Multilitteratus Incognitus

This past weekend a story came across my slashdot feed titled  Software Goes Through Beta Testing. Should Online College Courses?  I don't often see educational news on slashdot so it piqued my interest. Slashdot links to an EdSurge article where Coursera courses are described as going through beta testing by volunteers (unpaid labor...) The beta tests cover things such as: ... catching mistakes in quizzes and pointing out befuddling bits of video lectures, which can then be clarified before professors release the course to students. Fair enough, these are things that we tend to catch in developing our own (traditional) online courses as well, and that we fix or update in continuous offering cycles.   The immediate comparison, quite explicitly, in this edsurge article is the comparison of xMOOCs to traditional online courses.  The article mentions rubrics like Quality Matters and SUNY's open access OSCQR ("oscar") rubric for online 'quality'. One S...

This must be the easiest thing I've ever had to do for a course - absolutely nothing ;-) The preparatory items for this week include getting you own domain, which I have ( http://www.club-admiralty.com ) and getting some web server space. Having had a website for a long time that stuff is done. My website is designed using Rapidweaver. If you are a mac user, and you want something lighter weight than dreamweaver, wish awesome support, check out realmacsoftware  and their Rapidweaver product. Why do I still use blogger?  Well, as a CMS I like it, and if I change web hosting providers I don't need to worry about my content.  RapidWeaver has a nice 3rd party plug-in that harvests your content from your blogger blog and re-displays my blogger content using the theme settings that are available on my site ( click here for an example of this blog redisplayed on my site ).  The one glitch I haven't worked out is this: when using Disqus as my comment system, on my redisp...

For a few weeks now I've been using a piece of Web 2.0 software called Prezi. I read this blog post named Throw Away your PowerPoints, Simply Use Prezi , and I knew that I had to try it. To be honest, I really didn't read the blog entry carefully because now that I have used Prezi for a few weeks I know what this means. Ignatia (blog author) says: Prezi enables anyone to quickly build a multimedia rich presentation/visual/mindmap... that offers all the flash dynamics you can wish for. and she quickly follows it up with: This is not a software for the meek and weary, it is for those of us who like to jump, run, dive and stand out in a crowd. These two sentences are actually contradictory to one another! Prezi is NOT fast, and it does not enable Everyone to create multimedia rich presentations. Well, OK. Perhaps I am a bit harsh on Prezi. It does allow everyone to create something in that the software is free (unlike Microsoft's PowerPoint or Apple's Keynote ). Howe...

Now, don't get me wrong. At work I use Microsoft Office for the Mac and for Windows on a daily basis. It's a necessary evil. People just send me attachments in the all too familiar doc, xls and ppt formats. When the clock strikes 5 and I get off work, that's where MS Office and I part ways. As a student it just doesn't make sense to pay $150 for the student edition of Microsoft Office! If you're a non-student this price balloons to $317 if you want all the trimmings. I still have papers to write, presentations to prepare and spreadsheets to crunch. What is a student to do? Well, In the past year I've found the perfect solution to my office troubles. This solution is a combination of free and for-pay tools. OpenOffice - this is completely free. It has programs that do essentially what Microsoft office does, for free! And, it's quite compatible with Microsoft Office files, so you don't have to worry (much) about opening files that your friends and colleag...