Educational Communications & Technology :: A newish weblog from Rick Schwier, one of my profs in the Educational Communication and Technology program at the University of Saskatchewan. The archives aren’t quite figured out yet (maybe I should enlighten him about TypePad!) but he had an interesting post about wikis and blogs in education (coming from AECT ’03 in Anaheim): Well, I can come home now. The conference has already paid off. I saw one of the best sessions yet on using Blog and Whiki tools in education. I think that I’m going to move this Blog to a new location and we’re going to turn up the heat under it. Dave Wiley from Utah State University and Trey Martindale (sounds like a romance novel character, don’t you think?) from East Carolina University took us on a tour of weblog and … Continue reading »

9:10 – after some introductions and handshakes around the room, Brent is sitting down and Rick is giving an impressive intro. Jay is videotaping the proceedings – this may show up on one of Rick’s classes in the future ;^) BTW I apologize in advance for all misspellings of people’s names. Feel free to comment and correct me if you wish. Also this is not a verbatim transcript – just my notes as the conversation ensued. Once again, corrections and criticisms may be added by commenting this posting. Q and A begins Rick: What do you really love about ID? What’s neat about it for you? Brent: I care about the issues – how do you design good instruction and support instructors? What does good ID look like? Those are important issues – as important as any other issues out … Continue reading »

In about 10 minutes, Brent Wilson will be here in the hidden room in the Education building at the University of Saskatchewan for an informal chat with students in the Masters of Educational Communication and Technology program. We’re doing a lot of talking about blogs in the field these days, so it only seemed fitting to blog the proceedings.

cogdogblog: Print Styles for MovableType Blogs :: A big tip o the hat to Alan Levine from Maricopa Community College for his instructions on creating style sheets to make printed pages from Movable Type look nice. Now if only I could do something like that in TypePad – Ben and Mena, are you listening? Addendum – I considered deleting this since I am no longer using MT, but I’ll leave it up since its still a good resource for many bloggers out there, and a nice piece of style sheet zen.

Why tables for layout is stupid: problems defined, solutions offered :: If you ever wanted to know why you should move to using CSS for layout instead of tables, read this. Thanks to elearnspace

The Problem with Abundance :: Remember Peter de Jager? He was one of the prime prophets of Y2K apocalypse scenarios – I’m sure producers of gas powered generators are still living well thanks to him. He has aparently metamorphosed into a futurist (which is somewhat like being a religious prophet, but with better a better tailor and you get invited to much better conferences), and here is a piece from him discussing how abundance can be a problem in a culture that is designed around scarcity. This is, to me, a fascinating idea. I have noticed in schools that our daily activities are based around scarcity of learning resources – teacher as the transmitter of knowledge, standardization of textbooks and exams – while we actually live in a world of abundant learning resources. There is a incongruity that I believe … Continue reading »