CogBlogged from ‘August, 2005’

The recent T.H.E. Journal article 20 Technology Skills Every Educator Should Have has already bounced around the blogs I scan, many with some strong opinions about the value or lack value in such a list. The Edtech Posse Podcast #3 gave it a thorough roundup, and I concur with their skepticism about such lists which are narrowly focused on tools rather than the craft. I am not writing strictly about the list but cannot resist a few barks… When it first passed through my feed reader I passed up looking deeper– Come on, is it truly essential to know how to use a Zip disk? I have a whole drawer full of dusty zips. Much of the “skills” listed are going to have a shelf life of maybe another year or two. What is more important are the skills in being able to re-skill oneself or to move away from [...]

As summer winds down and the school year ramps up, I’ve been trying to refine a bit of the Small Technologies Loosely Joined approach we created last year for our Ocotillo instructional technology initiatives… For those irregular readers, Ocotillo is a faculty led program that attemps to drive technology agendas here, having been around in various forms since 1987. Last year was the first for a new “Action Group” structure revolving around 4 broad focus areas: Learning Objects, ePortfolios, Hybrid Course Structures, and Emerging Technologies. Each group is lead by a pair of faculty co-chairs who research issues, plan activities and workshops, etc for all 10 colleges in our system. For more, see our March 2005 presentation at the Innovations 2005 Conference. Or see the first year summary report. Last year, we tried hard to convince the groups to use a suite of open source tools we strung together with [...]