on-line teaching
sporte | November 1, 2008I was in in Washington D.C. this last week attending the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technology Education conference. During the conference, I attended one workshop and one talk on Second Life. Both of the presentations were focused on Teen Second Life, which was interesting, but neither presentation did a very good job of illustrating how I would use Second Life as a teaching tool.
Julian Lombardi's blog has a short YouTube movie that comes pretty close. Be patient, the marketing pitch doesn't last forever.
sporte | June 1, 2008In part I, I wrote about my first semester of teaching on-line and talked about our challenges with technology. Blackboard had a database corruption event during finals week and I had all kinds of struggles with the Windows version of Microsoft Excel. Mike wrote and asked if I thought students should be working more with non-Microsoft software and what I thought the challenges would be in doing so.
I can answer with a totally unqualified "it depends."
First, I think knowing how to use a spread-sheet program is an advantage in many different kinds of fields and even in real-life, outside of…
sporte | January 2, 2008When in doubt, turn to the internet.
In a couple of weeks, I'm going to start teaching my first on-line course. So far, I've been preparing by:
learning how to use Blackboard
getting a subscription to iFinch so we can do bioinformatics in style, and share data and other files
getting a microphone and some software for making video podcasts
But, since this is brand new and I'm used to seeing students face-to-face, I have a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I do not want to be one of those people who simply puts lecture notes on a web site.
So, I'm turning to you for advice dear…