Eric Frank, President of FlatWorld Knowledge, spoke today in the BCC English Department meeting and showcased the work they are doing around open textbooks. This is something that is gaining ground at BCC, as our very own Susan Amper described in a recent post.
photo © 2010 opensource.com | more info (via: Wylio)

He explained how they have attempted to take the best of the publishing world and the best of open-source ideas to create “sustainable open textbooks” — texts that are peer-reviewed, come with supplemental materials and instructor guides but at little to no cost to students. I found myself puzzled as to how this is at all possible. In a nutshell, they have set up a system where all content is available for free via the web, but students can pay for different formats if they choose. While 44% of the 115,000 students who have used the service so far have read the content free online, 56% have purchased one of the other options (ereader version, pdf printout, etc.). The purchases of these 56% balance the whole endeavor out to about $20 per student. So, for Introduction to Psychology, the purchase options include a print-it-yourself .pdf version for $24.95 (individual chapters are $1.99), a soft-cover bound version shipped to the student for $35-70 (depending on B/W or color), an eBook version for $24.95 (Sony, nook, iPad), and extra study aids for $14.95. Faculty adopters can either adopt a text themselves and leave it up to the students to select and pay for the options they want or the institution can purchase a “site” agreement that would cover any material the student wanted for $20 per student.

There are currently 37 titles, many of them are in business and math, but they have 107 authors signed who, Frank said, represent approximately 80 textbook projects. So more titles are constantly being developed.

What appealed to me most about the presentation was the editing aspect. You can edit any part of any book. And the editing isn’t limited to picking and choosing which chapters appear. It is line-by-line editing capability. You can also engage digital media by easily by embedding YouTube clips and other links into the “text.” After you make changes they are formatted to appear seamlessly integrated to the text. While the original author retains copyright and receives royalties based on their text, your additions, if they were to become adopted, would also allow you a slice of the royalty pie, so to speak. As I understood it, if I were to write an additional chapter for the Introduction to Psychology textbook, something about critical psychology or social justice, for example, that could eventually be adopted and I would retain the rights to that information. I would imagine this is something that will have to be constantly negotiated, but it seemed promising. Potential royalties aside, the chance to manipulate content so that it meets the specific needs of your course/students/school is invaluable, especially for busy grad students and adjuncts who may not know where to begin when they are assigned a new class. An arrangement like this would give us the chance to select a text, work with it, add to it and provide it to our students for extremely little cost.

There are, of course, other open textbook alternatives. The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources provides a valuable starting point, if you’re interested in learning more. As well as the College Open Textbooks site. Additionally, Baruch College has just partnered with Flatworld, so we’ll get to see how that relationship develops in real-CUNY-time!

What do you think? Revolutionary way to deliver customized content and save students mountains of money or too good to be true? I’m optimistic (for once).

photo © 2009 Justin See (coming back) | more info (via: Wylio)

Cross-posted at TE(a)CH with Purpose

Was there some official decree to make this week about efficiency? Many of my usual blog-reads were offering up tips on time management. Maybe it’s the spring-thaw meets almost-middle-of-the-semester-freak-out meets just-far-enough-from-january-to-still-try-your-resolution-before-giving-up? Either way, here’s what folks were saying:

First up, Google has launched a new labs feature called “Smart Labels” that filters bulk and notification emails out of your inbox and into another labeled box that sits under the “sent” and “draft” labels. You have to go to labs to activate it. I’m going to give it a try. I have a fairly elaborate labeling system in place, but it seems like merchants/politicians keep devising new ways to get past those. And, apparently, this new feature will play nice with your existing labeling system, allowing for modifactions and revisions.

ProfHacker documents both the Pomodoro technique and Pareto’s principle both of which, interesting, seem to be time management techniques that originated in Italy. These techniques deal with both effective time management and increasing productivity. The Pomodoro technique basically trains you to work in 25 minute segments with 5 minute breaks in between. Pareto’s principle is basically an economics rule — that 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your clients. Applied to academia it can serve as a reminder that, as the ProfHacker columnist points out, 80% of your tenure success may come from your publications and therefore you should spend 20% of your time writing. Not a hard and fast rule, but an interesting guide. I used an approach similar to the Pomodoro technique to get through my dissertation revisions, only it was 10 minutes on and 2 minute breaks. It worked…when I stuck with it.

