Digital Media Literacy

After reading Clive Shepherd‘s post on Media Elements I decided to host a Faculty Learning Community this summer on the topic of Digital Media Literacy.  For a couple of hours each Tuesday our FLC will explore various digital media elements: typography, illustration, photography, animation, audio and video, and consider when, where, and how they might [...]

I need Flash on my iPod Touch

Steve Jobs, President of Apple – makers of the top-selling iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad – has stated they will not use Flash with their hand-held technology. Flash has become the de facto standard for delivering online media including video, games, and animation. Hulu uses Flash, Scribd uses Flash, TeacherTube, Slideshare, StudyMate and many other [...]

Interactions: Online vs Classroom

I was speaking with a number of late adopters the other day (I realize the expression is not actually “late adopters”, but I am somewhat of an optimist – I think about TV and Microwaves and have to believe that everyone will eventually adapt). Anyway, I heard a couple of questions I hadn’t heard in [...]

Net-gen’rs, Digital Immigrants, and Geeks!

A small group of us on campus has been investigating alternatives for our next learning management system. We are considering four solutions: two proprietary and two open source systems. As I was reporting on our team’s progress the other day, we got into a discussion about student readiness. One of my colleagues said that he [...]

Plug -n- Play

Yesterday, I tried helping a faculty connect his class here on campus with another class at a high school several hundred miles away. Their plan was to discuss issues of diversity using a combination of teleconferencing and web-conferencing solutions. The arrangements had been made ahead of time and the faculty on my end had been [...]

Disability Services and Online Delivery

A recent article entitled “Help Students Overcome Online Accessibility Problems”, by Stacy Kelly, highlights several challenges students with vision loss may experience when taking online courses. In an informal survey of 100 users, respondants report that screen readers may not read PDF files as text, but instead as one large image. As a solution, they [...]

The “Online” Continuum

We often talk about online delivery in terms of “fully-online”, as opposed to blended/mixed, or enhanced. These conversations tend to try and clarify what considerations we should take when designing and delivering instruction and training. However, I think we need to further consider whether these are distinct modalities, or a continuum. Fully-online (asynchronous) Online (w/ [...]