Free Range Learning

I have a love/hate relationship with the comments sections on the web. The more time I spend reading blogs and online news, the more I end up interacting with the comments. But I can't make up my mind; one day I find the ability to comment to be the most interesting thing to have happened to public media in a long time, the next day I find myself closing my laptop in dismay over the oversimplification and extreme hyperbole of so many comments.

I regularly read blogs and news that cover a …

Luther Seminary offers quite a few online courses, and even more if one counts residential courses that have an online component. But many students are nervous about online learning for one reason or another.

In this Tech Talk, I discuss some common myths about online learning and explore what a typical online course at Luther Seminary consists of.

With the insurgence of cell phones that allow for quick and easy web browsing , (Apple's iPhone and Verizon's/Google's Android most immediately come to mind) we've been discussing how we might want to design Luther's online course to be a bit more mobile friendly .

Any good design project starts with knowing your audience:

• Who will be using your product?
• How will they be using it?
• Where and when will they use it?

Online courses are no exception to these questions. …

When I was in Denver for the Christmas holiday, I asked my mom to teach me to knit. So ever since returning home to St. Paul, I have been diligently working on my "first knitting project" - a scarf. I was talking to my mom yesterday on the phone, and feeling rather proud of how far I've come with the scarf, I told her I would send her a picture of it — as a text message, via her cell phone.

My mom is, at best, a novice texter. When she does happen to receive a text, her first …

Last week I wrote a post on how Google's autocomplete function gives us an interesting insight into what theological and biblical questions are being asked .

Well, last night I ran across a December issue of the NY Times Magazine that had a fascinating article on the Google Search Algorithm as Extinction Model . Apparently a couple of research scientists recently had a bright idea:

Google's search engine uses an algorithm called PageRank to identify the most important Web sites on a given …

This image is from Google's autocomplete function. Although I couldn't begin to explain understand the algorithm that Google search uses, I know enough to know that it is based upon user's searches. That is, the things that people search for the most tend to be the most heavily weighted. So when I typed "why does the bible…" the autocomplete fills in the most popular searches that begin with the same phrase.

This is an interesting sociological (and theological) exercise, …

Thanks to Mary Hess for linking us to a fantastic article from First Monday: Insidious Pedagogy: How course management systems impact learning , by Lisa M. Lane.

Lane writes a superb critique of course management systems (CMSs), such as Blackboard , Moodle , and our very own JICS (i.e. MyLutherNet ). Lane's point is not that CMSs are bad, or poorly designed, or even that they should go away. Lane's point is that CMSs are "not pedagogically neutral shells for course content. …Course …

Tomorrow, we, along with some folks from Computer Services and the Library are headed to Northfield for the annual GusDay conference . GusDay is an event designed for the technology staff from the Minnesota Private Colleges and other like-minded institutions to gather and share successes, challenges, strategies, and friendships. Representatives from Gustavus , Macalester , St. Thomas , Bethel , Carleton , St. Olaf , Augsburg , and many more will be in attendance.

It's a nice little conference …

I found this YouTube clip (see below) a while back, but thought about it again recently in relationship to what we do here at Luther . Lecturing, preaching, leading Bible studies, much of this is dependent on telling stories. This clip is of Ira Glass, host of NPR's This American Life , one of the great storytellers of our generation. He's talking here about how to tell a great story. One of my favorite words of wisdom:

...often you have the two parts of this structure, you've got the anecdote and …

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 …