While these things may help you make better use of your time, there’s also something to be said for bucking the system, right? Another ProfHacker post discusses the importance of not sticking to the syllabus when current events could serve as important teaching moments. But let’s say you really want to throw productivity and efficiency out the window. Well, there’s good news for you then, Angry Birds is coming to Facebook.

In other news: my favorite citation manager Mendeley is trying to get developers interested with a $10,001 prize and Mashable offers 5 Free Tools for Screencasting.

As part of the Title V work going on at BCC, Professor Kenya Harris and the team of nursing instructors are making use of VoiceThread, Twitter and a number of other Web 2.0 tools to make their courses more interactive. The results are really impressive.

In a recently published article, Prof. Harris reports an improvement in pass rate of 30% since she began incorporating technology into her course design. How has she done it?

Building on the idea of blended learning Prof. Harris has stopped lecturing in her courses, opting to capitalize on face-to-face time by engaging the students in “active learning” activities that build on the content they review on their own out-of-class time. All of her lectures are available to the students via Podcasts, Videocasts and PowerPoint slides, which students are expected to review prior to class. This is particularly helpful for language learners, who can listen to a lecture numerous times. If they have questions on the material Prof. Harris has set up a “muddiest points” forum on her Blackboard course page that allows students to post their questions in the forum. Other students are often the first to respond and Prof. Harris moderates the comments and joins the conversation.

This “multifarious instructional design” as Harris calls it, let’s students master the content in their own learning style (they can use the slides, podcasts, read texts, etc.) and bring that mastery into class where she engages them in activities that build on the content, such as simulation and role-play. This is especially important for nursing students, who will be responsible for conveying medical terminology to their patients. Students report that they find these activities more engaging and exciting and the data supports her efforts. Pass rates improved 30% over the course of just three semesters, as she increasingly implemented her techniques.

In another recently published article, Gerald Bergtrom of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee documents transitioning a Cell Biology course from traditional face-to-face to a blended environment. He documents the step-by-step process and used a process similar to Harris’s — content delivery and mastery was aided by technology and occurred outside the classroom so that classroom time could be spent on more “meta” activities that actively engaged students with the content.

Both instructors are capitalizing on the “asynchronous” online discussions and interactions that can fortify content delivery and boost the level of in-class activities. For me, these ideas completely shifted/challenged how I normally thought of out-of-class time and what I expected my students to be doing with that time. They also highlight the role that technologies available on a variety of platforms and Blackboard, such as discussion boards and blogs, have in these out-of-class interactions. Finally, it is refreshing to see that they are having success with students actually doing what they are expected to do on their own and taking responsibility for their own learning because they are ready to actively engage when they come to class.

In this week’s roundup I focus on the idea of collaboration, since there seemed to be a number of intriguing posts on the Edublogs…

Mashable brings us a really excellent and thorough post about Facebook’s Growing Role in Social Journalism. The article considers how major news sources, such as NPR, have begun using to solicit sources for timely stories and the role the network has played in the recent events in Egypt and Libya.photo © 2008 Mark | more info (via: Wylio)

Wired Campus reports on an novel idea — the Embedded Librarian. A reference librarian worked directly with a college class during their meeting hours to interact via Twitter. She was able to follow the class discussion, answer questions, and respond with useful links. Though the collaboration was ultimately very time-intensive it serves as a great example of how we can make better use of librarians and bring them in at the very beginning of students’ research processes, rather than half-way through. This could be especially important since a recent study shows that “87% of students believe online libraries and databases have had the most significant impact on their overall learning.”

