rusty chains: cc licensed photo via flickr by kazatzka

Last week I was collecting information for my annual job performance review when I realized that I had collected over 600 bookmarks related to online pedagogy in my Delicious account. Meanwhile, the WISE Pedagogy website has an outdated links page with a much more limited number of links — several of which need to be edited or replaces as the websites they link to have been moved.

The sad truth is that the links page on our static website hasn’t been edited or updated since, oh, November 2008. Although I’ve been intending to update this links page for a while now, I’ve been able to continuously update my Delicious account for the simple reason that it requires so little effort. Updating the static website involves connecting to the Bluehost server at another university by using our university’s SeaMonkey software, saving edited pages on my hard drive and uploading them onto Bluehost. This needs to happen every time I want to update content, which means I save the task for a time when there’s more editing to make it worth the effort, which means I put it on the back burner until I’m finished with projects that seem more important at the time.

Updating Delicious, however, means clicking a button in my browser and typing a few tags for each website I want to bookmark. Although my own laziness and procrastination are mostly to blame for this disparity in activity,  I can’t help but wonder if the behavior points toward a need to do away with the static links page entirely.

Before the web 2.0 revolution in this past decade, the old-fashioned Links Page was a staple of web design in the web 1.0 culture of the 1990s. Of course, in this ancient time, many of us were still new to the concept of the internets and needed suggestions about where we could go next on this mysterious journey along the webs: “Click here to go to this site! It’s really funny LOL!!!” (Naturally, the site creator then had to explain the meaning of “LOL” since visitors were not yet fluent in net-speak. Computers were carved out of rocks then, too, which explains why monitors and PCs were so heavy.)

While it’s tempting to get carried away with tongue-in-cheek nostalgia for the pre-broadband era (did anyone else sing along with the melodic noise while waiting for the dial-up service to connect, or was it just me?), I’m looking for an appropriate way to share valid, easily-updatable bookmarks on a static website. I haven’t yet convinced myself that simply directing visitors to my Delicious account is the right way to go — though I’ve been linking to it unofficially from this blog.

What methods, if any, do other elearning specialists share their lists of useful websites with other learners? Is it functional enough to invite visitors to visit a Delicious account, or link to some other web 2.0 resource like Brainify? Or, alternately, should I make a stronger commitment to updating the static links page on a regular basis?

The online synchronous learning platform Wimba is offering a free webinar to anyone who is interested in learning more about teaching with this product. This would be useful if you are teaching or planning to teach synchronous sessions in an online or blended course.

Time: July 22, 2009, 2:00 pm EDT / 1:00 pm CDT
An archive of the webinar will be available afterward.

Visit Wimba’s website to register, or for more information

Inverted Bookshelf via Instructables

The librarian who dares to be different could, with some do-it-yourself effort, stack books underneath the shelf. The website Instructables gives step-by-step instructions, with photos, for doing exactly this. The books seen in this photo can apparently be taken off and put back “on” the shelf, lending the design to practicality as well as creativity. (What you can’t see in this photo is elastic webbing–the kind used in clothing–stretching underneath each book.) I’m guessing this shelf design might also cut down on the amount of dust the books can collect…

"Cyberpunk Lit Class in the Metaverse", cc licensed image by Paul Graham Raven

This is apparently the Summer of Second Life for online education. For its June/July issue, the Journal of Online Education (Innovate) published an entire issue devoted to the medium as a teaching venue. The following are articles that present interesting information for any educator who is thinking about teaching in Second Life and its methodology and/or ramifications:

MSNBC.com recently published an article about Twitter and why Iranian protesters have been able to tweet news from inside their country when the Iranian government has been able to censor all other internet communication. In short, there are two reasons:

1. Users don’t have to visit the website — or even use the internet at all — to post messages, and
2. Twitter is the Niagara Falls of online communication. There are literally too many channels and streams of tweets for any group of censors to even attempt to filter.

I remember when I first heard of Twitter. I wondered why anyone would be interested in a website that only let users post tiny blurbs that get lost in a sea of inane updates about daily life: “Im wearing a blue shirt today, 4 rlz!” “My cheese soup is cold!”

