MEZCOPH Friday IT Tips

Hi,

I've been slacking the last few weeks and haven't posted anything. So I went on to Stumble Upon this morning and after going through a bunch of "interesting" site I found this page titled "200 Free Outstanding Online Classes". It's on a reader contributed site techsupportalert.com and is monitored by Gizmo Richards. Check out the Health courses - many are from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Although the posting is a bit dated the content is still pretty good. Also, explore the open source pages at the various universities that are listed.

This week's tip comes from facultyfocus.com and an article by Kathryn Linder: "Students and Social Networking: Should You 'Friend' Your Students?".  

I've always felt a bit uncomfortable about accepting (or rejecting) Friend requests from people I know or used to know. Facebook and other social networks don't readily allow multiple types of relationships so the issues that Ms. Linder brings up need to be heeded and one needs to be clear about the type of interactions that will be utilized in any social network. Hope you find the article thought provoking.

I was scanning YouTube as a resource for today's tip and came across a video titled "I have decided to teach online-How do I get started?". It's a recorded session of Ed Maise, an instructional designer, who (I believe) was teaching a classroom of people at UMSL (Missouri, St. Louis?) on how to get started with online teaching. As I have trouble sitting through a one hour video, I started following where Ed was going on the web in his presentation, which was his website: http://www.edmaise.net/ . He has it laid out with web 2.0 teaching tools like Moodle, Joomla, Wordpress, etc. For me, it was a pretty impressive set of tools that one should be exposed to if teaching with web 2.0 is on the docket. Anyway, read some of his blog entries in WordPress (http://edmaise.net/wordpress/) that goes into how to use some of these tools. I didn't get through his video but I'll make a point of doing so in the near future.

Today's tip comes from Tech & Learning online magazine which sent an email to me that contained the content for this Friday's tip. It is an online supplement to the regular content titled "Online Education: It's not just for students".   The supplement is really about online learning resources for working professionals but it offered a few facts and tips that I thought were important enough to share here.

The first is a list of tips for online learning:

 

The second is a list of stats on online learning:

 

and lastly a list of reasons why online learning doesn't work:

 

This week's tip is a link to another blog, one by Larry Ferlazzo. Larry is a fervant blogger and a high school English teacher in California. His site is here: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/ and he blogs mainly about learning technologies in the K-12 space, but I wanted you to look at his posting on plagarism. It's titled "The Best Online Resources To Teach About Plagiarism" and takes you to many online sites, mostly at higher education institutions, that try to teach students about plagarism. I think it's apropos for our college students.  

Additionally, our University Library has an online resource on avoiding plagarism here:

http://www.library.arizona.edu/help/tutorials/plagiarism/index.html 

 

Have a great week.

 

 

 

 

As we start to incorporate more videos into our online courses, being able to edit them so that they get to the learning points quickly and hold the attention of the students becomes important. So, this week I've selected a couple of YouTube video tutorials on how to edit videos as the Tip of the Week. The more interesting one to watch is the shorter one that covers iMovie and the other covers Windows MovieMaker. I suggest watching both of them if you plan to use MovieMaker.

Here are the links:

iMovie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEC9JKQVoj0

 

Movie Maker:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZXK68NS7gU

 

Today's tip is an article written by Malcolm Brown of Darthmouth College that was published in Educause Review July/August 2009 edition. Mr. Brown provides some insightful feedback from students he interviewed as to what works and what doesn't when using technology in the curriculum. I hope it's helpful input that may be applicable to your courses. Here is the link to the article:

http://www.educause.edu/library/ERM0948 

This week's tip is about screencasting. It's a concept that's been around for a while where the display on your computer is mixed with audio input to create a video stream. One of the first products I worked with in this realm is Camtasia and it is one of the products mentioned in this article. Even though this article from Smashing Magazine is about a year old, it's still quite relevant to the general direction we're heading here at the Zuckerman College of Public Health - put more of our courses' content online. Here is the article:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/19/screencasting-how-to-start/ 

This week's tip is a TED video that is both compelling and informative. Although most of TED videos (http://www.ted.com/) are supposed to be fairly short, this one lasts 17 minutes. I think you'll find it worth the time. The video is by Seth Godin who is an entrepreneur and blogger and he talks about how the world has evolved from mass production to mass marketing and now is moving towards "tribes" (I call it social networks) and how each of us can be a (market) leader and change agent in this Internet era. As he was talking, citing examples, I thought about how we, in our college, try to effect change through grass roots advocacy and how his examples would work for many of the public health related changes we would like to see. Anyway here is the link and I hope it's interesting and inspires you to become a leader in your choice of cause. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_we_lead.html 

Of course one way to implement what Mr. Godin speaks about in the video is to start a Twibe on Twitter. Here is the link for that:

http://www.twibes.com/ 

 

Have a great week.

I Stumbled (get it?) on an article looking for a blog post and it was titled Seven e-Learning and Teaching Resources.  After going through the article it seemed that the first of those seven was the most relevant and significant to what we do here at the College of Public Health. Scitable is an online resource made available from Nature Publishing that contains a large set of articles related to genetics and genomics. I was reading an article on epigenomics about how identical twins develop different characteristics - quite interesting though a lot of it was a bit over my head. Maybe we'll have a new EPI concentration on genomics. Hope you find this and the site interesting.