Living the Philosophy
Now that I’m a little less busy (only a little… I really wish these folks who know nothing about education would so get over the idea that we “vacation” for 3 months of the year, yeah, right!), I’m starting to try to get back into the groove of posting to my Twitter, my blog, etc. I’ll admit, being friends for @soul4real can be a little intimidating. According to a tweet by either @cogdog or @nooccar she is in the top five tweeters …
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| May 19 2008 | CommentsPosted in
PMOG Motivates Me
I’m excited to be more actively exploring new technologies again. The other night when I couldn’t sleep one of the people I always look to for finding out about new technologies was my good friend and constant twitterer CogDog was playing around with PMOG. Yippy...I’m so excited about this tool! I’ve been wanting to, and will now that I’ve got the super motivator, write curriculum for an intro to gaming class. Yeah, yeah...your snarky laughs are the same ones people gave a couple decades ago when faculty …
...Continued | May 17 2008 | CommentsPosted in New Tech
Socializing Kids
My partner in scholarly crime gave me a Webkinz frog for the holidays. She knows that I like to play with various online technologies and generally sign up for most social networking sites to see what they can do. While we were at NCTE we briefly talked about how her nieces and nephew play with Webkinz; thus, the reason I got one for the holiday. So I happily went to the Webkinz website to get started. I was amused by Miss Birdie and got cranky listening to her …
...Continued | January 14 2008 | CommentsPosted in New Tech
Evolutionary Trends of Social Bookmarking Tools
For the past couple years I’ve repeatedly told everyone who would listen that a social bookmarking is one of the “ah-ha” and “you must have one” tools for academics. I started out swearing by Furl because it cached pages. I still like this element when I’m working with writing students working on research projects. However, Furl is a lot less usable than del.icio.us. I’ve since become a devout user, and assigner to my students, of del.icio.us and still happily add to it daily;
...Continued | October 11 2007 | Comments
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Encouraging Digital Media
I’m trying to more systematically work in the reading, reflecting, and sometimes responding (if it’s an online text with a response space) to various scholarly texts. You know, keeping up with the profession. Of course, trying to follow multiple disciplines is difficult, but it keeps me out of trouble (kinda sorta). Today I read Debra Journet’s (2007) “Inventing myself in multimodality: Encouraging senior faculty to use digital media” (Computers and Composition, 24, 107-120). Obviously this will be something that will be extremely useful in wrapping up the dissertation! I really liked …
...Continued | July 25 2007 | CommentsPosted in Reading
Inherent Value?
< rant > IMHO, this article was a waste of publication. Well duh that podcasting doesn’t have inherent pedagogical value and that the context (teacher, environment, students, etc.) and how/why it is implemented impact its pedagogical value. I guess I’m just surprise that people out there still believe any technology has inherent pedagogical value. Whereas I’m the first to agree that technologies do have ideological baggage from their initial purpose (i.e.Windows GUI environment privileges a WASP middle class, etc. perspective that understands traditional “office” metaphors); however, I also believe …
...Continued | July 11 2007 | CommentsPosted in Reading
Thinkfree Has Portfolios
Thinkfree, an online document production and sharing tool, now has portfolio construction capabilities. I’m excited that this is another online “office” like tool that students can use without purchasing MS Office. I’ve been running my eng102, second semester FYC, courses in Google Docs this summer. I’m thinking I might try running my eng111, technical writing, in Think Free. Ultimately these types of sharing programs are what my students’ future employers are more likely to use. I’ll be presenting and writing up the results of the …
...Continued | July 11 2007 | CommentsPosted in New Tech
Requiring Change
As a part of my desire to get more engaged in our various scholarly discussion, I posted a discussion response to a colleague’s posting about wikis in the Kairos Praxis wiki. In this posting I wrote about a topic that was really triggered in my mind in various discussions at the 2007 Computers and Writing conference. The problem: what is the difference between how learn a new technology when it is required, versus being optional? In other words, I’m starting to cringe whenever I hear “my students learned …
...Continued | June 27 2007 | CommentsPosted in Reading
Future Mail
How would I use Future Mail with my students? Easy...have them set up email reminders for deadlines and such on the first day of class. How wonderful is that? Honestly, however, I’m thinking this could be a useful tool for myself as well. I’m constantly emailing myself with notes. Wouldn’t it be great to acknowledge that sometimes I don’t need those messages to self, yet?! PS...as I’m chatting with people in the CTL we talked about how useful it could be to have your students email themselves goals for the …
...Continued | April 06 2007 | CommentsPosted in New Tech
Snapper
James, one of the cool and hip dudes in our CTL, just told me about the Firefox addon Snapper. It basically allows you to snip images from a webpage and downloads them as PNG (Portable Network Graphic) files. For those of us who ask students to play with new technologies, and need to make “how-to” sheets, this at least allows you to capture specific images on the page (instead of doing a “PrtSc” and then cropping). However, the best part of this app is that it puts a little red …
...Continued | April 06 2007 | CommentsPosted in New Tech