The new issue of Innovate is out and it focuses on educational uses of gaming. Kurt Squire, COTF X afternoon keynote, has an article about his experiences using Civilization III.
This link is making the rounds too. U of Saskatchewan Library has a list of peer-reviewed academic journals with RSS feeds. What a great way to keep an eye on your discipline’s journals. I hope more scholarly resources start to take advantage of RSS. It could be a great time saver for busy faculty wanting to keep on top of publications.
Running a multi-user version of the blog software I’m running here, edublogs hopes to be the place for students and educators to blog. Hopefully it will take off. Here’s the press release
http://edublogs.org – Launched!
http://edublogs.org is an totally unique project aimed at teachers, researchers, writers and educators the world over.
Basically you get to set up a free WordPress blog (by far the best blogging platform out there!), 10MB of upload space (extending to much much more down the line), an enormous stack of beautiful themes and to be part of a unique community.
You could use a blog to record and annotate important resources and ideas, to propose and discuss anything under the sun, to progressively develop your thesis, to publicise and discuss your publications with the world or just to develop your digital identity.
Either way, http://edublogs.org is a no-strings-attached, open source, ongoing and freely available service for you and you’re invited to take part!
If you’ve got any questions, please feel free to contact James Farmer at james[at]edublogs(dot)org
I stumbled upon this newsletter that speaks highly of the presentation given by my partner-in-blogging at the COTF conference in May.
I’ve been catching up at work from being gone and hope to get some more reading in today so I can post here.
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.
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.