Blogs

I'm hoping that the Desire2Learn (D2L) and Sakai folks among our IHE community will tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about. When it comes to the LMS (or really anything in life), where you stand is where you sit. I've been on Blackboard for 10 years now (across 2 different institutions and in roles ranging from instructor to learning designer to program manager), so naturally I'm biased toward what I know best.

This past weekend (extended weekend, really), I attended the Canadian Writers Research Collaboratory (or, CWRC) conference with the theme of “Space/Place/Play.” This is a significant collection of digital humanities projects, all involving Canadian literature, writers, and texts in some form. It was a really fantastic experience, and, in the spirit of the theme of the conference, I’ve modeled my thoughts on the conference according to the themes.

UVenus Around the Web: Profiling the Academic Blogosphere : Lee Skallerup Bessette at UVenus at The Guardian (UK). What’s New...

Reading Elizabeth’s and Aeron’s columns this week made me wish more than ever that I had been able to participate in the recent Organization for Communication, Language & Gender conference. I had originally been scheduled to do so, but a series of insane technicalities got in the way, and in the end it was simpler to stay home and sulk.

Halloween seems to bring out the best in higher education web-based creativity. When Todd Sanders (#SAtech Profle #1) sent me an email with "Academic Zombies" in the subject, I knew I was in for a treat! The Office of Academic Advising at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (UWGB) has, according to Sanders, "taken to the social web in a big way since July. They've ditched safe and cautious, for risky and fun. This isn't a social web success story, it's a story on the reevaluation of current communication practices... daring to stand out, putting in the extra effort, not fearing failure."

In statistics one finds the experiment of flipping a coin and observing if the coin lands with heads facing up or with tails facing up. This is the central idea behind probability distributions that can be applied to many different situations involving uncertainty. I thought of the idea of a two sided coin recently when I realized that I am somewhat ambiguous about the coming holiday of Halloween.

Last weekend we went pumpkin-picking, and then stopped for lunch. I ordered a Blue Moon with my burger, which, to my surprise, came with a slice of orange on the glass.

What is motivation? On one hand we mean motive, or the reason for doing something; on the other we mean the energy and enthusiasm a person invests in the thing that she or he is doing. When teachers are talking about motivating students, it seems to me that the two meanings are conflated.