e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: edublogs

  • The 2007 Edublog Awards Final Voting is Open

    The nominations are in and voting is now open for the 2007 Edublog Awards (a.k.a. “the Eddies”). I am honored to say that e-Literate is a finalist in the Best Individual Blog category.

    Now comes the best part. You get to go through the list of finalists and discover all the gems that you never knew existed. The conveners (Josie Fraser and James Farmer), have promised that they will be publishing a del.icio.us feed of all the nominees, but in the meantime, the list of finalists should keep you busy with lots of good reading. (Many thanks, Josie and James!)

    Go explore, and don’t forget to vote!

  • My Nominations for the 2007 Edublog Awards

    Since I have urged all of you to nominate your favorite blogs for the 2007 Edublog Awards (or “Eddies”), I figured I should put my (virtual) money where my (virtual) mouth is and put some of my own nominees on the table. So here are mine:

    Best Individual Blog: Cole Camplese and Seb Schmoller. The reason for both is the same; I find that I actually read and learn from a very high percentage of posts on both blogs. If I only have time to look at a couple of edublogs on a busy day, these are the two that I’ll check for new posts first.

    Best Group Blog: Terra Incognita.  Ken Udas has done a fantastic job of assembling a large and impressive group of guest bloggers on the topics of open source and open educational resources.

    Best New Blog: Terra Incognita again and Mara Hancock’s Promptu. In addition to the fact that she writes about a very important topic (user experience for educational software), I just enjoy Mara’s writing style.

    Best Blogged Research Paper or Project: The eLearning Maturity Model (eMM) on Stephen Marshall’s blog. eMM is one of the most interesting and, frankly, useful ongoing research projects into educational technology adoption and Stephen’s blog covers it admirably well. Also, like many of the others on this list, Stephen is an excellent writer (which is one of the reasons that I had him as a guest blogger on e-Literate).

    Best Educational Tech Support Blog: As Much By Writing. This isn’t the place where you necessarily will go to get your ed tech support, but it is a model for how university IT departments should be augmenting their ed tech support to their campuses via a blog.

    Best eLearning/Corporate Blog: e-Clippings. I feel a little funny nominating in this category since I’ve been out of the corporate side of things long enough that I don’t have a clear sense of what is most useful in that field anymore. But Mark Oehlert’s blog is one of the few on the corporate side that I still read and enjoy on a regular basis. It’s just plain interesting.

    Best Educational use of Video/Visuals: MyGermanClass.com. Hilarious vodcasts of high school German lessons. I don’t speak a word of German and yet I find them strangely compelling.

    OK, that’s it for me–for now, at least. Now it’s your turn.

  • Nominations Are Open for the Edublog Awards

    Every year I am impressed with the effort and quality of results from the Edublog Awards crew. Every year I learn about at least a few edublogs that teach me something important. With nominations now open for the 2007 awards, I urge you to participate. Start by nominating those edublogs that you learn from. Try to include any worthy but relatively unknown edublogs; even if they don’t get the award, at least they’ll get more attention as nominees. I’m talking about making a small community-building effort that pays substantial dividends.

    Please go nominate.

  • Add This Feed to Your RSS Reader

    Friend, colleague, connoisseur of Swedish schnapps, and Executive Director of Penn State World Campus Ken Udas has started a blog. There are two reasons why this is significant. First, Ken often has novel perspectives on his work, and from the early posts it looks like this blog will be no exception. Second, it’s an official blog on a PSU URL. I would like to see more university executives take the plunge this way. Kudos to Ken for leading the way.

    The RSS feed is here.

  • Edublog Award Nominations Open

    Wow. I am so behind on posting I can’t believe it. I haven’t even covered all the important stuff from EDUCAUSE yet, and more thought-provoking info keeps washing over the transom every day. I’m going to put in another (possibly futile) effort to catch up over the next few days, starting with a couple of shortish posts today. In the meantime, I hope you have been reading guest blogger Stephen Marshall’s excellent posts.

    To kick this effort off, I’d like to note that nominations for the Edublog awards are open. For those who are new to it, the Edublog awards have been an outstanding forum for recognizing great educational blogs. Every year I have picked up a couple of gems I would not have otherwise known about because they were nominated for the awards.

    The nomination process is by email, and only current bloggers are allowed to nominate. (See? One more reason to start blogging if you haven’t already done so.) Once the nominations are in, everyone can vote. If you are a current blogger, I recommend getting your nominations in ASAP. And regardless of whether you are a current blogger, you should subscribe to the awards blog feed.

  • It's Time to Stand Up and Be Counted

    eSchool News has posted what is, in my view, an extremely important article on how the United States is lagging behind on support for integrating technology into education. The UK, for example, is spending literally billions of dollars tearing down aging schools and rebuilding them wired from the ground up. They are spending billions of dollars more on training teachers how to use the technology. Other countries are making similar investments. (Mexico and Australia are both cited as examples in the article.) Meanwhile, the U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is out there saying that the push for funding new technology in the classrooms is “complete” and recommending cuts in the Federal budget for such initiatives.

    I believe that those of us who consider ourselves to be “edubloggers” have a moral obligation to speak out, organize, and mobilize on these issues. Beyond simply talking among ourselves about what ought to be done, we should be reaching out to make it happen. We should be encouraging our fellow citizens in our respective countries–and around the world–to insist that our govenments fund infrastructure, teacher training, content development, and R&D for educational technology in a systematic way. If we really believe that what we do matters, then let’s make sure that it really does matter.

    I will be posting about specific things that can be done in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, I would love to hear suggestions from my many fine colleagues in the edublogosphere–both writers and readers. What can we do today to raise public awareness and get legislative action?

  • Calling All SUNY Edubloggers

    I have often referred to the smARThistory home page by SUNY colleagues Steven Zucker and Beth Harris. I have now added to my blogroll a second SUNY edublog, Learning Curve, written by the dark and mysterious MIDizen X.

    I would like to start a SUNY-specific edublogroll, but I need your help. If you are an edublogger at SUNY or know of any edubloggers at SUNY, please let me know.