Desire2Blog

Brian Lamb is the early morning keynote in Portland for the eLearning 2009, the ITC annual conference. Session title: The Urgency of Open Education Brian Lamb at ITC09

The ITC eLearning 2009 annual conference begins in a few days in Portland, OR. At this event, we are running an advertisement in the conference program for the new service being offered by my employer, Lake Superior College . It is called Innovations in e-Education and it is all about customizing e-learning conference experiences by bringing presenters and a full schedule of sessions to your entire campus, rather than a few people traveling to the next tech conference. The website is not nearly fully developed, but you can start to get a sense of the offerings for workshops, conferences, and consulting. The basic idea is that you can bring in 2 or 3 key presenters, for 2 or 3 days at a time, add in some of your local presenters if desired, and have a fully immersive professional development opportunity right at your campus or in your local area. Most of the time it costs about $10,000 to send 3 to 5 people out of state to a conference. For the same cost you can bring a 2-day confere...

The annual ITC eLearning 2009 Conference conference begins this Saturday at the Portland Hilton and Executive Tower in Portland, Oregon. From the conference website: "eLearning 2009 is the friendliest and most comprehensive annual distance learning conference you will find for eLearning practitioners. It is the one place where you will learn who is doing what, what technologies they are using, what works, and what doesn't." This is always my favorite conference of the year, which I certainly hope is true again in 2009. I'm busy working on presentation materials for all of the following sessions: The Basics of Blogs, Wikis, and RSS - Saturday morning: 1/2 day pre-conference workshop. This workshop will start at the very beginning, with no prior knowledge assumed. We will look at how blogs and wikis can be effectively be used in education. You'll create a blog, and see how you can use a blog to effectively communicate with your students as well as how you can ha...

I've been asked to do a couple of webinars after winning a 2008 Desire2Excel award for our Online Student Mentor program at the July Desire2Learn conference in Memphis. The slides used for these webinars are shown below. There's a sufficient amount of explanatory text on these slides so I didn't feel the need to narrate then as well. You can also view the slides at SlideShare . LSC Online Student Mentors from Barry Dahl Although I've never actually made a list of my Top 5 accomplishments in my career (nor even thought about it), this program would most likely be on that list. Not because of having the idea of the program, not because we've won a couple of awards for the program, but because this program has had a profound positive impact on so many of the students who have served as online student mentors.

As part of our AQIP Action Project dealing with Flexible Learning Options for students, we are proposing a new opportunity for online students who are interested in completing the Associate in Arts degree from LSC through the Lake Superior Connect e-campus. AQIP is our alternative approach to accreditation through the Higher Learning Commission and focuses on continuous quality improvement for the institution. The marketing plan for these offerings is still in development, so I can’t yet tell you what we will call this, but it will have something to do with the option of taking 2 classes at a time, 8 weeks at a time, and completing the AA degree within two years. (Those are 2-by-8 LEGO blocks in the photo - build your degree using 2-by-8s? Too lame?) There will be five start dates for courses during each academic year, which includes the three normal start dates (summer, fall, spring) and additional start dates in the middle of both the fall term and the spring term. Summer 2009 – 8 we...