Online Assessments

Presentation Announcement

Come join us for the first session of the new "Best Practices with Teaching & Technology" Series this week.

 

Co-sponsored by the Center for Instructional Excellence (CIE) and the Instructional Development Center (IDC), the series will host a 2 to 3-member faculty panel each month.  Faculty will present and discuss how they use a particular technology to facilitate learning in the classroom.

 

Please join us for the first session on “Online Assessments” Thursday, January 29, 10:30-11:30am in KRAN G004.  The faculty members who will present and lead the discussion will be Maria Cooks, Associate Professor in Foreign Languages and Literature, and Jill Lestina, American Sign Language (ASL) instructor from the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences.

 

This session will be translated for the hearing-impaired by an ASL interpreter.

Reading questions (1/26)

1. In the "Geek Chorus" article, it is suggested that people participating in backchannel conversations are not showing a proper level of respect to the speaker(s). Considering learning styles of the audience members, what alternative explanations for this behavior could exist?
   
   
2. The O'Reilly "What is Web 2.0?" article discusses in detail how some successful Internet ventures provide services that add value to existing databases of information. In the case of Amazon, they started their database with an ISBN database traditionally used by bookstores and libraries and added new books onto it. For recordkeeping purposes, they created an ASIN number that is equal to the ISBN number if it exists, but otherwise is a unique Amazon identifier code. Does Amazon therefore employ "virtual librarians," and if they do, what might their jobs look like?

Using Mac Mail as an RSS aggregator

As I was exploring options for RSS aggregators for my Mac, I found a nifty way to do it within Mac Mail under 10.5 Leopard.

1. In Mac Mail, choose File > Add RSS Feeds...
2. In the dialog box, paste in a blog URL (http or feed) and click Add. Repeat for all blogs.
   
3. To aggregate the feeds, choose Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox...
   
4. Type in a name for the smart mailbox, and create a rule to find messages with a type of RSS Article. 
   
5. Click OK. The smart mailbox will contain messages from all subscribed RSS feeds in Mail. :-)