January 2005 Archives

Five of us from the LTC are spending time this semester in the Integrated Learning Center's Digital Media Resource Center (ILC DMRC). The idea is to become more available to faculty for consultations. I am available to explore instructional blogging and faculty webpages. Jenny Franklin can discuss instructional design and assessment, Gretchen Gibbs and Sue South course management systems, and Wayne Brent for new technologies. If you have an interest, stop by! Pass this along to any interested colleagues as well.

An online calendar and electronic 3D memo will be sent out with schedules. Here is a look at my coming weeks in the ILC DMRC.

9-4:00 today, January 25th. Here is a look at other days/times.
1-4:00 Friday Feb. 4th
1-4:00 Tuesday, Feb. 8th
9-4:00 Wed. Feb. 9th
9-4:00 Friday, Feb 18th

This week Maite Correa requested a blog for her Spanish 330 class. She plans to have students write about their class readings. I think that this is another great use because it focuses on a particular instructional purpose. There is less likelihood that students will stray from their assignments and they wiil associate the blog as an integrated instructional tool.

Yesterday I had the opportunity, thanks to Veronica Diaz, to meet with members of the Eller Undergraduate Core Curriculum Integration Project Team about instructional blogging. In addition to Veronica, who is Manager of Learning Technology for Eller Undergraduage Programs, were: Vic Piscitello, Marketing; Mike Sechrest, Communication; and Dave Tansik, MAP. Kurt Fenstermacher, an MIS professor, came so that he could share his experiences with using blogs in his Fall semester CS/MIS 440/540 course. I took my laptop and Veronica provided a projection device so I could show some of the basics. Instructional blogging it a good tool for certain situations and not so for others. Kurt reported on some of the same things I found when I introduced instructioal blogging in IRLS613. Some students simply won't participate no matter what you say or do. So take to it and make useful contributions. Kurt also found it can be an enormous demand on one's time to try to respond to each student's entries with questions, direction, and encouragement.

I would be happy to meet with any departments to explore possible uses. Just call or email.

This afternoon I created a webpage to my own channels -- I'm starting with six. It's at http://www.elearn.arizona.edu/stuartg/portal.html , if you want to take a look. I've been using a slick aggregator called Bloglines to do this the past year and a half but right now I am buzzed over how simple this was to do for myself. I'm going to think about re-designing my website to draw this more into main focus.

Yesterday I picked up copies of a flyer that I designed with Jan Knight, the LTC's marketing specialist, to promote instructional blogging.

The flyer advocates using blogs in instruction to promote:

• greater sense of community
• extended discussions
• student collaboration
• instructor-student communications, and
• direct feedback to students

I also have three short "testimonials" from three faculty members (Leila Hudson in Near East Studies, Sharon Ewing in Nursing, and Bill Endress in English Composition) who have used blogs in their courses during fall semester 2004. From my own experience it works quite well. One of my IRLS613 students from last summer emailed me recently that he was remarking to an editor of a professional journal about his experience as a student using blogs in his course and was asked to write an article about it. That's great!

Here is a look at the flyer [pdf]. You'll need to picture it folded over.

With flashbacks to the kind of elementary school and junior high English themes we used to get, here is my brief essay.

The big job was getting three of our Through Our Parents' Eyes websites re-designed, edited and up on the new website. The three are: In the Steps of Esteban: Tucson's African American Heritage [screenshot], The Promise of Gold Mountain: Tucson's Chinese Heritage [screenshot], and A Heritage of Loving Service: The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in Tucson [screenshot].

Each of these sites brings e-texts of books, brief histories, and scholarly articles to students and educators. It was a pretty labor intensive job and having about ten days to work on them made it possible. Hopefully, I will soon have the entire in place on the LTC server and be ready to promote the entire project more fully to area schools, teachers and the comunity at-large. Ideas and suggestions are always welcome.