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Showing posts from 2010

Happy end of the year!

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Well, it's been one crazy year! I've managed to complete my final two masters degrees, meet some great colleagues from sister campuses and forged new friendships with classmates in both linguistics and instructional design. My last academic blogpost for the year I've posted over at the UMass Online blog; the topic is Making Services Accessible . Go have a look and post you thoughts on the matter of making services available to students more easy to find. That's all for this year. Once I tackle my instapaper reading list I think will have more higher education, EdTech and instructional design stuff to write about. Until then, keep your mind sharp and don't stop learning! -- Post From My iPhone

Another crazy semester | done

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Well, another crazy semester is now done! This semester was actually quite busy, despite the fact that I started preparing for it over the summer!  I had done most of the readings for my Psycholinguistics course, as well as starting to think about what I wanted to do with my Field Experience Practicum.  Despite all this planning, I ended up taking another route in my practicum, and preparations for my comprehensive exams (which were on my birthday this year) took up all of my available time. The practicum was an interesting experience. I got to teach the last two classes in a Classical Greek course on campus, in addition to observing the teaching methodology (as well as student reactions to this methodology) throughout the semester.  I did my final research project on putting forth a proposal to teach Classical Greek (and other classical languages for that matter) using communicative approaches that most modern classrooms use.  I also advocated different use of technology - but all

Journal article now (officially) available!

I was looking at the website of the journal (Human Architecture) in which I published an article last summer and I saw that it's out!  The journal hasn't hit SocIndex or EBSCO yet, but I guess it's official :-) Check it out either at okcir.com (link above), or the copy I've placed on my Scribd account

Less than a month to go!

This is it, the final countdown! (well, OK, may not the final final countdown) I posted something on the UMass Online blog recently, on how great and useful libraries are - check it out here (can't wait to  finish my comprehensive exams!)

In the thick of it all...

I know, blogs have been neglected... My instapaper list of things to read is getting big... There are quite a few things that I have read and want to comment on... There just isn't that much time! Hmmm...this sort of started out as a poem, it didn't work out that way though ;-) In any case, I'm in the thick of it all, however one way or another December 17th is it! I am taking my comprehensive exams for Applied Linguistics then, and that's it! I can then get back to instapaper, educational technology and technology punditry.  Until then I will be refreshing my memory of theorists, theories, examples and positions. Critical pedagogy, cultural capital, teaching culture, teaching grammar, teaching lexicon, how the mind works, about LADs and neuronal connections.  Fun stuff, but I think my brain might be reaching storage capacity ;-)

On the importance of orientations

My first blog post for the UMass Online blog is now live, check it out here I think I may have approached the subject here before, I don't really remember, but orientations are, I think, pretty important when you are entering an academic program.  It really sets the tone for the program, both in term of curriculum and all the administrative minutiae that we as students have to deal with (and if done right, it creates connections to classmates, alumni, and outside organizations!) What do you think? Have you been to an orientation that rocked?  Have you been to one that's been sub-par?  What's worked for you as a student and what would you like to see?

Course correction! Ay-Capt'n!

Over the summer I started working on my field experience, one of the last requirement for my MA in Applied Linguistics.  Honestly, last summer I would have preferred to have gotten the practicum waived and taken phonetics and phonemics instead, but now I am glad that I have to take it.  I am getting a lot out of observing a seasoned (and pretty awesome) instructor do what they do best.  Over the summer, to get out of the "teaching" requirement (which seems to have been absent in previous semesters... but anyway...) I was thinking of creating an eLearning module, perhaps using something like captivate, where I would be able to use communicative approaches to teach content and language.  My initial thought was to teach a little bit about the Apple of Discord and Paris' choice.  This would have coincided with conditionals, so students could learn a little more about what supposedly happened that lead to the Trojan War and the events in the Iliad, and they would have had an

Beating the education out of you!

