Scanning the horizons of my RSS reads… XPlanazine had this new one on A Discussion with the UT TeleCampus about Learning Objects (note to XPlanazine- how about using the blog title in your template TITLE tag; it makes for more laborious furl-ing)… Jennifer Rees and Michael Anderson of UT (University of Texas) Telecampus discuss an […]
More fun for Greg at Blogdigger 😉 My colleague Brian Lamb shared some nifty web resources for a class he is teaching at University of British Columbia. Remember, Rip-Mix-Burn… Specifically, he has created (rip) a Bloggdigger Group (a collection of chosen RSS feeds), that is itself turned into an RSS feed (mix), and is embedded […]
Yesterday I was listening to a Electronic Portfolios Virtual Community of Practice chat session that swam around on the issues of “Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants” and motivators for students to engage in eport activity. On reflection, I think the group under estimates the sheer power of having a personal publishing platform, especially if there […]
From a recent comment blog spam cleansed this morning. I think the spam author needs his own product (spammers URL intentionaly deleted) prozac http://anxietyXXXXXXX.xxx/ Blackmail Error: Send $200 to Bill Gates or your computer will get so messed up it will never work again. prozac online Jim, it’s Grace at the bank. I checked your […]
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 […]
