The week of February 28, 2005 through March 4 , our Ocotillo Hybrid Course Structures group is hosting an asynchronous discussion board activity. We are pleased and fortunate to have Bob Kaleta and staff from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Learning Technology Center (LTC) as our guests, and they will be checking the board to ask/answer […]

Despite our best intentions, the cart named technology seems to often get ahead of the horse. In a recent meeting, one of our groups looking at new technologies made the usual strong case for looking at video conference technologies- better use of time, people not having enough time to come to development events, people not […]

I cannot claim this was an Urgent/Important task, but my curiosity got the better of me… I made a new bookmarklet tool that allows me to run a search against my furl-ed sites either by entering the search terms or by highlighting the words in any web mouse-selectable content. This avoids having to load a […]

A commenter suggested I add Linkroll to the bookmarklet marklet maker collection, and that was an easy one to roll into the tool, which puts it up to a choice of 8 different web site submission tools that can be addressed with a click on a bookmark link. Linkroll is another “social bookmarks” site, though […]

flickr foto I Can Snow If I Want Toavailable on my flickr The thermometer is pegging 35+ degrees, but snow is falling in nice big clumps this morning at our cabin in Strawberry. A big wet storm is sitting on top of Arizona, the second in a week (I am convinced somehow our weather delivery […]

My latest 25 cent investment from the Pine Arizona Senior Center Thrift Store is “The Road Ahead” by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson. Far from being my hero, I was curious where the road he envisioned back in 1995 actually went. I’ve not read much yet, but flipping through, I have to grudgingly admit […]

… would likely program my current project more efficiently. This is one of those textbook examples of how not to build software, but in then end, good enough will (hopefully) be good enough. I am working an updates to an online application system we developed last year for one of our professional growth programs (where […]

Liz Lawly recently shared a great collection of edublogger’s explanations for why they blog:

I keep getting asked this question by colleagues here at RIT and elsewhere, and I find myself sending them the same links over and over again. So here’s what I give people who ask me this, in an attempt to clarify the value of blogging to those of us in academia. It’s not all about personal confessionals. Really.

These are great, useful, but in a way, like asking devout Apple users “Why they use a Mac?” I am curious about the flip side, why academics do NOT blog, what keeps them from it, what are the barriers, perceived or real?

I’ve been musing on this for a while, as I have created blogs for teachers and techies in our system that have various life spans from weeks to months. It is also curious in light of interests in our system in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), sprouting from the Carnegie Foundation’s movement— where a central tenet is being “public with our work as scholarly teachers” — what could be more than public than a blog?

And while the buzz is high among edu-techies for electronic portfolios, the prospect of an easy to use, comprehensive, portable, enterprise life long tool is on the 8 to never year horizon (don’t bark back about the ones in existence, I know about them, I know about the successful systems in place, but they are not near mainstream). So you can sit back and wait for the perfect tool or do something NOW which can catalog your accomplishments, projects, reflections, artifacts — a blog.

Following is mostly my own conjecture and speculation on why the blog updatke is slow, and is part of a later to be summary of how our faculty leaders are doing with using the blogs+wikis+discussion boards to document our Ocotillo project.