CogBlogged from ‘August, 2005’

A new meta-resource educational technology site has appeared on the scenes– The Academic Commons: offers a forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education. Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, Academic Commons publishes essays, reviews, interviews, showcases of innovative uses of technology, and vignettes that critically examine technology uses in the classroom. Academic Commons aims to share knowledge, develop collaborations, and evaluate and disseminate digital tools and innovative practices for teaching and learning with technology. We want this site to advance opportunities for collaborative design, open development, and rigorous peer critique of such resources. It may even make coffee, be a desert, and a floor-wax (sarcasm aimed to cheer up a sad Canadian). You can suggest I have a stake in this as I am hovering on the list of Board Members, at the gracious invitation [...]

Here at Maricopa, we’ve been trying to corral the herding cats of electronic folios for several years, back to a Dialogue Day in 2002, to a not so fruitful play with a consortium (it put the software cart before the eport need horse), to creation of our Ocotillo Action Group in 2004 to an excellent Dialogue Day with Helen Barrett in February 2005. Along side that was been the evolution of the MyEport developed at Chandler-Gilbert Community College thanks to Audree Thurman, and made available to the other Maricopa colleges on a server hosted in our office. We’ve seen a rise up the curve in tis use by faculty and several groups of students in Art, Teacher Education, and Library Technology. The software works well because of an easy to use but flexible interface, and is getting richer with tools for slide shows, quiz/polls, RSS and other forms of syndication, [...]

flickr foto SAC 2005 Session on Collaboration Toolsavailable on my flickr "Everybody say, I give permission to post my image on flickr!" Well, there is no way I am blogging my own session… that is someone elses job! This was the wild and open range discussion on “Collaboration Tools: What’s Out There?” and it was a great showing for the last day of the conference. We got all over the map of wikis, social bookmark tools, tagging, FERPA, instructional use of these tools… I was honored to be part of this session with technology all stars Phillip Long and Stephen Downes. There are some extensive notes (to be attached) taken by Cyprien Lomas here in SubEthaEdit with remote collaboration by Nick Noakes in Hong Kong. I ahd some links and resources set up in a wiki at: http://cogdog.wikispaces.org/CollabTools, and Stephen was recording the whole session with an MP3 recorder (it [...]

flickr foto SAC 2005 at Snowmasavailable on my flickr Not convinced of the “expertise” around Snowmass Village? This is the way to start a conference morning at the Seminars in Academic Computing (SAC) conference. Monday was an early morning hike “up the hill” (past the ski lift end) with Phil Long, Trent Batson, and Cyprien Lomas (behind the photo, thanks for the flickr photo, Cyp!) Given the altitude, the steepness, the earliness, single track through the aspen, a deer in the path, we did good burning dirt uphill (read the sign) and down!

Day two of the Seminars on Academic Community conference in lovely Snowmass…. I am reflecting that conferencing blogging is tiring work for me… Yesterday, in the morning keynote session, I was sharing note writing with Cyprien Lomas in a shared space of SubEthaEdit. We both talked later about how that experience played out- we were both scrambling to write down notes, sometimes stepping on each other, sometimes trading off, or one would start from the bottom of a presentation slide… he noted that when it works, people take roles, and I am thinking we do not have enough writers to do more than just notetake race. I recall that it was really effective at the NMC 2004 conference in Vancouver but there were like 8 or more people working it at the same time. I’m also giving reconsiderations to this process of note-taking during sessions. On one hand, I feel [...]

What Are We Playing At What it means to integrate games into the curriculum and why we should Richard Van Eck University of North Dakota Presentation and Game Analysis Packet available http://idt.und.edu/ A good session with a sound approach to Game-Based Learning, look for resources from the presentation. Good discussion form the audience. Bottom line- games are interesting, have great potential, yet we have a huge educational struggle to soundly integrate without trying to produce at the level of commercial games- recommendation is to integrate rather than create.

Principles of Distributed Representation Stephen Downes “Not another metadata talk” he promises…. since Stephen puts his presentations online, and I saw him turn on Audacity to record his own session, I am bowing out of taking copious notes (well no, I changed my mind, see below) While the intros are going, Stephen has a nice slide show of his photos from a visit to Aspen. Before the notes, it’s worth saying that Stephen in person is how he is in hos written work – deeply thoughtful, self effacing, sarcastic, humorous, challenging…) also in his presentation, note the use of references and information just published yesterday. And Stephen was on spot- challenging us, saying boldly what is crap and what is not… curious to hear from others how it was heard. Onto a few notes (Cyprien Lomas was taking more detailed notes than I, but trying to do it together in [...]

Open Source in Education- Evolving the IT Marketplace Bernadine Chuck Fong (President, Foothills College) Chris Coppola (President, rSmart) One sentence summary: Open source is good, happening, the game of institutional software is evolving.

Open Courseware and the Emerging Global Meta University Charles M. Vest Persident Emeritus, MIT Seminars on Academic Computing Claire Maple Address (Notes via collaborative SubEthaEdit session with Cyprien Lomas- I had never done this- it is very effective but tiring!)

flickr foto Another Conference Bagavailable on my flickr Another satchel bites the dust For me, the worst part about registering at a conference is when they hand you over the conference bag. Yechhhh. The only comfort is that 300, 1000, 6000 other participants are stuck with the same appendege. Out of 12 years in this game, I have taken home and kept a grand total of two conference bags. MERLOT in 2003 had a very cool travel bag that I have dragged all over Arizona (and to New Zealand). It is very functional, well built. The other was the metal toolbox giving out at a mid 1990s Macromedia Conference. That just had the ultimate “cool” factor though at this point it may have been relegated to holding old computer cables. So here I am at Snowmass Village, Colorado, for the EDUCAUSE SAC Conference, and have just discarded my conference bag. [...]