3229 Posts Categorized "Blog Pile"

Everything that does not have a home, just a big old stinking pile of posts.

Blog Pile

Shirt No Tie

I should be working but… I cannot remember the last time I wore a tie. Somebody died or got married maybe 10 years ago. Another I used as a rag to clean a bike chain. But today for work, I was decked out in this spiffy, CDB official ware, courtesy of Mom. I doubt she […]

Blog Pile

Copyright Lesson Activity

Last week, we gave our online students an activity on Copyright and Fair Use: Do the Right Thing, which I have also recently posted in the Maricopa Learning eXchange:

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/slip.php?item=1264

The subject merits almost an entire course in itself, but we boiled it down to sending them to to excellent web tutorials:

(1) Intellectual Property Law: Why Should I Care?- Carlos And Eddie in ‘Rock Machine’ is a nicely designed site geared for students based on the story of the antics of two cartoon drawn college students.

(2) University of Texas Copyright Tutorial has a great wealth of information found inside the UT Crash Course on Copyright

They were to review each site, take the simple online quiz from each, and post a discussion board message about their “scoires” and what they learned. Unfortunately, it seems we needed to spell out very specific questions for them to respond to besides “I liked the site”.

However, our follow-up activity this week is soaring like an eagle! We have invited a guest expert, an associate dean of instruction from one of our colleges that has probably the most experience in this area. Dr. Mary Lou Mosley participated a few years back (as the only rep from a community college) in a national task force of educators and copyright holders to develop fair use guidelines for educators. She has a great presentation online called “©opyright Doesn’t Mean “Copy it Outright!”.

The activity was for them to pose two specific questions (related to the course or content they teach) on copyright, fair use, intellectual property– Mary Lou offered to visit the discussion area once on three days this week. This is also turning out to be a great example of the power of using the internet to bring in remote experts– typically people think of doing this as live chat sessions, but with our smaller class size and schedules, synchronous meeting is not feasible.

Some questions already posed:

Blog Pile

SciencePORT: Scientists Get Fed Here

I think that SciencePORT is a directory/search site of RSS feeds in the sciences. It is hard to tell since the “About” link is just a bunch of links to RSS aggregator downloads. Well it does have “bugs” on the logo and a BETA stamp. Nuff said. But they have a directory structure that lists […]

Blog Pile

The Lost Art of Reading Directions

We are coming into Week 7 of our 12 week faculty course, Web Based Teaching, and thanks to the return of my co-teacher, we are mostly caught up on back grading of assignments. We had to provide some mea-culpas as our stated turn around on grading had lapsed– a good part as I had to […]

Blog Pile

Tending the Garden of Blog

Ahhhh, Spring time is almost here in the northern hemisphere (though here in Phoenix we have already experienced 90 degrees F for more than a week). This is a favorite time of year in the Sonoran Desert, as those precious relatively small, but important amounts of December, January rain, cause a burst of color as cacti and desert wild flowers burst into a raging riot of colors, even if for just a few weeks.

We have desert landscaping at our home, not a lick of grass nor any time spent pushing a lawnmower, and last weekend, while tending the gardens (pulling weeds) metaphors began wafting through my mind…..

Blog Pile

Confessions of a Lousy Online Teacher

The natives are restless and rumbling among the online web teaching course I am co-teaching this semester. One student’s self-evaluation referred to the “hostile” environment (a weeks worth of angry posts to the discussion board). There are a number of factors I am accepting my role in: * It is a course taught previously by […]