Desire2Blog

The ITC Grand Debate is held each year at the organization’s eLearning conference . The 2010 conference will be held from February 20-23 in Fort Worth, Texas at the Omni Hotel. Last year I was a participant in the Grand Debate titled “Virtual Worlds are the Second Life for Online Learning.” That event has been well chronicled and I don’t care to discuss it more at this time. The purpose for this post is to solicit a few topic ideas for the 2010 Grand Debate. The ITC Board of Directors meets later this week in California and we will choose the debate topics (and hopefully the debaters as well) for the next conference. A couple of the previous topics included: “Classroom Observation is an Administrator’s Right” (2008), “Cheating is Rampant in Distance Education Classes” (2007), and Open Source vs. Proprietary Course Management: Is Proprietary Software Dead?” (2006). Through a couple of tweets I received the following suggestions about two weeks ago. Generations: Net Gen Skeptics vs. Net...

Just a quick note to introduce two new web apps that you might find useful. Add Screenjelly to the list of web-based screencasting tools. In April I posted a comparison of Screencastle and Screentoaster for the very specific task of recording the creation of a chart in Excel. Screenjelly is restricted to a time limit of 3 minutes, which may make it less useful than the others, although it worked very easily and would be great for quickies. I used Screenjelly to demonstrate a new service called ShareTabs. Jane Hart tweeted about it this morning: Basically with ShareTabs you can provide a list of weblinks in a much more useful and visible format. I was thinking about how this could be used for aggregating web content for an online course, so I made this quick little screencast to demonstrate how you can embed a ShareTabs page inside Desire2Learn (and also how to use Screenjelly). Here's a link to the ShareTabs page of 6 Twitter links that I used for the demo. See this video at...

The D2L UNconference was a blast last night at the Liffey, an Irish pub in St. Paul. Kyle Mackie ( @kylemackie ) did a great job as emcee or chief organizer. Here's a short video (4.5 mins) containing several snippets from the evening, although not all presenters are shown. This video has absolutely zero value, as you'll soon see. There is a good chance that the full video of some of these segments will see the light of day, but probably not from me. I'm just saying.

50 or so of the early-arrivers for D2L09 FUSION will be gathering at 6:30 today for the UNconference prior to the official start of the conference tomorrow morning. Check out the attendance list to see who is going to be having the most fun in St. Paul tonight. The tag for the conference is D2L09. I expect lots of Twitter activity since many people that are coming are tweet-aholics. Here is a FeedFlash of tweets tagged with D2L09. I expect there will be much more to report about this as it unfolds. Live streaming might occur if we have good connectivity. We'll be at the Liffey in St. Paul starting at 6:30.