The more work you put into the preparatory phase of a journey … and barring disasters or unforseen circumstances … the smoother the ride. Right? Knowing where you’re going and how to get there is also useful. When it comes to prepping course materials for delivery to students, it’s helpful to switch thinking from what
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photo credit: Greg Melia
Next Monday is day 1 of teaching for a new academic year… or should the emphasis be on learning! Change is in the air. It’s a change in thinking, a sort of ‘can-do’ feeling that is beginning to nudge colleagues into giving this e-learning stuff a go. I’ve experienced this several times this week alone at my place. Now change at institutional level can be notoriously slow in uptake, and never more so than in academe. Tried and true ways that ‘work’ are hung on to perhaps long past their shelf freshness date, and for all sorts of good reasons. One of the prime excuses is time-poverty, and free-thinking academics are notorious for resisting the kind of change that comes from above … administrative mandates being one of the most resisted. But I digress a little.
Continue reading ...The past couple of weeks have been busy for most academics in
Australia. If they’re not grabbing the last of the summer before term
begins … and it’s been a miserable, wet summer for most of us …
then others are jetting home from far-flung cold climes. Most probably,
like me, they’re prepping for the first semester of the academic year.
When I was a kid, and it rolled around to back to school time, I used to love stocking up on stationery and getting my new textbooks. The trip to the newsagent (stationery supplier) in January was like Christmas all over again. I remember sniffing the new pages … exercise books provided an entirely different olfactory experience than did text books. I’d marvel over the contents … would all of this unfamiliar knowledge be all mine before the year was up? Then it came to the writing implement of choice for this new academic year … the colour of ink and the heft in the hand had to be right. I remember when those new fangled yellow Biro pens came in, but I loved the smell of Quink ink and the feel of a fountain-pen nib on paper, and still do. A whiff of Clag paste still jolts me back to days of grade school innocence. When I got to university, I experienced the same thrill browsing the shelves in the bookstore. By then it was agonising over the right folder or ‘student portfolio’ to capture lecture notes and to store class handouts in. Now I am all grown up, I still enjoy trawling the shelves at the local office supplies warehouse. But my, how they have grown too; is there no limit to the number and kind of pens these days? I walked the aisles of my local Officeworks a couple of days ago, checking out the latest in the office supplies department. There is more choice than ever, but what you only get a hint of … the tip of the iceberg as it were … is the relentless incursion of the digital world into the quiet backwaters of prepping for a class.
Continue reading ...Yesterday was the first anniversary of my niece’s wedding. I’d been feeling guilty about the dozens of digital images I had lurking in iPhoto and my tardiness in getting them out there for sharing as I’d promised. Truth is, I was looking for an app that would make putting a slideshow together quick and easy.
Continue reading ...The UK-based Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies is worth a visit, and Centre Director Jane Farmer’s ‘Learning Tip of the Day’ definitely worth subscribing to. Right now there’s a call out for educators to contribute their current favourite top-10 tools. The lists get boiled down at year’s end, and the top 100 for 2008
Continue reading ...There have been some great apps come my way this year. One of the best has been the aptly-named del.icio.us (I still have to think about the spelling when I type). I have no idea how I came across this marvellous, democratic, imaginative tag system back in January, but the first bookmark ever was ‘How
Continue reading ...There’s a sense of winding down, of taking stock all over the blogosphere … must have something to do with the end of a year and the start of another. Now that another year of e-learning adventures is coming to a close, I’m doing the list thing. What would I do differently if I were
Continue reading ...Image by Colleen AF Venable via Flickr Depending on the content and the form of your podcast, you’ll want to think about the style of your delivery. I most often use podcasts to provide course material to students, and more often than not the audio track will be accompanied by slides to support what I
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