Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

Let’s be honest, the real reason I’ve gotten around to typing up these why/what blurbs has not been for my students (bad Shelley, baaaad Shelley); but, instead, for a group of part-time faculty in a program that is helping to “train” them to teach ENG102 (our second semester FYC course) online. Let me start by [...]

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Warning—this message is definitely more of a rant
In his book, Richardson spends a little time talking about what Educause, and others, refers to as the Net Generation. Clearly since Richardson is focused on K-12, his audience does fit that category more—at least the middle and upper class school populations. I think many university scholars researching [...]

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As if I didn’t already have enough to do (snort!), this academic year I am participating in MCC’s new Faculty & Professional Learning Communities (FPLC—pronounced fip-lick). Now yes, of course no time (dissertation, what dissertation); however, I feel it is important to demo and contribute to building an environment of scholarship on our campus. So…I’m [...]

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Well…it’s time to get back into the swing of the school year. One of my resolutions is to blog more regularly. On some level, I really need to use it as a reflective area for all the craziness I am doing. So, some of the stuff you will get rants, raves, and other reflections upon [...]

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Although it’s already been over a month since the first Sandbox series workshop, I’m still glowing on how well it went. We had eleven participants, including a handful of CTL members and another group of Librarians. I admit, I pressured the Librarians to coming; I really wanted them to play with the social bookmarking tools. [...]

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I’ve been following Jakob Nielsen’s alertbox postings for a couple years now. One of the things I find fascinating about more “traditional” usability studies (which I associate with Nielsen’s work) is that they are very focuses on business models/websites. The more I read about them, the more I realize that educationally focused websites (specifically “course” [...]

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The fun, yet overwhelming and time consuming, aspect of my R&D gig for Ocotillo is all of the options available to play with Blogs, Social Bookmarking, RSS aggregators, and other “gluing” tools. However, as happens with any type of research, we do take into account our context and resources…ie, what we have access to. For [...]

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Brilliant technology folks have come up with a method to interface (OKI, OSID, and Pachyderm?? Still not quite sure…http://www.okiproject.org/) different repositories, with different coding schemes, to allow faculty and students to access a variety of material when searching. What I find fascinating about this discussion (of what I can follow) is that the reason they [...]

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One of the things I love about this conference is that it keeps me challenged. I’ve learned about technologies, or the applications of technologies, that I’ve never heard of, or imagined. I’ve had wonderful conversations with people who know a whole heck of a lot more about technology than I do. Part of the reason [...]

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My partner in scholarly crime, SKM-C, and I always talk about the need to critically engage, even theorize, the use of technology in teaching (or other scholarly acts). However, we recognize that we rarely see someone move beyond…I did this cool thing while teaching with XXX techno-gadget. And don’t get me wrong, I greatly appreciate [...]

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