Technology & Instruction for UNEX

Looking for teaching ideas or course materials? Connexions is "an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Our Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone — from children to college students to professionals — organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license." Since the content is broken down into smaller pieces, it should be more easily used and adapted than textbooks. Ideally, you could locate and make connections among several modules and use them in a course. While the site has quite a bit of material, it may need some more before it's easy to put together a course this way. Also, the organization of material is in a flat format which might be a challenge as the site grows -- all of the material submitted under one category is listed there. Each module has link...

Because I participated in a Google usability test for Blogger, this blog didn't get updated to the new version of Blogger right away. In fact, it was unavailable to me for many weeks until today, when it was finally upgraded to the new Blogger. I'll finally be able to resume my work blogging.

I have found the Tomorrow's Professor email list from the Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning and MIT to be a good source of information about teaching in higher education. It comes out a couple of times a week and consists of short articles or excerpts relevant to teaching. You can also find the entries at the Tomorrow's Professor blog . A recent entry, Teaching for Transformation: From Learning Theory to Teaching Strategies , offered some practical suggestions for instructors: No matter what you teach, you face the challenge of bringing students from point A--what they currently know-to point B--the learning goals of a course. In many courses, the distance between points A and B is huge, and the path is not obvious. Students must not only acquire new skills and information, but also radically transform their approach to thinking and learning. This newsletter explores theories and teaching strategies that address this universal teaching challenge.

If you subscribe to the feed for this blog in iTunes, in addition to getting any podcasts, you will also automatically receive any PDF attachments. This could be a handy way to keep people up to date on materials available for instructors. It might not do too much for anyone who doesn't want the PDFs, but the files are not that large. For the most part, these guides are specific to UC Riverside, although the ones for the discussion and the control panel might work for other people as well. Here are the completed how-to guides so far: Student Login Student Login (alternate) Participate in Discussions Instructor Login Managing Course Control Panel Managing Course Control Panel (alternate) Using Wikis Using Blogs Feedback or suggestions are welcome either through the comments or via email to breilly at ucrx dot ucr dot edu .

I interviewed Jon Kindschy of UCR Extension last week about the use of distance learning in the Sciences courses here at Extension. The podcast is a little under 9 minutes long. Click here to play the podcast or subscribe through the button in the sidebar.

It's a nice marketing idea -- putting previews of courses online so anyone can download them. Of course, anyone has to be able to sign up for the courses to make it worthwhile, and that is also the case here with Harvard Extension's use of iTunes U to offer video previews of selected courses. Not all online courses use video, but these do, so it's a nice use of the technology. Previews for 15 of the 50 courses are available. Check out the article at Playlist Magazine or visit the Harvard Extension iTunes U site . You'll need iTunes installed to view the videos.

Innovate is an online journal which covers online education and other technology-related topics. The current issue has a thorough summary and commentary by Stephen Downes about the Blackboard patent issue .