EDUC251

Another Professor from my Alma Mater, the Unversity of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He is a professor of Political Science.Taken from his blog the follow excerpt: "He received his Ph.D. from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 2003. He currently teaches introductory politics, international politics, and a U.S. Foreign Policy course at Steven's Point through the Collaborative Degree Program. His current research focuses on how the U.S. military has adapted strategies and tactics in stability and reconstruction operations. Contact Eric at: egiordan@uwc.edu" We both are Political Science majors with an interest in Law and Diplomacy and the U.S. Military.

I love reading reflections on implementing new strategies in teaching and learning. That's one of the best things about posting your reflections online. You never know when someone will find you and feel connected, or at least less alone!

I thought I'd start posting some job listings related to e-learning, so you can get an idea of the diversity of opportunities. Feel free to share anything you find!

Feedback and suggestions are always welcome. Please take the survey and provide your thoughts and experience with Module 4. Thanks.

Thanks for the kind words. Next week-end we have out-of-town guests, so that's one of the reasons for my early focus. Your directions were fine and helped the logistical process. I prefer this to a screencast, but that might be reflective of my technology knowledge and learning style. Two things, though, that took me a while to figure out were: 1. Sharing. It might be a default setting, but new documents I create have a privacy share indicated. You have to specifically change the setting (the share button is on the top of the screen) for people to be able to access it. 2. Editting. When you go back into Google docs, I got an excel spreadsheet. To actually update the form, you have to go to the form button and select "edit" in the pulldown screen.

I had fun responding to your survey, Ann! You did a great job--I liked the questions and the color format!

I just wanted to get this link up before we moved too far away from our Module 3 "presence" section. I'll be updating this very soon.

Whitney's got a nice site. That's just a wordpress theme. You could easily set up a site like that. I use wordpress on all my self-hosted sites. http://injenuity.com/ http://www.jentropy.com/ http://www.snohostories.com/ It's very easy to set up and maintain, and there are a ton of free themes.

I agree with Jennifer that Whitney does have an impressive site and I appreciate her input (link) about how to create one. I need to get on that myself in my "spare time" as my online presence or portfolio is pretty much limited to a very primitive blog. This is all new stuff for me, yet very exciting as I move forward with what I hope will become a new career.

I have posted the FBI can hear when cell phone is turned off; Is Your Cell Bugged?; and Big Brother is Watching as food for thought and because of earlier comments. The question is: In an Open Society how many freedoms are we willing to give up to be protected from Terrorist attacks? A thought worth pondering.

I had an interesting experience last quarter. I have a History of Animation class that is currently on Vista/Blackboard. What happened was that through an oversight, students weren't charged a use fee for the site, so I couldn't access it for the class. I had to transfer all of the content to a Google Sites location. I was amazed to find out that I could just copy and paste from Blackboard Vista pages directly into my Google site - preserving the links and formatting (!!). It was a life-saver for me.

That's great! That's one of the reasons I've created the files for our course in HTML. If it ever needs to be put someplace else, it will be an easy transition.

Again, I have lived with my phone being bugged. The bottom line is: being informed; not being involved in anything you don't want made public; and know your rights.

That's a scam :)

Thanks Jen.. Darn I fell for that one!!

Here's another useful open resource from Alan Levine, AKA @cogdog

Wow! This is one of the best tips&tricks lists that I've seen anywhere. Now, if I could just find some time to try them all out... Another interesting aspect of this Google document is that it's open for anyone to contribute - a good example of the wisdom of the crowds. Thanks for posting this, Jennifer - very useful.

It's for kids, but still good!

Check out some of the videos here about how your social networking affects your job prospects.

I'll attach the file to the email I send today.

Thanks Jen.

I found this website while I was searching for some information about eLearning. I think this website will help many kids who study online! :)

This looks like lots of fun. I'll have to share it with my kids. They love online learning games.

this page shows the advantages and disadvantages of eLearning!

You've got to be cautious about sites like this. When you see a page full of ads and links, it's likely not a very reliable resource. You'll notice they don't provide information about who runs the site. If you click on their blog link, they haven't posted since 2008. This is probably a site making money off pay-per-click ads. There are lots of sites like this, as well as aggregator/collector sites. Those sites actually harvest content from legitimate sites, and put it all together on their site, where they make money off ads.

There is a website that shows about the eLearning network in Washington state! :)

The trend for businesses to go online with learning seems to have really taken hold. I know University of Washington also uses an on-line training system, both for optional and mandatory training.

Interesting. I don't remember ever seeing that before. I'll have to check it out some more.

This article seems to be a good example of the type of design I hope to accomplish. Evan is a fellow University of Wisconsin graduate and has pursued an interesting career in design. His resume/blog was well worth the time it took me to explore and read it.

