Sigh. The wiki euphoria may be short lived. I’ve just wiped out a pile of link insertions from a pile of weird Chinese web sites from some of our Ocotillo wikis. Sure, I can remove them and ad some IPs to the banned list, but that approach surely will not scale. Over the weekend, there […]
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 […]
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, it was time for another system-wide email to invite our folks to “play” in the MLX Great Package Race. This is where we are tracking all MLX items submitted between April 1, 2004 and March 15, 2004 and will give the top contributers some software prizes, most of them donated from some nice vendors. In the last few races we had given multi-license software prizes to the colleges that contribute the most, but now we are “phasing” out of the competition/bribery approach, so this might be the Last Great Race.
Why stop this if it has been successful? I do not think we always need to create personal incentives for sharing resources. The act itself ought to be its own reward, and being public with your teaching methods is a cornerstone to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning movement which many in our system ascribe to.
And to be honest, I want to put some more effort on the next months on finding out how our packages are used/re-used…
Anyhow, for whomever cares, I am including the text of the email that was blitzed last week across Maricopa (so far it surfaced about 3 new items, sigh).
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 […]
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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I’ve not read much on Skype until I noticed via Joi Ito that a Mac version was out. Heck, I did not even know what it did! It appears to be a simple way to have audio conversations via the net, and even 3,4 way conversations. The trouble is I don’t have anyone to Skype […]
In a world where human behavior is in accordance to PT Barnum’s laws, we all would be using Internet Explorer. I am afraid we live in that world. I waste more time trying to fix CSS problems in IE than I care for. Why cannot those Microsoft engineers build a browser that follows Web Standards? […]
