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Videoconferencing Alternatives: How Low-Bandwidth Teaching Will Save Us All | IDDblog: ... - 0 views

www.iddblog.org/idth-teaching-will-save-us-all education tools technology internet pedagogy
shared by Ed Webb on 24 Mar 20 - Cached
  • The Green Zone: Underappreciated Workhorses Starting with the green zone in the lower left, we have readings with text and images. These types of assignments may not seem exciting, but sharing readings with students in a consistent and organized way provides your online course with a very practical, solid foundation. Email and discussion boards also belong in this quadrant.  Online instructors have been using these three tools—file sharing (for readings and such), email, and discussion boards—for decades. And while that might make them sound boring, you can create some fantastic instructional experiences with just these three tools. 
  • The Blue Zone: Practical Immediacy Moving over to the lower right, we have low-bandwidth tools that can add immediacy to student interactions. If you’ve used Microsoft Office 365 or Google Drive, you’re probably already familiar with some of the features and benefits of collaborative document editors. These tools allow multiple people to edit and comment on the same document, spreadsheet, or presentation slides. Depending on how you structure your assignments, students could collaborate over an extended period of time, or they could go online at the exact same time and write and edit each other’s work simultaneously.  When it comes to group chat/messaging, there are lots of free apps that can be useful in an educational setting. Slack and GroupMe are two popular examples. These mobile-friendly apps allow students to post text-based messages and images without requiring anyone in the group (including you!) to share their phone numbers. These tools allow students to communicate quickly and easily without scheduling an entire day around a formal video conference.
  • Screencasting adds a human element to online courses because your voice creates a sense of presence that plain text can’t. 
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  • Students are more likely to watch a series of shorter videos than a single, longer video, which is why I recommend instructors try to divide long screencasts into five-to-ten minute segments (whenever possible)
  • asynchronous discussion with audio and video. If you’re not familiar with this concept, I’m referring to discussion tools that allow students to respond with audio and video instead of just text. One tool that’s been a leader for a long time in this multimedia discussion space is VoiceThread. While VoiceThread’s defining feature is its user-friendly approach to audio-based commenting, it can also be used to create narrated presentations with PowerPoints slides, images, and video. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the interface of a traditional screencasting tool, VoiceThread is worth exploring as a simpler way of recording online lectures and fostering discussions that go beyond plain text
  • tools that require both high bandwidth and high immediacy, and the best examples of this are videoconferencing tools like Zoom or Skype.  Videoconferencing is a great way to engage with students when they truly need to see and hear each other in real time. It can also be useful for online office hours, since it’s easier to feel connected and avoid misunderstandings when you have the benefit of tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language.  Unfortunately, videoconferencing is one of the most inflexible and bandwidth-intensive activities we can ask our students to do. Before you rely on it too heavily, look at the other quadrants and ask yourself if there’s any other way to accomplish your learning objectives without it. 
  • None of this is to say that videoconferencing is inherently bad or that it has no place in an online course. It’s simply a reminder that seemingly small (and sometimes unconscious) choices about the technologies we use can have a big impact on how inclusive and effective our teaching is.
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OUseful Info: They Stole OUr Learning Environment - Now We're Stealing It Back - 0 views

ouseful.open.ac.uk/...007429.html moodle hacks LMS CMS
shared by Ed Webb on 08 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 08 Apr 09
     
    A way to make Moodle more flexible (like my PBWiki, for example)?
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How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live - TIME - 0 views

www.time.com/...0,8599,1902604-1,00.html twitter Time
shared by Ed Webb on 05 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth
  • "ambient awareness"
  • Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.
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Views: How Tweet It Is - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...mclemee246 twitter education technology
shared by Ed Webb on 23 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Part of my interest in this turn to Twitter comes from disappointment with most university press blogs, which often seem more like PR vehicles than genuine blogs with discussion, disagreement, expressions of real enthusiasm or curiosity or whatever. Reading very many of them at one sitting feels like attending a banquet where you are served salt-free soda crackers and caffeine-free Mountain Dew that's gone flat.By contrast, university-press publicists seem more inclined to experiment and to follow tangents with Twitter than they do on their own official websites. They link to material they have posted at the press’s blog, of course – but also to news and commentary that may be only obliquely related to the books in their catalog. It’s as if they escape from beneath the institutional superego long enough to get into the spirit of blogging, proper.
  • The range and the interest of Duke's tweets make its presence exemplary, in my opinion. Between drafting and rewriting this column, for example, I followed Duke's tweets to a newspaper article about whether or not English was approaching one million words, a blog post about rock songs cued to Joyce's Ulysses, and the Twitter feed of Duke author Negar Mottahedeh, who has been posting about events in Iran.
  • She then makes a point that bears stressing given how often university-press blogs tend to be coated in institutional gray: “I think that any kind of social networking needs to have a personality tied to it in order for it to be successful. Also, I think you really need to participate in the media in order for it to be successful. We ask people for questions and opinions, offer giveaways sometimes. My main goal is to try to get people talking -- either with me or with each other about our books and authors.... You can't just provide information or news feeds to reviews and articles about your books. Involving the Press in what is going, contributing to the various discussions, and asking (and answering) questions is really the way to grow your following.”
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4th-term U.S. Rep. Gerlach to run for Pa. governor - The Delaware County Daily Times : ... - 0 views

