Category Archives: Instructional Technology

Posts pertaining to instructional technology

A personal librarian in your Moodle Site?

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This is what they did at Marywood University.  They added a role of reference librarian to a few Moodle courses and then had one of the reference librarians subscribe to a research forum where they were able to answer questions and provide resources to students on the fly.  Since they were a part of the Moodle course they could see all the course information and follow the syllabus so as to know what the students were doing when.  One of the findings of the study though was that the project was extremely time intensive for the librarian and might be difficult to scale to more than just a few academic programs.  Might be worth trying a pilot of our own, especially since it gives the librarians the ability to interact with students in Moodle which many of them are becoming increasingly dependant on for program interaction.

Is copyright law relevant to education and science?

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Just got out of an facinating presentation by Lawrence Lessig called; It Is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright Right.  The presentation was a critical look at copyright law and how obsolete it has become in the era of digital media.  He questioned our complacency regarding accepting copyright rules and standards that not only do not apply to our current information access, but are creating a culture of “pirates” which will invetably be culturally destructive.  The pathway we are on is one of a public library model (books for free) to a bookstore model (you must pay for ALL resources) that does not do (culturally) what copyright law was designed to do.  Cultural preservation by providing a multitude of incentives for individuals to create and share those creations.

Here’s the video, his talk starts around minute 26 (scan ahead).  Enjoy!

Creating Innovative Learning Spaces

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Day 2 of educuase – Just went to a presentation by folks at GWU CITL who created what they considered to be an innovative learning space..  which wasn’t geared towards technology but had alot of technology imbedded in it.  They used a student academic program to redesign a technology learning space.  They conducted surveys of faculty, held focus groups, studied learning space desingn, furniture, AV, and other technology.  Seems like the focus was on a flexible space for small collaborative groups and the ability to record sessions in the room.  I think many of the concepts that were introduced here could be leveraged towards any of our spaces for a view of a new computer lab paradigm and technology teaching space.   Questions and ideas include;

What technology should be in the space? What is the tech focus?

  • Modular, moveable furniture for total flexibiliy.  Don’t be hardwired, mobile computing should be the dictum.
  • More whiteboards all around.
  • Double screens and/or tripod mount LCD’s (for mobility)
  • Technology should not be too visible – unobtrusive.
  • LCD’s are movable to different parts of the rooms.
  • All the furniture are on wheels (half round tables on wheels that can be configured a whole number of ways

Could this be something that we do in the GC1?

Allow the room to be used for reservation only collaborative needs – laptops with virtual desktops avaiable (but not just sitting out, needs to be coordinated)

Interesting ideas!

Rolling out Moodle Evaluation Scheduler

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By the end of week 3 we are planning on rolling out a new module for Moodle called Personal Appointment, which should be a really cool moodle add-on that will make it much easier for faculty and students to schedule meetings, evaluation conferences and the like. We have to do some translation (the module was written in Spanish) but then look for an announcement that it’s been tested and moved to the live Moodle site.