artpad

More creativity and more sharing and collaboration. Just more. I like it. Check it out for yourself at artpad.

Spresent

I saw this on one of my favorite vidcasts, geekbrief.tv. Spresent is a web-based presentation tool. I'm sure the world is super-saturated with powerpointesque presentations, I know I have sat through my fair share of terrible bullet screen after bullet screen. So there must be a need for these things, right? One need I would like to see more is pushing students to create presentations with these tools. And that is where something like Spresent might really come in handy. A student can share a presentation and collaborate with other students and when they are all finished, a simple publish button will send whoever an email with the finished product attached. Here is one I created for an introduction to the Flash interface.

There are some drawbacks, but this is still in beta, so with any luck these things will only get better. The most noticeable shortcoming was including images -- you need them uploaded to the web somewhere. They do offer Flickr integration, which seemed great, but for some reason, the interface did not function properly. In the end I had to upload the images to my personal site and link to them there.

I hope they make the powerpoint conversion feature part of the free service. Keep a watch on this one.

timeline

I was all set to start working on a timeline generator flash component for online course material, but decided to see what other examples might be out there first. Naturally, MIT is way ahead of me. And all without using any Flash at all! So, I'm shelving my timeline creator project, and recommending anyone with timeline needs just use this remarkable open-source tool. Granted it doesn't have a nice teacher-friendly user interface yet, but with an example file or two, you will be in timeline heaven!

Bb Greenhouse Grant

Blackboard announced it's annual Greenhouse Grant project today. Applications can be found on their website. If you have an initiative that will contribute to the greater e-Learning community that might cost about $25K, here is your chance. And for the first year in the history of Bb, they are welcoming clients using their Learning Systems CE and other versions previously called WebCT.

WikiSpaces K-12 Give Away

This is rather generous of wikispaces.com -- giving away 100,000 free fully paid versions of their hosted wiki to K-12 educators or institutions. Nice. If you work or are in K-12, click on the image above and grab yourself a wiki before they are sold out!

The Scout Report

Once again, I have to thank the Instructional Technology Council for bringing a nice resource to my attention. The Scout Report at University of Wisconsin Madison located and annotates educational resources on the web. In the most recent edition, they point to Charles Darwin's Complete Works, A fetal pig dissection, A Spanish learning site, immigration research and more. With so much on the web, if you are not looking for it, you might be missing it. This report is a nice place to stay current on some of the research and web highlights.

WebCT Extra Credit

Sometimes the easiest things are the most difficult. An instructor wanted to add extra credit for the completion of a course evaluation in her course. But wouldn't it be great if it was not necessary to manually search the submissions and award points for each and every course? What do we want?! Automaticity! When do we want it?! Now!

First we changed the anonymous survey to a quiz since surveys cannot have point values in WebCT 4.1. Then the quiz column total points -- which always works out to 4 points as long as every question is answered -- is added to the total. Well, WebCT, being the smarty that it is, naturally includes the 4 points as part of the new total. It's no longer extra points it's just become part of the possible points.

Turns out the instructor had another assignment that is a manually graded numeric column, so she might just lower that by 4 points. Not ideal since it will need to be explained to students that the total isn't really the total on that assignment. Still, it works.

WebCT backup size

Just received word from our IT gurus. Turns out WebCT CE 4.1 backup files larger than 2GB have serious troubles if it's ever necessary to reinstall. Thankfully, not too many ever reach this size. But these limits are certainly nice to know. And, from what I understand (which may not be much) the limit has something to do with the zip format.

Open Source -- Innovate

A whole issue on the Open Source movement. I feel a little funny calling it a movement. Maybe it should be called trend or direction. This is a nice summary of Open Source technologies and how they might be useful and where they might be headed.

Welcome to the October/November issue of Innovate. Among the range of technological developments that hold significance for educators, one of the most far-reaching in its future implications is the rapid growth of open source software. In this special issue of Innovate, our contributors explore, assess, and illustrate the potential of open source software and related trends to transform educational practice.

