Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

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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How do we support students in a class when we are asking them to learn new technologies?
What I have done: In the past I have primarily done two thinks. First, I build in “learn the technology” assignments. I find that students do not just “play to learn” the technologies unless they are given an assignment, [...]

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The problem: Community college students are over committed (as are their teachers :-). And when life throws them a loop, they don’t have a lot of extra time or energy to resolve the issue. Last semester I had a student in my face-to-face introduction to cinema class that got a promotion. However, it meant she [...]

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I’ve decided that I love having bankers, or people that work for banks, in my classes. They always point out various “security” glitches with the technologies I’m using. A few years back a colleague and I did usability testing on our online courses. After one session the student (a banker) when to log out of [...]

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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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This past summer I asked that the college pay for an institutional access to an online workshop. Since it was the end of the fiscal year, an administrator scraped up the money and just asked that I make sure to invite others to the event. I worked with our CTL (Center for Teaching and Learning) [...]

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