Two interesting posts bring up one common question: how much structure is too much structure? TeachPaperless blogger John T. Spencer considers this while watching his son color in a coloring book vs. drawing his own monsters. Using this experience he reflects on the use of graphic organizers and technology in his class and the extent to which they urge deeper thinking. Similarly, though at a larger scale, Jim Shimabukuro laments the restrictiveness of LMSs (Learning Management Systems) in terms of stifling instructor and student creativity and documents his history of blending LMS with other open-web resources.

And in other news, NspireD2 announces there’s now a Free Wikispaces upgrade for higher ed and Skype launches a beta version of it’s Skype in the Classroom, designed to allow classes from around the world to find other classes that would like to engage with them via Skype.

photo © 2009 Nationaal Archief | more info (via: Wylio)

Cross-posted at TE(a)CH with Purpose

A useful post at ProfHacker outlines an interesting way to “Avoid ‘Grading Jail’ through Course Writing Contracts” in which students create their own due-dates and these serve as binding contracts. The papers trickle in throughout the semester and you’re faced with a little bit of reviewing/grading per day than a whole stack a few times per semester. I experimented with a similar approach by having a large class divided into groups that had rotating due dates. I also remember my Human Sexuality professor providing a list of response paper topics and their due-dates and we were instructed to complete any three of our choosing by the end of the semester. I suspect this worked particularly well because the topics were often personal and controversial and so interest is what drove our decision to choose an earlier paper rather than procrastination.

Will Richardson, author of “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms” has a post outlining the difference between “online coursework” and “online learning” and his skepticism at the increased lauding of online courses as the silver-bullet of education reform.

Finally, as a follow up to last week’s post about Twitter and Classroom engagement, I appreciated this post at TeachPaperless on How Social Media Changed My Novel. The author cites Twitter and blogging as two major influences in the writing of his recent novel. Twitter helped him tune in to writing more succinctly and blogging helped him find his voice (and also provided a useful forum for feedback on drafts). The benefits and drawbacks that he discusses are readily applicable to your own writing and particularly to how students conceptualize and write-up their ideas in your classes.

Other notable bits:

• iPad/iPhone App documents “disappearing cultures” through photographs.
• Zotero has a standalone app meaning you’re no longer tied to a specific browser.
• Storify looks like a promising tool for having students develop narratives built on social media.

I’ve been slowly building a set of links, resources and questions in an Evernote note tentatively titled “Twitter and Engagement in the Classroom.” But this recent post on Cac.ophony – Saign flls aftr US wthdrwl OMFG — inspired me to sort through them and develop a post on the current pedagogical promise (and potential pitfalls, to stick with the alliteration) of Twitter.photo © 2009 Rosaura Ochoa | more info (via: Wylio)

The educational value of Twitter is becoming an increasingly popular idea. Just last week, and I know this may knock me down a few rungs on any sort of credibility scale, it was even a major plot-line on Grey’s Anatomy, where Dr. Miranda Bailey had interns actively tweet surgery updates and, when a surgery started to go dangerously wrong (natch), fellow Tweep-interns were able to save the day by identifying a nearby hospital that had the technology to (gasp) perform some rare procedure. Thanks to Twitter a life was saved, folks shared knowledge, a luddite doctor was convinced of the awesomeness of tweeting and all the hot doctors were able to go home and sleep with the other hot doctors. (And now I’ll pretend not to notice when you watch the video clip from the episode.)

So, perhaps it is possible to see two avenues for Twitter pedagogy (Twitagogy?): one that allows for the breadth of knowledge distribution, consumption and sharing; and another that allows for depth, as the Cac.ophony post suggests, and using Twitter as an actual tool for writing, critical thinking, summarizing, etc. As with any technology the main thing we emphasize here at TE(a)CH is to put the pedagogy first, so it will be important to consider what you want Twitter to accomplish in terms of these two avenues of engagement and whether you want to focus on using it for one or both goals.

