WSU Teaching & Learning Blog

While you or may not be library staff, you might still appreciate an opportunity to participate in a self-paced exploration of some of the cool features of Web 2.0. It could be the perfect summer learning task. The tutorial, developed by the California School Library Association, provides 23 Things for you to do. Each Thing will show you one more web tool. There are many places for you to explore, experiment with, and think about creative ways to use this in your own work. If you are interested, visit http://schoollibrarylearning2.blogspot.com/ and get started exploring.

The  Pearson Foundation Digital Arts Alliance has produced a thought-provoking video on the direction that our education system needs to be moving in. You can check it out on YouTube. (thanks to Anne-Marie for the link)

Alan Levine, one of the better known digital pioneers in higher education, put together a great tour of 50 different tools that can be used to tell a narrative tale with pictures and more online. A narrated slideshow walks you through them, and a wiki points you to the sources discussed. Very interesting…

The Connexions clearinghouse at Rice University offers a wide variety of open learning content. One very useful jumping off point for faculty and students interested in the growing wealth of shared learning content is the online course Introduction to Open Educational Resources. 

Developed by Judy Baker, the course walks the user through the major topics in the OER world, namely Open Courseware, Fair Use and Copyright, Finding Sources (including discipline-specific ones), Public Domain Textbooks, Primary Sources, Development of OER resources, and mechanisms for the Delivery, Storage and Organization of free content. Plenty of links and examples provide a quick entrance into an exciting area of growth for instructors at all levels of our educational system.

While this isn’t exactly about teaching and learning in the traditional sense, conference blogs provide an important resource for staying up-to-date on the latest information in your field. At our Virtual Citizenship conference for instance, WSU faculty member Kevin Deegan-Krause did an impressive job covering both the speakers and audience participation. Just in case you are going to a conference and want to try blogging about it, or if you are hosting an event and want to encourage blog coverage, you may want to have a look at this idea-packed 6-page booklet presenting Tips for Conference Bloggers developed by Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno Giussani. Here’s the direct link to the  PDF.

Join us this Thursday, January 3rd for a workshop on Blogs and Wikis in Academia. We will explore the use of these tools in academic contexts. UPDATE: Slides from the session now available  http://www.slideshare.net/warters/blogs-and-wikis-in-academia/ 

Here are the details:

• Thursday, January 3rd
• 1:30 – 3:30 pm
• 150 Purdy Kresge Library
• (TRC Instruction Lab)

Back in 2001 the Australian Universities Teaching Committee commissioned a series of online resource materials designed to help faculty leverage advances in technology. The working groups developed five generic learning design templates that can be applied to different disciplines and problems. 

 As an example, one of the core methods that they focused on is use of the Online Roleplay. The resource site for this is known as “enRole, Research, React, Resolve, Reflect: Developing and using online role play learning designs” and it is chock full of useful tools for creating learning roleplays.  I was particularly intrigued, given my interest in campus conflict resolution, to see that their QuickStart Roleplay #2 (pdf) uses a university controversy as the subject of its sample roleplay scenario. In addition to various templates and checklists, the roleplay Designers Guide provides video clips from people who have developed online roleplays or participated in them. There is lots of good material here.

The EduBlog Awards process always provides a nice window into the best of the educational blogs world. To have a quick look at the various nominees, check out this Grazr widget of all the nominees with their most recent posts (thanks to Andy Powell for the OPML list). If you have used Grazr before, it is a pretty slick tool once you figure out the interface. Tip: Click on a title to load the latest items from that blog; to go back “up the tree” to see an earlier menu item, click on the left sidebar with the arrows…

Jason Rhode from the Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center at Northern Illinois University (and also a doctoral candidate in Instructional Design for Online Learning at Capella University) has collected an interesting e-learning photo set on Flickr that provides different visualizations of e-learning processes and tools. If you are a visual learner, you might find these instructive. Note: If you’ve never used Flickr, you might also want to explore it as a tool for managing photos online.

I’m looking forward to participating in our WSU symposium on Virtual Citizenship (aka “virship”) happening tomorrow, November 30th starting at 9:00AM in the Bernath Auditorium. You can view the days events streaming live from within SecondLife or on the symposium website’s streaming video page. The symposium will launch a broader research, teaching, and service project that can help us understand what citizenship means in the 21st century and can help our students, staff and faculty use emerging communication and information technologies to become better citizens.Speakers include:

• Russell Dalton, Professor of Political Science at the University of California Irvine, whose recent study called The Good Citizen looks at the attitudes and behaviors of young people
• Fred Stutzman, graduate researcher at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, whose research and active blog outline both the theoretical and practical aspects of social network software and its role in academic and political life.
• Wendy Chun, Associate Professor of Media and Modern Culture at Brown University, who will be talking about “Imagined Networks”.
• Vernor Vinge, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at San Diego State University and award-winning science fiction writer, whose recent Rainbows End is insightful in its thinking about how ubiquitous computing might affect everyday life.

The real estate and ability to stream media within Second Life graciously provided by the New Media Consortium. Live stream coordinates: 135, 124, 22. Join us if you can!