XplanaZine

Last week was the very definition of crazy. My wife and I held a giant garage sale, closed on our house, loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly… er… Boston, that is. As crazy as it was, though, we had a blast driving across the southern states en route from Oklahoma to Massachusetts. We drove through the flatlands covered with red earth through the hills of Arkansas and on into the Appalachian mountains. On our last day, we crossed through eight states — Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts — all in a period of nine hours.

One particular bright spot in the week was the night we spent in Wytheville, Virginia. For those who don’t know, Wytheville is a quaint community set in the hills and home to Wytheville Community College. The latter is what made the stop in Wytheville so significant because it is home to an educational technologist who has made a big difference in my teaching career.

You see, several years ago I was busy putting one of my Spanish courses online and was getting pretty frustrated with the quiz creation tools provided by BlackBoard. I had several hundred activities to create and was worried I’d never get the course built. Much to my pleasant surprise, however, a friend and faculty member from the Classics department, Laura Gibbs, came to my rescue by turning me on to an open source tool designed specifically for people in my predicament — The BlackBoard Quiz Generator by David Carter-Tod. This application let me bypass the awkward workflow of BlackBoard and create quizzes easily using a simple text editor. Better yet, I could use the quiz generator with BlackBoard and WebCT, and I was able to keep my quizzes in an LMS-agnostic format.

One of the things I always loved about the BB Quiz Generator is how easy it was to find when I had misplaced my bookmark yet one more time. A quick search on Google always led me back to the application and the tagline “A Service of Wytheville Community College.” So, when my wife and I decided to stop in Wytheville for the evening, I couldn’t help but feel a special sense of gratitude to the whole community for the help David Carter-Tod had given me via his application.

Wytheville also made me think about the wonderful friends and colleagues I was leaving behind in Oklahoma. As I tend to be a plodder, it was only through their friendship and support that I was ever able to get around the curve of education and technology. So here is a big Lone Star Learning salute and tribute to the Oklahoman educators and technologists who made my life easier in recent years.

• A very special thanks to Laura Gibbs , queen of online teaching. Laura provides tireless and selfless support to all faculty at OU and she gives back to the educational community every single day. If you’ve never visited her Web site and checked out her myth-folklore course, you’ve been missing out on a real treasure.
• Another salute to the wonderful staff at the Modern Languages Learning Center (The Lab). This is truly one of the most creative places around and it is led by the incomparable John Verbick. Keep up the good work.
• Also, thanks to a former OU student, Randy Hoyt , for his amazing open source spirit and his great calendar content tool.
• Finally, thanks to Karen Cozart, Coordinator of Distance Learning for the College of Arts and Sciences, and to my friend, Susan Smith Nash, who moved on to Excelsior College a year ago but who’s inspired teaching and dedicated research have made a big difference in my professional career.

Of course, the great thing about our world today is that I can continue to communicate and collaborate with these people even after I have changed physical locations. The education community is truly global and I’m happy to be a part of it.

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