October 2006 Archives

Using Wiki in Education - a wiki-based book, launched today (October 24) at 10 a.m. Eastern! Stewart Mader, Senior Instructional Technologist for Life Sciences and the Brown Medical School at Brown University, is editor, author and developer. Following is Mader's news release launching the book. Besides it value as a primer for educators on using wikis in instruction, Mader has chosen an interesting, if not innovative, way to release the book. Read on!

Official Description

This book is a deep extension of the focus and content on the blog, Using Wiki in Education It contains 10 case studies written by teachers that describe how they're using the wiki to transform courses and engage today's students in a range of environments including high school, small college, major research university, online/distance learning and research lab. This is the first book to focus specifically on the wiki in education and be developed and published using a wiki, so it actively demonstrates the tool in action.

What is the book about?

This book is a deep extension of the focus and content on Stewart Mader's blog, Using Wiki in Education. It contains 10 case studies written by teachers that describe how they're using the wiki to transform courses and engage today's students in a range of environments including high school, small college, major research university, online/distance learning and research lab. It is the first book to focus specifically on the wiki in education and be developed and published using a wiki, so it actively demonstrates the tool in action.

Another beautiful fall day is shaping up here in Tucson, this Sunday morning. I have jazz icon Gary Burton's Sirius radio program playing on the stereo and am online reading the NY Times. Sunday mornings you need something beyond the Daily Star. I was just in Pogue's Posts and came upon one worth sharing: "Blogging From Microsoft?." Take a look at the Microsoft staffer's blog entry "Features that didn't make the cut" that he links to and then watch Steve Ballmer "Dance Monkeyboy" on Google Video that someone added in a comment to Pogue's posting. Some good grins in both of these.

For those you involved with instructional blogging, here are two recent articles of possible interest.

Dunnewind, Stephanie "Teachers are reaching out to students with a new class of blogs," The Seattle Times, October 14, 2006.

Parry, David “The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom,” Blogs for Learning

My students are on the user interfaces module this week and one assignment is to review bad websites in terms of criteria identified in Web Pages That Suck. One of the worst sites I've ever seen was reviewed by one of the students. It is from a Tucson real estate website. Look at the linked screen shot and see if you can spot the horrendous mistake on it. There's many many more on this site, but this one takes the cake! (I added the black bar to protect identity of the innocent realtor)

I happened to catch an interview about a week ago on NPR with the author of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, David Quammen. It was so interesting I stopped at the UA Bookstore that afternoon and purchased a copy. If a layman's biography of Darwin appeals to you, I heartily recommend this one.

Among the many fascinating stories (at least fascinating to me) about Darwin that Quammen wrote, is one found at the end of the book. Darwin has not much time left to live but is still plugging away. A young man wrote to Darwin that he had found a beetle with a mollusk of some sort attached to its leg. Darwin studied and conducted many of his own experiments to determine how plants and animals are found in different places. For instance he floated seeds in sea water to see if the seeds would germinate after, say, 60 days. From this he concluded the seeds could be carried off in the ocean and reach other lands. So he told this man that he was interested and the man, mentioned as a Mr. Crick who had a shoe factory, sent the beetle with the mollusk stuck to its leg in the mail to Darwin. Did you pick up on the man's name? This Mr. Crick was the grandfather of iFrancis Crick who was one of the discoverers of DNA. How interesting is that!