Innovate - October/November 2006 Volume 3, Issue 1

Gaming video

This might be a little old, but the content is good. Except for the department of education guys. They really need to loosen up a bit, and they need to look less like sports reporters.

TILT tv

I have been brainstorming and searching for educational vidcasts. The kind that might appeal to teachers. It would be fun to do one, but I don't want to just repeat the same stuff others are doing better. Here is one such educational do-gooder: TILT TV (Teachers Improving Learning with Technology). I'll be adding this one to the links too.

Robert Sternberg

Came across some of Robert Sternberg's writings today. In There Is More to Teaching Than Instruction: Seven Strategies for Dealing With the Social Side of Teaching he joins other Yale-ites (and one U of Toronto Prof) in proposing a new element to educational curricula (or is it -ums?): Dealing with others. I wish this would have been a part of my educational curriculum -- seems practical. They boil down dealing with others into seven different catergories: avoid, confer, consult, comply, delegate, legislate, or retaliate. And they have developed some suggestions on how educational programs might assess students ability to deal with others. It's been interesting to reflect on my own teaching, and how I chose to deal with others in a variety of contexts. Good stuff.

50 ways to take notes

Solution Watch compiled an incredibly convenient collection of websites to assist you in your random acts of note-taking and list making throughout your day.

WebCT Drop Lowest

This was a nice little find in the Dr. C WebCT help boards. It's simple and effective. If you ever need to drop your lowest test score in your WebCT grade book (version 4.1) this formula might help. To use this, all your tests would need to be out of the same number of points or be calculated percentages. First add a calculated column to your gradebook. Then edit the formula for that column. You will want to add up all your tests with the SUM method, and then using the MIN method, find the lowest score of those same tests and subtract it. The formula for 5 tests would look like this:

SUM{[test1],[test2],[test3],[test4],[test5]} - MIN{[test1],[test2],[test3],[test4],[test5]}

audio component

I helped build this audio glossary spelling tutorial component for a new online pharmacology course. I think everyone was happy with the results. The students click on the vocab items to hear the pronunciation. With the spelling hidden, only ****s show. I wish I could post the entire component here, but with all the audio files, it's just not practical.

web 2.0

TechCrunch put together a nice 24 minute documentary/interview video Q&A-ing many Web 2.0 industry leaders. And I use the word "industry" loosely.

social brain

Here is a quote from the recent 10 question interview with Arthur Chickering from iStream. Kirkwood subscribes to iStream, so any Kirkwood employee can read the whole interview once you register on the site. Many good articles to read. I chose this quote mostly as a reminder to myself. I need to exercise my social brain.

What do you mean by the phrase, “Learning is a whole-person, whole-brain activity?”

Here is what brain researchers have found: Body, mind, and brain exist in a dynamic unity; our brain is a social brain; the search for meaning is innate; the brain establishes meaning through patterning; emotions are critical to patterning; learning involves conscious and unconscious processes; complex learning is enhanced by challenge, inhibited by threat; and every brain is uniquely organized withresulting differences in talents and preferences.

iStream Portal

multiple communities

Community building is stressed often as an important element to distance learning. The social aspect of education is powerful if not necessary. I was reminded recently of my own difficulties in individualized French instruction in large part due to the missing error correction that inevitably happens when learning in groups. Later, when I took classroom French courses, I was part of the error producing group. There was comfort and relief in that I no longer had to make all the mistakes myself. But I was also part of the grad-student-in-undergrad-course community. And I was part of the sit-towards-back-right-of-room community (oh, the jokes made at the expense of the lef-side-of-room were many). And I was part of the prepared-for-class community. And so on. The point is, if I may be so bold as to have a point, there isn't just one community to build. And by building, I mean, allowing to exist.

