Tuesday, September 23, 2008

WAOL Council - 9/22

The WAOL council had its second meeting yesterday. We discussed the following agenda:
  • --Elluminate Roll-Out Check
  • --ANGEL training developments
  • --ANGEL Phase 1 and Phase 2 timelines
Of interest to faculty is that training for ANGEL will begin in the fall for Winter pilots. Personally, I am really loving ANGEL and encourage you to jump on board as soon as you are comfortable. Email me for log in information to visit my ANGEL classroom.

Also of interest to faculty is the Elluminate roll out. I have completed the required training and am working on the training plan for Cascadia faculty and staff. I hope to have that out to folks later this week. I hope to demo Elluminate and ANGEL for folks in the next couple of weeks.

An archive of the meeting is available - View the Elluminate Live! recording

Monday, September 8, 2008

Sloan C Membership!!

Great news from the SBCTC. I'll be sending out information about this after faculty are back in session next week.
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Greetings eLearning Council,

A big part of the strategic technology plan is about professional development for faculty and staff.

Strategy III says we should “create a system of lifelong learning and change management for faculty, staff and college leadership.” And Action 3 (in that strategy) says we should: “buy a statewide membership in leading national professional development consortia, and extend benefits to all faculty and staff.”

Great news – we just bought the first national consortia membership!

The SBCTC eLearning Team has purchased a Sloan Consortium 2008 / 2009 College Pass. Sloan-C is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed to quality online education. They provide online workshops delivered by national experts. With the purchase of College Pass, many of our faculty and staff can participate in these workshops at no cost to the college.

Key Benefits of the SLOAN-C College Pass:
• Over 20 online workshops were scheduled for 2008, though less than half are remaining.
• Quality workshops are online… to fit busy schedules.
• Workshops are archived and remain available from the time they are offered, until the end of the calendar year, allowing participants to reference materials even if they missed a session.


Guidelines for Participation
• Our 2008 college pass provides 150 TOTAL seats for all workshops through December 31, 2008.
o each college is limited to 4 TOTAL seats for the 2008 series.
 one person registered for one workshop = one seat
• The eLearning Team is asking college ELC reps to be responsible for advertising this opportunity and allocating your 4 seats.
• We also encourage all workshop participants to share what they learned, with their colleagues (maybe a “brown bag” lunch), after the workshop has ended – though we leave that decision to you.
• SLOAN-C workshops are typically last 1-2 weeks (sample workshop description), so each is a serious time commitment. When sharing this opportunity with faculty and staff, and then selecting your four participants, please let them know what they are getting into. We don’t want seats to go unused.

The logistics will be pretty simple (detailed instructions forthcoming)
1. You tell me you want to participate by October 1, 2008 (If I do not hear from you by October 1, your college’s 4 seats will be redistributed)
2. You advertise this to your faculty and staff and identify find 4 participants (You can include yourself as a participant).
3. I’ll get you the 2008 registration “coupon” code
4. You sign them up using SLOAN’s registration process
5. Participants attend the sessions and then share what they’ve learned with others at your college.
6. You share what participants and/or you leaned at ELC meetings.

Better news … once we work out the kinks with this membership, we plan to join more national consortia and push those benefits out to the colleges. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

Sincerely,
Boyoung

WAOL Council - first meeting

The purpose of the WAOL Council is: The Council will meet online monthly with additional meetings scheduled as needed. The Council will meet in person once a year. Agenda items may be suggested by any Council representative. The Council will work to support each other’s ability to utilize the WAOL collaboration and learning environment to support learning and teaching, at the highest possible level of reliability, and for the lowest possible cost. Opportunities to share resources, information, procedures, and personnel will be a priority of the collaborative.

The session was recorded and you are welcome to view it.

Evergreen Island Update

There has been a lot of activity on Evergreen Island. It is now open to the public (building and terraforming restricted to members). You no longer need to belong to a group to get to Evergreen Island and it shows up in searches from within Second Life.

John Miller and his builders have put in a new clinic and classes will be held there in the Fall. We have an Administration of Justice class that will be taught there by Erik Laurentz. I am seeking other instructors to connect with TCC instructors to work on joint curricula. I am also in contact with students in France and Korea who are interested in learning about our strange and wonderful North West culture. Some of them are ESL students, and I am looking for more English teachers (or other disciplines?) who are interested in using Evergreen Island as a hub to meet people from around the world. Language issues are not a problem because many are learning English, the international language of business, and I have been using the free translator in Second Life called the “Simbolic Translator” that allows you to chat with people in a couple dozen languages. It is often wrong – but it is enough for simple sentences and some humorous explorations of grammar and international relations!

Andy Duckworth, Christopher Soran, and Jason Sandusky here at TCC have been working out many technical issues as far as supporting SL institutionally. Christopher will be posting a page to our wiki about having students run SL from a thumb drive, eliminating the update issues that many school labs have with SL. More on that later.

Slurl to Evergreen Island: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Evergreen%20Island/128/128/0
Simbolic Translator: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cupo/102/120/36