Professor David Silver in San Francisco is using Twitter as a means for sharing information among students. He opened his class with a simple assignment to get students on Twitter and following one another. Each following assignment makes use of the #greenmedia hashtag and requires students to post photos, recipes, etc. via Twitter. You can follow his other posts to see how Twitter is integrated into each assignment. While the main page of Twitter can at first seem daunting, I can see this being very useful if you have students using a third-party client, such as TweetDeck (which has desktop and smartphone versions) that lets them highlight and save specific searches or hashtags.

Tom Barrett created one of his crowd-sourced google docs to address the very issue. 31 Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom has some useful ideas. Those that seem more applicable to the higher-ed classroom involve:

• following a popular hashtag and engaging with participants outside the class on the dialogue associated with it (slide #12);
• having students tweet their learning process (could also relate to writing process) including what they are learning, a problem they’ve encountered, a useful resource or other tips (slide #19);
• using Twitter as a “research diary” for sharing, reflecting, engaging, inquiring and reporting (slide 26);
• generating “Twalterego” accounts for characters or historical figures (slides #21 and #27);
• have students follow a current event or track a topic on google alerts and use twitter to inform the class of new articles or stories and summarize them into one (or more) tweets (slide #28);
• use a companion site like paper.li to aggregate class member tweets into one multimedia “newspaper” (slide #31)

By thinking more in-depth about uses of Twitter, a few have come to mind that I’d be eager to try (and to know if you have tried). From a course management perspective, I could imagine using Twitter as a forum for students to ask questions that pertain to the whole class, such as clarification of an assignment or a specific concept. Not only would this cut down on the amount of email (and redundant emails asking the same question), but it would give students the first chance to respond to their peers’ questions. It might also be useful to have students tweet summaries of lectures, discussions or events, similar to conference hashtagging, but you’d have to be ok with mobile devices out during the classroom or relegate that activity to out-of-class hours. The geo-tagging feature available on most smartphones could also provide interesting opportunities for students in Urban Studies courses who could photograph their commutes or their neighborhoods or locations at specific times, etc.

Twitter engagement doesn’t have to be limited to your students. You can use it to enhance your own professional presence online or — double bonus — to share pedagogy resources and ideas as exemplified by #FYCchat for first-year writing instructors. How have you used Twitter, or how would you like to use Twitter? What have been your experiences? Please share!

Quick Guides to Twitter:

Twitter glossary from @ to Z

Twitter 101 for Students guide

Topics to consider next:

Hashtags vs. creating a specific class account: safety issues and spamming?

Assessing the impact and usefulness of Twitter. What do students say?

After perusing my Google-reader this week I noticed there were a handful of posts addressing academia and technology or, more specifically, having an academic identity online. The following links in this roundup follow that theme and range from simple how-tos to more philosophical questions about taking your scholarly presence online. And, in the spirit of the day, they document the ups and downs, loves and hates, of engaging online.

photo © 2009 webtreats | more info (via: Wylio)

Defining your web presence: ProfHacker has a useful post about Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics. As someone who is currently on the market I’ve been receiving a lot of those little notifications from Academia.edu that someone Googled me and landed on my Academia profile. Do you have one set up? Are there other ways that you have built an academic web-presence? This post also suggests LinkedIn, discusses the benefits of Tweeting (or not), and highlights the usefulness of RSS feeds. It also dovetails nicely with NspireD2′s Three Easy Ways to Make Academic Websites post including a range of out-of-the-box options to more customizable platforms (such as WordPress, which I wholly endorse).

I appreciated this (yet another) ProfHacker post on Encouraging a Conference Backchannel on Twitter. After attending a few DH and IT heavy conferences over the past year (Digital University @ CUNY and both CUNY-IT days) I found the Twitter participation intriguing and, ultimately, helpful. At first I was put off by how many people seemed to be engaged with their devices during a presentation, but I also realized that they were often going deeper with a line of thought and at some points were even having Twitter exchanges with the panelists! But the real value became more apparent to me after I attended a conference this past month in Arizona. There was no social-networking component and, low and behold, I didn’t meet anyone. I stayed with my usual circle of colleagues (all folks I enjoy, of course) but didn’t really make connections with others sharing my research interests. This stood out in sharp contrast with the conferences that had a hashtag and a group of even 5-10 active Twitterers — I made some solid connections that have presented a number of opportunities to build relationships. If anything, Tweeting a conference helps shy types like me get a foothold in that ever important conference-networking door.

