if i am doing most of the work… who is doing most of the learning?!

I am trying to practice what i preach. present, engage/interact, assess. it is harder than it sounds. Pacing, sequencing, spreading the work out over 12 weeks and making sure they have enough time to do all the activities and trying to find a balance of activities in each module… will i let them work ahead? what will i do with diigo? how will i assess their reading of the journal articles for the course?

grading…

trying to figure out how to cultivate quality interaction and performance in a pass/fail course. I need to provide a grading scheme that will help students to know how to succeed in the course and to offer compelling enough reasons to do more than just pass…

cooltools

Here was my top 10 list of cooltools in february 2008

  1. twitter – http://twitter.com – microblog, community of practice, communication, support.
  2. Second Life – https://secure-web14.secondlife.com/join/- to create your avatar. There are no costs associated with Avatar creation. – user created virtual reality. I am interested in its potential as a an extension of the educational institution for online and f2f students and faculty and as a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
  3. Voicethread – http://voicethread.com – very cool!
  4. Ustream – http://www.ustream.tv
  5. Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/- audio editing/recording.
  6. Blinklist – http://www.blinklist.com/ – social bookmarking tool.
  7. Del.icio.us – http://del.icio.us – social bookmarking tool.
  8. Skype – http://www.skype.com/
  9. edublogs (wordpress) – http://edublogs.org/ – free education blogs for faculty and students.
  10. Adobe Breeze Presenter – voice annotated powerpoint presentations. Breeze Presenter works with Microsoft PowerPoint content and allows the ability to add narration, presenter information, interactive quizzes, animations, and video.

Today, i would have to also add:

  1. seesmic – http://seesmic.com/ threaded asnynchronous video discussion.
  2. jing – http://jingproject.com I can’t tell you how slammin’ this tool is! – screen capture/screen casting.
  3. oovoo – http://www.oovoo.com/ – like skype on steroids.
  4. youtube quickcapture – www.youtube.com/my_videos_quick_capture – really easy to use.
  5. diigo – http://www.diigo.com/index 

: )

diigo?

diigo for etap687. I believe there is something very powerful  in this tool. I am in the process evaluating it for instructional and professional development purposes.

So far these are my thoughts:

  1. I think I can easily mark up online student work with this tool.
  2. I think online students can mark up each other’s online work with this tool. and discuss. One of the course activities is to use a rubric to evaluate an online course that the students will each be building as the main project for the course. The course review, I think, can be done using diigo. I think… not sure yet.
  3. Online students can easily create annotated bibliographies of web resource in directed learning activities AND share and discuss them with others in the class.
  4. This resource can grow and be available for the online course from term to term.
  5. In addition, for webenhanced courses, this is an awesome, easy, slick, cool way to incorporate some very cool online enhancements to a f2f course that completely bypasses all the extra unnecessary flotsam you get with a full on CMS/LMS. you get a lot of functional features bang for the “buck” in this tool. It is a slick tool with a lot of functionality to suport interaction/collaboration, etc.
  6. When i have my university administrator’s hat on i also see great potential as a tool to facilitate and enhance community and for professional development. I have an extended staff of 50-100 online instructional designers that i could use this tool with to aggregate links and info and resources and networking. We have over 3,000 online faculty that we could use this with to support them with info and resources and networking – differenciating between the needs of new online faculty and experienced online faculty… there is potential for discipline specific resources and info for online faculty… and it goes on.

As i said, i am exploring this tool for its potential, and i think there is something here.

I have several questions:

  1. Can a group be open for viewing by the public, but closed to participation unless you are a member of the group. I think so.
  2. Also, can you export stuff out… to archive it, keep it safe, take it to another tool?