Online Blogucation

Why couldn’t teachers create games for their students with the students having no idea they were playing? I started by creating a list of learning objectives in my class. Each starting letter of the list was a corresponding letter of my personal website. To my surprise, several students found it, went to my site, and got a small bit of extra credit! So, I started trying other things. I placed “hot spots” on my pages – white text that blended into the background – the when rolled over sent students to a YouTube video. Some students found it. Meanwhile, other students found a puzzle that I created and, upon solving it, found their way to a wiki. There were 4 sets of students working the game from different angles and they didn’t realize it until they were well into the game. But here’s the cool part…the game was all about the educational stuff I was teaching normally!

Yep. Barnes & Noble. Of course, if they wanted to, students could go to Starbucks or several McDonalds these days. They can find Internet access almost anywhere but their own school. These students can find Internet at airports during Spring Break, at Kinko’s for X cents per minute, or by going to the public library, but they can’t access the world wide web, including their online classes from school. Ugh.

My summer courses are winding down again and I wanted to try something different for my final discussion topic where students reflect on what they’ve learned that term. I decided to try using Wordle as a visual tool for summarizing text, instead of simply using the typical discussion board posts.
For those of you who haven’t [...]

This professor of communications and lover of cheese steaks bought a new pair of running shoes a few months back. Then, he bought the Nike sensor system – a small sensor you put in your shoe somehow. This sensor sends information to your iPod during a run. That data tells you (in real time) how you’re doing, but it also allows you to see any trends in your running after you upload the data to the Nike+ website. Apparently he’s run about 340 miles and his average speed has increased by 1 mile per hour. He can tell you how many calories he’s burned and he’s delighted to tell you how many pounds he has lost.

Most of us have heard of the European Union along with the establishment of the Euro as a common currency across the continent. Fewer have heard of the Bologna Process which began in June, 1999 with the goal of creating a more standardized higher education system in EU member nations. One initiative has been a [...]

Questions about copyright and the fair use of copyrighted materials for education come up a lot during out work with educators on different campuses. I was planning on writing about this topic anyway, and then I came across a great resource that I knew I had to share. It’s an interactive guide to using multimedia [...]

In my last blog I discussed my steps towards joining Facebook (which, by the way, I have joined and love! I’ve even received a “monkey poop” gift from an anthropology colleague, but I digress…). One part of that discussion was the idea of personal versus professional space online, and I wondered how I would navigate [...]

A column on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s website recently reported that students’ #1 technology request is to have online chat capabilities with their instructor (here’s a report on the CDW-G study examining the role of technology in higher education). I’ve been kicking this around in my mind since first reading that CHE column. What [...]

Do you know the story of the student who kept taking his Final Exam after the class session ended?  The instructor of the large, Freshman lecture called for all tests to be turned in on her desk.  Every student complied, creating a very large stack, save one.  He just sat in his desk, writing and filling [...]

Over the past few months I’ve been reflecting and writing about assessment accountability and its intersection with workplace competencies.  I believe today’s post on competency-based learning nicely integrates these two topics and provides academic leaders with a progressive assessment model that dovetails nicely into learning outcome management systems which support the more rigorous demands of [...]