Running with Scissors

I’ve been at the Blackboard Southeast Users Group conference this week in Savannah, GA. The conference just wrapped, so I thought I would try to talk a bit about what I saw here in my first podcast. I’ll be blogging on this a bit later as well. Hope you enjoy these ramblings. :)

Some of you have been following Dr. Greenlaw’s Experiment where he is radically reinventing his process of teaching in his introductory ECON course. Moving away from the traditional lecture method, he is moving more to a “learning partnership” model where student discussions and input are as much a part of the learning as the information from the book and instructor. I admire Steve’s courage to go for it – I believe he is on the right track.

Of course, just because he is reinventing his teaching for his intro classes, that doesn’t mean it is business as usual in his upper level course. In his ECON 300 research course students are using blogs to journal their process through the research project. You can take a look at what the students have done so far and even add comments to the student blogs if you can help them out.

To do this, I helped him set up a content management PHP script called Drupal. Part of this system has a module to allow blogging. I have been very impressed with Drupal so far – it is fairly easy to set up and administer, and I really like that you can define roles for users and them give them permissions to the system based on those roles. So, if you ever just have those instances where a user doesn’t fit into a current role, you can just create a new one as needed.

Steve has also been making use of the Polling module in Drupal to test student opinions and get feedback for the course.

Drupal has lots of different modules (called “blocks”) that can be added, and a user community that adds and improves them all the time. You can get more info on Drupal here, or feel free to contact me as well.

Hurricane Katrina has been one terrible story in many ways, but here is something that shows how the internet can help those affected.

The web site scipionus.com has posted a Google map where users add information balloons to the map to provide information about a specific area in the disaster zone. By allowing anyone to add this information (just like a wiki does), the users of the site work together to create something that is useful in many ways – it lets those who cannot get in get some idea of the condition of a neighborhood, but it also gives those of us on the outside a way to look in and see what has happened in a very personal way. Some of the balloons are asking for information about loved ones, others warn of roving gangs that are looting homes and businesses. Together, it is a glimpse inside a place none of us would ever want to be.