Creating academic posters

April 14, 2009

I’m taking a workshop on creating academic posters and it’s been very helpful in addressing many of my questions. Some issues I’m still thinking about are how to minimize the blocks of text on the poster without trivializing the reserach, and how best to represent the study in a format that is so visual. One [...]

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Linking to Fulltext Articles using Persistent Links

April 1, 2009

Research articles or other resources found online through the UofC Library databases can be great additions to course content for students, or even shared among colleagues. The problem I have encountered is that the URL in a browser address bar for such resources cannot be copied and pasted because the generated URL is for one [...]

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2009 Horizon Report – trends to watch

March 25, 2009

The New Media Consortium, in collaboration with EDUCAUSE, released the annual Horizon Report this January. The document describes trends and innovations in education and educational technology, providing detailed overviews, investigating relevance for teaching, learning, research, or creative expression, citing examples and supporting resources. It’s a fantastic overview of the state of the art(s), and should [...]

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What the Best College Teachers Do – Assessment

March 24, 2009

I’m reading an excellent book right now, What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain. Though it’s research-based, it’s actually an easy read and chock full of ideas for instructors. In the chapter on evaluating students, he makes a number of thought-provoking points:

Assigning student grades should be about helping students learn, but often has [...]

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skills for community designers

March 23, 2009

One of the designers behind the Drupal.org – the community that develops and uses the Drupal content management system software – recently published some excellent tips for effective community designers. A good teacher is a community designer.
Read the post for the full list, but here’s the Coles™ Notes™ version:

you need to take responsibility for the [...]

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Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning

March 19, 2009

When George Siemens was on campus last week giving a presentation at the TLC, he mentioned a handbook that his group at UManitoba had just released. From the preface of the handbook:
Over the last decade, in seminars, conferences, and workshops, Peter Tittenberger and I have had the opportunity to explore the role of technology in [...]

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Rubrics for online activities

March 18, 2009

When integrating online activities into a course, it’s important to clarify what is expected from all participants. How do the instructors define “participating”? What exactly is expected from students? From instructors? How will everyone know if they are participating at the level that is expected? If not, what are the repercussions and implications? How will [...]

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Wikipedia: Beneath the Surface

March 12, 2009

Paul Pival just linked to a great video presentation put together by the North Carolina State University Libraries, which describes what Wikipedia is, and how it works, from an academic point of view. If you have (under) 6 minutes, check out the video.
For more background on what wikis are, and how they work, be sure [...]

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Links from George Siemens’ Presentation

March 11, 2009

George Siemens (Associate Director of the University of Manitoba Learning Technologies Centre) was on campus on March 11 to give a presentation at the Teaching & Learning Centre, on “The Social Technology Revolution – Tensions and Solutions”. He talked about a pretty wide range of things, and I wanted to capture some of the links [...]

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Creating Rubrics to Bridge Instruction and Assessment

March 9, 2009

As mentioned in an earlier post, students tend to prefer rubrics over written feedback. Which brings about the question, “How do I create a meaningful and useful rubric”? I describe a rubric as a teaching and assessment tool that brings accountability to both the instructor and student. Some ideas to get started are:

Review examples of good [...]

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