Eureeka! Today I finally read a handout that I collected last week. It's about assessment. This is key to my thinking about push-pull design for next semester's course. Students shall have the option of push (reading the textbook, basic quiz) or pull (internet readings with different sort of assessment). My goal is that we go topic by topic and it's not the details that matter but the process of making meaning of what is presented and learning by interacting with each other. That's the vision, at least. How to design this, how to pull it off is another story. But this new assessment information is a breakthrough!

 
continuing to collect feedback about the site. I can't believe the number of problems found on it. Some commentary has been really insightful and helpful as well as hard to hear. Receive a note from Lucie today about my pedagogy work and this was a boost. She was very positive about my efforts which I have not been giving myself enough credit for. She also raised a number of issues for us to discuss. I also talked with Claudine about the customary meetings of capstone advisors and students and have decided to develop a set of questions for Lucie and Peggy and establish what we can do online and what we can do face to face. There seems to be a need sometime soon for a face to face gathering. But I want to work out my thinking about it more.
I felt a little awkward during the meeting with Abigail yesterday since most of what she was telling me, I already knew, or should have known after 9 months in the Marlboro program. However, I found myself reflecting alot about the conversation since then. Some new ideas have been spawned. One is the use of the CD that comes with the textbook. If students have laptops I can use these discs to my advantage. This allow for more video especially, a nice opportunity.

 
met with abigail today to learn what are the advantages of using technology in the classroom. it's part of best practices. the one important thing that I learned was about it supports, it conducts student responsibility. A course web site provides constant access to course information and makes it so students need to use it to stay up to date. reduces excuses.
key will be application and implementation with the course. using the course web site in class is a good way to promote its use by students outside of class

Chris Dede in "Emerging Technologies and Distributed Learning in Higher Education"
"How the medium shapes its users, as well as its message, is a central issue in understanding the transformation of distance education into distributed learning. The telephone creates conversationalists; the book develops imaginers, who can conjure a rich mental image from sparse symbols on a printed page. Much of televsion programning induces passive observers.

David Thornburg in "Technology in K-12 Education: Envisioning a New Future"
3 fundamental skills for effective use of the web: knowing how to find information, how to determine its relevance, how to determine its accuracy

 
Posted site 2 today and want to catch up with stuff. Marie and I met and she suggested that I record my process since it might be helpful for other faculty. The process was to create most of the site over 4 days of the vacation. I had used frontpage before and went to a refresher workshop with jennifer casten. I was fortunate to have a lot of content from my site of a couple of years ago. This was greatly revised. It took about 20 hours to create. I ran into a number of inconsistencies with the program. I did use style sheets and shared borders (Iike templates). I tried to hierachize the infor and have clear links from place to place. I use a dark background and light type. I added copyright information and acknowledgements. There was alot of busy work - touching up details, going from page to page and making the same set of changes for consistency and navigation. Pam said it's worth it - the point is to have it work for everyone. Part of the battle is to have thought about this ahead of time.
Have received several feedback forms and I forgot how hard it was to get criticism. I was feeling really good about this site but sharing it with others adds new perspectives. I need to just learn to learn from them. Greg really panned it with a number of references. I called him and borrowed them. These materials will help me more than what I am getting from the library.
The other plan it to try to activate some usability testing. This is starting to become key in my mind. After I dig into just getting the skills to make the sites, then deal with the politics of sharing them with others, getting the administration interested, the bottom line is how will the sites work for students. This is the brave new world. The information that no one really has and that I am trying to get to. The problem is that this nugget at the bottom of the pile can get overlooked and lost. Stay focused.