks random numbers from a pool 1-N). “Are you okay that 16 of our faculty use this?” he asked? Of course! I want more re-use! Anyhow, now with the semester in gear, [...]

I sure regret not having time to make the Instructional Technology Institute at Utah State University apparently well orchestrated by David Wiley and nicely blogged by others. The blog buzz is good from folks I know and trust. I’ve got some blog scraping to catch up on. Some wishes: Earlier Notice. It was announced like in the early summer– I already had plans for the time period, but for educators in general, we need some long lead time line up travel $, begging and scraping the desk draws for loose change. More Stuff Online. Just a schedule as PDF? Thanks to the ever vigilent Stephen Downes, there was almost word for word coverage [1], [2], [3] but conferences (IMHO) out to leave some sort of electronic footprint for prosperity. Something Different. This is my own conference peeve, but I am sure in search of some other format for our professional [...]

Ahh, and end to the lack of blog labor for an extended Labor Day weekend in San Diego. Over there, the refer to us invaders from the east as “Zonies. Some highlights included: Excellent Mexican food at a little place in Blythe, CA (we drove out the LA way to visit family south of Riverside) called La Plamosa Cafe- off the beaten track of the fast food exit stops, good home made tortillas and a carne asada taco that was heavenly. Not such a highlight was all the traffic non stop Friday night. Where are all these people going? (There must be a Go Dog Go reference here) Away from the mainstream beaches, nice time at Silver Strand and Imperial beaches, Lunch at Tin Fish on the end of the Imperial Beach pier (hey, there is a food theme to this weekend!) Yum, swordfish tacos, and great chips. The folks [...]

After today’s Ocotillo Online Learning Group meeting, I am hitting the road for a long weekend in San Diego. I need to romp in the ocean and find some good fish tacos. Much to Mrs CogDogBlog’s pleasure, I am likely leaving the laptop at home ;-) so this blog will be in holding pattern a few days.

In the last two years, we have home spun 4 or 5 online surveys for our projects. It took a bit of elbow grease in PHP and mySQL to get a decent system, and we were successful in creating a usable form for our survey-ees and a reporting tool. But this year, the demand was growing for doing more of these, and each iteration of a new type of survey was a big pile of custom changes to our code. It looked like time to buy a package that we could use to deploy web surveys more quickly. After some research, we purchased phpQuestionnaire from the humbly outfit named Chumpsoft. It pretty much matched our server environment, has a good set of question types, templates, saves data to mySQL as well as exports to other formats, for US$199. I already created a first survey that will be used by one [...]

A few clicks back I had played with a test Blogdigger collection – this is a service that allows you to take a pile of web/RSS feeds, and then have that itself be able to collapse into its own feed- an uber feed if you will. My test was to build up a collection of RSS feeds from known Learning Objects sites, and is Blogdiggered at: http://groups.blogdigger.com/learningobjects. A few notes and quibbles: (1) They have redesigned the layout, some improvement. (2) There are 986 items listed as returns from 10 sources. (3) I had listed a feed from EdNA but it does not appear to be learning objects but news about instructional technology. So that would has slid off my list. If someone wants to fix this, see below. (4) There are two search fields- very confusing. The top one searches all of Blogdigger, but there is a second search [...]