Back to school…
I did my homework for Introduction to Open Education! Check it out if you’re interested in that stuff.
Introduction to open education
Despite my new status as a graduate, I’m taking a class this semester, IPT 692R: Introduction to Open Education, taught by David Wiley at BYU. Obviously, he practices what he preaches – this course is available to me (and you, and anyone else) for free. While plenty of free educational materials are available on the web, I have never before seen a course that a professor was actively teaching unpaid students for free. Even if you are not interested in participating in the course, the first lecture is interesting and a good introduction to open content. And if you are interested in participating, why not sign up and join us?
One more selling point for the class, in case free isn’t doing anything for you: it’s set up like a role-playing game. You choose a character class (I want to be a bard!), perform quests, and earn experience points to level up. If you’re not geeking out with enthusiasm yet, I can’t help you.
I haven’t done my first assignment yet (give me a break – the class just started yesterday!), but I have a blog set up for the purpose of posting coursework. For my first post, I’ll be reading the OER Handbook for Educators and writing about it. I haven’t gotten very far into it yet, but it looks incredibly relevant to what I want to do with this website, which is publish my teaching materials in an open, accessible way.
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Western dragon
My boss generously gave me a Barnes & Noble gift card as a graduation present* (thanks, Melissa!), and I blew it all on a new origami book: Genuine Origami: 43 Mathematically-Based Models, From Simple to Complex, by Jun Maekawa. I’ve made several things so far, but this Western Dragon is the first one that I think is presentable. I should probably try again, now that I know how to do it. But this one looks okay! Just squint your eyes if the image is blurry.
*By the way, I graduated in December. I got my MA in second language studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And now I fold paper.
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Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary
Happy new year! Something I want to do this year is post here more regularly, especially to share the interesting educational tools I find. So, here’s the first one, although I may be a bit late to the party on it:
Visuwords™ is an online (English-only) dictionary that graphically displays the relationships between words. The screenshot is what I got when I chose the “Random” option. (Just before this one, I got “boob.” It also makes for a nice visual, but you check it out yourself.)
The screenshot doesn’t really do the site justice, however, because when you hover over any of the colored circles, you get synonyms and a definition. The colors and patterns connecting the circles, as well as the colors of the circles themselves, also have meaning. You’ll just have to go and discover that meaning for yourself.
Thanks to Angela Maiers for mentioning this tool in her blog.
Using Google Reader for Professional Development
I made this slideshow, Using Google Reader for Professional Development, as a supplement to an article I’m writing for HITESOL The Word. Check it out, and let me know how to improve it!
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MyTweetSpace
I tend to use Twitter very little because I don’t find it very interesting. Maybe I would find it more interesting if I knew more people who used it (follow me–I’ll follow you back!), but it seems like most people I know use their Facebook status message in much the same way. In fact, some of us post the same messages there using a Facebook app or ping.fm (or something else I’m unaware of).
Despite not using Twitter that much, I had fun using MyTweetSpace. You can design your own custom Twitter background using a choice of templates and your own social networking information, contact details, and photos. It has a few hiccups where the background options don’t always display properly and your photos don’t necessarily show up in the final product. But it’s free, and you can experiment with it and make as many different backgrounds as you want. I made quite a few! The one I’ve got up right now is a bit over-the-top, but I like it.
[Thanks, Mashable!]
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Facebook connect added
- Image via Wikipedia
I’ve been a bit of a Facebook addict lately, so no one should be surprised that I’ve added Facebook Connect to this here blog. Thanks, Sociable! You can check out the widget on the right. (You might need to scroll down to see it.)
However, I’m not convinced that it’s working properly. It seems to be a bit buggy, especially in IE. Chrome seems to handle it the best, and Firefox…I’m not sure. Check it out and let me know if/how well it works for you and in what browser and OS. I might get rid of it entirely.
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Update (4/23/2010): I ended up removing Facebook Connect…a long time ago! But I just added a feature that allows you to “like” a post and displays that on Facebook. Thanks to the Digital Inspiration tutorial that showed me how!A second helping of MoFuse
The kind folks at MoFuse helpfully removed the ads from the mobile version of my site, and you can check it out here. I like it much better than the ad-plastered version. I like that I can include my custom logo and change the color scheme. However, you can only view the blog portion of my site there, and it inexplicably adds some graphics to the left of the posts that I didn’t put in. It might look better on your particular phone than the Google version–but on my iPhone, the Google version wins. Sorry, MoFuse, unless you care to step it up for Round 3?
If anyone checks out the two different versions, tell me what you think and which phone you viewed them on. Since it’s free to have them, I’ll probably just keep them both.
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Mobile version of this site!
Thanks to Google and Cliotech, you can now view this site on a mobile phone: http://is.gd/9GdJ
I tried MoFuse, too, but I didn’t like the ads–which they don’t show you in the preview! It also only really works for the blog, not for the rest of the site.
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One complete online course is up!
I finally had some free time to work on getting some more content up here, and here’s the result: one complete online ESL course is up! I’d be happy to hear your comments on it. But please be kind–this was my first attempt at such a course, so it definitely is rough around the edges. And the middle. And, well, everywhere. But I do think that it has some redeeming qualities, so I hope you’ll check it out and use it however you can.
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