Wow! On the whole, I think this was a very worthy conference. Had a great conversation at the beginning session--"How Do Faculty and Others Use Merlot?"--with a British IT person from Coventry University in England. Shared what we thought worked pedagogically and content-wise for online teaching. Broke to go to another MERLOT workshop regarding OER--a much-needed consideration of access to cheap/cheaper texts electronically. Got a good list of URLs to check out; however the lack of content for courses beyond the foundational level came up again. One online teaching staff person suggested that it was up to the authors to get publishers to make their work electonically available, as if we were the ones calling the shots with publishers. Pretty exciting--one person just got up and walked out! My feeling was that was a naive assumption, but the issue remains--how to go beyond Humanities 101 to courses requiring more critical thinking and more skills? ("Well, why don't you....)
Rather than return to that session I went on to one on "Marginalia," a wonderful way of annotating text online in Moodle: talk about elegant and simple! Wow! They are Canadian but will work with some willing yanks to refine the idea. I have to say, that was very inspiring!
The wrap-up session, Lisa Dawley from Idaho, felt a bit like she was preaching to the choir, though she wisely commented on the overly transparent sales pitch, "re-invent yourself" strategies of some online teaching programs. (Appalling, too, that, according to Dawley, the U.S. now has a 30% high school drop out rate!) Idaho's, I thought, was a far more intelligent approach, geared towards looking out at the wider world (esp. when onine teaching now enables all of us to have students--literally--from all over the globe), supporting rigorous and substantive research, and good standards.
All in all, very stimulating, lots to think about, and though the bandwidth was surprisingly narrow for a fancy conference center and the Fairmont hotel conference food channel went down far too early, the food for thought was more than sufficient. Overwhelmingly worth the effort!
Friday, July 23, 2010
FULL DAY! JY 22
Today was an odd mix of the practical and impractical. Generally some very useful information:
From the workshop on MERLOT's "Content Builder," I got a good rerun of the techniques of doing that--clear, not too complicated, and in plain English. It wasn't so rushed that those of us who were no techies couldn't keep up. Useful, though the Achilles heel of MERLOT continues to be very little information out there on courses beyond the basic foundational ones: by the time I got to Gerry Hanley's workshop on affordable "learning solutions"--open source textbooks, if you will--the familiar refrain was, "well, why don't YOU start something, a 'bookshelf,' etc.?" His workshop was nonetheless exciting and for the teaching other than basic skills, I connected to several links and other folks' "open" syllabi to get inspiration/help from. I did download a few things from a history source as background to my areas; however, I found them to be much too general and definitely lacking in sophistication.
Facebook as a tool was an interesting workshop, though after the presenter talked about security considerations I would seriously caution schools from using it. I might be able to protect my privacy, but I am not convinced one could protect one's students'. I had briefly stopped by the JOLT (Journal of Online Teaching) workshop: heavy on pedagogy at the expense of content, I thought.
Stopped by a MOODLE-oriented workshop for techies--and there was the whole NMU crew--just to see "how the other half lives." I think our folks are pretty saavy to the system from the look of things. Would be nice, though, if we could get tabs, as one person suggested, for our different "topics/lessons/modules" rather than just that one L-O-N-G single Moodle page.
Great dinner at a Moroccan restaurant with the NMU crowd--nice for group solidarity and all; and the food was quite satisfying!
From the workshop on MERLOT's "Content Builder," I got a good rerun of the techniques of doing that--clear, not too complicated, and in plain English. It wasn't so rushed that those of us who were no techies couldn't keep up. Useful, though the Achilles heel of MERLOT continues to be very little information out there on courses beyond the basic foundational ones: by the time I got to Gerry Hanley's workshop on affordable "learning solutions"--open source textbooks, if you will--the familiar refrain was, "well, why don't YOU start something, a 'bookshelf,' etc.?" His workshop was nonetheless exciting and for the teaching other than basic skills, I connected to several links and other folks' "open" syllabi to get inspiration/help from. I did download a few things from a history source as background to my areas; however, I found them to be much too general and definitely lacking in sophistication.
Facebook as a tool was an interesting workshop, though after the presenter talked about security considerations I would seriously caution schools from using it. I might be able to protect my privacy, but I am not convinced one could protect one's students'. I had briefly stopped by the JOLT (Journal of Online Teaching) workshop: heavy on pedagogy at the expense of content, I thought.
Stopped by a MOODLE-oriented workshop for techies--and there was the whole NMU crew--just to see "how the other half lives." I think our folks are pretty saavy to the system from the look of things. Would be nice, though, if we could get tabs, as one person suggested, for our different "topics/lessons/modules" rather than just that one L-O-N-G single Moodle page.
Great dinner at a Moroccan restaurant with the NMU crowd--nice for group solidarity and all; and the food was quite satisfying!
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
More...
Merlot get-up-to-speed session suffered from the PowerPoint presentation--showed only the merlot pages in fonts too small to read.
Good session on online peer-writing feedback too from a Wisconsin-Madison professor working on its development.I'd love to get on board with this! Our studentswould have trouble with mechanics--maybe the Writing Center would be interested?
Vendor sponsored talk--a bit dull in the verbal presentation, but an interesting idea: Campuspack (TM) where STUDENTS can organize, even create wikis, blogs, and journals so it's not just the province of faculty. Tantalizing!
Good session on online peer-writing feedback too from a Wisconsin-Madison professor working on its development.I'd love to get on board with this! Our studentswould have trouble with mechanics--maybe the Writing Center would be interested?
Vendor sponsored talk--a bit dull in the verbal presentation, but an interesting idea: Campuspack (TM) where STUDENTS can organize, even create wikis, blogs, and journals so it's not just the province of faculty. Tantalizing!
SLOAN -C
Fighting my way through traffic in a rental car, but I finally made it! First session was interesting as it addressed teaching literature online with what amounts to online student "books clubs," geared for high school students (didn't know that when I signed up!) However, the process looked very adaptable and well worth looking at further. It also opens up the opportunity to communicate with other schools/student groups: the presenter was from Canada and is WAY up in the middle of nowhere; for her that feature was key to her small rural school. I couldn't help thinking of the isolation of the U.P. as she spoke. She also pointed out the collaborative (I suppose we'd call that "team teaching" potentials of this kind of project.)
Good beginning and, I must say, good coffee.
Bronwyn
Good beginning and, I must say, good coffee.
Bronwyn
Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium
Tom Gilespie, Dr. Bronwyn Mills, and yours truly are at the Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium in San Jose this week. ET4, as it is known, is a joint conference of MERLOT, Sloan-C and Moodle. We'll be periodically blogging during and after the conference about what we're seeing, learning, thinking, etc. Stay tuned!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
