The Wonderful—Yet Misunderstood—World of Wikis Posted on April 11, 2014 by Chris ParisIn academia, the word “wiki” often conjures up images of students copying and pasting assignments from Wikipedia, daring the plagiarism police to catch them. The word reminds others of that revolutionary vanguard of the fifth estate known as WikiLeaks—with some welcoming a new age of electronic social justice and others arguing that some dams should never crumble. Wikis can be powerful tools for cataloguing and disseminating information. However, with their ability to inform and misinform, some may wonder about their value for research and classroom collaboration….
Etextbooks.02: Don’t Leave Students to their Own Devices Posted on March 15, 2014 by Nathan LoewenAccording to some, the difference between conventional textbooks versus e-books is like comparing apples and oranges. I’m not entirely convinced. Fortress Education recently revised its Introduction to World Religions textbook for the Inkling e-book platform. I was a part of the 22-person team whose task was to enhance the conventional textbook’s content and add educational enhancements offered by Inkling. Our team’s objective was shared with Inkling: to improve students’ learning outcomes through built-in learner-based evaluations, social features such as shared notes, multimedia additions and links to web-based content beyond the e-book itself….
Etextbooks.01: Potato, Potahto, Tomato, Tomahto? Posted on March 9, 2014 by Nathan LoewenAccording to some, the difference between conventional textbooks versus e-books is like comparing apples and oranges. I’m not entirely convinced. Fortress Education recently revised its Introduction to World Religions textbook for the Inkling e-book platform. I was a part of the 22-person team whose task was to enhance the conventional textbook’s content and add educational enhancements offered by Inkling. Our team’s objective was shared with Inkling: to improve students’ learning outcomes through built-in learner-based evaluations, social features such as shared notes, multimedia additions and links to web-based content beyond the e-book itself….
Sipping the Firehose: The RSS Post! Posted on February 24, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorThe Web is huge, and everything is all over the place. You want to collect just the stuff you want, and put it in one place. What you want is “RSS.” “Really Simple Syndication” is both old and new: old, because it’s been around for 15 years or more; new, because every day somebody discovers RSS for the first time and wonders where it has been all her life…
Intensive Courses—Requirements and Design Posted on January 23, 2014 by Ryan TormaA number of seminaries, such as Luther Seminary and Bethel Seminary, are developing intensive courses, which bring students on-campus for face-to-face learning for one to two weeks at a time. Instead of 3 hours per week for fifteen weeks, an intensive course might meet up-to 8 hours per day over the course of 5 days. Designing and teaching courses in this format presents a number of significant challenges….