Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

(beware…my frustration leads to the blatantly horrible mixing of metaphors)
I’m beginning to feel like my social bookmarking crusade is turning into the continued beating of a dead horse who sure as hell doesn’t want to drink the damn water. I was a huge fan of Furl for years. And as I got more interested in [...]

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So…I facilitated two “new” technology workshops in our district this semester (2/24 and 3/1). I forgot what I originally wanted to name the workshops; however, because people wanted the name more descriptive, we got: Teaching and Learning with Emerging Technologies: Blogs, Wikis, RSS, and Social Bookmarking. Since I still think “Keeping up with the Jetsons” [...]

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Personal portals allow individuals to construct an internet browser homepage (default page) with tools and links that are relevant and regularly used. Once you set up a personal portal account, you are able to customize your page/s with internet resources that are most useful to you. Most personal portal tools allow you to add specific [...]

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(Remember, I teach first year composition courses. In these courses, especially the ones with research agendas, I have to teach information literacy.)
We are living in an age of information overload. You are probably already overloaded by all the of the information available on your general topic. To help you filter through that information, and to [...]

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(I’m sure some of you are saying, “come on, do you really need to explain this?” And the answer is “yes.” As I love to harp, not all of my students are Educause’s “net generation.” And even some of those who are still do not necessarily understand all of these distinctions.)
Have you ever notices that [...]

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(if you are using another bookmarking tool like del.icio.us or Digg just change some verbage below)
Furl is a social bookmarking website. If you’ve used “my favorites” in Internet Explorer, or bookmarks in Firefox, you will know the usefulness of bookmarks; however, bookmarks saved on your computer can not travel or be shared with anyone. For [...]

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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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I am again responding to Will Richardson’s book…
…Context: I’m on a plane flying to Corpus Christi for a meeting on an executive committee I accidentally got myself elected to. I’m missing one of our podcasting FPLC meetings and we were going to talk about some chapters from the book. I’m also writing these as my [...]

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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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