Free Range Learning

One of the big things I've noticed recently is a surge of online multimedia that takes advantage of the web's simple tools to explain complicated phenomena.

Planet Money is a podcast produced by National Public Radio that does a fantastic job of looking at the economic crisis in terms that non-economists can understand. All while avoiding over-simplification and dumbing-down, not an easy task. Having scored a C+ in my introductory college economics course, I never thought I'd be faithfully downloading …

Here's the latest Tech Talk. The topic this week: Searching Databases. Databases mentioned in the talk can be found on the Luther Seminary Library web site.

Here's the latest Tech Talk. The topic this week: BibleWorks. Links mentioned in the talk are BibleWorks web site and the BibleWorks wiki.

A movement that later became the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther began with a simple premise: the Christian church had become overly professional. The Priests were the only ones who had both the education and the access to be able to read and interpret Scripture. The average person had no way of knowing, much less disputing, whether the hierarchy of the church was being faithful to the tradition handed down by the Apostles.

Luther understood that for Scripture to have real power, it needed …

Here is the video of our most recent Tech Talk. The Student Network Access Portal (SNAP) allows students to transfer files from their home computer to and from their campus HomeDrive. See how below:

We've recently added two new "features" to our Tech Talks.

1. We've created a Google calendar for all the upcoming Tech Talks. Anyone with a Luther Seminary user name and password can subscribe to this calendar and have the dates, topics, locations, and descriptions of the Tech Talks accessible from their Luther Seminary calendar. Instructions for how to subscribe to the calendar are on the Tech Talk web site . We've also embedded the Tech Talk calendar into our web site - if you'd rather copy specific …

View the recording of the Sept, 22, 2009 Tech Talk on using Google Docs.

Yesterday was the first night of class for me - I've enrolled in an eight-week pottery class . Among other things, Daniel Pink's book, A Whole New Mind , inspired me to take the course. Pink's main argument is that our once left-brained society is changing into a more right-brained one. And if we want to thrive, we better prepare ourselves. It's a great read with lots of suggestions for creative outlets.

Apart from music and words, I've never created anything with my hands so …

This week's Tech Talk was Google Mail: conceptual shifts, tips and tricks for using Luther's E-mail service, etc.

While much of what we do here in Learning Design & Technology is focused around curricular learning, we're also very much interested in learning how to take care of ourselves; we want to pass that learning on!

It was fun to have our Seminary Parish Nurse, Karen Treat, pass on this fantastic video on how/how not to sneeze! It's really quite funny.