Desire2Blog

The annual ITC eLearning 2009 Conference planning committee is in full gear. Every year that I have attended this conference has been better than the previous year, and I expect this year to be no exception. As a board member of the Instructional Technology Council, you would likely expect that I am biased in that respect, which is probably true. However, it is because of the quality of the conference and the people involved that I even wanted to join the board in the first place. The conference is scheduled for February 21-24 at the Portland Hilton and Executive Tower in Portland, Oregon. Pre-conference workshops will be held on Saturday, February 21 with the main conference kicking off Sunday, Feb. 22. I'll be hosting two pre-conference workshops : The Basics of Blogs, Wikis, and RSS - morning session Using Web 2.0 Tools inside your Virtual Learning Environment - afternoon The proposal deadline is Friday, October 10, 2008. Because we use a Moodle installation for the ITC websit...

Only four slides embedded below. The results are shown from a clicker question I posed during two different speaking engagements in front of K-12 audiences. I just think it's interesting, but not terribly surprising. About Virtual High Schools View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: onlineeducation elearning )

I love goofy generators like this . Thanks to John Krutsch  for the heads up on Twitter and for the very creative tool that he just whipped up one day. Wow!

To go along with our other TV and Internet advertisements, we put together a little riff on the green aspects of e-Learning. Very well done. My thanks to Gary K and Dave K. The other videos? Lake Superior Connect - Why Us? and also Lake Superior Connect - Talking e-Campus

Since I first started teaching online (back in the day), it has always struck me how many of the students are in a different place in their lives than most of the students that I taught in the traditional classroom. I realize that's not a news flash, but the whole aspect of providing access to higher education to some of those who otherwise wouldn't have it is still the number one reason why I get out of bed in the morning and make my way to the office. A few years ago I started a scholarship fund just for students completing one of our online programs at Lake Superior College. The scholarship fund balance has grown to more than $10,000 and we typically give 2 or 3 awards to deserving students each year. The scholarships for FY09 were handed out at the end of the spring term and sometime after that I received the following thank you note: "Dear Virtual Campus Contributors, I have been yearning to return to college for several years and the generosity of this scholarship is...

Okay, I'm back. Nine days of being disconnected was an interesting experiment - but I'm really glad to be back online again. As I previously reported ( also here ), those of us who are in the distance education business will not be required to start treating our students as criminals. We now have the final clarifying language (actually called the Statement of the Managers ) regarding the Higher Ed Act especially as it relates to distance education. Contrary to some of the original fears (including my own), this Congressional act will NOT have the effect of making us put ankle bracelets on all online students - nor will we have to install webcams throughout their houses to watch their every move. Instead, we have to make sure that they authenticate (with username and password) each and every time that they login to our online courses - something that most of us are already doing. A great deal of work was done to get this clarifying language into place. Leading the charge was Fr...

I threw together the following video rather quickly, so it doesn't have the highest production value. Photos from FUSION08D2L as well as some video clips of speakers and musical groups from Beale Street and Graceland. No sound except during the videos. Still rather bummed that I decided to leave my camera in the hotel room (I had thrice walked away from it during this trip) rather than tote it along for the final night on Beale Street with John Baker, Shonagh, McLeod, Matt, and lots of other D2Lers; plus Terri, Dany, Dawn, and several others including Stephen Downes. Suffice it to say that I really wish I could have included shots of most of this crew singing karaoke and dancing (and yes, that includes Stephen who the karaoke jockey introduced as David Crosby). It was over the top.