Since then educators have developed innovative ways of using Twitter to glean student feedback in the classroom. Professionals use it to network and ask or share advice with colleagues worldwide. And now, apparently, it is more powerful than dictatorial government.

It’s intimidating in its might and strength, but it is also beautiful.

Twitter 1, Censors 0: Why it’s still working

Once again, the Common Craft team is making technology more understandable. Their latest video helps explain how to use Twitter to search for specific information:

Please note that the free version of this video on YouTube is for non-commercial use only. Visit the Common Craft website for more information on purchasing a copy for commercial use.

In related news, I am still making notes for a Twitter-related tutorial for educators. I’m looking at TweetDeck as another tool to make Twitter more user-friendly for education professionals. In the past I’ve been hesitant to do more than make announcements in Twitter so creating this tutorial will in part be about my own mastery of the medium.

Twitter Search in Plain English

Mark your bookmarks: the WISE Introduction to Online Pedagogy on-demand workshop is now available at a new location and with added content. See below for details:

Please forward to LIS students, faculty, and professionals –

Learn how to teach online on your own time! WISE Pedagogy offers an open-access training experience for its Introduction to Online Pedagogy workshop. Learn effective teaching practices anytime, at your own pace, without the necessity of enrollment in a program or adhering to a semester schedule. Interact with other learners/instructors via linked forums for pedagogical discussion, course development exercises, and continuing your education in new developments for distance learning.

A Certificate of Completion is available to those who finish the workshop and participate in each exercise.

Introduction to Online Pedagogy is a free resource for LIS instructors, students, and professionals from beginners to seasoned instructors looking for new ideas in online instruction.

Click here to access the on-demand website: http://introductiononlinepedagogy.pbworks.com/

For more information, please contact Anne McKinney.

This screenshot was added to the website FAIL Blog today:

FAIL Blog: Solution Fail

For those who have trouble reading the text within the image, it’s an online ad that reads:

Paper Due? Out of time? Can’t finish that paper? Don’t hand in a garbage paper or buy one online! Send a corrupted file instead for $3.95!

Oh, if only that were the answer to all of online education’s little problems…

Scott Nicholson, a WISE instructor at the iSchool at Syracuse, will be teaching an experimental course on Gaming in Libraries (IST 600) throughout the month of June. In addition to teaching this course for Information Science students at Syracuse, the course will be open to the public. The course is designed to connect students, public librarians, gamers, and professionals in the gaming industry to learn about incorporating games into libraries.

Watch the following video for Scott Nicholson’s own description of the course:

The course can be accessed through the Syracuse University YouTube channel, American Library Association Connect (a social networking site that will host the discussion activities), and Syracuse iSchool’s private course management system.

Anyone interested in participating in the “Gaming in Libraries” course can learn more here.

Click here for the syllabus.

Syracuse.com article

About a year ago during a WISE administrative meeting, I jokingly commented that web 2.0 had become so important to online learning, I was waiting for someone to invent web 3.0. Now it officially exists.

Digital Inspiration explains web 3.0 concepts “in plain English” (not to be confused with Common Craft’s Plain English video series) with a series of slide presentations. In simple terms, web 3.0 refers to personalized web content, from mobile web apps to audience-specific advertisements (based on an individual’s search/browsing history).

The following slide helps distinguish between web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0:

slide image from Digital Inspiration

The slide presentations (six on one page) are visual-only and explain the concept of web 3.0 in greater detail.

What does this mean for online education? If web 2.0 is about collaboration, web 3.0 is about personalization. I’m guessing that more online courses will be flexible in terms of scheduling, and possibly even in terms of content. The on-demand Introduction to Online Pedagogy workshop may be a reasonable example, since it’s designed for learning at any time of day or year, and specific information can be accessed on content pages rather than reading through the entire website just to find the page on rubrics, for example. (I’m getting an updated version of this workshop ready to announce later this week.)

University-based semester courses are less likely to see this type of change very quickly, but shorter workshops, webinars, and other continuing education programs could see more influence from web 3.0 advocates in the near future.

Web 3.0 Concepts in Plain English