I have a hard time navigating the internet.  I get lost  easily.

But I have directions: find content that relates to the course learning outcomes.

Museums are a good source of design inspiration and clothing details for pattern making.

There is a Museum of Online Museums so that seemed a good place to start.   I was expecting an online version of traditional museums but I found something that is quite amazing!

Cliff Muskiet’s Stewardess/Flight Attendant Uniform Collection

http://www.uniformfreak.com/uniforms.html

This is a wonderful resource as the clothing is dated, and there are detailed pictures of the garments.  An assigned pattern  project based on the database would be interesting.  The pattern making project could incorporate ‘period’ details or reproducing the pattern for a specific garment.

I wandered a bit around the museums, and though more appropriate for my other course, I also found

The Vintage Wallpaper Gallery

http://www.5qm.de/#/

Like most museums, you need TIME to visit.

Tags: learning outcomes, online resources, virtual museum

I plan to use LiveBinder as an open resource for FW 540, Vertebrate Population Dynamics.  This tool gives me a place to start presenting online resources for students, from helpful Khan Academy video bits to links to tutorials on using Excel.  I can embed my own jing files in this notebook also, demonstrating spreadsheet tricks needed for laboratory exercises.  Students will be encouraged to add their own links and materials, from interesting websites, links to documents that they found helpful, or to upload their own content.  From my preliminary explorations of this tool, I believe that not only can all students access it to add things to it, but the URL can be kept active so it ends up being a resource that they can collectively keep after the course is over.  At least, that’s my understanding of this tool.  Comments, anyone?  Am I right about that??  I am also considering having subgroups of students work together on a notebook in which they will keep their group laboratory assignments, so they can collaborate on creating the models and exploring the questions I give to guide them in exploring model behavior and in its interpretation.  I would like students to just have to become familiar with using ONE tool, so I am hoping LiveBinder will work for both.  Another option is Zoho Notebook, has anyone played with that one much?  I found for myself that LiveBinder was more intuitive, but that may not be true from the students’ perspective…

Tags: collaborate, learning tools, LiveBinder

I confess that Shannon Riggs came across these tutorials first, but I am finally getting a chance to look at them. Yeah!

These are nicely narrated videos about writing computer programs in the Python language. These will be excellent additions to my GEO 599 – GIS Programming with Python course.

These videos are at the Khan Academy website, listed under Computer Science.

http://www.khanacademy.org/science/computer-science

If you are curious about how to write a program: see http://khanacademy.org/video?v=husPzLE6sZc

Thanks Shannon!! I am so excited!!

Tags: python tutorials

Happy Friday, Folks!

In the process of creating an online version of FW315, Ichthyology, my biggest initial frustration lay in finding high quality images that met the demands of copyright clearance (e.g., public domain, personally produced, or from sites that don’t demand exorbitant reuse fees).  In my particular case, I need images of fishes.  Lots and lots of fishes.  There are over 30,000 species of fishes in the world, and I probably talk about 150 of them in FW315 at one point or another in my lectures.

There’s no shortage of gorgeous fish photographs on the web, but a lot of the best ones are from professional underwater photographers.  Royalty charges for individual professional photos can add up very quickly when one is looking at using dozens or hundreds of images.  On the other hand, many photos in the public domain are pretty lackluster.  For example, searches from government archives associated with NOAA and US Fish and Wildlife, returned most fuzzy shots of dead or dying animals on the decks of trawlers.   It annoyed me to think that I might have to use suboptimal images that didn’t show the anatomical features or simple beauty of the organisms that I was trying to illustrate.

Then I found the ARKive.

ARKive is a repository of professional images of organisms (not just fishes) that aims to solve exactly this problem.  They state that they aim to gather “together the very best films and photographs of the world’s species into one centralised digital library, to create a unique audio-visual record of life on Earth, prioritising those species at most risk of extinction. Preserved and maintained for future generations, ARKive is making this key resource accessible to all, from scientists and conservationists to the general public and school children, via its award-winning website”

This is a goldmine of really high quality images on an astonishing diversity of animals, and nicely helps to balance my desire to use the best photos available with the need to not spend a fortune in royalties to do so.  All of the photographers involved have agreed to make everything on the site free to use for educational purposes.

