In another of our self-serving web celebrations, August 2004 marked the 10th year since we created the DirectorWeb, a resource site for users of Macromedia Director. We have an irregular scrapbook of the site showing some its evolution– this was an early lesson on that in the rush to create new content, iin web site […]
Wow. That’s about all, I can summarize. Wow. The newest EDCAUSE Review (September/October 2004) has not one, but two top notch articles on things near and dear to the CogDog, blogs and wikis. These are so good I am ready to print them, something I almost never do. In Educational Blogging Stephen Downes not only […]
I am just testing the Windows version of ecto, the MovableType desktop editor. I am offering it to our newbie bloggers in the interest of making it easier for them to edit their Ocotillo Action Group blogs.. It is about the same as the Mac version, different panes, buttons in different places, and the buttons […]
… when it takes less time to find a department’s web page via Google than navigating the main site itself.
It’s energizing to have an eager workshop audience…. today I demo-ed our Maricopa ePortfolio system for the new interns in our Faculty In Progress Program (FIPP). After a presentation on portfolio-ing by one of our experts from Mesa Community College. I showed them a mocked up fake ePort, and then we just created new content […]
Todd has done something cool. He published a search plugin for Mozilla/Firefox web browsers that provides a direct keyword search into the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). I don’t do a lot of browser hopping beyond testing on the major brands. I’ve taken the cues from the Zeldmans out there to develop and test for on […]
Completely irrelevant to technology… but I am in a 3 week physical ramp up in preparation for a Grand Canyon backpack, 3 days, 2 nights down the Hermit Trail. I’m getting my 2-3 day a week bike commute, some good weekend climbs, like Camelback Mountain. The park service issues lots of dire warnings about people […]
Today I cleaned my desk of paper piles, revamped the “todo” list that overflows from my whiteboard, and finished up a little experiment I had started on our ePortfolio site. Audree Thurman, the clever programmer of this nifty system, had developed a nifty approach for RSS feeds. There is a web page version (human readable) […]
Who needs Broadway? Last night we were at the “theater” in Pine Arizona (that is the town community hall, an old school gym that still has the wooden basketball court floor), with $7 tickets to see the one performance by Wyatt Earp – that is his name and he is the great nephew of the […]
Friday was our first meeting for this upcoming academic with the faculty co-chairs of our Ocotillo Action Groups. Part of this was planning, part of it catch up in the research they did over the summer, but the first bit was me trying to get them up to speed on the blog/wiki/discussion board tools we are using (blogged previously here as the “small pieces”).
We have pairs of faculty leading activities, projects, research, in Learning Objects, Hybrid Course Structures, ePortfolios, end Emerging Learning Technologies.
I’ve had to remind myself numerous times that I am a full time technology person who has been immersed in blogs and such for 2 years, and these are new fish in the pond, and as busy faculty are going to not jump in head first like I do. I’d been sharing information, instructions, etc over the summer, but the traffic had been, ahem, light.
In fact, it was just last week that I was able to sit down with John, the faculty member who is the over all leader for the group, to give him a quick start. John was quickly sold, and he has his own area for blogging his “chair’s eye view”— but he saw the power rather quickly and several time in last week’s meeting he let it be known he had high expectations for much activity on the group blogs.
We are working toward a late September event for our system- a virtual “kickoff”. Rather than setting up a physical meeting where people could learn about the new groups, each group will be posting on their blog their goals and plans for the year. We will be doing some brief video interviews/greetings, which will be made available the week before the “kickoff”- the activities during the kickoff will be mostly in the discussion boards, where people can ask questions and more or less “shop” for the groups they might be interested in participating in this year.
We are trying to not just “talk” hybrid courses, but be more hybrid like in our activities.
The group were all positive abut the potential, especially for the “dashboard” view we have for being able to scan the activity from 4 blogs, 4 wikis, and 4 discussion boards on one screen. From the questions over the summer, they were all struggling with figuring out what should go in a blog versus a wiki versus a discussion board. I tried to explain that there are no rigid rules, and they are going to have to figure out what works by trial and some error.
What follows is from a document I whipped up the morning of the meeting…
