There are currently 3,141 tools catalogued, and 2,381 of those are FREE!

You won’t be overwhelmed because the site is well-organized. Even if you are not involved in distance education, you will find some helpful tools to make your teaching/life more productive. Check it out!

Jane also has several blogs worth following. For example, Social Media In Learning or Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day.

You can also follow Jane on Twitter: @C4LPT

For you iPhone users, be sure to check out #10, which points you to an iPhone app called Open Culture that connects you to many of the free resources!

HT: Randall Short (@shortNtweet), via Twitter (he also has a blog)

• Degrees of Presence: Using Various Technologies to Provide Distant Students which a Degree of “Presence” (PDF summary)
• http://www.bigbible.org/blog/2009/11/degrees-of-presence-ii-backstory.htm
• http://www.bigbible.org/blog/2009/11/degrees-of-presence-iii-research.htm

Taylor Halverson, Brigham Young University
Effective Uses of Discussion Forums for Biblical Studies Courses at a Distance (20 min)

• Discussion Board Rubric (PDF)
• Distance Education and the Bible Presentation Outline (Word doc)
• Effective Uses of Discussion Forums for Biblical Studies (PowerPoint)

22-201 Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
11/22/2009 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM Room: Studio 9 – MR
Theme: Distance Learning: How to teach traditional topics in a non-traditional format

I’ve posted links to some of the resources mentioned in my portion of session below. An updated list (including material from the other presenters) will be kept on the SBL 2009 Pedagogy page of my blog. Check back again to find more material as we (the five presenters) update the links.

• CDW-G survey 2008: The 21st-Century Campus: Are We There Yet? Challenges and Opportunities for Campus Technology
• CDW-G survey 2009: The 2009 21st-Century Campus Report: Defining the Vision
• Campus Technology article 11/3/2009: Students Unimpressed with Faculty Use of Ed Tech
• Campus Technology article 10/28/2009: Most College Students to Take Classes Online by 2014
• Michelle Everson, University of Minnesota:10 Things I’ve Learned About Teaching Online

Online Tools:

• Moodle: Open Source community-based tools for learning
• Elluminate: web, audio, video, and social networking solutions for teaching, learning, and collaborating
• LearnCentral: social learning network for education, sponsored by Elluminate

A few of the tools mentioned by Brooke Lester:

• Wetpaint: A site solely for creating wikis
• Diigo: Social bookmarking, highlighting, and commenting of web pages.
• Netvibes: Bringing feeds to a central location from blogs, from wikis, from Diigo, from Twitter, from Yahoo Pipes, and so on.
• Yahoo Pipes: Grouping, filtering, ordering RSS feeds from anywhere.

Check his resource page for more links and tutorials to use these resources.

So, what exactly have I been doing in Grand Rapids? Well, the short description is that I was invited (at the request of my advisor, Christo van der Merwe) to participate in a three-day Consultation on Bible Software in the Classroom and Pastorate. There were approximately 20 attendees. All stakeholders, but from different vantage points. Some were data producers, some software designers, others professors, and still others represented “real world” situations in the pastorate. There were representatives from four continents. No final answers or results came out of this time, rather it was the opening of a discussion and an assessment of the needs, tools, methods, and future of digital biblical tools. In addition, relationships were forged, ideas exchanged, and experiences demonstrated. It was a privilege for me to be able to participate.

I think we are still contemplating the content of our discussions, so it may be a bit before I post any real reflections from these three days. However, I do think that the fruit of the consultation should be shared more broadly, and receive input and contributions from others. Stay tuned!

Oh, and did I mention that I’m teaching her (and her brother) via the internet? We’re using Google video-chat and an eLearning classroom. Her mom scanned her quiz and emailed it to me. I love technology.

Campus Technology, likewise, has an article discussing the report. Read their summary here.

The surprising (really??) result is that faculty think they do a great job and students don’t think their profs do such a great job. That is not the only disparate pair. IT departments and faculty don’t see eye to eye about how the other handles their role in technology in the classroom.

But as LeVar Burton might say, “you don’t have to take my word for it.” Go read the report yourself.

To download the actual report and draw your own conclusions, go here.

I hope to get as much information as possible, so please direct folks to this post and ask them to help by leaving their own experiences in the comments.

If for some reason, you have experiences you would prefer to keep private, please email me: karyn@boulders2bits.com and I will keep your comments confidential.

I will make this easy. Just 2 questions.

1. What did you like most about the distance learning course that you took/taught? Please avoid the obvious answers: “I didn’t have to be on campus” or “I could do it at my own pace/time.” Instead, think about how the teacher-student(s) interaction worked, the user interface, or options that worked better online than in a classroom.

2. What did you dislike (i.e. what really drove you crazy?) about the distance education course? You can be specific to a particular class, or to the entire experience (or both).

Please include in your comment if you were a student or a teacher. Feel free to add more comments, suggestions, etc.

Thank you for helping!