Faculty Development News This Week:


Faculty Development


--"Empowering Online Teaching through Faculty Development"


This introductory chapter comes from the blog IDEAS: Instructional Design for E-Learning Approaches, 29 April 2004.


"Empowering Online Teaching through Faculty Development"


--"Online Course Design and Faculty Development"


This is also from IDEAS, 29 April 2004.


"Online Course Design and Faculty Development


--"Formal Course Design and the Student Learning Experience"


This article is from the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks(JALN),September 2003.


"Formal Course Design and the Student Learning Experience"


--Creation of UniSCOPE: A Model for Rewarding All Forms of Scholarship"


This article is from JALN, july 2003.


UniSCOPE


--"Coordinating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies for Educational Reform"


This article is from Systemic Reform: Perspecitives on Personalizing Education, September 1994.


"Coordinating Top-Down and Borrom-UP Strategies"

Online Learning


--Seizing the Opportunity: The Quality and Extent of Online Education


This report is a publication of the Sloan Consortium, September 2003..


Seizing the Opportunity


This is a 32-page PDF file.


--"University Teachers' Reflections on Their First Online Teaching Experiences"


This article is from JALN, April 2004.


"...First Time Online Teaching Experiences"


This is a 14-page PDF file.


--"Best Online Instructional Practices"


This article is from JALN, April 2004.


"Best Online Instructional Practices"


This is a 26-page PDF file.

Building Community


"The Interactive University Project uses the Internet to open UC Berkeley’s resources and people to California’s K-12 schools and citizens. Our goal is to use technology for the improvement of teaching and learning while making accessible the knowledgein universities, museums and libraries."


Interactive University Project

Community Colleges


--"Anytime, Anyplace and the Community College: Ten Emerging Insights"


This article is from JALN, February 2004.


"Anytime, Anyplace and the Community College: Ten Emerging Insights"


This is a 6-page PDF file.


--"Mainstreaming Distance Learning into the Community College"


This article is from JALN, February 2004.


"Mainstreaming Distance Learning into the Community College


This is a 10-page PDF file.

Libraries / Knowledge Management


--Librarian Avengers


Read the introduction to this site:


"Ok, sure. We've all got our little preconceived notions about what librarians are and what they do. Many people think of them as diminutive civil servants, scuttling about "Sssh-ing" people and stamping things. Well, think again buster.


Librarians have degrees. They go to graduate school for Information Science and become masters of data systems and human/computer interaction. Librarians can catalog anything from an onion to a dog's ear. They could catalog you. Librarians wield unfathomable power. With a flip of the wrist they can hide your dissertation behind piles of old Field and Stream magazines. They can find data for your term paper that you never knew existed. They may even point you toward new and appropriate subject headings.


People become librarians because they know too much. Their knowledge extends beyond mere categories. They cannot be confined to disciplines. Librarians are all-knowing and all-seeing. They bring order to chaos. They bring wisdom and culture to the masses. They preserve every aspect of human knowledge. Librarians rule. And they will kick the crap out of anyone who says otherwise."


Look it up!


Librarian Avengers

Blogging


--Blog Shop


This blog introduces blogging to educators.


Blog Shop


--The Year of the Blog


This Web site on blogging comes from Rutgers University.


The Year of the Blog


Recommended.


--Webquest: Blogs and RSS


"This WebQuest is the result of an individual study assignment for EDA 556 at ASU West, with Dr. Lance Wilhelm. The ideas and information presented come from several months of research which consisted primarily of following discussions in the Ed. Blogging community. This page attempts to acknowledge the primary influences and sources for this assignment."


Webquest

Blog Grab Bag


--Jabber.org


"Jabber is a set of streaming XML protocols and technologies that enable any two entities on the Internet to exchange messages, presence, and other structured information in close to real time. The first Jabber application is an instant messaging (IM) network that offers functionality similar to legacy IM services such as AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo."


This utility is open source (free).


Jabber.org


--Pluck.com


"Share a WebLink or an entire folder of WebLinks with any individual or group of users. Plan a vacation or event, keep a wish list, collect investment advice, research a school project, or track a company. "


Pluck.com is an open sourse (free) RSS reader.


Pluck.com


--"Patterns of Hypertext"


This article, written by a scientist at Eastgast Systems, discusses the " vocabulary of concepts and structures that will let us understand the way today's hypertexts and Web sites work."


Patterns of Hypertext


--TouchGraph


Type in a URL and you get an interactive graph of the link architecture. Move nodes around, retrieve them, get information on them.


TouchGraph


--del.icio.us


de.licio.us is "a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others."


del.icio.us

With this issue, Ruminators' ILK will take a break from blogging and resume in mid August 2004, the beginning of fall term.


Wishing you serene ruminations this summer.


Blog editor, Colette Wanless-Sobel, and blog namesake, Percival Ennis (seven year old wether, Pygmy X Toggenberg) Photo Credit: Steven L. Sobel
Goat.au

Faculty Development News This Week:

Wikis


Teaching Wiki


Teaching Wiki "aspires to be a community for college-level faculty. We imagine our primary audience to be faculty who are interested in writing instruction, perhaps techno-rhetorians but (as we invoke the wiki way here), we invite all college faculty and instructors to be wikiteachers with us. "


Teaching Wiki

Games / Simulations


--Sexual Harassment Prevention


This “game” provides instruction on sexual harassment issues.


