Many readers might have wondered where we were during the posts in between November and the start of Spring Semester. We had a little challenge with our blog software, but we are obviously back online now, thanks to James Bowles who has been serving as our new Systems Administrator.
As for myself, I’ve been very busy since returning to the CTL after a semester-long sabbatical leave to finish a master’s degree in Educational Technology at ASU. It’s done and I’m back and although I’ve been really struggling to find time to do everything I want to as well as serve the needs of the CTL faculty it’s been fun.
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Educators have bored their students to death with it…
Sales Engineers have hounded us for money with it…
Conference presenters have put us to sleep with it…
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Whilst working on some other projects at school, I wanted to finally post this to a searchable resource that instructors and other educators can use. This is a combination of my most two recent posts at my own website at Edutechnorama…
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As instructors continue to increase the number of online courses MCC offers, as well as continue to shift from paper to electronic homework submissions, we are beginning to notice the following two trends:
1. many of our students do not own MS Word; therefore,
2. an increasing number of our students electronically submit documents that are not in the “.doc” format.
There are a few easy suggestions to help with this issues.
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I liked Jim Mancuso’s metaphor that MCC is not just turning a new page this academic year, but an entire new chapter. I think the CTL is also starting a new chapter with the recent return and/or turnover of new staff in the CTL. As a part of our new chapter, the CTL is kicking off a new program called “Focus On“. The purpose of this program is to give the CTL a pedagogical topic to focus on for each semester. Our kick off topic is Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs). We hope this semester that everyone will participate by talking about, and possibly trying, CATs sometime during the Fall semester. Hopefully you all filled out your “ticket out” at the end of the Convocation. Those of us in the CTL will look at those results and report back to you all later this week.
I thought I would “cheat” and make my blog posting this week an easy one. For those of you who do not know, Donna Guadet, Mesa CC’s fabulous instructional technologist, decided she missed the classroom and moved over to Scottsdale CC as a full-time math instructor. To allow MCC to run a full search to replace our instructional technologist position, I will be the acting instructional technologist for the 2007-8 academic year.
I just finished five years, full-time, in the English, Humanities, and Journalism department teaching writing and media studies classes. My scholarly interests generally include the interface between technology and humanity. My various scholarly projects are usually about teaching and learning with technology, technologically mediated professional development, and cross-media narrative studies. I have been blogging about my various scholarly interests for the past year and a half and just upgraded to my own domain.
Besides helping with workshops, course design, and various programs in the CTL, I will also be working on my own interests of scholarship at the two-year college (specifically how do we seek funding and do it). I will also be working on revising the ETL (excellence in teaching and learning) courses.
So swing by if you:
need help with some funky teaching and learning technology,
want to chat about redesigning your course,
like to share what projects you are working on, and/or
just need a place to hide for a while!
Recently there were articles in both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed about working students in higher education. Probably not a surprise to most of you, there were many statistics that emphasize, and reemphasize, the hurdles that many of the working students at MCC must go through to attend college. The report discussed in the article from Inside Higher Ed claimed that “the working poor who take college courses think of themselves as students first and employees second.” The report also listed recommendations to help working poor students; all of those listed in the article have to be implemented by either the federal government (or other student aid decision makers) and individual institutions. None of the recommendations focused on what individual instructors can do in their specific classes.
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I was the one who initially put together the streaming media guide in preparation for some media classes for MCC faculty taught by Richard Felnagle of the English Humanities department and myself. The guide is horrendously out of date, but the class itself was fun class to teach, and I learned a lot. I really enjoyed teaching it with Richard who delivers a great portion of his own instruction for his on campus and distance-learning students via our Helix Universal Server. (more…)
I’m not about to become an authority on the subject of constructivism, but one of the challenges with early online learning where instructors who knew their subjects very well but didn’t understand how less-productive it could be to just toss students into an online learning environment and expect that their instincts would take over and they would just ‘figure it out’. Most distance-learning students (including myself) have a certain amount of online survival mechanism built in that very closely mimics survival in the real world.
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In the CTL we have opportunities of trying out new services for the purpose of experimentation and growth for new methods of instruction. While we have had a blog before, currently, this blog is the first official blog hosted on the same website as our main page. Thanks to Martin Lehner, and James Bowles, our website is able to support more dynamic content than in the past. Anything PHP based is now a thing of reality, whereas before it was harder to support on our server. However, we aren’t quite there yet in terms of supporting a broad campus-wide instructional blogging community. In the interim, if anyone wants to do blogging for themselves or collaboratively with your students or co-workers, there are many free alternatives. (more…)
