Another Look at 20 Somethings

For all of you who daily teach to our 18-22 year olds:

What is it about 20-somethings?

Wordle Surprises

I just got done teaching some first looks at Outlook 2007 for SCC faculty and staff. But the best part of the day was when one of the instructors asked me if I had heard of Wordle. It makes word clouds for free for you. Here is a cloud from my posts. It just took me under 60 secs to generate:

Ideas Worth Spreading

I just got introduced to such an incredibly great site—

Quoting from their site, “TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks are available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.”

Today I was listening to Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, who talks about his Hole in the Wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum. When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had successfully learned how to navigate the Internet. His experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they're motivated by curiosity. Now how intriguing is that?

The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge.

Slumdog Millionaire, which just won four Golden Globe Awards, is based on a novel by Vikas Swarup. Swarup said he was inspired to write his book by Mitra’s Hole in the Wall project. He states, “That got me fascinated and I realized that there’s an innate ability in everyone to do something extraordinary, provided they are given an opportunity. How else do you explain children with no education at all being able to learn to use the Internet. This shows knowledge is not just the preserve of the elite.”

Adjuncts Teaching Adjuncts

I am an adjunct technical instructor at a community college in Lincoln Nebraska. I have been an adjunct for over 18 years now, in several different states. What I’ve noticed in general is that most community college instructors are experts in their fields, and they have a sincere desire to teach what they do to others.

Their only weakness is that they are not necessarily trained educators. Training is typically achieved through being informally mentored with a more experienced faculty member in their department, maybe sitting in on one or two other classes, and/or maybe taking hit-and-miss short professional workshops that address teaching issues throughout the year. Adjuncts also frequently have to fit all this training into their free time, which gets squeezed in between their primary work and their adjunct teaching.

So I see adjuncts as the glass-half-full. The full part—the water—is their subject matter knowledge. Lots of great stuff there. The empty part—which can vary in volume—reflects their teaching skills.

So my focus this year is to share ideas and tools that could be useful for other adjuncts to think about incorporating into their teaching—and thus adding to the full part of the glass.

Some time ago I gave a series of talks to faculty and staff at my community college about using wikis and/or blogs as another teaching aid. There was a lot of interest, but every once in a while someone would bring up concerns about copyright or intellectual property issues.

I found a site that might appeal to some of us to address that area. Copyscape is a free online plagiarism checker. Just enter your page's URL. And it will search the Web for word-for-word reproductions. It will even highlight the copied text.

http://www.copyscape.com/

It also allows you to include a graphical notification on your web site that you are using this feature.

Publishing from Word 2007

It seems Word 2007 has a menu command specifically to help publish blog entries.

1. In Word, go to the Microsoft Office Button and choose New.
   
2. Under the Installed Templates category, choose New Blog Post.
   
3. You will be prompted to register, and it's as simple as that!
   

Found a great online site this week for teaching resources again: it's the Faculty Innovation Center from the University of Texas at Austin. Great stuff! You can click the image below to see the topics more clearly!

del.icio.us.ly Devouring Excel 2007

It’s only been three weeks since classes have ended, and already I find myself overwhelmed with commitments. For over a year I have been telling everyone I would get to them “come August”, and here it is—August. I’m feeling a little blindsided!

My two projects for this week were

1. del.icio.us
2. Excel 2007

del.icio.us How on earth did I ever exist without this site? The website is a free social book marking web service for storing and sharing bookmarks. Sign up is quick and easy, in just a few steps my 200+ Favorites were imported, and two new toolbars in my browser now allow me to add new sites quickly and painlessly. Considering I can work out of up to 5 sites in a day, being able to have access to my Favorites from anywhere with an Internet connection is incredibly useful!

If you need to consolidate all your Favorite sites so you can access them from anywhere, my advice is--don’t wait any longer!

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Project number 2 was to get up to snuff on Excel 2007. Screamed through an 800 page reference book, streamlined a training manual and got files ready to go for this month’s faculty and staff training sessions. There’s some pretty nice additions to this new version. I found out I missed Excel’s intersection formula somewhere along the line in the last few versions. Excel’s infamous INDEX and MATCH function has always made the bravest of students groan, but it can easily be replaced with an Intersection formula.

Go figure!!

TED Talks

TED Ideas Worth Spreading makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give “the talk of their lives” (in 18 minutes).

More than 100 talks are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

This video is on PhotoSynth—software which gathers video from all over the web and integrates it into what Blaise Aguera y Arcas, its architect, call “metaknowledge”.

Back to Work

Acadia National Park in Maine is close to home for me, and last week’s respite in that park did me a world of good. It’s tough coming back from vacation, but I’m still determined to try to catch up to the rest of the pack!

I finally figured out the easy way to tap into RSS feeds, and I now get a daily dose of the latest thoughts and ideas coming out of such sites as 2 Cents Worth, Academic Commons, Educational Technologies and many other great sites. I’m starting to feel a little cocky now! (Thank you Google for making this so easy!) I’m thinking of creating a small video of how to set up RSS (and any other features I find interesting) and adding the videos to this blog. I wonder if that would be interesting for others?

This site has proven interesting to me this week—it comes from the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies. It’s a guide to trends and emerging tools and e-teaching technologies. They list a Top 100 Tools for educators and students. Many I know, but there's a couple of new ones in here that caught my eye.

I’m thinking I’d like my students to each pick one they are interested in, and as a project, have them detail the strengths, weaknesses and show samples of what one can do with their choice. We can then rank as a class as to our own opinion of which products we deem most useful. Sounds like fun!

Over 50 and Still Exploring

Have you ever seen that ad "Over 50 and still exploring"? It's basically an ad for senior vitamin pills, and it shows a woman, supposedly over 50, gingerly hopping over a creek (all of 1 foot wide) as if she's still 15. The ad always made me cringe, but now that I'm blogging on my own, I'm starting to feel more and more like that woman.

What is it about being older and learning new things? Yes, we can and do still learn, but we tend to do so a little more cautiously and with a little more thought with each passing year. It's more like kind of wanting to put one toe in the water first, before actually wading all the way in.

I used to tell my kids, "Try something new for 10 minutes each day, and you'll be amazed what you can learn in a year." So, I try to do the same. So I intend to keep these blogs going, but I'll keep them short and sweet, unlike the past 10 weeks. And each week I hope to point out something new to check out or explore.

So here's this week's site that caught my eye. It's got a short but succinct list of links for students to access free applications that can help them in both face-to-face and online classes. General categories include office suites (such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets), notetaking, mind mapping, bookmarking, collaboration, online calendars, calculators and even online bibliography software. The only thing missing is a multimedia category. Perhaps that's coming.

Web 2.0 tools for students

I'm thinking the title should be Web 2.0 for teachers…