Sir Ken Robinson

This is a speech by Sir Ken Robinson. It speaks to many reasons why I question the trend I see in many distance learning program's design team structure. While I do believe a designers input and involvement is important, I think the creativity of instructors will be hampered by templated and ultra-uniform design.

Course Evals - Article

A new edition of Innovate is out. The article quoted below is timely since we will be piloting a student evaluation in the Fall. Many of their findings certainly ring true with my own experience. I had no say in my course eval procedures and felt like it was just another administrative hoop I needed to leap through. That attitude most certainly tranferred to my students and likely explains how they completed the surveys so quickly (with no reflection or thought at all). While some students did take the surveys seriously, they were usually the ones who had something to gripe about. Little insight could be gleaned from such feedback other than personality differences.

Moving student evaluations online inherits challenges unrelated to technology and the Internet; instead, as is often the case, it is the migration online that puts an old issue under a new light. There remains a persistent lack of evidence that student evaluation instruments evince strategies for improvement, ostensibly their principle purpose. In fact, evidence suggests that most student course evaluation instruments may even impede improvement (Birnbaum 2000). The lack of a shared understanding of the purpose of evaluation among students, faculty, and administration underlies this concern.

Innovate - Online Student Evaluations and Response Rates Reconsidered

RSS feed in WebCT

Say you have a blog, like this one, or some other RSS feed that you would like to incorporate into your WebCT course. Sounds like a good idea to me. Or maybe you maintain a list of public bookmarks on a site like FURL or del.icio.us both which have RSS subscription possibilities. If you are not sure what RSS is, not to worry. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is made up of code (XML) that a user can subscribe to and is then pushed out to other places you might be more inclined to visit like your google homepage or news aggregator or even a WebCT page.

The site that makes this so easy to do in WebCT is feed2js.org. This site will generate all the code necessary to build a simple RSS aggregator for yourself or your students. All you need to know is the URL for the RSS feed. This is usually a little button somewhere that says RSS or XML or ATOM. If you click on that, your screen typically doesn't look too pretty, but your address bar will contain the URL that you need. Select it and copy it. The feed for this blog is http://abbreviated.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

Then you visit Feed2js.org and click on the Build tab. Paste in the URL, make your selections, preview your feed and finally click the Generate JavaScript button. Select this script and copy it.

Then inside WebCT, create a new HTML file and paste in the script. Save it and take a look at your handiwork. Now, everytime that blog or RSS feed has something new added to it, your page will change automagically. If I update my blog, my feed page is updated as well. A great way to incorporate blogs reading into your WebCT course.

Thanks to Jason Vetter for showing this at the WebCT User Conference!

cueFlash

This is a simple little tool that has wide application potential. Create your own deck of Flashcards for any subject and share your deck with others.

I have created a deck for Online Learning jargon and terms (you will need to create a login to actually use the deck). Feel free to share it with your learners by passing them the link. And feel free to add to the deck if there are items missing!

!mpact 2006

Much to say about the WebCT user conference. Not sure where to start. First, check out Dr. David Weinberger's website, blog, books and more. Intriguing and maybe even inspirational. Next, check out the WebCT website for news on Application Pack 1 that was recently released for CE 6 and Vista users. Lots of expanded features. Then, once that's all soaked in, come back here and maybe I will have posted something more on using RSS feeds in WebCT and my opinion of the designer's role in distance learning courses.

CJLT

Below is an excerpt from an article in The Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology. The morphing role of the instructor in online courses is certainly interesting.

Having instructors understand their role in the online environment is a theme that also appears in the work of Kanuka (2001) and Mills (2000). According to the participants, instructors seem to have different roles during different stages of the program. For example, instructors teaching students in the beginning of the program may need to play a nurturing role to deal with students’ feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Instructors teaching students in the middle of the program should have a challenging role, pushing students to move further on their learning. Instructors teaching students in the end of the program should have a peer role, working collaboratively with students more as colleagues in the field than as instructors.

