Still storing your bookmarks on your browser? That is soooooooooo 2007. It’s time to get with the program and start using social bookmarking. Social bookmarking
Most people assume that any presentation must be accompanied by a PowerPoint. Many conferences even tell presenters that they must submit their PowerPoint slides before the show–assuming that presenters will use PowerPoint just as they assume that presenters will be wearing shoes. Yet we’ve all seen terrible PowerPoints that detract from the presentation, so much so that we’ve coined the term “PowerPoint induced sleep.”
Most universities press their faculty to add technology to their classroom by adopting the Learning Management System—Blackboard, Moodle, etc. This is a mistake. Faculty often end up spending hours learning the system and loading the same content that they use in the classroom, and finish wondering if the benefit was worth the effort.
Most academics consider Wikipedia the enemy and so forbid their students from using Wikipedia for research. But here’s a secret that they don’t want you to know—we all use Wikipedia, including those academics.
Online educators have long known that asynchronous discussion is deeper than face-to-face discussion due to the increased thought time and the “democratization” of the classroom. But one major disadvantage of traditional online discussion is that it is separate from the lecture.
Alex Halavais, assistant professor of communication and graduate director of informatics at the University at Buffalo, has incorporated blogs in his courses to encourage students to think beyond a single course, to integrate their learning across the curriculum, and to provide opportunities for feedback as students’ work evolves. Halavais has written a chapter on this topic for the forthcoming book International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments (Kluwer Academic Publishers). Online Classroom recently spoke with Halavais the evolving pedagogical uses of blogs.
