Future of Cyberlearning presentation

Christine Borgman's presentation from this week's EduCause conference is available online as a combination video and presentation recorded with Mediasite. The quality is impressive -- I can get just as much out of the presentation at my desk as I would have sitting in the auditorium. The title is the Future of Cyberlearning and it is based on the recent NSF report with the same name. Professor Borgman was the chair of the committee which produced the report. They present an exciting future for technology and learning, but I have two sons who are students in a school district that bans all electronic devices, so as enthusiastic as I am about the power of technology to enhance all aspects of learning, I'm a little skeptical about the impact it might make in schools. The same story has been told too many times already and despite lots of examples of success, there are too many examples of non-use.

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Learning to Teach Online - new online series from UNSW

I have been watching some of the videos in the Learning to Teach Online series from the University of New South Wales . The series covers various topics related to online teaching and they are divided into episodes which include a short video plus a PDF. I had some trouble getting the PDFs to download, but the videos played fine for me. I think the Managing your Time video is a good one for new online instructors: Overall, this looks like a good resource.

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.

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.

Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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