Creating appropriate online learning environments for female health professionals

Our Story

For those that have yet to enter the blogosphere, this site might be just the conceptual nudge you need. At OurStory.com you post story-answers to questions posed by yourself or other users, or you just tell your own stories in whatever random order they come to you. The timeline structure organizes everything for you. It's certainly being marketed towards the family audience, but storytelling has a long tradition in education.

Flock

Flock is a free web browser that makes it easier than ever to share photos, stay up-to-date with news from your favorite sites, and search the Web.

Flock — The web browser for you and your friends

If you are in the habit of blogging or sharing photos/videos/bookmarks, this browser has quite a bit to offer you. The browser has a built in blogging tool that links to your blog(s). All I needed to do to blog the above text was highlight it on the webpage, right-click and select "blog this". Photos can be similarly dealt with via a Flickr account. A Snippet bar is also available for dragging text or photos that you might need to use later. News and other RSS feeds are also nicely available. And the search bar is interesting as it catergorizes and leaves out the ads. A rather nice piece of work (WebCT 4.1 seems to function just fine, unofficially of course).

Word to HTML

I think I found something here: Textism Word HTML Cleaner. Many faculty will first create syllabi and other course material in MS Word and either simply upload those word files or save them as bloated HTML files with the MS Word Save As Web Page/Web Page Filtered option. I decided I needed to find a better solution. Textism involves an extra step, but the end result is much cleaner! And it's free!! With this tool, the file to be cleaned must already be saved from Word as an HTML file. After the conversion, you copy and paste the resulting code into your HTML/Text editor and save it (or paste it directly into WebCT's text editor). There is also this software that I am exploring: Word Cleaner. It does the same thing except that users can theoretically choose which HTML tags to preserve and which to remove all from within the Word environment. It also allows for batch converting! But it costs a little something ($69 for educational license, trial version available). The complexity of the program seems to create more possibility for errors and I have encountered a few already. But it has incredible potential!

timely communication

I went on vacation for a couple of weeks in May, and coming back I was greeted with over 200 emails (very little was spam)! I guess I am just that popular... and I do subscribe to a few e-zines and the sort. Of the emails I had the pleasure of sifting through some were student complaint issues. And there weren't all that many... maybe 10. But every single complaint concerned timely communication. The students were not getting it, and they wanted it. I can certainly understand their frustration. It's hard to begin an assignment if I question my understanding of the content or the requirements. And I don't mean just cognitively difficult, it is a motivational traffic jam! Does this thought process sound plausible?

"Well, I'm not sure if my paper should be double spaced and I don't really want to write four pages if I only needed to write two, and maybe my topic is too broad for only two pages, so I will just wait to hear back before I start."

Now, it's likely you include all the requirements in your syllabus and maybe you feel responding to course management questions is painful. But ignoring them is certainly not the way to go.

Following are some ideas you might apply to your courses to help students feel more connected:

• Include a statement on how quickly and in what manner you will respond to them (24 hours is typical). If you don't check email on the weekends, let them know!
• Sign up for an instant messaging service (AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, IMVU) and run it during office hours (or whenever you are at your computer). Ask to add students to your buddy list.
• Call your students at least once a semester. Do this within the first two weeks and I bet your completion/retention rates will surprise you.
• Respond to assignment submissions with "I received your assignment #2. Thanks."
• Respond to course management questions that have been previously dealt with by pointing to the information rather than answering the question (e.g. "Refer to the syllabus for paper requirements")
• If you have a discussion board available, make it lively and organized.
• If you don't have time to respond to emails on a certain day (vacation, family emergency, conference, etc.), send out a mass email informing everyone before the fact or as soon as possible.

If there are others I am missing, let me know!

*edit: The other side of the coin is that many students DO have unreasonable expectations of their instructors. Many will assume someone is facilitating their course 24x7. So, to all you students out there, be aware that normal turn-around is 24 hours and instructors have lives on the weekends that might exclude their computers.

