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Showing posts from June, 2008

Google Maps Mashup (Salem, MA)

I like to take photos, either on my 5MP Sony digital camera, or my 3MP mobile phone camera. Most times it's just sights and objects in my every day life. My goal is to get a high quality (10MP or more) DSLR :-) View Larger Map

Week III

UMass Boston's Mission can be found Here , and it has as its tenets Access, Excellence, Public Service, Innovation, Economic Development and Quality of Life. An e-learning project that may go well hand in hand with the University's Mission is an information literacy curriculum that can be accessible not only to members of the UMass Boston community (students, staff, and faculty) but also to the broader community that UMass Boston serves (Boston, the state of Massachusetts, the US and the World, since many students who study at UMB are not only local, but also national and global). Information Literacy is something that many people do not have the opportunity to learn. Providing a free e-learning curriculum in information literacy, using free and for-pay services (the for-pay component such as academic journals may be limited depending on who the student is), could be Innovative , it could provide Access to resources for people who don't have them, it will definitely be a p

Week 2: Reflections Part II

1) Anderson cites studies that claim that effective instruction is learner centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered, and community centered. Given these dimensions, what impact does technology mediation have on instruction? I would say that technology mediation positively affects instruction in these areas, for both hybrid and purely online courses. Through technology mediation, we can have community centered learning, where every student can have access to the class's public forum and participate, in a democratic fashion, in the class. They analyses, thoughts, and opinions on what has been read or discussed can be freely posted. These posts can then be read and responded to by fellow classmates and the instructor. In this sense, it's sort of like sitting in a big circle and having a discussion, but not having to worry about place and time constraints as much. In a f2f environment you have 180 minutes per week, in an online environment

Week 2 Reflections Part III

Is there any validity to the arguments of David Noble, Hubert Dreyus, and Mark Bauerline or are they just curmedgeony Luddites? I can't really lump everyone in the same category so I will break this down: Bauerline: I don't thin he is a Luddite because, as he said, he does indeed use technology. I was left with my jaw hanging after listening to the interview. From what he said, I think that his "research" is really one sided. He uses the excuse that (paraphrasing here) by the time he puts together a research proposal and gets all his ducks in a row (grants,staff, etc.) the technology will have changed and thus the value of technology cannot be tested. I think that this is fundamentally wrong. Sure the platform may change, but the underlying principles of the technology (examples: blogging, microblogging, social networks, LMS) do not change, the technology adapts to better serve that vision for which the technology was invented. I listened to the subsequent

Week 2: Reflections Part I

In Foundations of Educational Theory for Online Learning , Mohamed Ally argues that no one school of thought on learning is used exclusively in online design, and that an online developer must know the different approaches to learning in order to select the appropriate instructional strategies (p. 6). Personally I agree with Ally's assertions, not only for Online teaching and learning, but also for face to face. I've been a student for quite a long time. In the past couple of years I have been paying attention to not only to my learning preferences (and learning style) but also what worked for my classmates. At grad student meetings where students would discuss which classes they wanted to take and other students gave them my two cents, I often asked students questions to determine their learning preferences and then suggest a professor whose teach

INSDSG 605: Embedded Presentation

This is my introduction presentation from INSDSG640 (I added a photo though)