Free Range Learning

Learning.   It used to be so easy.   One would sit in the classroom or lecture hall — those magical places — and gaze at the professor lecture, recite, reiterate, review, or rampage about something.   It was great entertainment.   Then we’d go home and read a text to reinforce what we’d just heard.  

Still, something happened in the classroom .   We learned something.   We left the lecture hall feeling like we had just witnessed something …

View the recording of the Tech Talk from Nov. 19, 2009 on using End Note

Links mentioned in Tech Talk:

• Luther Seminary Library
• EndNote Wiki
• EndNote X2 Training Videos

Here's the latest Tech Talk. The topic this week: Thesis Templates. Download the thesis templates here as well as the Thesis Templates Help document.

I teach a history and theology course online.  There’s one thing that’s missing — bodies.  Three dimensional bodies.  Our connection happens along the intergalactic highway of the internet, a medium that allows us to communicate — but in a very peculiar kind of way.

Do I sound selfish when I notice that although I read your online postings, I can’t see you or hear you?  I miss closing my eyes like a wise old owl and listening to you react to the text we’ve …

I teach a history and theology course online. There’s one thing that’s missing — bodies. Three dimensional bodies. Our connection happens along the intergalactic highway of the internet, a medium that allows us to communicate — but in a very peculiar kind of way.

Do I sound selfish when I notice that although I read your online postings, I can’t see you or hear you? I miss closing my eyes like a wise old owl and listening to you react to the text we’ve just read together. Maybe …

Last week the Learning Design & Technology team were in Denver for the annual Educause conference. We heard lots of great speakers and saw how other colleges and universities are thinking about technology in education.

So it was fun to see Educause 2009 promoted on the Official Google blog today. In the slideshow, you can even see the Luther Seminary logo along with all the other schools who have "Gone Google."

I’m proud of my ability to remember names.   I learned long ago to match faces to names, and then gaze at the person while I say their name in my head five times.   It works!   Not only do I remember names and faces, but I retain them in my memory for quite a while.   People love to be remembered.

But now I’m teaching a course online.   And the only ‘face’ I have to go on is a tiny square photo — …

This week we be gan another phase of user testing of MyLutherNet . We are in the initial stages of redesigning some of the navigational structure of the portal and wanted to get as much user feedback as possible. This particular redesign focuses on the registration, bill pay, and degree progress functionality of MyLutherNet. So our friends from the Registrar's Office have been helping us out with the testing.

  The type of user testing that we've been conducting does not (perhaps …

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 …

Building on Dan's previous post, simple video animation can can also be a powerful storytelling device for communities and organizations. Courtesy of our friends at Lutheran World Relief, we've been enjoying some Divine Chocolate in the office this week. I wanted to learn more about Divine and found this great video on their site.