IACON 2006

Last week I attended the Iowa Connections 2006 conference for IDLA & IACT. Good times, plenty of snacks and coffee to go around, and some interesting sessions to boot. Here are some highlights.

1. Spaces and Environments: I have been thinking about space lately. And as the radio seems play sad songs when we're sad, I couldn't help but notice the spaces many of the products on display have created. Microsoft's Learning Gateway presents a fairly standard space that integrates many of the tools we are already using. Course management meets life management. iPrismGlobal showcased a 2d perspective of a virtual office space -- go with what's familiar approach. And the Croquet Project expands the idea of space to an entire world, but then also goes beyond by giving users control of that world. Very new, on the cusp of revolutionary.
2. Sound: Who doesn't love audio!? iPrismGlobals work with text to speech software is inviting. I wonder if they will make their voice engine available outside their other products. Apple was present talking about podcasting and iTunes U. If you haven't listened to a podcast yet, you are missing out on some serious content. iTunes U certainly seems like a viable solution to podcast delivery, but still we would need some server to host all the audio.
3. Community: Can't attend a DL conference with talking about community, right?! Absolutely! Drs. J. Ana Donaldson and Mary Herring shared their experience with Phases of Engagement. A very nice structure for facilitating the kinds of collaboration they expected from students. Moving from "Newcomer" to an interactive agent to a collaborative learner to an interactivity initiator. Smart and well planned. I really liked the idea that groups worked together to form consensus and that consensus is what was presented to the instructor and the rest of the class.
   

Free Book

This comes from the Instructional Technology Council pages. A very nice resource in and of itself. Terry Freedman has edited a welcomed new text aimed to explain to instructors and administrators most of the hip and happening tools currently popular on the Internet. The text is called Coming of Age: An Introduction to the New World Wide Web. If you find yourself a bit behind on understanding the craze behind blogs, wikis, podcasting, rss, and social e-networking I recommend this introduction. Each contributor presents theory and practical applications for the classroom. It's free to download and free to distribute among your friends. Pass it on!

Berkeley on iTunes

This is exciting and amazing! iTunes Berkeley. While other universities have partnered with Apple to shelve their media course content, it seems like Berkeley is the first to make these available to a wider, global audience. To make course lectures available to the world seems to tip the balance of accessible education just a bit. And what will it do to attendance? I listened to one Computer Science course lecture in which the instructor collected attendance cards for extra credit. Might just be enough to keep students coming. Then again, maybe they don't need to be there... maybe there is something more important they could be doing. In the same lecture, the instructor points out that students have been skipping class since the Middle Ages and probably before. He goes on to work on redefining the lecture into a more socratic dialog. Makes me want to go to Berkeley!

search tools

Ever wish your search tools were more interesting? Here are a couple of recent finds that you might like.

• www.ujiko.com
• www.kartoo.com
  

eyespot

Eyespot is another potentially useful edu tool. Still in beta, and will likely mature with time. The concept of sharing and remixing short video clips and audio tracks for quick stories is intriguing, but perhaps I am easily intrigued. This example is fairly abstract. This was pieced together from other user clips uploaded to eyespot.

BubbleShare

This seems like a useful tool for sharing photos and creating quick tutorials. Check out their website: BubbleShare. Play the slideshow or click on the image below to view the slides at actual size.

This album is powered by
BubbleShare - Add to my blog

WZ, My new Hero

Walter Zorn is my new hero. I was looking for a tool tip tool and stumbled across his work. Not only are these useful applications, but careful attention is paid to making them stable across multiple browsers. This means more of your students will easily benefit. Tool tips might be especially useful for labeling complex drawings or glossing difficult texts or even providing a small thumbnail image for vocabulary.

It might not be the easiest tool to use just now. There isn't a GUI, so if you are not comfortable working with code, it might not be for you. Or maybe it just means finding someone who is comfortable and working together.

