Well, even if Blackboard’s website and its Academic Web Resources don’t offer instructors much help or inspiration in using Blackboard, there are fortunately some other websites you can go to - and I’ll start with the Blackboard services at Wytheville Community College, where you can access a Blackboard Quiz Generator online. 
This invaluable tool, created and run by David Carter-Tod (of Serious Instructional Technology fame) allows you to type your questions in “normal” question format, many questions at a time, and then import them in one fell swoop into Blackboard. Continue reading ‘Some Online Resources for Working with Blackboard’
Archive for April, 2003
XPLANA CW is an open-source courseware system that allows teachers and students to create learning experiences online, sharing their thoughts and ideas over the Internet.
The following is a listing of articles currently available for discussion under the XPLANA CW Courseware section. These articles are being released gradually; if there is a section in which you are especially interested, send an email to laura.gibbs@xplana.com and we will turn our attention to publishing an article on that section asap. Continue reading ‘XPLANA CW COURSEWARE: FORUM INDEX’
RETURN TO THE FORUM INDEX
XPLANA CW Student Projects
Student Web Publishing. A major goal of XPLANA CW is to promote student web publishing. One component of student web publishing is the Journal. Journals are untethered from courses; every student in the system has a Journal, and they have one Journal no matter how many courses they are enrolled in. The other component of student web publishing consists of Student Projects. Continue reading ‘XPLANA CW Student Projects’
The Blackboard System Administrators repaired our access to the Academic Web Resources section of Blackboard, so I took a look around. Unfortunately, what I found again confirmed a basic problem at the heart of Blackboard: it does not interact very well with the open Internet (I will give a little sermon on frames tonight)… and it is shockingly commercial. Ignorance is bliss with Blackboard: I actually did not realize that there were all kinds of commercial products being promoted to our students inside Blackboard. Given that SIN, OU’s Sooner Information Network student portal, was just raked over the coals in the April 25 2003 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education for having advertising on its site, I am surprised that the Chronicle did not say anything about all the advertising on university Blackboard sites. I am assuming these ads are not unique to OU, although I could be wrong?
But let’s begin at the beginning… Continue reading ‘Blackboard’s Academic Web Resources … and the Advertising’
The volume of unsolicited bulk email has doubled in the last year. One of the hardest hit groups is higher education due to the relative openness of our networks. We are in the information sharing business so many of the techniques used in corporate environments will not work for us. In corporate networking culture it is often possible to simply block email at the server from regions of the world that tend to be a problem. Likewise, being a business we would not make every email address in our organization available via the web. In higher education we play by very different rules. We cannot just filter out all email traffic from a given region of the world no matter how troublesome the region is. Nor can we refuse access to internal email addresses. We are all about sharing and collaborating with diverse groups around the world. While this is our best asset, it is also our worst security hole. Continue reading ‘Spam by the Truckload’
A recent article on scenario-based learning brought to light again how well students respond to “experiences” in the learning process.
Experiences take the material being learned — science, language, business — and provide personalized context for that material. By making learning personal, these experiences help students go beyond memorizing facts for short-term memory storage. Learning through experience leads to the internalization of knowledge and is a prelude to actual understanding. Continue reading ‘Gaming Mobility Pushes Envelope of Experience for Education’
T-Mobile Sidekick — just one option
Connectivity, access, and mobility are primary problems with web-based or online education. It’s pretty limiting to be hunting for connection, or lugging a laptop when what’s really needed is the ability to instant-message, and to save, send, and transfer text and images — either to one’s own e-mail or to the e-mail of others. Continue reading ‘REALITY MAPPING WITH T-MOBILE SIDEKICK: Using low-end PDAs such as Sidekick for truly mobile, field-based online education’
Pick-A-Prof has arrived at the University of Oklahoma, thanks to the Student Government Association which is fully funding the cost of this commercial service. I am very excited about it. There is something futile about asking students to do course evaluations that sometimes the faculty choose not to read - and the students sense that futility. Why should they provide detailed comments about a course when the only person who (might) read those comments is the instructor? But with Pick-A-Prof the information that the students provide is available both to the faculty and to the students. And that makes sense, doesn’t it? Both faculty and students should have a stake in doing whatever they can to make the best possible instruction happen on campus. Continue reading ‘Pick-A-Prof Comes to My Campus’
LOVE, MADNESS, AND SHAKESPEARE: Embedded journalist and video game-inspired collaborative strategies
LOVE, MADNESS, AND SHAKESPEARE:
Embedded journalist and video game-inspired collaborative strategies.
By Susan Smith Nash.
Done well, Shakespeare can be a heart-pounding limit experience where you find out about yourself and the psychology of larger-than-life characters. It’s emotionally intimate. The thrill is so intense it almost feels “wrong” - toying with the taboo, exposure, violence, longing, death.
Why doesn’t someone make a video game of this stuff?? Continue reading ‘LOVE, MADNESS, AND SHAKESPEARE: Embedded journalist and video game-inspired collaborative strategies’
When we were talking with the Math Adjuncts here at OU the other day, there was a clear sense that using the Internet to do teaching was something “impersonal.” There was a strongly voiced fear that any efforts to teach online - either in conjunction with a regularly scheduled class or in a fully online environment - would result in something impersonal. This was exactly the word used (and used over and over again): impersonal. Continue reading ‘Getting Personal in an Online Course: Listening to Voices’
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