A guest blogger, Katrina Gulliver, on TenuredRadical debates the merits of identifying your blogging vs. operating under a pseudonym. The post raises important questions about performances of online identity(ies) and the ever-diminishing online privacy (i.e. ability to actually operate anonymously). Her post provides examples of scholars who have helped shape their fields through their online presence and considers how social networking has changed during her career and the specific value of social media for history. Dr. Gulliver also makes use of the about.me platform mentioned in the NSpireD2 link above to create a visually appealing “meta” page that compiles all of her online activities into one page.

Finally, when you’re putting your words in the public forum, whether online or in print, there’s a great post over on Cac.ophony that considers what happens when you lose control of your words, as seen recently with the hullabaloo around Frances Fox Piven.

What would you like to know about engaging with your students online? Don’t forget to take our poll (to the right!)

photo © 2006 Alexandre Duret-Lutz | more info (via: Wylio)

Cross-posted at TE(a)CH with Purpose

People. Whatever you do, do NOT ignore your google reader for 45 days. Ouch. But writing a dissertation is a good excuse, right? Things are back and running here at the TE(a)CH arm of BCC. So, without further ado, here is a roundup of some useful ed-techy things.

• An interesting tool that allows you to make fake facebook walls. The obvious use would be for English or History teachers to have students create walls for literary/historical figures. Are there other creative uses?
• A promising looking website, Higher Education Teaching and Learning Portal, has grown out of a Linked-In group for higher education folks interested in using technology. You can also submit articles of your own experiences for bi-weekly publication.
• BiblioBouts online resource and citation game: A really cool way to have students collaboratively (and competitively) create bibliographies for projects and assess the quality of the information while building them. It works in phases, or “rounds” in which students complete various tasks of finding sources, ranking the sources found, and generating a bilbiography.
• TeachPaperless provides ideas for how to give your students non-exams. And then provides an example of a final exam in human geography. The final makes use of visual data and a variety of websites. Some of the questions are more scavenger-hunt level while others make use of aggregating and comparing data and asking students to synthesize their responses.
• Boomerang plug-in for Gmail. Make emails reappear in your inbox or set a delay for sending out responses/reminders. Between this and the priority inbox feature I’ll either be super-productive or lose half my emails…
• At one of the sessions I attended at the CUNY IT conference, a professor talked about having their students create actual Wikipedia entries. This idea is gaining ground…at Wikipedia! They’ve announced an initiative to recruit college professors who are interested in having their students contribute work. Rather than banning Wikipedia from our classrooms (another discussion entirely), the idea of having our students contribute to a site and inherently learn the tools of evaluating information seems very promising.
• Finally, what are you using now instead of delicious? Derek Buff chronicles how he’s switching to using Diigo with his students and is enjoying the more participatory aspects of the service.

Like Sarah Morgano, I was super happy to attend the CUNY IT Conference Day 2 on my home turf as well! The day was even more focused on pedagogy and it was distressing that there were many concurrent sessions that I wanted to attend but could not. But here’s the lowdown on the sessions I was lucky enough to catch. In a rush? Scroll down to my take-home points to get the nutshell version.

Authorial Implications of Collaborative Online Learning

Matthew Gold, Claire Fontaine, Daniel Reshef, Jean Darcy, Joan Dupre, Sara Ruth Jacobs

