Jossey-Bass Online Teaching and Learning conference

Last week, I virtually attended the Jossey-Bass Online Teaching and Learning conference. Everything happens online through Adobe Connect, so there is no travel involved. That makes it easier and less expensive to attend but also eliminates the possibility of running up big bills in restaurants paid for by your employer. The pre-conference had 4 presentations and then there were 6 on each of the two days of the conference. I learned something from each presentation, and many valuable links and other information was shared by participants in the chat that went on during each presentation. I experienced few technical issues -- some audio dropouts and in the middle of day 2 I had to switch computers because I could no longer connect using my laptop, but overall it was a very smooth experience. Everything happened on time and the pacing was good throughout.

This was the second time I attended this conference and I think it was even better this year. Although you do miss out on face-to-face contact and the opportunity to talk with people in person outside of the presentations, this format was a good compromise for me, and I really found the live chat during the presentations to be beneficial. The only thing I would change is to make a list of all participants available because you really only see the names of people who are active in the chat and there may be other people you might want to connect with.

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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.

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Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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