Suggested Conference Tag – ITC09

Posted on January 30, 2009 by barrydahl

The ITC annual conference is quickly approaching. eLearning 2009 will  be held in Portland, Oregon starting Saturday, February 21 with pre-conference workshops and ending Tuesday, February 24 with the final speaker during lunch. I’ve created a Netvibes page that will be used during one of presentations at the conference, but that can also be used as a resource page for anyone interested in tracking events as they occur at the conference.

To accomplish this task, it is helpful if most people use a common tag for any blog posts, tweets, social bookmarks, photos, or other web content that they might post about the conference. It is best to keep a tag short (especially for tweets), so I propose that we use the following tag:

ITC09 (or #ITC09 on Twitter)

I’ve already checked Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, and Technorati to see if the tag is in use, and it appears not to already be in use except for one rogue blog post about some project in South Africa. We can bury that in short order.

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Bay College – Teaching with Technology

Posted on January 20, 2009 by barrydahl

I spent a day at Bay College in Escanaba, Michigan in early January for their spring semester opening day. The second of three presentations was titled “Teaching with Technology – Myths & Realities.” This is a clicker presentation where the audience shares their opinions about whether some of the common statements about teaching with technology have any resemblance to the truth of the matter. For example, lots of people say that PowerPoint is Evil – but do they really believe that or is it just a catchy saying? What about “schools suck the creativity out of our children.” Is that mostly true or mostly false? The embedded slide show indicates how the audience of about 45 people voted on each of the potential myths. Only about half of the potential myths were covered during this presentation,so I still have a pretty good supply of material for the next time I give this presentation.

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Northwestern Michigan College – Learning 2.0

Posted on January 9, 2009 by barrydahl

I had a great day at Northwestern Michigan College on Tuesday, January 6 for their spring semester opening day. They have a great professional development project this semester called Learning 2.0 where they (at least 40 people so far) will learn together about many of the Web 2.0 tools that can be used effectively in higher education.

Update: 95 people in Learning 2.0 as of 1/12/09. Cool!!

About 130 people were in the audience using clickers. I gathered info about their uses of Web 2.0 tools and other things related to using technology. Here are a few of the results (much more in the slides embedded above.)

  • 65% file their income taxes online, but only 1% use Dogster.
  • 32% have taught an online class, but 53% have taken an online class.
  • There is an overall disagreement about whether the Digital Net-Gennials have the characteristics that the “experts” say they have (slide 42). (Yes, those quotes are intentional.)
  • 95% of the audience had a cell phone, with almost 2/3 of them using text messaging on their cell. 7% own an iPhone.

I’m going to analyze the info in a bit more detail and make another post later on. I’ll also be posting info soon about my visit to Bay College in Escanaba, MI.

Filed under: Higher Ed, Web2.0 | 1 Comment »