Daniel Reshef kicked off the panel by showcasing some tools for online collaboration. One of the tools was the simple Typewith.me which is similar to a google-document but extra awesome because it allows one to playback the entire creation of the document. This would provide immense opportunities for reflecting on both the process of writing and collaboration.
photo © 2009 Marcelo Noah | more info (via: Wylio)
Matt Gold and Claire Fontaine chronicled their work on the impressive Looking For Whitman project. Matt began by stating an obvious but often overlooked observation: in this day there’s no reason to limit our collaboration to the classroom or even institution; with online technology we can collaborate with students around the world. Exemplifying what he called “networked aggregated learning” the LFW project brought four very different institutions together around the life and locations of Walt Whitman. This emphasis of “learning in place” was particularly valued by Claire, who conducted research on the process and student reactions to the project. Though a challenge of the project was the different content that students were engaging with at different institutions, a strength of the project was the connection students felt to Whitman by focusing on their connections to the places he lived and worked. This connection to place was especially valuable to NYCCT students who were able to do archival research on Whitman’s life in NYC and were thus positioned as experts on this topic.

Jean Darcy and Joan Dupre presented on their work with ePortfolios and digital storytelling. Jean’s presentation certainly took a different turn from the normal technology presentations as she explained how she was influenced by John Dewey’s “Art and Experience.” This text is also one of my faves, so my ears perked up quite a bit. She outlined an 8 step “symphonic reflections” that warrants its own blog post (at least). Luckily, her slides are available on the AEBEEL site so you can get the full picture.

The session ended with a good discussion involving Steve Brier who pointed out that all of the projects have an underlying pedagogical goal of making students active learners and that we can’t be dazzled by the technology to the extent that we lose the underlying pedagogy. This speaks 100% to our aims at the TE(a)CH project so it was especially nice to hear. Jean concurred, noting that the underlying theory is to begin with the “authentic experience” of the students and to witness how the professional community uses technology to grow from that point.

Keynote

Virginia Heffernan was great. Her keynote was particularly engaging in that it considered our cultural and psychological connections to technology, our fear or embracing of the future and nostalgia for the past. Proclaiming the death of analog she asked the audience to not mourn what has been lost but to actively engage what the future can hold. Seeing as how my partner is in publishing, I cringed a little when she said that “eReaders are qualitatively better than books” — but she did follow that up with comments about how vinyl sales where the highest in history this year and that we still have radio. So I was slightly comforted.

Building Communities on the CUNY Academic Commons

Stephen Brier, Charlie Edwards, Brian Foote, Matthew Gold, Boone Gorges, Carl Grindley, George Otte, Daniel Phelps and Michael Smith

Personally, it was great for me to put some faces to the names of folks I’ve been interacting with on the Commons for the past few weeks. The room was filled for this session, with many of the audience members already members of the Commons. Matt Gold began by outlining the main goal of the Commons, to build connections across CUNYs campuses and to make visible the fabric of the intellectual life of the university.

Michael Smith and Daniel Phelps showcased York’s page for their Communications Technology Program. The Commons provided a way for them to showcase student work in a way that the standard College’s website hindered. What I found particularly useful was how they were able to use the Commons WordPress platform as a content management system (CMS). This is something I have done personally but that we’re trying to do at BCC as well. So it was helpful to see how a program had made a very impressive site from the flexible platform of the Commons.

Charlie Edwards showed the Commons Digital Humanities Initiative presence, highlighting the different ways they have used the group, wiki and blog features to accomplish different aims. Integrating third-party applications like Twitter, the CUNY DHI page has gained recognition in the field as a “hotspot” for DH work.

Matt then introduced the two Commons Community Facilitators, Brian Foote and Sarah Morgano, by explaining that the Commons “actively rejects the service model of IT.” Rather, they feel members who are actively involved in using, building and troubleshooting the Commons will develop a stronger community. Brian provides weekly “meta-blogging” in a round-up highlighting blog posts across the Commons which are helpful for getting a sense of the work taking place on the site.

Boone picked up on the idea of openness by explaining the fundamental differences between open-source and close-sourced software. The Commons mirrors an open source relationship and has overlap of users, support and developers. Closed-source tends to divide users from support and development and place a paywall in between. He explained the symbiotic relationship of open-source relationships by showing how many of the Commons plug-ins have had success outside the Commons in the larger WordPress community.

Steve and George closed out the presentation by outlining some of the history of the Commons development. The ultimate goal, as explained by George Otte, is to have a “generative” environment but that “generativity does not happen without openness.”

