Technology & Instruction for UNEX

I've been a little inactive here recently, but there are two entries from the Presentation Zen blog by Garr Reynolds which are worth a look. First, his gift buying guide has a great list of books for anyone who has to present information to others. I've got a few of the books and have actually read some of them, but should spend some time with a few more of them. Garr also has a list of gadgets you might like. His entry on Slideshare and the value of uploading PowerPoint slides -- "Sounds promising, but the only problem with this service today is that you can not actually share a presentation. What they mean — and what they should say — is that you can share slides generated in PowerPoint/OpenOffice." This has always been a pet peeve of mine. Uploading your PowerPoint presentation to the web doesn't do much for me if I can't hear your voice and see the actual presentation as it is done. Garr points out that the lack of audio on Slideshare is a problem that m...

The blogging and wiki tools from Learning Objects are now available in the UCR Blackboard installation. These add some new options for instructors and students. The blog is a group blog which can be set up either for the entire class or for a group. I'm still looking for some more documentation or help which explains the features and limitations. Actually, the blog tool offers individual blogs. I just haven't figured out how to set that up yet. So, you can have a course blog, a group blog, and an individual blog for each student. Documentation on the blog feature is here [ PDF - instructor version]. The Wiki tool is called Teams .

There is an interesting contrast in the ideas expressed in an article about an Australian University's medical school's decision to replace lectures with online learning . While delivering information through lectures is still the most common method of instruction at universities, there are other ways to accomplish the same goals. The comments sound to me like a conflict between a student centered and a teacher centered instructional methods. Some people still prefer the "sage on the stage," but when you are talking about preparing people to perform a particular job, like teaching or being a doctor, there needs to be a balance between practice and theory. The traditional university lecture will be scrapped by the nation's biggest medical school and replaced by online learning programs. Partly prompted by a swell in student numbers expected in 2008, the University of Queensland's School of Medicine is developing an interactive web program to deliver the inform...

Google Docs has a recently added new feature which allows you to publish to your Blogger blog . I like this idea. In fact, it was something I suggested as a beta tester for Blogger Beta. I am sure there are some ways that you could take advantage of the collaborative writing features with Google docs and use the blog as the end product. But you could probably do that with Blogger already, so maybe if you are using features on Google Docs that you don't get with Blogger, that might be the reason to do it that way. I'd like to see some integration with Google Reader for either Google Docs or Blogger though, as reading other blogs tends to be a popular way to get ideas and content for bloggers. One thing I noticed is that there's no way to include a title when you post from Google Docs to Blogger.

The Online Education Database has an interesting article from yesterday, " Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better." Funny how many of them deal with things which seem more peripheral to learning but definitely make a difference. Here are some samples: Food for thought, part 2: Eat a light lunch . Heavy lunches have a tendency to make people drowsy. While you could turn this to your advantage by taking a "thinking nap" (see #23), most people haven't learned how. For the multitaskers: Focus and immerse yourself . Focus on whatever you're studying. Don't try to watch TV at the same time or worry yourself about other things. Anxiety does not make for absorption of information and ideas. And in the category of "This is just not going to work": Learn by osmosis . Got an iPod? Record a few of your own podcasts, upload them to your iPod and sleep on it. Literally. Put it under your pillow and playback language lessons or whateve...