This video by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University, creatively and powerfully looks at today’s students and how they are changing the world of learning and education.
Do you find these attributes as characteristic of the students you teach? What steps might you take to engage students of the 21st century? Please post a comment with your thoughts and reflections.
Biographies of the 5 fallen NIU students are now available on the NIU memorial site at http://www.niu.edu/tragedy/memorial/biographies.html
Apparently, the young man who died, Daniel Parmenter, was actually shielding his girlfriend from the attack. Click here to read the complete story.
As some of you are aware, I have been putting in a lot of hours over the past few days as my department has been helping prepare resources for NIU faculty and assist with various logistics involved in dealing with the tragic events of the past week. For example, my office has created a handout for faculty on “Teaching in Times of Crisis” as well as compiled numerous resources for teaching after crisis. His office has also setup a new blog that they’ll be using as yet another way to communicate with NIU faculty and provide support resources moving forward.
You may or may not have heard on the news of the incredible efforts that are going on at the campus to respond to this tragedy and help faculty and students deal with the issues. A few of these efforts include:
There are many other efforts going on behind-the-scenes that you may not ever hear about in the news but are further examples of why NIU is such a great university. After witnessing first-hand the response, I couldn’t be more impressed with the level of student support and safety on the campus. I’d have absolutely no reservations with someday sending my child to school at NIU.
The outpouring of support from other institutions as well as colleagues and friends has been overwhelming. Thank you to everyone who has expressed your support and been praying for the students, families, faculty and staff of NIU.
For those who have blogs or other sites and would like to help honor those who have lost their lives in this tragedy, NIU has made a memorial graphic available that can be posted on any site. The image is available here. When posting the image on your site, please make it a link to the NIU memorial page at http://www.niu.edu/tragedy/memorial.html
In response to the recent tragedy at NIU, my department is compiling information and resources for faculty at http://www.niu.edu/facdev/resources/crisis as the campus community begins the healing process. This page will be frequently updated in the days ahead to provide links to resources and details on special programs to be offered for NIU faculty.
In addition, our center has just launched a new blog that will also be using to help communicate information and updates to faculty, staff, and graduate teaching assistants in the days ahead. The new NIU Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center Blog is at http://facdev3.niu.edu/blog
As I posted earlier, the NIU campus is reeling from the recent shooting on campus. For those who are interested and weren’t able to watch it live, here’s a video of the press conference featuring comments from NIU President John Peters and NIU Police Chief Donald Grady responding to the tragic events.
In the press conference, Chief Grady discussed the rapid response of the NIU campus police force in response to first reports of the shooting. I can attest personally to the responsiveness of NIU police…they certainly are a highly trained and VERY responsive unit. There’s no doubt that police were on the scene within 29 seconds as Chief Grady noted.
Please continuing praying for the entire NIU community.
As you most likely have heard by now, yesterday afternoon (2/14) there was a tragic shooting at NIU. If you’ve been watching the news, you likely know as many details at this point as I do. At the time of the shooting, I was in my office which was about 2 blocks away from Cole Hall, the building where the shooting took place.
Thanks to everyone who has called or emailed to check and make sure that I was ok. It was a chaotic scene on campus yesterday with media and emergency personnel flooding the scene. The news of what was happening on campus initially spread faster by word of mouth and cell phone text messages than any other means. It was a surreal experience to be watching events happening live on CNN while also watching it happen through an office window. Waking up the day after, it still is hard to believe that such a horrendous event could take place in DeKalb.
Here’s a video with a few photos from the past day at NIU:
For more details on the healing process on campus in the days ahead as well as any further news, you can check the NIU website at www.niu.edu. Please keep the campus administration, faculty, students, and most importantly the students and families of those directly affected by the shooting in your thoughts and prayers. The university community has a long road of healing ahead…
In this episode of Teaching with Blackboard, Ishak Shaik, Olga Urban, and I discuss Scholar, the new social bookmarking tool integrated with Blackboard at Northern Illinois University | mp3 Audio | Podcast RSS | iTunes | Scholar Documentation | Scholar Wiki | SafeAssign Documentation
I received word earlier this week that the paper I had submitted for the upcoming Sloan-C International Symposium on Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning has been accepted. I’ve not yet had the opportunity to attend a Sloan-C event but am now really looking forward to attending this upcoming symposium in Arizona May 7-9, 2008.
Anyone else going to be attending and/or presenting at this upcoming event?
A while back I stumbled across the CommentPress theme for WordPress that in essence allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. I’ve been wanting to try this out and finally got around with my dissertation manuscript to doing so.
Therefore, after making the final revisions to my dissertation manuscript, I posted the entire manuscript in an installation of WordPress at http://www.jasonrhode.com/publications/dissertation. There readers can not only view the entire manuscript in text format but also download and printable version in either .DOC or .PDF formats.
For the figures and tables, I simply took screen captures and uploaded to Flickr and then embedded and linked to them. When viewing the online manuscript, clicking on any of the thumbnail images will bring up a full size image hosted on Flickr.
To be completely honest, this was more of an experiment than anything else to get a feel for the CommentPress theme and the capabilities. Yet, as I’d like to have a permanent digital home for my dissertation outside of UMI that others can access, this approach is a great solution.
Anyone else using CommentPress already? If so, are you using it for collaborative authorship efforts or for more editing-type activities? Or perhaps, something else?
I’ll continue to leave my blog journal of my dissertation journey online for those who may find my experiences of benefit but am happy to also have this new separate home for the completed study.
Yes, that’s right, I’m starting another blog. If you’ve stumbled across this posting, you happen to be reading the very first posting of a brand new blog I am starting. I have numerous other blogs already, such as my dissertation digest, idolresources, and even my personal site.
Why another blog? I’ve found each and every blog to serve a distinct purpose. I’ve been wanting a place where I can just ramble about anything related to education and connect with other educators on a more impersonal level. I’ve had an account over at Eduspaces for quite some time but with the recent instability of the ownership of that service, I wanted to move to another more stable host. I’ve linked this blog with my Eduspaces blog so anything I post here will also make its way over there. However, I’m all but abandoning Eduspaces at this point.
Also, idolresources has evolved into basically a place to post resources and I don’t want to diminish the quality or purpose of that blog.
So, here goes another blog. This one happens to be hosted on Edublogs and therefore is a bit restricted in terms of features but is completely free for me to operate. I’ll continue to post to idolresources as well as maintain my more polished professional academic site at http://www.niu.edu/~jrhode but am looking forward to using this blog for my very informal online journal of my scholarly activities.
In the meantime, if you stumbled across my new blog, please leave a comment and say “hello.”