Walter attains hero status because of the cycle he built. That is incredible!

MI requires DL

Mich. first to mandate online learning

This is timely. Just this weekend I was talking with family about the upcoming expectations for students in regards to distance/online learning. I suggested hybrids and blends are almost expected these days in higher ed. Students want access to materials and more online. The students in the room (highschool) agreed. But I also suggested that as tools become more sophisticated less seat time will likely occur. The students in the room were less sure they would benefit from this as communication would be sacrificed. Of course, I assured them that online learning is (or ought to be) very communicative... potentially more so than F2F. My wife then shared her horror story of taking on online course where she was required ("forced") to post once and reply twice to a poorly designed discussion board. This didn't help my argument much. So, it will be interesting to see how MI students react to the requirement. I sure hope MI educators are ready in terms of the pedagogy of online learning, or my wife will be joined by hordes who will never stop sharing their less than positive online learning experiences.

odeo

powered by ODEO

And one more possibility here from Odeo.com. They must be using the same service as audioblogger as I called the same number. Only the pin numbers were different. This doesn't post directly to my blog, I had to copy and paste the code (they give this to you so it is quite simple) into this entry. But it does have the advantage of playing directly on the page with the help of the flash player.

audioblogger

This is the audioblogger.com method for posting audio online. The image is attached to an MP3 file so the audio will be opened (or saved) with another program. It might not be fair to judge the quality with this post as I was walking into a strong wind and speaking on a cell phone with poor signal strength. The posting procedure is simple: place a call, key your primary phone number, enter your pin number and press 1 to post to your blog.

evoca

This is evoca.com's audio posting. The quality seems better, but in fairness, I was out of the wind. The procedure for posting is simple: call, record and hang up when you're done, return to your computer and click a button to post to blog. There might be a way to have this automatically post to a blog, but I haven't seen it yet. There is code provided so you can post the audio directly into your WebCT or HTML page.

google video

Google has partnered with the US National Archives to begin offering video online. Nice. Another powerful resource for educators and those who seek to learn. And personally, I find other video offerings within google interesting as well... particularly the old commercial and education videos.

Learner Satisfaction

I returned from Savannah, GA this week. I was attending the ITC e-Learning Conference. Both the conference and Savannah were fantastic. This topic seemed to recur in many sessions. And in many sessions presenters were quick to point to statistics that learners are not very appreciative of peer-to-peer collaborative assignments. Other stats seem to show that a majority of online students claim community is not very important to their learning.

I think these stats are mis-guided. I am not doubting that learners dislike being forced onto discussion boards and pushed into groups to produce reports. I am not doubting learners find these activities more wasteful than educational. I am quickly annoyed in courses I have taken with the post once, respond twice routine. This is forced conversation! Do you ever take the time in your F2F class to ask everyone for their answer and respond to two student answers? No, there isn't time for one, and more importantly the idea that everyone's voice is necessary on any given topic is a bit mis-guided.

So, pay no attention to claims that students do not like community. Instead focus your attention on how to better create thought provoking prompts for learners. And allow community to form more naturally. Remove the classroom picture from your head! The online structure is different.

*steps down from soapbox*

Learn Sth New

An instructor asked me today how to allow students to see results of only certain quizzes in WebCT while not giving them access to the entire list of Quizzes they have yet to take. I replied I didn't really think it was possible as any quiz tool will lead to the same page housing ALL quizzes.

But then I was curious so I poked around on Ask Dr. C and found a javascript hack that loads specific quiz results... pretty slick, but not very user friendly (see script below).

I figured my search was over, but when I thought about it I realized I never had any reason in my courses to even try to add more than one quiz tool. So I wanted to see what it would do. It did just what I thought it would do. Created two quiz tool icons pointing to the same quiz listing page. But here is where it got interesting. I noticed a little field I had not seen before. It's in the picture above. That little Quiz listing section. The Select button let's the designer choose which quizzes or surveys to display on the linked quiz page. How cool is that!? Why didn't I know about this sooner?

