Hi from Vance

Responses to participant blogs and wikis

I've posted a recording at http://vance_stevens.podomatic.com . If that URL is in your Bloglines then you already know that. I also left a comment on Hala's MyChingo at http://webheadsheaven.blogspot.com/

Hi everyone, now it's Sept 23, and I've come to work to meet someone on Skype and prepare for a start of a new week of classes tomorrow. Aside from deadlines and pressures in many aspects of my professional life, I have to shepherd 75 students through a curriculum of learning how to use computers, and having spent a whole afternoon (after teaching) marking and recording results of exams Thu, now (Sat) I have to mark a set of Word documents (for correct formatting etc). I've also spent a lot of yesterday and today (weekend in Abu Dhabi) working on this course.

I started out by updating this wiki, and I'm writing something now that I can refer you to from our Moodle forums. First I sorted those who had posted blog and wiki addresses into a separate section (and I need to be sure that all those addresses are in my bloglines). But before that I began browsing through the sidebar and seeing what people had done with their wikis here. Aside from Elder Bob, always impressive, a professional (technology consultant in real life), I was particularly impressed with the work of two participants: Hala and Moira.

Moira made an interesting point in her blog at http://moira.edublogs.org/ that the expectations of work to be done on online assignments can be unrealistic, with due dates being quite arbitrary, and personal lives of participants not beig taken into account. I tried to post a reply but experienced network communication difficulties, but what I said was the same is true for instructors. I try to be assiduous in my conduct of this course but I simply can't stay on top of it day to day with real 'daytime job' work intervening. I pointed out that I build in a breathing space in my courses (we've got one coming up) and also I try not to hold people to deadlines, though I like to see evidence of some participation. I do understand that procrastination and that initial feeling of being overwhelmed can set someone back in a course to where they might give up or, if they try, just not be able to dig out of the rut.

But browsing through Moira's and Hala's materials I thought it would be really neat to have some kind of presentation of what they had done, say present their work at the Elluminate tool available at http://tinyurl.com/y3eh. This would mean this group needs to show an interest in synchronous events (something that some of us here take too much for granted). Moira made creative use of the Multiply tool, and Hala took a systematic approach in her wiki to the things she had done for this course, ticking off accomplishments and referring us to others. Be sure and visit her Buzznet blog and her "messy" webheads one. The latter brings in a number of web 2.0 tools. The frapper slide show is what I wanted to set up with our map, but when I started the map the code for the picture slide show wasn't there, and I thought maybe we needed to populate it with pics first. I'll revisit it later. At any event I was charmed by these two sites and by the creativity shown in both.

When you visit, be sure and leave comments. At Blogger, you will need a Blogger account ID and password in order to post comments (and at Buzznet too I believe, and possibly at Multiply). Ok, enough for now, I plan to work all day on this online course and am very much looking forward to it.

Putting pics up at your wiki

First you store a pic on the Internet, or find where one is already on the Internet. For example, there's a pic I want to use here:

http://www.vancestevens.com/vance.htm

• One way to store your own pics on the Internet is to upload them to your pbwiki space.
• Right now, Hala, Moira, and Beth have all taken out their own personal wiki spaces, and Moira and Beth have uploaded pics to theirs

Next you bring the picture up. For example:

• You visit the page where the picture is displayed
• If the picture is in your pbwiki Images or Files area, you surf there and bring the big picture up in your browser.

Once the picture is displayed, as shown below, you:

• right click on it
• select properties
• copy its URL to your clipboard, as shown below

Finally, to display the picture on your web page you simply but right and left brackets around it like this:

[http://www.geocities.com/vance_stevens/pix/vance_auc_jan2104.jpg]

And it will display as shown below on your wiki page: