Stealing like an aritist

The first thing that jumped out at me in this article was the statement, "There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income". This is speaking for everyone, but my best guess is for many people, at least 2 or 3 of their closest friends probably come from their job simply because they spend so much of their life at their job. I agree with the concept of you are what you surround yourself with, but I didn't think that "economic theory" was that much of a breakthrough idea.


I definitely agreed with his thoughts on reading. In order to be a true thinker in society and have opinions on a range of topics, it is important to read as much as possible. I like his idea of finding those people we love reading and find out what they read and work our way up the "reading family tree".


Without being cliche, the thing I found most useful was one of his parting pieces of advice, "be nice". In the end what are we here for? To make friends not enemies. I know we don't live in a utopia, but such a simple phrase has such a powerful undertone.

Faculty Perspectives Using Moodle

I have had little experience with Blackboard, but the experience I did have did not leave a great impression.   I remember it being difficult to use and not student friendly. After only using Moodle for a few months now,  I not only feel comfortable using it as a student, but it is so easy to create a site and disseminate information as a teacher, that this program will be in many high schools and colleges in the coming years.

A friend of mine who went through this CCSU program was over my shoulder watching me update my Moodle site and was blown away at the ease in which I could navigate the site, add supplemental materials, and customize my settings to fit how I wanted my site to be used.

My first question would have been for Connie. It seems as though she chose to go with the Moodle site because of the inspiration she received from a workshop she attended before she set-up the course. She also said the Blackboard workshops were poorly done. I wonder had she been exposed to a better first impression of Blackboard, would she consider using it. It sounded as if she is only using online tools in order for her students to participate in forums and ask questions after-class, and it seems both Moodle and Blackboard can offer that type of interface.

My second question would ask Connie why she preferred the interface to Moodle much more than that of Blackboard. I agree with her assessment of the interface of Moodle, but it didn't seem like she gave the Blackboard interface much of a chance to fairly rate it higher than Moodle's.

My last question would be whether they both see themselves using Moodle a lot more in the future. Are there deficiencies that they would like to see fixed within Moodle that could eventually have them move to another operating system.

Post your response to the article and list three questions you would ask any of the teachers about their experiences. No repeat questions so if someone else asked it then find another.

E-Learning

In my opinion most people learn from e-courses through knowledge construction. This metaphor  described in the article articulates exactly what the designer of any e-course show aim for: engaging in the active cognitive processing during learning. Even in the classroom, I strive for my students to learn this way, so I wouldn't want it to be any different when they are learning in a distance learning setting.

It is my belief anyways that concepts will stay with students longer when they are actively engaging in the cognitive process and not just being "passive recipients of information". When developing our Moodle courses, we should all keep in mind that the goal of it is too not just flood our site with information that students can read. They can do that at the local library. We also need to make sure there are learning activities embedded within our site that foster higher-level thinking and assess whether student learning is taking place or not. If we fail to do this, then we fall into the trap of using the newest "technological fad" with very little academic merit.