Week
1
Agenda
- Course introduction, policies, and tools
- Student introductions
- Needs Assessment
- Publishing and syndication with RSS
- Wiki intro
Fun
- Make a Snowflake
- Interactive Narratives, which features interesting multimedia and animated narrative sites from around the web.
Intro
- introductory page from me.
- my website
- my short biography as a way of introduction.
Blogs, Wikis, RSS
Weblogs, or "blogs" are an interesting web phenomenon, about which you must be conversant. To understand what blogs are and how they work, read this article (PDF) I wrote with David Wiley. David is an expert on learning objects and social software.
For the technically curious, this is how blogs work.
Here's short article about blog use at Harvard Law School.
RSS as a syndication model is probably more important. You should be very familiar with RSS, and be using an aggregator to follow at least a few RSS subscriptions.
Spend a few minutes at this site, and choose one or two articles to read. Also, try at least one of the tools.
Wikis
A wiki is server software that results in a web site composed of linked pages that anyone can edit. First, read "What's a Wiki", from extremetech.com.
Read this interesting commentary, "Wicked (Good) Wikis" from darwinmag.com.
Resources
Instructional Technology Connections, a massive site, well-organized and regularly maintained by Martin Ryder at the University of Colorado at Denver, is a treasure-trove of information about instructional design and technology (IDT).
