Love working with Faculty!

Met with Diane today and talked to her about how she can use Google Docs in her classroom. Diane has spent a great deal of time this summer trying new stuff. She's made a cool interview podcast already this summer and now she wants to take on Google Docs.

She has a great project and lots of ideas so I'm looking forward to working with her and hearing how it all goes.

Working with Faculty is definitely one of the things I love best about this job!

eTutoring!

It looks like the eTutoring Consortium is up and running. We are getting signatures from the appropriate people and we have the Writing Center on board.

It's looking great! It will be extremely exciting to offer this service to our distance students. Hopefully we have the problem of having way to many users and we will need to add tutors! Finger Crossed!

Hiccup!

Small Hiccup with the Plenary speaker for e-volution. Mimi is too expensive for our modest group. Serious bummer but we'll find someone great before this is over.

We're no moving on to other options. We'll see how it goes.

Internships Revived?

After more than a year I am putting the ALT Internship idea back on the burner. With the reorganization of ALT into the new Professional Studies Department I'm hoping I can get something moving. I think that John and I were just too focused on other activities and couldn't get it actually done. I blame both of us but now is the time to try it again!

I've scheduled a meeting with Kent next week with the hope to get some movement, I'm guessing for Spring. We need that time to get the kinks worked out and to get it into the schedule.

We are looking at 3 types: teaching, instructional design and research. We had administrative and student services on the list but I don't know how to do the administrative and Nicky doesn't want a student services intern. I might revive the student services intern with the idea of helping me with SI and eTutoring but I think we'll start where we are with the 3 more basic ones.

We have descriptions of all three and we will need to complete a learning contract. I'd also like to be the instructor if at all possible. Maybe become adjunct in Prof Studies.

I truly hope this will work out because it will be beneficial for everyone, us AND the students.

Distance Learning Guild

The TIE project participants have now spun into a new group that I have named the Distance Learning Guild. I chose this name because of it's Distance Learning nature and the associations that Guild has both historically AND in virtual worlds and gaming. It seemed appropriate.

I have set the meetings for the last Thursday in every month. So far we've had 2 official meetings that weren't associated with TIE. The first we had Rachel talk about Second Life and the possibilities for teaching and the one last week we talked about iPads, iPod Touches. We didn't have a huge turn-out but we had some people and for the middle of the summer it was great.

I didn't plan much but we just went around and discussed how we each used them for various things. It was informative and instructive and I think everyone enjoyed it.

I'm not sure what to do for next meeting but I'm sure something will come to mind!

TIE, a grant program?

Last week I came up with the idea of making TIE into a grant program. There are several reasons for this:

1. It will, hopefully, help up identify distance faculty that are interested and/or are doing something innovative but have managed to avoid detection by the ID's
2. It will have a more direct impact on their tenure and promotion since it will show up in their packets as a grant.
3. I am always impressed with the creativity and imagination of faculty and this would allow them to propose their own project, some of which I'm sure will be something none of us have imagined.
4. It will give clear requirements of program reports etc.

I'm sure there are others but these are all that come to mind at the moment.

I talked to Jane, who has done TONS of these small grants, and got a lot of great ideas and some questions we need to consider. Here is a list in no particular order:

1. Are past TIE participants eligible for the new grants? Maybe we should require presentation or publication from returning faculty?
2. We need a solid beginning and ending date.
3. State how faculty can spend the money
4. Ask faculty to propose how they want to spend the money
5. Have a review panel that includes OCP as well as a couple of faculty members
6. Should we encourage collaboration between faculty and/or disciplines?
7. Require and  end of the project report
8. Create a reviewer rubric for choosing the projects
9. Have a session at e-volution that will help them craft a possible grant proposal
10. Plan to go for maybe 3 years as is and then re-evaluate the effectiveness and whether things need to be changed.
11. Require participation in the Fall 2011 e-volution

We are thinking of sending out the call for proposals the second week of classes, advertising it and having a session at e-volution and then have the due date about 1 week later. We would do several meetings in the fall semester to get faculty oriented and then faculty would be required to teach and complete their project in either Spring, Summer or Fall of 2011.

I'm excited about this idea and I think it will help to turn TIE into standard operating procedure. It will also give some structure to it and to me!

e-volution Update

I think we've finally settled on asking a speaker for the e-volution. We don't know if she'll do it, how much she'll cost and whether it will generally work out but her name is Mimi Ito,
http://www.itofisher.com/mito/ . Several people have seen her talk and we've seen a video and she looks great. 


I'm really hoping we'll be able to work it out with her.


We're tentatively looking at the Thursday or Friday the last of September or first of October but much will depend upon Mimi and being able to schedule rooms.


We now have a working group of Jane, Cathy, Stan, Jeff and Cheryl. I should probably schedule a meeting as soon as we have a possible speaker.

iPod Touch - Everybody wants one!

We ordered 76 iPod Touches. Here is the list of people who either have one in hand or will by tomorrow afternoon:
Christi
Larry
Jeff
Cody
Reed
Brent
Renee

Leaving 69 for the students.

Thoughts so far...

The iPod Touch is a fantastic piece of equipment. It is simple and elegant with more apps than I can imagine and a fairly straight-forward interface.

I also have a Motorola Droid  and a comparison might be useful.

Likes - Touch only:

• integrates with Audible.com
• integrates with iTunes so I can get my purchased songs onto it
• tons of apps
• zoom feature
• nicer graphics
• Kindle reading app

Likes - Droid only:

• multitasking
• slide-out keyboard
• no restrictions on apps
• plays flash
• ability to move cursor with "mouse"
• can download free apps without authenticating

That's it for now, I'm sure there will be more as I go.

We have faculty!

Tim joined us right away and we asked Brent to take care of getting a UW/CC faculty member to do the in-class experimentation. We now have Rod on board and he seems pretty excited about the project!

I'll be headed up to Casper tomorrow with an iPod Touch. I hope to meet with him and get him started on thinking about how the Touch might be used.

Once I meet with Rod we will really be rolling and I'll need to start thinking about an assessment strategy.

Jim is in!

Jim has agreed to help with the tech support for the iPod experimentation. Woo Hoo!

Now I just need to find an iPad to reward him...

iPod Touch Experimental beginnings

I have started the iPod Touch Experimentation, it should be interesting.

I have successfully recruited Tim for the online faculty and I've contacted Rod for the UW/CC faculty member.

Tim has his iPod and has already started playing with it, he is a great choice, although I now see that I have two men. Oh well, you can't get rid of good people just because they had the unfortunate luck to be born priviledged...

I have also given iPods to Cody, Jeff, Reed and myself. I want to keep track of numbers.

Cody has created several YouTube videos of examples of educational uses (http://www.youtube.com/uwocp) and has started a Google Doc with a list of blogs or sites that list educational uses of iPods.

I just now need to meet with Rod and get him completely on board and see if I can entice Jim to help with tech support in Casper.

We're off!

Today it begins...

I've been threatening to start a blog for awhile and finally decided to do it. I hope to be able to update is on a fairly regular basis. The idea is to document my journey's through my special projects so I have some record and may be able to resist making mistakes. It's probably a hopeless thought but I'm going with it.

I'm going to tag each post with the project so they are easy to find later.

I don't really care if anyone follows this blog, I just want to keep a personal record of my projects.