Previously on CDB, on the doubts of “Learning object repositories”… “The folly is that educators will give up some time to share information about resources they have created or used”. Now a different slant. I had lunch recently with a colleague working on a new grant funded project– creating discipline-specific “learning objects” and yes, their […]
Just took a quick at Furl, a new web site for organizing bookmarks centrally (tip of the blog hat to Seb). The concept is not new at all, but I have found most of these sorts (e.g. BackFlip) too tedious to maintain. It’s gotta be simple. Bookmarks/favorites in web browsers have hardly evolved since Mosaic. […]
On its own, blogging is nicely permeating among some of our faculty. At this Friday’s Ocotillo Online Learning Group meeting, we have 4 demos of different ways weblogs are currently in use at Maricopa.
A brief preview for those who cannot be at Phoenix College Friday…
One of my procrastinated pending projects was updating our Learning English Electronically (LEE) CD-ROM software, a still well-used English Grammar coded with Macromedia Director 5.0 in 1998 and updated last in 2000. I had read some time ago that Director Apps needed to be authored in at least version 8.5.1 to run in Windows XP […]
Trying another “new aiming to be regular” CDB feature, highlighting an interesting “”package” from the Maricopa Learning eXchange. This is is special because it is not a “reusable learning object” (RLO) but a ‘reusable idea object” (RIO?) Maybe we can breed a whole raft of meaningless acronyms, like RCA (re-usable classroom activity), RCS (reusable communication strategy), RCP (reusable class project), etc. But again I digress.
This one is also special because it comes from a long time veteran teacher, both a passionate teacher in class and online, someone with an uncanny knack to truly reach and touch her students, and someone who excels and doing effective things with rather simple but effective strategies. I recall these computer workshops Donna and I did back in the mid 1990s, typically in those computer classrooms where the participants were more or less huddled behind monitors- she brought out a classroom technique she called “mouse up” to get their attention. Simple, effective, (and fun). . But again I digress.
Anyhow, Donna has shared an introductory activity she uses as the first bulletin board assignment in her online classes. Rather than a dry, “introduce yourself, what you do, what are your interests” sort of thing, she has applied this activity called The View from Where I Sit (an in this vein of RIOs, she learned this one from another faculty member at a summer workshop).
The energy was electric yesterday at our system’s first introduction to “Pachyderm” at our Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day. The reaction to the potential of Pachyderm and the level of participation in the afternoon activities were beyond our wildest expectations. Much had to do with the enthusiasm guest speaker Peter Samis […]
Microsoft provides this “hard to believe someone wrote it seriously and they were not smoking crack” Knowledge Base article Steps that you can take to help identify and to help protect yourself from deceptive (spoofed) Web sites and malicious hyperlinks..
In a nutshell, the smart folks in Redmind suggest that you type all in the browser address field rather than actually touching your mouse on those dangerous hyperlinks:
…a malicious user could create a link to a deceptive (spoofed) Web site that displays the address, or URL, to a legitimate Web site in the Status bar, Address bar, and Title bar. This article describes steps that you can take to help mitigate this issue and to help you to identify a deceptive (spoofed) Web site or URL.
The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.
Can you imagine how popular the web would be if this was how Tim Berners-Lee designed it from the start? Heck, we’d still be using Gopher…
I’ve always had this fascination in the large scale effects from small points of change, punctuated equilbrium not just in evolution and white water rafter trips, but also in human nature (anyone with me on that one?) Actually, I was thinking about a vocal faculty member in our college system that for sake of vagueness, I refer to as non-gender specific “Pat”. The frequency of Pat’s antics vary, but Pat is well known in our system for the loud (in email) finger-pointing, administration bashing, emails blitzed system wide. On a much lower level of frequency, Pat sends out a meaningful story related to life or learning, but usually it is a rant against Pat’s department, Pat’s college leadership, the dark forces of our District office, etc. Anyone who rebuts Pat, whether to the entire system by email or even privately in a direct email to Pat, is then publicly lambasted by Pat in (again a system-wide) email. The best way to deal with Pat is to ignore Pat, logic and reason fail if Pat disagrees. No, this is not about the circus. Well, we hope not. Tomorrow (Jan 30) is our Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day event for about 70 registered participants from our colleges, held at Paradise Valley Community College (our “Dialogue Days” are one day special events, workshops, etc that are organized by our office in response to requests of faculty or promising trends, etc). Pachyderm is one of the most promising tools that would actually be able to build something useful from so-called “learning objects”. Developed by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a vehicle to allow non-technical staff (museum curators) to create rich multimedia web/CD/kiosk experiences that add layers of context around the museum exhibits, and it is constructed via a web interface that accesses a database of digitized assets. It is not a small leap to say this is a similar need for faculty, so SFMOMA in conjunction with the New Media Consortium (NMC) have launched the Pachyderm 2.0 project with this goal in mind- to create an open-source authoring platform for educators.Blog Pile
Motivating Drivers- One Person’s Actions Drives Learning E-mail Filters
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The Pachyderm is Coming to Town