I've been following an interesting discussion in one of the LinkedIn groups that I am a member of called " How important is a formal certificate/degree in Instructional Design to become a successful Instructional Designer? " I guess the discussion is not new (well it may be new to this group, but it's been going on in the ID circle for a while). There are pros and cons to each position, for example non-formal trained IDs (Instructional Designers) are seen are more creative and adaptive and in their mind formally trained IDs are a bit more rigid. At the other end of the spectrum, formally trained IDs see a formal education as "I know why this is happening and I can harness its power instead of relying on chance" and the degree of course can get them in the door whereas non-degreed IDs might have a problem with that. There are some comments which just derail the discussion like a commenter that said that she wants to see people rename IDs learning designers

The importance of Portfolios while searching for a job

I posted this as a discussion topic in one of my LinkedIn groups, but no takers!  Everyone seems to be paying lipservice to Portfolios, but no one (that I've seen in groups) has talked about their effectiveness.   Your thoughts? //Start of copied info from LinkedIn// This thought came to me while reading the discussion on the importance of a degree/certificate in ID. So here's a question for all of you: How important is a Portfolio when searching for your new ID job? Many people place a spotlight on the importance of portfolios of ePortfolios (in addition to experience, recommendations and perhaps a degree of some sort in education) but I've seen three points AGAINST portfolios that are coming to my attention 1) Recruiters or employers don't necessarily have the time to review your portfolio. You may have done excellent work but when they are looking through a tall pile of applicants (made event taller by portfolios to go through), do hiring managers really have

McCranky Friday ;-)

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Welcome back to school!!!! I think today I may be channeling the Annoyed Librarian ;-) In any case, here is a response to a blog post on InsideHigherEd.com about Netflix and library collections. Now I have to say that I enjoy reading Josh's posts despite the fact that most of them induce a facepalm gesture. I guess the first thing that gets me about these blog posts is that no one bothers to read them before publication - either that, or people really don't know the difference between a SHOW and a SHOE. In any case this is a minor evil. The major facepalm moment comes from not really understanding the "making available" aspect of library collections. The question posed is this: Should [institutions of higher education] be in the business of purchasing videos for our collections? The Netflix value proposition was pretty compelling with over 100,000 titles, but has the iPhone and Touch app put Netflix over the edge? I can't really blame people for wanti

Jay Walker on the World's English Mania

Here's an interesting TED video on the World's English Mania. You know, I am not sure I completely agree. I think that there is a need for a worldwide lingua franca, but I don't necessarily agree with Jay that English or other "major" languages for that matter, are not eroding regional and other national languages. I guess this is a topic for a much wider discussion. What do you think?

T-minus 1 week!

In one week the new semester starts! The FINAL semester of graduate studies - woohoo! On the roster this (final) time around we've got the following: Psycholinguistics which deals with: Contemporary issues in the fields of first and second language development and bilingualism will be addressed within the framework of the psychological development of the individual, from early childhood through adolescence. Theories of learning will also be addressed, particularly as they have been used to explain language development, including behaviorism, cognitive psychology, Piagetian constructivist theory, Vygotsky’s Social Interactionism and Freirean critical consciousness and praxis. Having done most of the reading for this course over the summer, I think it will be rather interesting. It's all about how the mind (a child's and an adult's mind) picks up language and how we learn to learn a new language on top of our native language. And the Practicum (aka Field Experienc

Translation - random thoughts

A number of years ago I was approached by a firm to do a translation. A one page bureaucratic document that that to do with excise taxes. I was quite excited to be approached for this, although I borked the translation. I spent way too much time sweating the somewhat difficult stuff (like all the crazy acronyms found in the document) that I mistranslated big time units to small time units. Oh well. Live and learn! Now I've been working on a longer literature translation on my spare time for a friend, and I've learned my lessons, however another thought has come to mind: How close to the original does a translator make his work? The intent of the translation is to not necessarily translate everything verbatim, but convey the meaning of the original into the target language. What I am wondering is how much leeway does a translator have with tenses, active versus passive voice and participial expressions. For example, you are translating something from a language where the

Wave goodbye to Google Wave, say hello to...

OK, this isn't really news, but the news is our all over the interwebs - Google will no longer be developing Wave as a stand-alone product, and will keep the service up and running until the end of the year - it will also provide a way for people to get their data off Google Wave. I have to say that I really enjoyed messing around with Google Wave. I got an early beta invite, I invited some friends, but the mistake was that I invited people that are gadget geeks like me, but we don't normally collaborate! This Wave was really a bit useless for me because the people that I invited were people whose interactions with me would not push me to use the service! Google because open for everyone's use this past spring, but by that time I hadn't really thought of uses for Wave. In a recent comment in InsideHigherEd, I saw that people were using Wave as a replacement for the Bulletin Board System within the LMS (learning management system). What a brilliant idea! I think

Translation procrastination...

