A recording of the January 22nd online information session for the Ohio Five CODEX 2020 Summer Institute is now available online at https://codex.ohio5.org/codex-institute/info-session-2020/. Thanks to Katie Holt and Amy Margaris for sharing examples of pedagogical digital projects they’re currently working on with their students, and thanks to those who joined us over the […]
EdTech
103 posts
Educational design is shifting from Instructional Design, or ID, to Learning Experience Design, or LXD. That might seem subtle, but it makes a world of difference. It’s still designing toward learning outcomes (LO’s) but paying more attention to the learner’s experience. Far too many traditional courses are top-down, sage on […]
~ Howard Zinn Audrey Watters has a nice essay/lecture on Why History Matters, on her Hack Education blog, that goes into detail on the history of the blackboard, (the wall-mounted slate kind, rather than the online LMS kind.) I appreciate learning more of our history, as it’s always eye-opening. I […]
I just attended a webinar presented by Jon Bergmann, author of Flip Your Classroom, and one of the founders of the Flipped Learning Global Initiative. The webinar was expanding on his blog post, “We Didn’t Know What We Didn’t Know: Flipped Learning 3.0“, which is a good read on the […]
We’re looking for another solution for our OWU Radio station’s show archives. They’ve previously been simply uploading them to the WordPress server where we host their site. This has quickly gown into double-digit GB storage usage for their site alone. Before we migrate that site to the new server, which […]
The OWU WordPress server migration that started over a year ago is moving along. We’ve learned a lot about WordPress and Linux and Apache and PHP along the way. Currently, there are 41 sites now on the new server and 54 sites still on the old server. We’ve added some […]
And here we are on a new server home. The only change you should see (other than this new post) is that this site is now secure– with an “httpS” or a lock icon in the address bar. Now we’ve got about 100 more sites to migrate. Approximately 58 of them […]
This site will be the guinea pig (isn’t there a better image for a test case than a small, cuddly pet?) for our WordPress server migration. If all goes well, you won’t notice any difference, because there shouldn’t be any outage. I’ll be copying everything over to the new server, […]
My first trial of Adobe Spark. Very easy to use, but very limited in customizing or even tweaking options. For example, there was no way for me to resize the images or specify that they should be fully displayed. Spark automatically cropped them, and I couldn’t change it. I tried […]
This might be out of reach for OWU at the moment, but we can certainly head in this direction. Watch video! Source: Mixed Reality Can Make Every College Class Extremely Cool – Vocativ
This article from a colleague up in Oberlin was shared with our campus today, and I felt it was worth sharing here too. Preparing the Environment for Active Learning, by Steven Volk, Professor of History and Director, Center for Teaching, Innovation, and Excellence I feel like so much of what […]
I was composing a list of new tools that have come up in discussion and/or are being supported this week… When you go to a conference–or, in this case, an institute–you typically learn of new tools to try, tools that might save you time or allow you to do something […]
The Great Lakes Colleges Association is launching an innovative take on a center for pedagogy, funded by the Teagle Foundation. It’ll be consortial: a community of faculty and staff with demonstrated commitment to improving teaching and learning across all of GLCA’s colleges. It will rely pretty heavily on the Web and web […]
A colleague at Beloit College recently shared this impressive video: [This Will Revolutionize Education] The idea that technology will revolutionize education is an old myth that keeps getting new life with new tech. It's an age old truth that education is a social experience that's been affirmed in many ways. ...and then I introduce SAMR.
I’ve been thinking lately about my role on campus, or my official role, what it should be, what it could be. These thoughts often revolve around language and labels and titles. For example, what’s the difference between an Instructional Technologist and an Instructional Designer? Recollections of past conversations come to […]
Robert Talbert has this nice article in the Chronicle, describing how his thinking on flipped learning has changed over time: Three evolving thoughts about flipped learning His three points, (in his own words, my rearranging:) Pre-class activity is for generating questions, rather than mastering content-oriented instructional objectives. Accountability doesn’t have to […]
eSchoolNews.com has a nice article, with 6 questions to determine if you’re technology rich, yet innovation poor. The questions are deeply thought-provoking and may stimulate institutional soul-searching. While the article goes into detailed explanation, the questions are copied here: Did the assignment build capacity for critical thinking on the web? Did […]
Little did I know, as I was watching the big OSU National Championship game with my wife and 11 year old son Monday night, that the winning Buckeyes owed much of their success to an innovative teaching style that’s growing in popularity. It’s a technique that I’ve taught and consulted with faculty […]
As you can see, my last post was in mid-October, lamenting that it was mid-term break already. Here it is December, and winter break is looming. In fact, tomorrow is the last day of fall classes. It has been a busy semester, and I still feel swamped with a Blackboard […]
Today is the second day of mid-semester break and the campus is pretty quiet. It’s a good time to catch up on things. This fall semester has been busy. It sure seemed like classroom equipment was misbehaving or completely failing more than usual. Sure, some of it is getting old. […]
Our WordPress server, 15 plugins, and 8 themes have all been updated. So I’m trying out new features: Now that’s nice! As soon as I pasted in the URL for my old YouTube video, it appeared in the post editor. Also, browsing for new plugins should be easier. Now, on […]
The Chronicle has a nice article reflecting on the deluge of data we’re awash in every day. Specifically, it draws attention to the failure of colleges to adequately prepare graduates for effectively working in and with this data in critical, in-depth ways: Many employers said their fresh-from-college hires frequently lack […]