Open It Up: The Prospect of a CUNY-wide Online Student Publishing Platform

Luke Waltzer, Mikhail Gershovich, Matthew Gold, Boone Gorges and Joe Ugoretz

After a much needed break (a lot to process!) I attended this session that was much more of a brainstorming/working meeting to discuss what a blogging platform might look like across the entire University. Participants were broken up into the following groups based on their interest/expertise/whim: support, curriculum and pedagogy, and technical/development. Our discussion began with Joe Ugoretz  wanting to make open and public publishing of student work a live question. Referencing his recent blog post, we talked through some of the advantages and disadvantages of open publishing, and the need to keep this an open conversation among faculty and students rather than a fixed decision.

We also discussed logistical matters. For example, how would we “discover” student content across campus-wide platforms that might have thousands of users? Could there be a “marketplace” where instructors could find other instructors to collaborate with around similar topics?

Two words that came up often were moderating and curating. Both actions are relevant to large-scale student publishing platforms but have potentially different consequences. Moderating connotes limiting, controlling and protecting. Curating connotes displaying, showcasing, and organizing. Both would be relevant to a student-publishing endeavor. Moreover, who controls each of these would be of particular concern to faculty members, who may avoid a platform moderated by administrators who may not be familiar with the context of the course or campus.

The discussion generated many questions and issues to consider. As a follow-up, there were talks of moving the discussion of ALL the breakout groups to a forum on the Commons, perhaps to the Open Education at CUNY Commons group.

Take Home Points:

• typewith.me provides online document collaboration with playback ability
• collaboration doesn’t have to be limited to just the classroom or institution, think outside the four walls!
• add Virginia Heffernan to your RSSReader
• If you’re not on the Commons, join. If you are, think of how you could get more involved and encourage others. And if you need help, the community facilitators are there for you.

photo © 2009 Jennie | more info (via: Wylio)

The EdTech community has become rather twitterpated by @TomBarrett, who has developed a series of worldwide crowd-sourced google documents on a variety of uses of technology in the classroom. Each is essentially a series of slides made public where anyone can add their own use or see ideas from others. While many of the examples pertain more to elementary or secondary education, there are plenty of applications for higher ed and professional development as well. There’s one for pocket video cameras, one for iPads, Voicethread, Prezi and tons more. Thankfully he’s collecting them all in an “Interesting Ways” page on his blog. It is definitely worth checking out. To boot, he’s also been engaged in a Creative Commons license violation argument with an Australian software company who lifted the slides directly and removed all attribution. Thus, the advantages of worldwide collaboration and the pitfalls, all at once.

As we began sketching out our vision for the TE(A)CH site I perused a number of web-site design questionnaires to outline what we knew we wanted in the site as well as identify gaps in our thinking and issues we may encounter. Though much of the commercial stuff wasn’t relevant, I found the exercise helpful in that we thought about the user’s experience more than we might have otherwise. Smashing Magazine has assembled a list of Web Design Questionnaires, Project Sheets and Work Sheets that might prove useful as you plan your own website or work with faculty/students to design project sites.

Honorable Mentions:

• Talia at Cac.aphony has a great post about developing a visual assignment for her FIT students to help with their interpretation of a text. This ties in nicely with the document design discussion and follow-up posts happening over at ProfHacker. What is the role of the visual in your classroom?
• Teach Paperless has been nominated for an EduBlog Award for their post “Why teachers should blog.” The post brings up a number of points but one of the most interesting is the notion of a public display of thought processes and teachers as models for this, which echoes Joe Ugoretz’s post about the public/private of blogging and learning.
• Awesome. Evernote founder states “Where there’s a platform, there will be Evernote.” Which is why it is quickly growing on me after only about 10 days of usage.
• A useful post on 11 Ways Not to Use Powerpoint at NspireD2.
• Though the list is short right now, NspireD2 is creating a list of blogs about teaching in the disciplines. Hopefully the list will grow as more folks use the recommendation form to add blogs to the list.