October 29, 2009 | 10:30am – 4:30pm EDT (more…)

I’ve been reading Bob Cringely’s column ever since I discovered he was the person behind one of my favorite PBS documentaries, “Triumph of the Nerds” which is a history of personal computing. Last week he posted an article about how the later generations of our students who are beginning to perceive that there was no life prior to computers, perhaps much in the same way my generation perceives television. What will our children’s children be experiencing in their learning opportunities?

(more…)

Many readers might have wondered where we were during the posts in between November and the start of Spring Semester. We had a little challenge with our blog software, but we are obviously back online now, thanks to James Bowles who has been serving as our new Systems Administrator.

As for myself, I’ve been very busy since returning to the CTL after a semester-long sabbatical leave to finish a master’s degree in Educational Technology at ASU. It’s done and I’m back and although I’ve been really struggling to find time to do everything I want to as well as serve the needs of the CTL faculty it’s been fun.

(more…)

Educators have bored their students to death with it…

Sales Engineers have hounded us for money with it…

Conference presenters have put us to sleep with it…
(more…)

Whilst working on some other projects at school, I wanted to finally post this to a searchable resource that instructors and other educators can use. This is a combination of my most two recent posts at my own website at Edutechnorama…

(more…)

Have you been looking for a way to continue exploring issues related with technology and teaching. Consider subscribing to the TGIF (TLT Group Inspirational Fridays) email. Maricopa Community Colleges has an institutional subscription to TLT Group (Teaching, Learning & Technology). The weekly emails invite you to participate in a weekly online session about some topic or technology. Some of the upcoming Friday Live events include:

• Is Facebook the ePortfolio we’ve all been looking for or a distraction worse than …say…heroin?
• Poster Sessions - The Pros and Cons of Using Virtual Worlds in Teaching Beyond Second Life……………..
• 10 Years Back, 10 months Forward…Where is the Educational Starbucks?
• If you build it, will they come? POD/MERLOT

If you are interested in subscribing to the email and possibly attending some of these online events, go to: http://www.tltgroup.org/TGIF_subscribe.htm

As instructors continue to increase the number of online courses MCC offers, as well as continue to shift from paper to electronic homework submissions, we are beginning to notice the following two trends:
1. many of our students do not own MS Word; therefore,
2. an increasing number of our students electronically submit documents that are not in the “.doc” format.

There are a few easy suggestions to help with this issues.
(more…)

I liked Jim Mancuso’s metaphor that MCC is not just turning a new page this academic year, but an entire new chapter. I think the CTL is also starting a new chapter with the recent return and/or turnover of new staff in the CTL. As a part of our new chapter, the CTL is kicking off a new program called “Focus On“. The purpose of this program is to give the CTL a pedagogical topic to focus on for each semester. Our kick off topic is Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs). We hope this semester that everyone will participate by talking about, and possibly trying, CATs sometime during the Fall semester. Hopefully you all filled out your “ticket out” at the end of the Convocation. Those of us in the CTL will look at those results and report back to you all later this week.

I thought I would “cheat” and make my blog posting this week an easy one. For those of you who do not know, Donna Guadet, Mesa CC’s fabulous instructional technologist, decided she missed the classroom and moved over to Scottsdale CC as a full-time math instructor. To allow MCC to run a full search to replace our instructional technologist position, I will be the acting instructional technologist for the 2007-8 academic year.

I just finished five years, full-time, in the English, Humanities, and Journalism department teaching writing and media studies classes. My scholarly interests generally include the interface between technology and humanity. My various scholarly projects are usually about teaching and learning with technology, technologically mediated professional development, and cross-media narrative studies. I have been blogging about my various scholarly interests for the past year and a half and just upgraded to my own domain.

Besides helping with workshops, course design, and various programs in the CTL, I will also be working on my own interests of scholarship at the two-year college (specifically how do we seek funding and do it). I will also be working on revising the ETL (excellence in teaching and learning) courses.

So swing by if you:

need help with some funky teaching and learning technology,
want to chat about redesigning your course,
like to share what projects you are working on, and/or
just need a place to hide for a while!

Recently there were articles in both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed about working students in higher education. Probably not a surprise to most of you, there were many statistics that emphasize, and reemphasize, the hurdles that many of the working students at MCC must go through to attend college. The report discussed in the article from Inside Higher Ed claimed that “the working poor who take college courses think of themselves as students first and employees second.” The report also listed recommendations to help working poor students; all of those listed in the article have to be implemented by either the federal government (or other student aid decision makers) and individual institutions. None of the recommendations focused on what individual instructors can do in their specific classes.

(more…)