Day 1 – lost and jetlagged

We flew into Shannon airport about 80 km south of Galway (as the crow flies, but no road in Ireland is straight) and rented a car. Renting a car is good. Renting a car right off the plane isn’t. You see, we arrived about 8 AM Ireland time. To convert you add 6 hours to central standard time or subtract 6 hours from Ireland time. So it felt like 2 AM and it was full daylight. So we had to both deal with extreme tiredness and the shock of driving out of the Avis rent-a-car place on the left side of the road. After a few days driving was fine, but this was only an hour into our trip and it wasn’t fine yet.

After we got going with the free Avis map (which was pretty good) we made our way to Galway. We knew we had to get to Corrib Village, but we weren’t exactly sure how to get there. We knew what street it was on. Google maps made it look easy, it wasn’t. We needed the Ordinance Survey map of Galway. Once we had that the next day driving was easy. Again, that is the future. We had a really hard time finding it. We kept getting turned around because the streets wind everywhere and aren’t labeled. After an hour we finally found someone who knew where Corrib Village was. This was because we were 3 blocks away from it.

Corrib Village was interesting. They are self-catering apartments (with kitchen). Hotel rooms are considered en suite if they have a bathroom in the room — a private bath does not necessarily mean it is in the room. Because my mother was teaching for a summer abroad program we were able to share the apartment in Corrib Village. We wouldn’t have been able to take the trip without that help.
Some main points on Corrib Village:

• casual : times were flexible. The shuttle to City Centre (downtown) was supposed to run from 12 noon to 8pm. It actually ran from 10am to 7pm or so. It all depends who you talked to.
• concrete block construction : this seemed common throughout Ireland. We saw houses being constructed with concrete blocks and eventually stuccoed on the outside.
• damp : it had rained before we arrived and we started in a ground floor unit. It was damp! We eventually moved to a second floor unit which was far less damp and we could leave our windows open during the day to keep it aired out.
• plastic bathrooms : they REALLY like plastic in their bathrooms. The walls and ceiling were plastic and the floor was some solid sheet of flooring. Our hotel in Dublin also had the same plastic walls and floor!
• heating : The temperature must not fluctuate too widely since the heating was by small space heaters. We needed to use them a few mornings to take the edge off. Each bathroom had its own little fan-driven heater that proved useful in drying clothes — things don’t want to dry by just hanging them up! Oh, and the light switches to the bathrooms were in the hallway outside of the bathrooms. That left me confused initially.

After we found Corrib Village Aimee promptly found the bed and napped for 2 hours. I took about an hour nap. We pretty much took it easy.

Innovate June/July issue and it’s Kay!

I saw in my RSS feeds that the new issue of Innovate is out [requires free registration]. Hooray! There’s some good articles as always. One author’s name jumped out at me, Kay Wijekumar. I thought, “No, is that the same person who I saw in 2002 at educause?” And yes, it was! Now I just have to fix my Innovate login so I can read her article. Here’s their summaries of the articles I am looking forward to reading:

New technology tools and practices are exciting on their own, but making them work within Web-based course management systems is often a challenge. Kay Wijekumar outlines the best ways to design and conduct an online course with such constraints—and proposes software changes that would make CMSs more effective and user friendly.

Educators like those above spend significant time and energy on technology integration, yet their effort may not be recognized in tenure and promotion considerations. Expanding this matter to another area of faculty responsibility, Ellen Cohn and Bernard Hibbitts reexamine the traditional definition of public service. In particular, they question its division from teaching and research and argue that service can be just as valuable online as in person. Two exemplary Web sites that serve both an academic purpose and the public good illuminate their discussion.

Marc Prensky suggests how one common device could move us closer to that vision. Cell phones are portable, powerful, and already in the hands of millions of students. Rather than ban mobile technology from the classroom, Prensky contends, educators should embrace it as a flexible learning tool. Like cell phones, weblogs have obvious social uses and less appreciated educational applications. Drawing on pedagogical theory and personal practice, Stuart Glogoff documents the ways in which blogging can build community, enhance knowledge construction, and increase interactivity in both online and hybrid courses.

OK, pretty much every article is on my list to read.

Sloan-C View and Blended Learning

The latest issue of the Sloan-C View has some initial results from their April workshop on blended learning. They defined some key elements of blended learning:

Courses integrate online with traditional face to face class activities in a planned, pedagogically valuable manner in which a portion (institutionally defined) of face to face time is replaced by online activity.

I am looking forward to some further publication of workshop results.

6-month blog-iversary

I just noticed that I started blogging just over 6 months ago with this post. I also looked at my November posts and saw one on M-learning… and I was just talking about it again. I hope I’m not just repeating myself here.

Faculty Development

I stumbled upon this faculty development site that has many links of use to both new and seasoned faculty. Maybe I’ll check out some of the links. I clicked on ‘Constructivist Teaching’ and found even more links…. maybe later. Too much good stuff to read now.