As you can see, I am creating a main course that contains the syllabus and then hyperlinking each unit in the syllabus to a meta-course. Will upload meta-course headers a bit later.
February 10, 2009
February 4, 2009
vote on a pup cut
tool test: gliffy.com
Gliffy is a free web application for diagramming. It has a straightforward interface that makes it easy to create a little diagram in about fifteen minutes. Not the slickest looking product, and I always find it annoying when you can’t remove the little advertising stamp, but I bet it wouldn’t be too difficult to really master the tool and make it work for you.
February 1, 2009
Social media’s coercive side
Howard Rheingold is a vanguard figure in participatory learning and a recent winner of the HASTAC Digital Media and Learning Competition, which sponsored the development of his recently unveiled Social Media Classroom. Here’s a screencast that describes the project:
While Rheingold embraces the use of social media tools in the classroom, he also is careful to explore the darker side of social media with his students. Here is an interview between Rheingold and Trebor Scholtz, author of “What the MySpace generation needs to know about working for free” :
the future of the university?
One of the things I’ve tuned into lately is the proliferation of free online courses offered by scholars in the open education and open culture movements. Anyone with an interest in the subject and an internet connection can enroll in these online courses, and it is often possible to arrange for credit through one’s home university by getting a faculty advisor to sign on to the plan.
Stephen Downes and George Siemens teach a course on Connectivism & Connective Knowledge which they offer through the University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Center and the Division of Extended Education as part of a just-announced Interdisciplinary Certificate in Emerging Technologies for Learning.
Another standout offering courtesy of David Wiley at Brigham Young University is Introduction to Open Education 2009.
Although I’m not at this time actively participating in these courses, I am following their development and making use of some of the high quality resources they so conveniently aggregate. In that spirit I share a video of Wiley’s introductory lecture:
