I’m experimenting with different blogging clients as a way of exploring different tools that might help faculty and students work offline and synch up with the LMS when it’s convenient. Today I’ve been trying out ecto. (more…)
Author: Michael Feldstein
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Social Software, the LMS, and Walled Gardens
Antero Aunesluoma writes:
There should exist somekind of continuum between “totally public” and “delimited to a single course in LMS”. A continuum that would serve the diverse users needs. And I refer the term “user” to faculty and students, not to educational technologists. The users need to decide themselves their products level of publicity. Whether the product is a blog entry linked to a course or an article written to a Wiki by a group of students. By level of publicity, I mean some kind of general categories friends/group/course/university/universum.
Amen.
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Web 2.0 for Tracking Web 2.0
Before I start on this post, I want to note that I am writing it in the Bleezer offline blogging client found via D’Arcy. This little freeware application is just a couple of months old and it already rivals much older for-pay blogging clients.
Anyway, Alan Levine is asking for a Web 2.0 tools list that is managed using a Web 2.0 tool.
His wish is my command (created using Lazybase):
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Why All Faculty Members Should Blog
So much to blog, so little time.
There have been a few interesting responses to the “Sisyphus Taught Videography” post. For example, in a comment on that post, MIDizen X observes that students can be the producers of the media: (more…)
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Sisyphus Taught Videography
One of these days I’m going to have to figure out how to tweak my blog’s CSS so that I can get my SUNY-specific blogroll section up. In the meantime, I’m going to keep pointing to SUNY bloggers from time to time. Today’s entry is from Alex Reid at SUNY Cortland, in which he reflects on the challenge of getting faculty literate in video and other multimedia forms. Alex calls this “information literacy”, which makes me think of charts, statistics, and search engine proficiency, but his definition is more expansive and provocative: (more…)
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Video Literacy
There’s an old joke among instructional designers. In response to a request for “gratuitous” video in a course, we ask, “What moves?” The implication, of course, is that if you are not showing content that is inherently dynamic and in motion then there is no point to video.
How last millennium can you be?
The joke betrays a lack of sophistication–of literacy–regarding the expressive power of the moving image. I think we need to take video more seriously and give it a privileged place right beside the written word in freshman composition classes. Because video can express some of the same concepts we ask students to relate using the written word, only more powerfully, more compactly and…well…just differently. (more…)
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In Defense of Walled Gardens
I’ve been seeing the phrase “walled garden” a lot in the edublogosphere, and always with a negative connotation. It is a term that seems to carry over from more general usage referring to either media content or wiki pages that are not open to the public. Of course, Walls are Bad, Open is Good. (“Two legs baaaad, four legs gooood!”) I am a general advocate for Openness, particularly when it comes to education. But I think we are in serious danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. (more…)