Howard Rheingold in Second Life

Robin Good has a nice article with great illustrations about Howard Rheingold's presentation at the NMC Campus in Second Life, Participatory Media And The Pedagogy Of Civic Participation - The Transformation Of Education And Democracy. The article includes the audio from the presentation as well as screen shots and photos. Nicely done. Here's an abstract:

''Education – the means by which young people learn the skills necessary to succeed in their place and time – is diverging from schooling.
Media-literacy-wise, education is happening now after school and on weekends and when the teacher isn't looking, in the SMS messages, MySpace pages, blog posts, podcasts, videoblogs that technology-equipped digital natives exchange among themselves.

This population is both self-guided and in need of guidance, and although a willingness to learn new media by point-and-click exploration might come naturally to today's student cohort, there's nothing innate about knowing how to apply their skills to the processes of democracy.''

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Blackboard Podcasts

I've been searching for podcasts about Blackboard and have come across a few. Some are too site-specific while others could use a little more polish before I would recommend them to others. However, one podcast I did find to be useful and high quality is Teaching with Blackboard by Jason Rhode at Northern Illinois University. Episode 5, posted last week, discusses how to incorporate RSS feeds into Blackboard using Feed2JS , a website and tool for converting an RSS feed to JavaScript which can be copied and pasted into your Blackboard course. This gives you a relatively easy way to add dynamic content to a course. For many instructors, RSS may be a foreign language, but I think if you listen to the five minute podcast, you will learn enough to get the idea. If you want more, Jason's previous podcast covers RSS and podcasting in more detail.

Change the Text Editor in Moodle

This lesson shows how to choose an alternate text editor in Moodle. Edit profile After you login, click Edit profile under My profile settings in the Administration block. If you have moved the Administration block to the dock on the left edge of your browser, you can choose Edit profile from the menu by moving your mouse over the Administration menu on the left edge of the screen. Text editor The currently selected text editor is shown in your profile in the General section. Change the editor Click on the Text editor menu to choose a different option. The TinyMCE HTML editor was the default editor in versions of Moodle prior to 2.7 and it has a few more options than the new default editor, the Atto HTML editor. The Atto editor works with all browsers while the TinyMCE editor does not work completely with Chrome or Internet Explorer. Update Click Update profile at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

QuickSource Guides to Blackboard

The Resource Network in Harrisonburg, Virginia, publishes fold out guides to various software applications like MS Office, WordPerfect, Adobe Acrobat and more. They have student and instructor guides to BlackBoard for $4.00 each. Prices are lower if you buy in bulk. I got mine yesterday and they look nice and are easy to read. Each one covers the important things you need to know to use Blackboard as a student or instructor. They are also available through Amazon.com for $4.95 each.

Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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