For the holidays, a little wordplay fun.

At a public educational gathering last week I heard two educators at two different events toss off references to a minor concept in computing—using the wrong word. You ask, “if they were homonyms, how did you know it was the wrong word?” Okay, well let’s use the loose definition of homonym that allows for differences in spelling and non-identical pronunciation (maybe I’m asking too much). Check out Wikipedia for all the options: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym.

Cache, pronounced kash, in the way it was meant last week, refers to how our browsers store information from visited Web pages to make future visits to those spots happen more easily. You might know the cache on your browser as the Temporary Internet Files or you might just know it as the cache. As Merriam-Webster notes, it can also refer to a hiding place—where you might store your cache of stolen goods, for example: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/CACHE. Or you might be familiar with geocaching (jee-oh-kashing), where people hide and find hidden objects using their GPS devices, a kind of scavenger hunt.

Cachet, pronounced kashay, is a mark of prestige that an object or person possesses; physically, it was a kind of seal, perhaps like the Seal of Good Housekeeping! http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Cachet.

But here’s the interesting part—both words come from the same French word cacher, which could mean both to press or to hide!

No big deal, but you could gain a kind of cachet if you pronounce the words right the next time you use them.

Facebook | An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook evolves by reverting, it would seem. As Zuckerberg’s letter explains, Facebook is doing away with regional networks, which were added when the popular social networking site moved beyond its student base. Now they are implementing more privacy controls, but the options swing wide–share with friends, friends of friends, or everyone. That’s a big jump from friends of friends to everyone. It seems to me that the regional network is in between those categories. So, I can’t share with Cleveland unless I open up my posts to everyone in the world. Yikes.

Part of the logic for doing away with regional networks is that 50% of Facebook users are in regional networks. Say what? Perhaps that means that a lot of people like a regional network, as opposed to, say, the whole world. It’s big, but not too big. Zuckerberg is promoting the move as controlling your privacy, but is it a move to get more people to open up to the whole world, instead?

I don’t know what to think, yet.

Point/Counterpoint: Disrespectful and Time-Wasting, or Engaged and Transformative? The Mile-High Twitter Debate.

Interesting discussion of Twitter in terms of passion for a new and open tool vs. concern for privacy and firewalls. The debate took place at EDUCAUSE 09: http://www.educause.edu/E09+Hybrid/EDUCAUSE2009FacetoFaceConferen/DisrespectfulandTimeWastingorE/175838

You may need to download Microsoft Silverlight browser plugin to view the video.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/10/28/most-college-students-to-take-classes-online-by-2014.aspx

Here’s an article to make you think about whether you are conforming to your Course Management System (CMS) or whether you are making it conform to your pedagogy. Lane suggests that novice Web instructors who learn the basics of their institution’s system before they think about the principles of teaching their course are working backwards and risk forgetting what they know about teaching well. The CMS dominates their course organization and, consequently, their teaching.

As someone who supports faculty use of Blackboard, and who is involved in the ritual training in its features, this article has me thinking. As an online instructor, it has me wondering how to evaluate what I’ve been doing. I think I started with the course and course objectives, and then moved into how it could be expressed within Blackboard, but we’ll see when I get a chance to reflect at the end of the semester.

If you have recently been trained to use Blackboard, do you think it has been dominating your pedagogy?

Lane, Lisa M. “Insidious Pedagogy: How Course Management Systems Impact Teaching.” First Monday 14.10 (5 October 2009).

Here’s one possible way:

Google Docs Become More Student-Friendly.

Follow the link to read about the addition of math equation tools to Google Docs. In addition to enabling students to write with these tools, this gives faculty another tool for grading online–gotta save those trees and the printer ink!

Here’s my lame English major attempt to use the equation editor:

google equation editor

Signals tells students how they’re doing even before the test

[Shared via AddThis]

John Campbell, associate vice president for Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, developed the neat tool in this article that mines the data in Purdue’s course management system to send students a quick view of their status in courses in an easy-to-read list of Signals–like traffic signals. The study shows that students benefit from the early warnings by changing their work habits to turn around poor performance.

Mention virus anywhere near a technology professional and the response is likely to be a cringe, followed by a series of questions: “Is your anti-virus software up to date?” “Are you playing safe on the Web?” “You’re not clicking on links in emails, are you?” Recently, though, higher education has been worried about a virus of the biological kind–H1N1.

I’ve overheard (on one listserv) more than a dozen colleges and universities discussing plans of how to keep their semesters going if droves of students are unable to make it to class, or told not to come to class to prevent the spread of swine flu.

One solution, or emergency response has technology coming to the rescue, sort of. No, your computer won’t make you better, but it might allow you to continue to conduct your classes at a distance. Here’s one example of a readiness strategy from the University of Oregon: <http://libweb.uoregon.edu/cmet/fluedtech.html>. They try to cover all the bases, from changing your syllabus, to widening the use of Blackboard, to re-thinking your face-to-face course as a hybrid.

In some cases, faculty will still be able to hold their classes and accommodate only a few students too ill to attend, but there just might be areas of the country that are so hard hit as to seriously affect semester completion. Are we (you) ready for that? Can you imagine how you might change your course organization and delivery to meet what the U of Oregon calls “radical adaptation,” particularly if you get sick? Perhaps the pandemic won’t materialize. After all, we remember the Y2K dud. But maybe we were safe, rather than sorry, because we were prepared. I’d start packing that teaching first-aid kit now.

Here’s that new semester, the fall renewal, even though it’s still pretty hot outside. We are all excited about starting up again, before the complexity of courses, grading, student conferences, and committee work start to fill up all those moments we had planned to learn about new innovations in teaching and learning. Some of us have new ideas we’d like to try out in the classroom, whether on ground or online, and hope to keep up our excitement long enough to put the ideas in motion.

Pardon a personal note: I’ve been reading about online teaching, since I’ll be teaching online for the first time, reading about translating face-to-face practices into online experiences, all the while trying to keep three areas in mind–student/content interaction, student/faculty interaction, and student/student interaction. That doesn’t seem like a difficult organizational plan, until you start to fill in the blanks. Assignments and due dates are easy enough, but creating experiences that engage students as they work through those assignments is the hard part. All of a sudden I feel like an orchestra conductor waiting for the sheet music, and discover that I am the composer, too. I know that if I feel overwhelmed, students may have the same reaction, so my first order of business has been to retreat from displaying all the content of the semester at once. In a f2f course, I would never hand out all the assignments on day one, so why would I try to make them all available on our LMS? I’m giving myself permission to slow down and judge how the course is going in the first few weeks, leaving room for adjustment. I’m sure it would be nice to have the whole course and its content created on day one and just turn it on, but for this first time around, I need to test the waters a little. I’ll be busy in the evenings and on weekends.

Here are a few of the things I’ve been reading online:

Instructional Design for Online Learning: http://www.ibritt.com/resources/dc_instructionaldesign.htm

Getting Started Online: http://vfc.project.mnscu.edu/index.asp

Principles of Online Design: http://www.fgcu.edu/onlinedesign/index.html

Instructional Design Handbook: http://www.psuonline.pdx.edu/docs/id_handbook.htm

Guidelines for Teaching an Online Course: http://tltc.findlay.edu/onlinesupport/Guidelines/index.html

Teaching Strategies: Online Teaching: http://www.crlt.umich.edu/tstrategies/tsot.php

Send me your favorites to post, whether about online teaching or not.