A long while back I had translated a government memo from modern Greek to English. It was only one page and I wanted to have it be perfect! I looked up all acronyms (some of which I had no idea existed since I left Greece before being involved too much with governmental BS), but I missed the small things! I had translated "minutes" as "seconds" - bah! What an newbie mistake! I still beat myself up over it! I became blinded by perfection that I missed the obvious! In any case, I am now back in the translation game, this time translating, for a friend, the life and times of St. Margaret from New Testament Greek to English. It's about 40 pages of New Testament Greek (medieval Greek?) goodness! Luckily all those years as an altar-boy in Greece, and my two semesters of Ancient Greek had prepared me a bit for this under taking. I procrastinated most of the summer but recently I got back in the groove. The biggest problem, again, was perfection. I was expec

Informal Learning in the Workplace

One of the topics that we covered in our Knowledge Management class back in the days of the MBA was this whole concept of informal learning (or water-cooler learning) that happens day-to-day in any given workplace. In those 1 minute interactions at the watering hole you may learn something that impacts your job performance (for better or for worse) and one of the goals of KM was/is to capture such leaky knowledge for the benefit of everyone in the company. I came across this presentation on informal learning a little while back and I thought it interesting. I think that this is something that learning professionals should be exposed to if they are in a degree or certificate program :-) 8 Reasons to Focus on Informal & Social Learning View more presentations from Charles Jennings .

Road to the PhD - some thoughts

Last week I spoke to a friend of mine who is already pursuing a PhD - said friend is at the dissertation stage if I am not mistaken.  I let her know that I am considering a PhD - having overcome my fear of writing long research-based passages, and having grown accustomed to the Master's level difficulty, I've decided to up my game since I like learning new things.  I also aspire to one day be a professor, so a PhD is generally a must in these cases. After many professors, in many different fields, have encouraged me to go for it, I've started compiling a spreadsheet of which schools have what I am interested in, what the requirements for entry and exit are, who the movers and shakers are (i.e. potential advisors), and what other important things are nearby (i.e. centers of research that those schools collaborate with).  Another major consideration is cost: where are the stipends and assistantships? You don't go into a PhD program, or the professoriate for that matter,

How important is encoding?

Here's some non-random stream of consciousness for you as far as language goes. How important is encoding to you? Does encoding really matter? What do I mean by encoding? The alphabet you use, whether you represent words as syllables, as characters, as letters, and how you put all that together. The impetus for this though process comes from a (pretty silly in my opinion) facebook group that I was invited to a while back. The group is called "save the Greek language," kinda funny if you ask me because I don't think that the Greek language is in any danger of being lost. The details of the group say the following (for the original look at the end of the blog post). Greek is one of the most beautiful languages. English has a far reach and is...a requirement. Greeklish [emphasis added] on the other hand is nothing. Mixed up, messed up [words] that are convenient. We will forget the Greek we know. Prefer to write in Greek [script]. You will be expressing yours

Prezi, revisited

I came across this Prezi course introduction to an "Intro to Learning on The Cloud" course. I have to say that from a teaching and learning perspective the course looks pretty compelling! This introduction was interesting as well, however there is a big caveat. I don't know if this was a self-paced presentation, or if it was used in an in-class presentation. As an in-class presentation I can see this Prezi working, however as a voiceless self-paced presentation it's a major fail. About 40 seconds in, having clicked next-next-next the animations in this prezi made me nauseated - the the point that I needed to stop viewing it! I wonder if this was a case of flashy-prezi use, or just a good presentation for the wrong medium teaching & learning in the "Cloud" on Prezi

Does language influence culture?

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Here's an interesting article on the Wall Street Journal about the relationship of language and culture.  If you haven't studies psychology or applied linguistics, it's an interesting thought provoking article to get you primed for further exploration into the topic of language and culture - and if you are not interested in these topics enough to study them further, then it's a nice conversation (or ice breaker) topic for any meetups or cocktail parties that you go to :-)  The author, a university professor, writes that Chomsky's Universals have not withstood scrutiny.  I am only starting to to immerse myself in psycholinguistics so I don't really know much about the subject (other than the primers on Chomsky's Universal Grammar ), but as far as I know, Chomsky keeps refining his hypothesis, so if one version of the hypothesis has some issues, as more knowledge on the subject is gained and as more studies are conducted, we see newer interpretations of t

What's happening in the ivory tower?