delcotimes.com/...doc4a5ca8ed90282561507876.txt PA politics GOP
shared by Ed Webb on 15 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Bachelor's degree in political science, Dickinson College, 1977;
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News: A Gripe Session at Blackboard - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...blackboard blackboard
shared by Ed Webb on 17 Jul 09 - Cached
  • At an open "listening session" with top executives of Blackboard here Wednesday at the company's annual conference, college officials expressed frustration with many of the system's fundamental characteristics. At times, the meeting seemed to turn into a communal gripe session, with complaints ranging from the system's discussion forum application, to the improved -- but still lacking -- user support, to the training materials for faculty members. Participants' concerns were often greeted with nods of agreement and outright applause from their peers as they spoke of their frustrations with the system.
  • "We recognize there are still some shortcomings in our products," responded Michael Chasen, president and CEO of Blackboard.
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Search Engine Helps Users Connect In Arabic : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...story.php Arabic internet online language transliteration typing
shared by Ed Webb on 16 Jul 09 - Cached
  • new technology that is revolutionizing the way Arabic-speaking people use the Internet
  • Abdullah says that of her 500 Egyptian students, 78 percent have never typed in Arabic online, a fact that greatly disturbed Habib Haddad, a Boston-based software engineer originally from Lebanon. "I mean imagine [if] 78 percent of French people don't type French," Haddad says. "Imagine how destructive that is online."
  • "The idea is, if you don't have an Arabic keyboard, you can type Arabic by spelling your words out phonetically," Jureidini says. "For example ... when you're writing the word 'falafel,' Yamli will convert that to Arabic in your Web browser. We will go and search not only the Arabic script version of that search query, but also for all the Western variations of that keyword."
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  • At a recent "new" technology forum at MIT, Yamli went on to win best of show — a development that did not escape the attention of Google, which recently developed its own search and transliteration engine. "I guess Google recognizes a good idea when it sees it," Jureidini says. He adds, "And the way we counter it is by being better. We live and breathe Yamli every day, and we're constantly in the process of improving how people can use it." Experts in Arabic Web content say that since its release a year ago, Yamli has helped increase Arabic content on the Internet just by its use. They say that bodes well for the Arabic Web and for communication between the Arab and Western worlds.
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Twitter 101: Social Media's Move to College Classrooms -- Politics Daily - 0 views

www.politicsdaily.com/...ias-move-to-college-classrooms socialmedia education web2.0
shared by Ed Webb on 17 Jul 09 - Cached
  • It is likely too early to gauge the effectiveness of these social media courses, degrees, and classroom experiments. Perhaps such endeavors are akin to, as a colleague recently mused, "a massively expensive For Dummies book." Our understanding of online culture will continue to evolve with or without academia's involvement, but it does beg the question: Should our institutions of higher education share some of the responsibility of explaining the online frontier of social media, or are its participants fully capable of self-management and adaptation? The answer may require more than 140 characters.
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Wolfram|Alpha - 0 views

www20.wolframalpha.com search searchengine math systematic knowledge
shared by Ryan Burke on 21 May 09 - Cached
  • Ryan Burke on 21 May 09
     
    Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer
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Wired Campus: Whitman Takes Manhattan - Chronicle.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...whitman-takes-manhattan literature edupunk poetry whitman NYC jimgroom collaboration WPMU
shared by Ed Webb on 08 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Next fall, some modern New Yorkers — students at City Tech, CUNY’s New York City College of Technology — will explore the Fulton Ferry Landing that Whitman described in the poem and record their investigations on a Web site. Meanwhile, thanks to open-source software, students at three other institutions — New York University, Rutgers University at Camden, and the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia — will be recording their own literary and geographical explorations of Whitman’s work on that same Web site. The project, “Looking for Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman,” is the brainchild of a group of professors at all four schools led by Matthew K. Gold, an assistant professor of English at City Tech. It received a start-up grant of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities. James Groom, an instructional-technology specialist at the University of Mary Washington, is the site’s architect.
  • Mr. Gold believes that Whitman would appreciate the openness of the endeavor. The poet was nothing if not open source:
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