Incorporation of social software into courses is a growing trend in higher education these days. If you are looking for insight on ways that web based collaborative tools can be used to assess learning check out this post Assessment Technique: Collaborative Authorship from JoAnn Gonzalez-Major at MID Solutions. The post gives a short rationale for why collaborative writing assignments through blogs are valuable activities. The post also provides links to additional resources on the topic.

Posted by James Fadden at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OET has received many positive comments from the participants of last week's workshops on Emerging Technology and Intro to Social Software.

That being said, I want to share with you two ways to stay informed about upcoming NITLE workshops.

You can keep an eye on what's coming up at this web page; http://www.nitle.org/index.php/nitle/opportunities/programs/upcoming_events. For those of you who know about RSS readers you can subscribe to the RSS feed of new opportunities at: http://www.nitle.org/index.php/nitle/rss/feed/calendar.xml

NITLE picks up the full tab for participants at their workshops - travel, hotel, food, workshop fee, etc. (At least that's how it is through June 2008. ) So I'd encourage you to take advantage of any workshops that interest you this year. You can sign up for a workshop by contacting our NITLE liaison, Rick Holmgren.

Note that some workshops suggest a team attend from a given institution - sometimes a faculty - IT team, sometimes faculty - librarian, sometimes faculty -faculty. Since NITLE pays for all of us, don't be shy about asking your instructional technologist to join you at a workshop!

Posted by James Fadden at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week I would like to draw your attention to the tutorials on PRS Clickers. Personal response devices are handy tools being incorporated by faculty to increase interactions, enable peer learning, and check for understanding through polling students with multiple choice questions incorporated into class presentations.

Clicker-based pedagogies have been exploited by professors of all disciplines including the chemistry faculty at Allegheny who incorporate clickers into introductory chemistry courses.

If you are interested in learning more about clickers check out 7 Things You Should Know About Clickers from the ELI's 7 Things... page or tune into the Clickers in the Classroom episode of the Allegheny Workshop Podcast.

Posted by James Fadden at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

NITLE has left the building,
originally uploaded by jfadden.

Resources for the workshops are available through NITLE's wiki pages.

Posted by James Fadden at 04:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The second day of NITLE workshops is underway. Today, Bryan will lead the group through exercises and thinking related to social software as applicable to collaborative writing.

Workshop resources are available through the NITLE blog.

Posted by James Fadden at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Faculty, Librarians and Instructional Technologists from Allegheny and other liberal arts colleges came to Murray Hall for NITLE's emerging technology workshop. Bryan Alexander is facilitating the workshop which will focus on gaming, virtual environments, podcasting, blogs, wiki and other things Web2.0.

Participant bloggers will be encouraged to tag their posts with nitleemac2007 so that we can start tracking content across the blogoshpere.

Workshop resources are available online through Liberal Education Today.

Posted by James Fadden at 09:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

• ETC @ BMC: Copy protection, web 2.0, and education
  "There are two reasons I find this story interesting for educators. First, it's a story about Web 2.0 on a couple of levels. For me, following the story and trying to find out historical information about the code, I had to rely on Web 2.0 sources--blogs,
  (tags: ac aclearn AC-Newweb web2.0 acw20 copyright etc@bmc)
• Sarah Robbins On Teaching In Second Life
  A preview of her ELI 2007 Spring Focus Session. Sarah is a TA at Ball State University who use SL for an immersive learning environment. Discussed are her objectives for and benefits of using SL.
  (tags: ac-emerging english SecondLife ELI2007)

Posted by James Fadden at 04:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A while back I posted over at the techNOcool blog about a new tool from Yahoo called Pipes. Recently, I got to play with Pipes to mashup the various OET Feeds into one RSS feed that contains all the updates from OET as they happen.

The Allegheny Educational Technology Feed provides faculty information about workshops, services, department news, and links to educational technology resources. There are many ways to subscribe to a feed whether through your web browser or through a news aggregator like Bloglines.

Posted by James Fadden at 03:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)