Here are a few images that I’ve used so far in the course.

Lamprey attached to trout

Queen Triggerfish

Gill Arches of Basking Shark (second largest fish in the world)

Spectacular!

Best Fishes,

– Brian

Tags: ARKive, biology, copyright, ichthyology, images, photographs, public domain, Webquest

In doing the webquest for this week, a fact became clear to me that I hadn’t considered before, and I must say I was very pleased to learn it. I am working on a literature course at the 300 level, which would normally have an audience of people majoring or minoring in German. What I found in my searches, however, is that on the native speaker side of the equation, the audience may be considerably younger, as in equivalent of our middle or lower high school ages.
The upshot of this is that there are websites with wonderful activities for many of the texts that I am using, including games (see my forum post for the week), webquests and instructions for interactive group work. Below is a link to the site for the book I am using for the workshop. It is in German, but the layout is still clear, I believe:

Tags: materials, school, wheel

Three of the differences that I perceive between e-campus and brick-and-mortar campus teaching are the testing environments, the more limited ability to offer additional clarifying information informally in e-campus, and the greater need for up-front course development.  I wish that the support for developing distance programs was offered to on-campus instructors, as the rich bag of tricks offered by e-campus offers a lot of value to traditional teaching environments as well.  Traditional testing is better suited to a brick-and-mortar situation, where the instructor can act as proctor, or answer questions in real time.  E-campus has a variety of tools to help prevent academic dishonesty, but these may require more time to arrange and to determine which is most appropriate for the particular situation.  I have found that I frequently use the first few minutes of a brick-and-mortar class to explain assignments, clarify expectations, or evaluate student comprehension of previous material.  This spontaneity is much more difficult to achieve online, and more work is necessary up-front to ensure that assignments are as clear as possible.  Exercises to evaluate student mastery of material need to be built in so they occur frequently enough that changes in course pace can occur before any train wrecks.  Finally, having often been just two lectures ahead of my students and presented lab exercises that I proofed that morning, having all of the materials all ready to go weeks in advance will be very different.  I’ll be glad to be out of the pressure cooker, but I’m wondering how I will find the loss of flexibility to bend the syllabus a bit to respond to either recent events, a sudden spark of interest in a topic from my students, or other such teachable moments.

Jen

(developing online graduate-level vertebrate population ecology)

Tags: assessment, course design, formative exercises

What are we doing? Why are we here?

Learning objectives for blog assignments in our workshop:

• To use social media to reflect on learning and to connect with a real audience
  • Posting your blog entries is one part of what you’ll do here, but commenting on others’ posts is just as important. Who knows? You may also see comments from visiting readers, such as colleagues here at OSU, colleagues from other campuses, authors we’re discussing, or tween pop star Justin Bieber. (Well, it could happen … this is a public blog!)
  • To gain experience with a common social media tool and try something that you might use in your class
• To share artifacts created for your courses
  • Collaboration = Inspiration!
• To learn from each other’s reflections and creations
  • Two heads are better than one!

How often do you need to blog?

• Participants will need to post two original blog entries during this six-week professional development. However, you are welcome and encouraged to post and comment on each other’s posts more often.

What are these categories and tags all about?

• Categories have been created for you and are based on the learning outcomes for our training. (Each category name is an abbreviation of a learning outcome.) Each post you write should relate to at least one of our class categories. Placing posts within categories is an organizational strategy, but it’s also a form of metacognitive reflection.
• Tags are up to you. Try to come up with at least three tags for each post. Tagging a blog post is kind of like creating an index; it helps you and others find information in the blog.

How long do blog posts need to be?

• Use as many words as you need to get your idea across. Keep in mind that blogs are not dissertations. Most blog posts are between 100 and 500 words. This one is about 300, which makes this a good place to stop!

Tags: community, connection, getting started, welcome