Here is the javascript hack if you need it (replace the "course_id" and "quiz_#" and note that a return was added to make it fit on screen):

<html>
<script type="text/javascript">
self.location="/SCRIPT/course_id/scripts/
   student/serve_quiz_marked.pl?DO_GRADE+
   quiz_#+1+VIEW";
</script>
</html>

Podcast Resc.

This is just the site to help bring understanding to the potential of podcasts:

Educational Podcast Network

Organization is a simple idea, but it can be so useful to our understanding of why and how things work... or can work. I wish I would have taken a picture of my upstairs work room to show you. It wasn't terrible, but there were stacks of CDs, piles of books, mounds of papers... get the picture? There was order, but the the order was too general. Paper was together, CDs were all together. This weekend I took some time to categorize my CDs into backups, software, learning, games, etc. Now, when I look at my CDs they make sense. I think podcasts are kind of like this. There are so many and we have so little time. NCQ Talk is one I try to listen to regularly (I still don't have an iPod or the sort so I can only listen at my computer) and they were responsible for sharing the link above. See if your content area has something interesting. I found one called Podcast Beijing!

MLK Jr Day + Online Learning

Yesterday was MLK Jr. Day. The college organizes an in-service day with educational presentations, food and more. I couldn’t help but dwell on some of the comments made and how they relate to online learning.

“…their quest for education”
The concept that education is indeed a quest interests me. Students who attack their education like Don Quixote chasing windmills, but maybe not as delusional, are going to succeed in ways unimaginable to those who merely receive their education. Unfortunately, many of our students are not sure what the goal of their quest might be. As instructors of online learning, it may be more difficult to engage students in spontaneous post-class advisory sessions. Look for ways to help students discover their quest. Encourage students who seem bored or lost, to speak with an advisor.

“…the perception of differences”
The keynote speaker stressed the concept that perceiving differences is not racism. Actually, the perception of our differences ought to be the fuel for our conversation. It’s what can be the most interesting. Everything I can learn from you is defined by our differences. The anonymity that online learning can provide works against this. Many school systems are now incorporating student photos into their LMSs. I believe this is a positive addition. I predict conversations will be more real and ultimately more meaningful.

“…Conversation is a process”
This is kind of a no-brainer, but it’s good to be reminded. There is no need to treat our interactions with students as Q&A. Have conversations instead. Encourage students to talk with each other and teach each other.

“…social-ability: 63.3%”
Incoming first year students reported that the social aspects of their college experience are rather important. If your online course doesn’t allow for social interaction, your students’ expectations and needs are being ignored. Add a discussion board that permits off-topic discussion, call your students, blog with your students, skype, podcast, IM….

The remaining thought I had yesterday doesn’t really relate to online learning: I will not be putting in a water garden any time soon! Just way too much work. Or maybe this does apply… show learners up front what is involved in a course and the outcome of their labors. I now know that even though the outcome of water garden can be spectacular, I would not enjoy the process or the maintenance.

Bloglines + Odeo

Bloglines: This site collects and organizes all your blog (or any RSS) feeds. And it's free. There are some potentially pedagogical applications that leap to mind: research - all the news comes to you; community - share your favorites and explore your students' collections; save time - if your students have their own blogs this one stop will save you a bunch of time...

Odeo: This site was cool when it only provided podcasting subscriptions, but now it can do so much more. Once you register (and it's free!), you can create your own audioblog without the need for any recording software. Granted, you won't be able to edit without some extra tools, but as there is no time limit, why bother editing?! You can even set up your account to record phone in messages that are then instantly blogged. And you can quickly make your channel public allowing anyone with interest subscription potential. This is very cool! Think about having your students record their oral reports, engage in debates, dramatic readings of poems, etc....