I made a new category, Evaluation, for this blog to make it easier to find my posts on online course evaluations. It was interesting to look back to this old post and see where my thought process was at the time. This is one of the things I like about blogs and blogging — seeing what I was thinking. We’ve since gone with CoursEval 3 for our evaluation software. After having some great conversations with colleagues I’m working on a proposal for Educause 2006 on this subject. Fingers crossed!
I came across a reference to this article in nature on the sciences using blogs and wikis. It points out some o f the strengths of Web 2.0 for the sciences. It also ties the origins of the web as a collaboration space for researchers into the modern technologies that make that real. The web up until now, Web 1.0 as it is now coined, was at its core far more static and siloed. I believe that researchers working in a wiki on a project is really the realization of Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web. While I can see over-blogging as a distraction. I can also see having a blog on certain project where you document your progress through the experimental stages. It provides a nice chronological record of what you did, when, and why. I think it could capture the excitement better than a finished paper would — and serve as a tool for students, showing them the excitement of the field. As more younger faculty come up the ranks I suspect we’ll see a shift in collaboration tools used.
It’s always a good day when the latest Innovate comes out. I immediately jumped to Steven Downes’ “Places To Go” column — not only because he’s talking about moodle, but because his columns have always been interesting. I honestly don’t know when he has time to eat and sleep. Have you looked at his web site? I could spend days there. I’m halfway through “Taking a Journey with Today’s Digital Kids: An Interview with Deneen Frazier Bowen” which is describing her keynote that I’m going to have see online. It illustrates the divide between the typical educator and the “digital natives.” I was able to watch the first 5 minutes of the keynote before the feed cut out. But it looked like a memorable keynote! This issue does seem rather K-12 focused but still of interest to others.