I came across a blog post on InsideHigherEd recently about PhD programs and the disappearing tenure-track job market and how PhD programs should help their students to do something more than research and specialization in an area that has a focus on tenure-track professorial jobs (because as we all know adjunct instructor pay stinks). The main point of the author here is that PhD programs should include: Teacher education because simply knowing your subject matter does not make you a great teacher of said subject matter Higher Ed. Management - so you know the inner workings of your environment Leadership Development Media Training Now off the bat, I don't get the media training piece - perhaps someone could explain this to me.  Leadership development - well, shouldn't you have had this when you were working on a Master's degree?  As part of my MBA, MSIT and MEd I've worked in teams for projects, even as an upper level undergrad taking grad level science courses

Does spelling matter any more?

A week or so ago I saw this posted on eLearning Brothers and I had a facepalm moment. I have to say that I am one of those people, the people that are turned off from misspelled words and misused words. Yes, I know we've all, by now, seen this: Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. The fact of the matter is that it's not really about our brain's ability to decode the mess that we see above.  The brain can do it, provided that we know (or think we know) the words that are there.  If we don't know the words, and we need to look them up to figure out what the sentence says, we are SOL (sh*t-outta-luck). When I see things such as "truely"

Evolving Paradigms in Knowledge Management

I came across this brief video on the Harvard Business Review the other day on how knowledge management is moving away from the repository as goal . Here's the transcript of the video: One of the interesting ways of capturing the problems with traditional knowledge management is it came at knowledge from a stocks viewpoint, a stocks of knowledge. The problem is, we have knowledge, it's distributed and dispersed throughout the organization. How do we capture it and make it available to others? Certainly a big challenge, I don't want to diminish that as a value, but I think what people found as they tried to implement the various systems and methodologies to do that is there wasn't really a lot of motivation for people to invest the time and effort to develop and define those stocks and make them available as part of a broader repository. This kind of approach really shifts the attention from stocks of knowledge, what we know today, to defining and developing new k

Technology Illiterate Students

I keep reading (and hearing) about the wonder about this supposed Net Generation, or millennial students or...well other terms that mean the same thing: absolutely nothing ;-)  In the past couple of years I've heard and read so much about how these students process things differently and that we need to adapt our ways of teaching to suit their unique learning preferences and technology savvyness.  Now, I am a member of this generation - granted I am from the early stages of this generation having been born in the early 80s, but I am a member of this generation nonetheless. Being a member of this generation I call all this BS. I've actually been thinking about doing research and writing about it (and hopefully getting published). My main line of though is this: just because a certain group of individuals has grown up around technology, it doesn't mean that they know how to use it effectively.  The main comparison that I can make is cars.  I grew up with cars in my life,

Good Ideas don't Die!

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I was recently reading these two articles on ProfHacker, one was on RSS & SMS integration in the (library) catalog , and the most recent one about mobile applications for libraries . This brought me back to my days as an MSIT student.  Back in those days I took many opportunities to work on homework/class projects that dealt directly with library systems - some examples are IT/Library mergers and integration, patron privacy and Project Wormhole - which is what these ProfHacker posts reminded me of! Project Wormhole* (yeah, I used imaginative names), was a project I worked on for an Object Oriented Programming course.  The main idea was that each patron would have a customized library homepage that they would log-onto and they would have a widgetized HUD of all of their information needs.  The patrons already have a library barcode and a student/staff ID number, so there isn't really a need to create yet another log-on! They just need to log on with information that they alr

Why Johnny can't Code

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A month or so ago I came across this this post on Salon via OSNews . I read both the OSNews post and the Salon post and I've wanted to write about it since, but something wasn't sitting right - I just couldn't put my finger on it. Well, yesterday - reading about child development, specifically language development, it hit me! Here's an excerpt: Only there's a rub. Most of these later innovations were brought to us by programmers who first honed their abilities with line-programming languages like BASIC. Yes, they mostly use higher level languages now, stacking and organizing object-oriented services, or using other hifalutin processes that come prepackaged and ready to use, the way an artist uses pre-packaged paints. (Very few painters still grind their own pigments. Should they?) And yet the thought processes that today's best programmers learned at the line-coding level still serve these designers well. Renowned tech artist and digital-rendering wizar

Definition of a PLE

This came across my twitter stream today, pretty interesting what you can do with a Prezi (haven't spent much time on Prezi - I suppose I should once I finish Applied Linguistics and I have some more free time on my hands :-) ) Definition of a PLE on Prezi

Blackboard buys WIMBA & Elluminate, the crowd goes wild!

