Faculty Development News This Week:
Teaching
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Book on Community College Teaching
Honored But Invisible: An Inside Look at Teaching in Community Colleges,
by W. Norton Grubb (Routledge1999).
"This book examines the nature of teaching, and the institutional forces that shape it, in community colleges. These colleges include the most diverse students and the most varied subjects of any form of education in the U.S. Unfortunately, both they and the teaching within them are often invisible."
Honored But Invisible: An Inside Look at Teaching in Community Colleges
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Using Blogs to Exhibit Class Projects
This link suggests ways of using blogs to manage project communication.
Publishing a Project Weblog
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What is Blogging?
Blogging--What Is It?
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Principles of Adult Learning
Pedagogical principles relating to adult learners.
Principles of Adult Learning
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Positive Feedback
This article by Alfie Kohn was published in
Young Children, September 2001;
and, in abridged form (with the title "Hooked on Praise"), in
Parents Magazine, May 2000. Although Kohn is talking about teaching young children, the psychology of rewarding students with a perfunctory "good job!" response is no different for youths than adults. Kohn argues that we, as educators, should think twice about handing out this type of feedback.
Here is a quote to entice you to read the rest of the article:
"The reason praise can work in the short run is that young children are hungry for our approval. But we have a responsibility not to exploit that dependence for our own convenience. A "Good job!" to reinforce something that makes our lives a little easier can be an example of taking advantage of children's dependence. Kids may also come to feel manipulated by this, even if they can not quite explain why. "
Read the entire article:
Five Reasons to Stop Saying "Good Job"
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The Rise of Cell Phone Cheating in the Classroom
This article appeared in the December 2, 2003 issue of
The Christian Science Monitor.
A Call to Curb Cell Phones in Class
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Scholar Activists
How to make a difference as a scholar-activist.
Professors Who Profess
Software / Design Tools
--HTML Tutorial
Interested in learning HTML? Check out this site:
Netstrider
--Microsoft Blogging Tool
Go ahead: register and get a free blog site to start work on!
The Spoke
--New Age Keyboarding
Q-Pointer is voice enabled software that allows you to voice enable any program (net browsers, word processors, photo editing--yes, any software)! You simply speak to click, surf, dictate, and keyboard using a headset.
Q Pointer Keyboard
--Float Images Tutorial
Floatutorial takes you through the basics of floating elements such as images, drop caps, next and back buttons, image galleries, inline lists and multi-column layouts.
Floattutorial
--Learning Objects Portal
This site is a gateway to learning objects resources.
Learning Objects Portal
--Advanced Distributed Learning
"In November 1997, the Department of Defense (DoD) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched the Advanced Distributed Learning
(ADL) initiative. A major collaborative ADL partner and presenter at the Kick-Off Meeting was the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) Project, a consortium of government organizations, over 1,600 colleges and universities, and 150 corporations. The purpose of this project is to develop an open architecture for online learning."--Center for International Education, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
ADL
--Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM)
What is GEM?
GEM is
"... a consortium effort to provide "one-stop, any-stop" access to the substantial, but uncataloged, collections of Internet-based educational materials available on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites.
... a consortium of 400 + organizations and individuals who support the goals and mission of the GEM Project.
... a set of metadata standards and technical mechanisms that provides efficient, simple access to educational materials.
... The Gateway, a searchable, browseable catalog of metadata records for resources from GEM Consortium members Internet sites."
To find out more:
GEM
--National Learning Infrastructure Initiative(NLII)
What exactly does NLII do?
"The NLII organizes its work around key themes chosen annually from the larger domain of the transformation of teaching and learning with technology. The NLII has begun plotting this domain space visually in a series of concept maps to gain higher-level views of the relationships between themes. Working with the NLII Planning Committee, the NLII identifies emerging themes, tracks their development, and prioritizes work for each year on selected themes. Key themes change as they mature into the mainstream and new ones are identified. The NLII model uses a framework for action that organizes the key themes according to the interrelationships and interdependencies among the forces affecting behavior associated with the role of technology in transforming teaching and learning. The framework represents the complex interplay of agents, technologies, roles, communities, and principles, reflecting the sociotechnological context of decision-making on today's campus."
Interesting site.
NLII
Culture and Trends
--The Library as Temple
Read a passage from this article:
"The library is also not just functionally important to communities all over the world, but a library itself is the embodiment of enlightenment values in all the best sense of that. A library is a temple to the notion that knowledge is not just for the elite and that access should be low cost if not free, that doors should be open. Investing in libraries monetarily, spiritually, intellectually, legally is one of the best things we can do for our immediate state and for the life we hope we can build for the rest of the century."
Read more:
The Anarchist in the Library
--m-learning
This European Commission site is thought-provoking an disturbing on a number of counts. Here is what the Homepage says about the site's mission and purpose:
The products and services in development are designed to capture the interest of young adults (16 to 24) who are not currently taking part in education or training and to assist them in the development of life long learning objectives. The learning themes focus on subjects of interest to young adults, e.g. football and music, and the modules include activities designed to develop aspects of literacy and numeracy. m-learning's target audience includes young adults who are unemployed, under-employed or homeless.
m-learning
Online Communities
--Phantom Authority
This article explores many of the issues involved in the creation and maintenance of an open, online community.
Interesting reading.
Phantom Authority
--Wikipedia
What is Wikipedia?
"Wikipedia is a multilingual project to create a complete an accurate free content encyclopedia. We started in January 2001 and are currently working on 180096 articles in the English version."
Visit the site:
Wikipedia
--Slashdot
--World Summit on the Information Society
Even if you can not travel to Geneva for the 2003 conferee, you can visit the site.
World Summit on the Information Society
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Blog Grab Bag
--Blogging at Harvard
Read about the Blogs at Harvard Initiative.
Blogging Comes to Harvard
--Blogging at Stanford
"As multidisciplinary work becomes more and more important to the sustained success of Stanford University, the tools available from ITSS must be better able to support such work.
Weblogs are an excellent tool for supporting multidisciplinary teams, which is one of the reasons why we're considering creating a Blog service for all Stanford faculty, staff and students."
Read more:
Stanford ITSS Blog Project
--Top Twenty Definitions of Blogging
This is a list of blog applications.
Top Twenty Definitions of Blogging
--Internet Mapping
"A project to create a comprehensive graphical representation of the internet in just one day and using only a single computer has already produced some eye-catching images."
Internet Mapping
--Workplace Rituals
An interesting perspective on the culture of work.
Rituals of the Workplace
--Online History Sourcebook
Online texts for ancient, medieval, and modern history. A history film archive is also available.
History Sourcebook
--Voice of the Shuttle (VoS)
"Started in 1994 as a suite of static Web pages, VoS has now been rebuilt as a database that serves content dynamically on the Web. "
Recommended.
Voice of the Shuttle
--Teacher Xpress
This education resources portal is managed by a robot!
TeacherXpress
--Virtual Tour of the Concorde
It is the end of an era for the Concorde passenger jet, but you can still take a virtual tour of this magnificent plane.
Take the tour:
Tour the Concorde
Until next semester!
Blog editor
