Time for a change
For the past several years this blog has been mostly postings of links to items I've bookmarked using Diigo generated automatically each day from Diigo. Those links have been mostly associated with resources I've bookmarked for classes that I've been teaching. There have been occasional other posts related to conference attendance or some thinking about courses I've been teaching. Now it's time to make a change.
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SITE 2017 – Austin, Texas, 5–9 March
Last week I attended the 2017 international conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) with support from the USQ Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts where I work in the School of Teacher Education and Early Childhood. I'm thankful for that support and for the patience of students in my classes who may have experienced oddly time-shifted responses to queries resulting from the time zone differences and long haul flights. With my retirement locked in for 31 December this year and accumulated leave to be taken from early July (77 working days to go) I anticipate
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Muddling in Moodle
Those of us involved with developing and teaching courses hear a lot about the desirability of consistency which sometimes seems to be interpreted as just short of uniformity. Historically that is based on student responses to a survey conducted a few years ago which was interpreted as students wanting to see the same features in the same locations in different courses. An alternative interpretation of the data I saw might be that students wanted more consistency in the availability of staff in courses. At times it has seemed as though having courses appear too similar has confused students about where they are leading
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Creating digital solutions in EDP4130
It's late January. I started writing this earlier in the month, soon after I was back in my office and thinking about first semester courses. After a couple of years working with the most recent iteration of assessment in EDP4130, a project-based design challenge, it was time to consider a change. In 2015 and 2016 students created teaching resources for the two Australian Curriculum: Technologies subjects, Design and Technologies and Digital Technologies. With more than 150 students each year that's in excess of 500 teaching resources, many of which were very good quality. Having so many examples from past years out there means
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Muddling through Moodle books
I want to be a good corporate citizen but that can be difficult when the tools (like a web server) that enable you to do your job are withdrawn. Still that impulse got me thinking about using Moodle books to present study material. If that could be made to work, without subverting the quality of presentation of materials, it would get material in-house and offer advantages of being easily printed or downloaded as eBooks for use on computer, tablet or smartphone.
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