Joy, I really appreciate your link to Evan Sveum's blog, especially this week when we're taking a look at how to organize and present an online curriculum. Initially, as I was moving through his opening page review, I was struck by the following item: "Voice Recognition (Dragon NaturallySpeaking). Talk-to- type has been a huge efficiency for me! I very rarely use the keyboard on my computer anymore". I used Dragon software about 8 years ago, and found it to be very unsatisfying to use. However recently, I've been hearing good reports back about it. I'd be curious to know if anyone in the class has been using voice-to-text in their work...

The tab in Sveum's blog regarding eLearning technology was useful - a good overview of different types of technologies one needs, with the practical tools highlighted.

Here are a bunch of resources about PLE from a conference that happened last year.

The issue you proferred in you blog - being able to quickly address technology issues - is one I deal with personally and is both easier and harder in the professional environment. In the professional enviornment, there is staff who is responsible for the technology and has expertise and focus that I don't. Yet, it is often working through others, where their priority or objectives might be different (like not standardizing on a tool that I prefer) that makes the situation even more frustrating.

This is a continuation of a blog started last summer with the first course.

Oops - should have said Online Class Blog. Can't locate a tool to change it...

Hmmmm. . . .I'm digesting this one to determine its relevance to instructional design for elementary and middle school students. More later.

(Oops! Please disregard my accidental "bookmarking." I have been having problems with my Diigo site not listing the "comment" button. I was fooling around with it this morning.) Thanks, Jennifer for finding this wonderfully concise blog on the role of ID's in training and education. I have been volunteering to design a training product simply to learn more tech skills and have been thinking about ID work. Although I can easily make the distinction between a "training course" and an on-line course, there remain some fundamental considerations for how instructors "deliver" information and "design" learning activities which influence both professions. When blogger, Syreya Dutta, states " . . . the fact is that the way people are learning today has changed phenomenally due to the increased access to social media tools and advanced mobile devices. Twitter, blogs, wikis, and discussions have become the new age learning methods." So my question - "If social media networks enable better knowledge feedbacks, do educators have to be active users of each and how many should be incorporated into the learning activities of the courses they design ?"

Interesting perspective on attention. This addresses some of the issues we've discussed this week. I'd be interested to know if you're able to watch the entire video without doing anything else. I'm 6 minutes into it, and I'm composing an email for work, writing this, and texting a friend in the UK.

I finally had a chance to watch this talk by Rheingold. He's covering some of the issues that we've already discussed over the past couple of weeks. One of them is the need for our educational institutions to change in response to global communications changes (1 billion online users, 2 billion cell phone users). He says we need new forms of literacy both in terms of how to use these new technologies, as well as how to communicate effectively using them. He said this isn't a new situation - in the past, societies had to adapt to the technologies of the phonetic alphabet, the printing press, telephone, television, etc. One interesting quote: "Our educational system, our schooling system is very well tuned to creating good citizen workers for 19th and 20th Century industries."

"It's often said that services like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter - you name it - are not the product, you are. Each and every bit of information you share and action you take is used to create a profile of user behavior, which is used then to either advertise directly to you or to people on a whole. But how can we ride the fine line? How can we have great, world-changing services at a price (read: free) everyone can afford without completely selling out the end user?"

I think it's going to have to be redefined. But I also think we're in the process of defining new commodities. We need to decide what we value.

I think this issue of privacy and use of personal information by online service companies is a very big deal. I'm also beginning to make use of some of these cloud-based applications (especially from Google) as part of my standard approach to teaching hybrid classes. Up until this past year, I've relied on the tried and true Vista/Blackboard to manage student projects and interactions, but I've found it to be sort of a dinosaur compared to the speed and ease of use of other Web2.0 apps. But if I'm working outside of Vista/Blackboard, I need to be especially careful of privacy policies and procedures of the companies behind these online apps. In the 'Sharing and Privacy' article, Mike Melanson makes some interesting points. He says: "...the companies themselves - the Googles and Facebooks and Twitters of the world - realize that correctly handling these issues of privacy are center to their continued success." and... ""All things equal, the company that's going to want to win in the next couple years will have the best privacy model." When I was doing my own investigation into this issue last winter, I asked myself, "What are the most conservative and and security conscious organizations using for social networking tools?" So I went up to the US Army website to find out. Certainly they have a heightened need to be careful what companies they choose for their social networking tools. I posted the results of this online research on my Web2.0 Chronicle blog. The results aren't surprising... Google, Facebook, Twiter, Wordpress, Flickr... among others. I see no need to rush into this area, and am willing to wait until the dust settles and user results come back from dependable sources. Jennifer's recommendation of Diigo is a good example of this. For myself, I've already left a significant "digital footprint" over the past 15 years - which is now out