Category: New Educational Technologies

SCoPE out this rich international resource – Trevor Holmes

I’ve just returned from four days in British Columbia, where I had a small glimpse of Olympic fever in Vancouver as I passed through coming home from a conference in Kamloops. While Canada’s medal quest will be over in a short while, a site I’ve used before and was reminded of this past Saturday truly deserves the Gold. It’s called SCoPE, and it’s for anyone interested in higher education research and practice, often but not exclusively with an online flavour. There are synchronous seminars with live interaction, as well as asynchronous discussions and archives of past events. The content-rich site has documentary, wiki, and video resources from their early seminars to their latest offerings — currently, “Pimp your Post,” about that important first class message in an online course. It’s free to join, and an excellent use of resources through BCCampus (after a start-up grant ran its course through SFU a while ago). This was just one of many resources showcased at Educational Developers Caucus 2010 at Thompson Rivers University; in the coming weeks I’ll report on other useful stuff I learned (or re-learned — sometimes it takes Your Faithful Curmudgeon a few tries).

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The Centre for Teaching Excellence welcomes contributions to its blog. If you are a faculty member, staff member, or student at the University of Waterloo (or beyond!) and would like contribute a posting about some aspect of teaching or learning, please contact Mark Morton or Trevor Holmes.

Live from Austin, Texas — Mark Morton

I’m in Austin, Texas this week at the annual conference of the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI). Today was  a long and full day (and two more days of conference are to come) so I’ll probabaly need some time to reflect and sift the various things that I’ve learned or heard about so far. Two things, though, stand out from today. Continue reading Live from Austin, Texas — Mark Morton

A commercial webinar on teaching – do we want this? – Trevor Holmes

Normally, I’d be loathe to flog a business solution to a pedagogical problem that can be solved easily in-house. However, I noticed in my email inbox (I belong to too many listservs!) a freebie from a company that specializes in higher ed “webinars” — ugly word, I know — this one has some time-saving tips about uses of regular everyday technology and higher-octane stuff. Continue reading A commercial webinar on teaching – do we want this? – Trevor Holmes

A new version of the CTE home page

To my mind, the design of a website is as much an act of pedagogy as the design of a course: the goal, in both cases, is to present information,  encourage interaction, and foster an experience in a way that facilitates learning. Because of this, I tend to keep an eye open for web apps that can enhance the CTE website, and for layout ideas (from other university websites) that might further improve the navigation or presentation of our own site. I’ve cobbled together some of these potential enhancements in a version of our home page that can be previewed here, and which can be compared with our current home page here. As you’ll see, the “new” version makes use of a triple column “newspaper” layout, in an effort to succinctly display important information, and to maximize the real estate of the screen; as well, the RSS widget that appears below the three vertical columns now spans the entire width of the main content area. That RSS widget also now makes use of “tabs,” in order to pull in dynamic data from three (rather than one) sources: namely, the RSS of this very blog; the RSS of the CTE Diigo Group; and the RSS of a Twitter feed (which will pull in any “tweet” that contains “#uwcte” as a hash tag. If you have a moment, please compare the current home page with the potentially new one, and let me know what you think. You can do so via the comment feature of this blog posting, or by emailing me at mmorton@uwaterloo.ca.

Word Frequency Visualization with Wordle – Mark Morton

On the lower left-hand side of this blog you’ll notice what is called a tag cloud: it’s a cluster of the words that people who have posted to this blog have “tagged” their postings with. For example, I’ll probably tag this posting with words like “technology,” “web 2.0,” and “wordle.” These tags allow other users to search the archive of the blog: if someone is interested in learning technologies, they can do so search for the word “technology” and all the posting that have been tagged with that word will appear. Tag clouds take all those tag words and display them as a cluster; moreover, the more times that a tag word appears, the larger it will appear in the cluster. That way, you can tell, at a glance, what are the popular themes across the blog postings. Continue reading Word Frequency Visualization with Wordle – Mark Morton

Twittering and Continuous Partial Attention – Trevor Holmes

For a week, I’ve been Twittering. Normally, Mark Morton (intrepid voyager in neotechnology-land) would be the jolly fellow bringing you glad tidings of great techno-teaching joy. Having experimented for something like fifteen years in the classroom, though, I thought it would be fun to continue my Early Adopter mentality and change up my own course this coming Winter term over at That Other University down the street, adding a bunch of social networking tools that had previously existed in partial form or by accident in Cultural Studies 101. Continue reading Twittering and Continuous Partial Attention – Trevor Holmes

e-learning: green learning?

ereaderA few weeks ago our Senior Instructional Developer, Emerging Technologies the illustrious Mark Morton sent off an email informing us of an interesting new device that he had come across called the PlayAway. This device is an audiobook that is integrated with its own hardware, including battery so you can just plug your earbuds in and “play away”. He suggested that they were virtually “disposable” and popular in elementary schools where it would not matter if they were lost since they were relatively inexpensive. Continue reading e-learning: green learning?