Well, last night Blackboard went on the Borg trail again - resistance is futile, you will be acquired! This time around it's WIMBA and Elluminate that are up on the acquisition block.  Some people have rejoiced at news of the acquistion while others have dissenting opinions (same link as the rejoice, just scroll down).  From a business point of view I think that Blackboard did the right thing, they obviously had a deficiency in their product, open source alternatives like Sakai and Moodle were doing what Blackboard is doing with their current LMS product, so they needed a differentiator.  Even if you do use Moodle or Sakai, you still need synchronous capabilities, don't you? So you can be happy with your Open Source LMS and still buy a blackboard product.  Also by buying two products in the same category you're eliminating competition! Of course, there is the side that makes business sense - in the fiscal, competitive sense - and the business side that makes sense

Real Learning - what is it?

I came across Charles Jennings's piece the other day titled " Real learning – let’s not confuse it with completing templated exercises ." It's quite a fascinating read and I encourage all of you to read through it and think about it. This piece reminded me of my Knowledge Management days as an MBA student, and as an Instructional Design student in thinking about corporate learning. A few nights ago however this piece had relevance in the academia context as well in the form of a discussion about plagiarism/academic honesty (pick whichever term you see fit - glass half-empty/glass half-full - same thing) Charles writes: Firstly, let’s clear something up. We shouldn’t confuse what L&D/Training departments spend a lot of their time on with real learning. Learning professionals spend a significant amount of their time (maybe even the majority) designing and delivering content and then evaluating completions and short-term memory outputs from structured mandatory

How will you grade this?

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Last weekend I finished reading the book Second Language Teaching and Learning in the Net Generation . It was an interesting book, recommended for both Instructional Designers and Language Teachers alike. Some chapters as admittedly better than others, but as a whole the book was quite good (related note: follow me on GoodReads ). Hot on the heels of this I came across a post on ProfHacker called " How are you going to grade this? Evaluating classroom blogs ". Instructors in our Instructional Design program drilled into us the, by now, infamous WIIFM (What's In It For Me) - learners are going to ask this before they take any course (or learning event) that you design. Well, the question that I (and my fellow students) were asking once we were in the course was "How is this assignment going to be graded?" Learning is all nice and dandy but in the end we need to achieve a certain grade and knowing the grading rubric helps us focus our work. In any case, thi

DDC and it's utility in Public Libraries

So here is a library related post :-) A while back (a long while back according the date!) I came across this article on LIS news - a short essay on the utility of the Dewey Decimal System in public libraries. For as long as I can remember there has been debate in the public library sphere as to whether to continue to use the Dewey Decimal System (henceforth: DDC) or if they should switch to something called BISAC. If you've ever walked into a bookstore in the US (and probably in Canada as well) the shelves are organized by the BISAC system. The argument for BISAC is that it's easy for people to find books, whereas in DDC (or in LC numberings) it's not as easy. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think that Dewey is infallible, it is after all a man-made system and as such it has flaws, however I could not really put my finger on why I would not like my public library to switch to BISAC. And then I read this: “Customers often comment that when they visit books

Facebook or Tattoo?

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A while back this posting came out from the Chief Security guru at the UMass Boston campus regarding the information you post on Facebook and how, by using it, you may potentially self-sabbotage future opportunities at jobs (or ever higher education). While there is some good advice given in the article, namely: Make sure that you allow only people that you know for sure as friends and give them the access you want them to have. You never know when some stranger is looking at your personal information. the blog post, in my opinion, fails to demonstrate that this is not just a shortcoming of facebook, but rather something that every web user has to know. Before facebook (and a lot of other Web 2.0 types of applications) only a few knowledgeable people were able to put stuff on the web. They knew that what they posted was public, and eventually what they found out was that someone was archiving it! If you know a URL and want to see what a website looked like in the past, go to t

ID Research vs. Application

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One of the articles lingering in my Google Reader for a while has been this blog post . The topic piqued my interest since I've written (or talked a lot about) the role of research in practice in the ID field over the past few years while I was a student in ID (graduation today - yay!). One of my criticisms has been that professionals in the field (based on my observations) don't pay much attention to research being done and how that research can benefit your organization. Of course research itself does have caveats and certain conditions that were true in the research study that may not be true in your organization, thus it is unwise to actually take research on face value and implement it wholesale without doing some critical analysis of what the research environment was like, how that environment compares to your environment and without doing your own experiments before you implement something throughout the organization. I do agree with the author that the gap between

A Brief History of Instructional Design

Happy Friday to all! I came across this presentation a while back and it presents a brief history of instructional design. Pretty interesting! I came across some familiar names (Skinner and Mager for instance), and I was introduced to a few historical factoids that I didn't get as part of my ID training. It's interesting that there isn't much mention of ID models (a la Dick & Carey and ADDIE). I would be interested to see if someone has created some sort of genealogy of ID models out there in the interwebs... History of Instructional Design and Technology View more documents from Ben Clark .

