05.26.06
Posted in Conferences, Archives at 2:05 pm by Norm Garrett
This year’s version of the annual Faculty Summer Institute, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was a good one. Overall, the conference went well and the enthusiasm of the participants led to some really good collaboration opportunities. This year, the organizers tried something new: Everyone was allowed to select a particular track they were interested in and learning teams were created around those tracks. The learning teams met three times during the 4-day conference and then were given five minutes in the closing session to present some of their ideas. The end result was a good list of resources and ideas that I still have to sift through. I’ll be sifting through them in the next few weeks and presenting salient points here. Judging from the presentations, there were some excellent ideas to consider and I look forward to looking at them all in detail.
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05.21.06
Posted in General, Society and Technology at 10:28 am by Norm Garrett
Those of us who engage in website development, blogging, and podcasting need to be aware that anytime we put something before the public (which you are doing if you are connected to the Internet), copyright law may apply. The Creative Commons website has a wonderful legal brief on podcasting that is both understandable and straightforward. It is a must-read if you are podcasting, blogging, or putting any form of content before the public. As educators, we often immerse ourselves so much in “fair use” in the classroom, that we don’t realize that when we do things outside the classroom, the same rules may not be applicable. I highly recommend that everyone read this brief, whether you are podcasting or not. It’s a great primer on copyright law and the Internet.
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05.20.06
Posted in Conferences, Tools at 9:53 am by Norm Garrett
It is interesting how the concept of RSS feeds is finally beginning to take off. Last week I presented a webinar for the Instructional Technology Council (a community college consortium) and had 30 participants from all over the country. They asked some really good questions at the end of the presentation and we even went 15 minutes over our allotted time trying to answer them. My face-to-face session at their conference in Savannah, Georgia, last February was well-attended and participation from the group was excellent.
Yesterday, I got a call from a writer for Distance Education Report, a scholarly journal on distance education. We talked for 45 minutes as I explained RSS to him, how it works, and how it can be used in the classroom to create learning communities that are peer-to-peer, self-organizing, and easy to use in the classroom setting. We had a wonderful conversation about RSS. Even as a technical writer, he had no idea how it worked and was eager to understand not only how it worked, but how it could be used in education (particularly distance education).
This week I am presenting a double-session hands-on workshop and a 75 minute forum on using RSS, blogs, and wikis in learning communities. Again, these will be well-attended based upon pre-registrations. So it seems that interest in RSS technologies and how they work is rising. At the beginning of 2005, there was a major survey done of Internet users where one of the questions asked was if they had ever heard of RSS and, if so, whether or not they were using it. Only 5% responded that they knew what it was and only 1% were using it. Those figures have to be a lot higher now, as awareness has increased. It would be interesting to see that survey repeated now and to examine the results.
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