Sexual Harassment Prevention


--Are You Sure: The Ultimate Business Challenge


Learn while you play!


Are You Sure

Blogs


--"I'm Blogging This: A Closer Look at Why People Blog"


Read an excerpt from this article:


"For bloggers who think by writing, blogging provides two vital advantages: an audience to help shape the writing and an archive of posts, some of which may be valuable in the future. Personal webpages often perform in a similar way, but the audience is far less defined. In our study, bloggers had "regulars" who they knew were reading their posts. The writing could be directed at them, solving one of the key problems of any writing, i.e., knowing who to write for. The fact of having an audience would keep the writing moving along, as the author knew that people were anticipating new posts."


"A Closer Look at Why People Blog"


This is a 16-page PDF file.


--RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators


Find out about Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication.


RSS




--The Blogosphere


"Have you ever wondered what the collective voices of a few hundred thousand people might say? This Web site collects links from weblogs all over the world to discover just what it is people everywhere are talking about."


The Blogosphere


--BlogShares


"BlogShares is a simulated, fantasy stock market for weblogs where players invest fictional money to buy stocks and bonds in an artificial economy where attention is the commodity and weblogs are the companies. Weblogs, or blogs for short, are valued by their incoming links from other known blogs. In effect, links become the business deals in the simulation and players speculate on the fortunes of thousands of blogs by buying and selling shares. A whole host of options exist for advanced play including gifting shares, leveraged buy-outs, stock splits, additional share issues, market and player bonds.


Blog-Shares

Internet


--"UC Berkely Professors Measure Exploding World Production of New Information"


Although an older article (October 2000), you will find interesting content on knowledge explosion and the democratization of information.


New Information


--"Friday Forward: A Chat with Futurist John Smart"


This article is from USNews.com, 23 April 2004.


"Friday Forward"


--"Organized Labor and the Internet"


This article addresses the future of the American work force and cyberunions.


"Organized Labor and the Internet"




--Internet Studies Center


"The Internet Studies Center at the University of Minnesota addresses compelling questions surrounding the social, ethical, legal, and rhetorical aspects of the Internet. The Center is based in the Rhetoric Department but is an interdisciplinary effort drawing on faculty from around the University and industry partners. By providing access to current theories, critiques, and explanations of the Internet, the Internet Studies Center is a hub for innovative Internet research and discussion


Internet Studies Center


--"Doing Research with Internet Texts: A Brief Bibliography"


TEXT


Doing Research with Internet Texts


--Creative Commons


"Creative Commons is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share.


Creative Commons

Utilities


--Typepad.com


"TypePad is a powerful, hosted weblogging service that gives users the richest set of features to immediately share and publish information -- like travel logs, journals and digital scrapbooks -- on the Web. TypePad lets people communicate, publicly or privately, with the audience of their choosing."


30-day free trial offered.


Typepad.com

Blog Grab Bag


--www.theory.org


This site is devoted to media, culture, and politics.


www.theory.org


--LORE: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing


"Lore is a journal for adjunct and graduate student teachers of writing published three times a year and edited by TAs, adjuncts, and assistant professors."

--The Writing Instructor.com


This site promotes itself as a "digital community for writers and teachers of writing."


The Writing Instructor.com


--The Third Space


Third Space is "a site for emerging feminist scholars."


The Third Space


LORE


--Disinfopedia


Disinfopedia is "a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests. We started in February 2003 and are now working on 4349 articles. To learn how you can edit any article right now, visit Disinfopedia: Welcome, newcomers, our Help page, Frequently Asked Questions, or experiment in the sandbox. "


Disinfopedia


--CompPile


CompPile is "an ongoing inventory of publications in post-secondary composition, rhetoric, ESL, and technical writing: 1939-1999."


CompPile


--OPen Source Book Publishing


"Last year, in January 2003, my first novel came out. I was 31 years old, and I'd been calling myself a novelist since the age of 12. It was the storied dream-of-a-lifetime, come-true-at-last. I was and am proud as hell of that book, even though it is just one book among many released last year, better than some, poorer than others; and even though the print-run (which sold out very quickly!) though generous by science fiction standards, hardly qualifies it as a work of mass entertainment."


CrapHound


--CommonText


"Commontext is a completely new concept: a publisher of freely shared classroom texts. Its goal is to allow unrestricted, free access to a vast collection of learning materials produced at the highest level of excellence, including academic peer review and fact checking, and professional editing and proofreading."


Common Text


--"Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite"


This article is from FreeRepublic.com, 5 April 2004.


"Dead Souls"


--"The Ideological War Within the West"


This article is from AmericanDiplomacy.org, 2002.


"The Ideological War"


--"An Anglosphere Primer


This paper was presented to the Foreign Policy Institute, 2001.


"An Anglosphere Primer


--"Cute"


This article is from the London Review of Books, 15 April 2004.


"Cute"

Until next week!


Blog editor

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