Some unexpected figures...

It's the week after finals and before graduation. Campus was pretty much dead today. I took the opportunity to look at scribd to see if there are any good EdTech related documents and per chance I looked at my account. I gotta says that I am pretty surprised by some of the numbers I see. First off, my Instructional Design Capstone, Greek for Travelers , has been viewed over 300 times in the month that I've put it up. Now this is somewhat surprising, but not that unexpected since it's the only capstone in the online (volunteer) instructional design repository and I've spoken about it to many current students in the program. What I find fascinating are three linguistics documents that I have put up that were assignments for various classes in the applied linguistics program. In a month, my paper on the use of subjunctive in contemporary American English has been viewed over 120 times, a Thematic Unit Module that I created on Greek Kiosks was viewed over 100 time

Exams | Done

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Well, exams are now done, I just finished my Sociolinguistics final last night and I am relieved to be done with all my academic obligations of the semester - now I can chill out for a few weeks and ruin my brain with wonderful television and video games :-) The funny thing about last night's exam was that we had the option of choosing which questions we wanted to answer, and from an informal exit-poll it seems like all of the class answered questions 4 and 5. Here's a comic strip dedicated to those who still need to grade exams and project :-) We

Week 13 of 13!

Yes indeed! The semester is almost over! I have two classes tomorrow night and I am done with Instructional Design :-) Next week I have a sociolinguistics class (on a different schedule than Instructional Design) and I am almost done for the semester! Funny thing, since I posted some of my assignments on Scribd (especially those linguistics papers), I've gotten emails from people looking for more resources on the subject. I don't really fancy myself an expert on some of these topics (after all I've only taken one or two classes on the subject), but I am happy to help people with their research :-) If you cite any of my papers, do send me an email - it will make my day! :-)

Capstone now available on Scribd

This week I received the good news that my capstone had been viewed and evaluated by the powers that be, so since they know that I've done my work, I've decided to post my capstone on Scribd to share it with the community. Truth be told, I am not really sure when I will be able to capitalize on my capstone (actually building the course which I have designed) so I've released the work under a Creative Commons BY-SA license, this way if there are Greek language teachers out there that want to use this work to collaborate on building this course, or if there are multimedia people who want to get some practice editing video or creating podcasts, or any actors that want to practice their acting skills, here's a venue. I guess if there is enough interest by a number of parties I can create a community to organize this effort :-) In the mean time, if you are interested in language learning, and in particular learning or teaching Greek, head on over to Scridb to have a lo

Capstone | Done!

Well, that's it folks! The capstone is completely done! I've proof-read the thing at least 6 times, made edits, added stuff, removed stuff, and kept myself from going overboard with the appendices! I printed it out, bound it, and submitted it! Woohoo! Of course school isn't over for the semester, there are still projects for other classes that will keep me busy until May, but at least there is one thing off my plate :-) Since it is under CC licensing, as soon as I get a grade (and a diploma on hand), I will most likely post my fine work somewhere for people to use and add to it as they see fit :-) Now all I have is: 1. term paper for Sociolinguistics class 2. eLearning project for INSDSG 616 3. a journal entry for my communications class 4. a presentation for my Sociolinguistics class My Google starred items, things that I want to comment on is getting huge - I'll probably have to prune it before I can start commenting on it ;-)

ePortfolios - my take

Response to a colleague on sister campus, via our campus technology Google Group -- check out Carrie's original post here : Carrie, I was debating whether to leave a comment on your blog (as well as post on the Google group) or whether to post on my blog and the Google Group. Since this seemed like a rather lengthy topic I opted to post on my EdBlog :-) Speaking of Blackboard...all I can say about that LMS is "bleh". We use WebCT Vista (aka Blackboard Vista) on our campus. I'm sure that the ePortfolio trial we had at our campus was because we couldn't wait for WebCT to implement something in their LMS products. Of course looking at some of the social features of Vista all I can say is that it's good that we started a trial instead of waiting for the LMS vendors to do something (it would have probably been bad anyway ;-) ) I personally don't have an ePortfolio, opting instead to list my academic work in my online CV (under print and online). In a sense